Houston Strategies

My City Journal piece defending Houston, Katy commuter rail vs. freeway, Elon Musk vs. transit, zoning failures, and more

"The freeway carried 387,144 average vehicles per day in 2016 at Gessner. I'm assuming that's all the lanes: main, managed and frontage. 

If you assume uniform distribution across all the 20 lanes (which of course it not correct, since the main lanes carry most of the traffic), you get 19357 vehicles per day per lane. Two lanes are 38714 vehicles per day. Metro reports 65894 boardings per weekday on all light rail, with the disastrously low 4588 on the Green line and 6769 on the Purple line. Since TxDOT numbers are an average over all days of the week, you can average the Metro data over the week, which lowers it to 55324 average per day. 

So the question becomes: what is the traffic of a main lane? I'm thinking the main lanes carry at least 75% of all traffic (but that's just a guess), and then that would be 387144*.75/10=29000 per lane or 58,000 vpd for two lanes. So the two lanes carry about the same number of trips as the entire Metro light rail system, and of course some cars have more than one person, further increasing the highway advantage. 

Of course the Red Line has good ridership. A better comparison would be a light rail lines going along a freeway corridor, like in Dallas. The entire 90-mile Dallas light rail system has only 96,300 average weekday boardings. The Red (26,800) and Green (24,900) roughly parallel freeways. The blue (22,200) and orange (22,400) lines are similar. I think those numbers are good for comparison, and a single Katy Freeway lane carries more trips than any of the radial DART lines."

And one lane of freeway is a heck of a lot less expensive than a commuter rail line!

One commenter on Swamplot also makes a good case for Park-and-Ride buses over commuter rail:

"The train isn’t going to travel that much faster than buses, if at all. Also, buses in the Katy corridor make just one stop at most between the burbs and Downtown (the major route is express from the Park-and-Ride lot direct to Downtown). And people play on their phones on the bus (have you never been on one? the park-and-ride vehicles have nice cushy seats and baggage racks). And unless one’s destination is outside the CBD, no transfers are required; you are likely dropped off within a few blocks of your destination, an easy walk. Furthermore, on the highly used Park-and-Ride routes the buses leave every several minutes; you don’t have to time your arrival, the wait time to depart is minimal. Commuter rail never works like that (though light rail can). The assumption that rail is going to provide superior service simply isn’t true. In fact, it’s likely to be worse service for the patrons than what we have now with the Park-and-Ride buses. Especially since most everyone will have to drive to the station anyway, so no difference there.”

Moving on to some smaller items this week:

• My new City Journal piece with Joel Kotkin responding to critics after Hurricane Harvey: Doing Houston Wrong - Contrary to the sneers of elitist planners, Houston has the right approach to urban development.
• At COU we just released our second year of ranking cities by Standard of Living (mentioned in my last post), leading to this piece in Forbes: The Cities Where A Paycheck Stretches The Furthest 2017.  Houston came in #2 again behind San Jose, CA.
• In case you missed it, Elon Musk spoke some pretty harsh truth about public transit recently: 

Musk said that “public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end?”

• Houston needs some cool hip new business lounges!
• Houston poised to grow in energy innovation.  Hat tip to George.
• George sent over some good links articulating the problems of zoning:

1. Why Zoning Doesn’t Work
2. Zoning Laws Destroy Communities
3. Zoning laws: A tool for designing dysfunctional, unsocial communities
4. Ten Good Reasons Why Zoning is a Bad Idea, Houston Chronicle, 1993

Finally, ending on a little heroic inspiration from a METRO employee.  If the opening few seconds of this video don't grab your attention, I don't know what will.  Wow.

Labels: affordability, commuter rail, development, energy, entrepreneurship, home affordability, hurricanes, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies, rail, rankings, transit, zoning

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:35 PM