Commuters instead of circulators? Bad idea.
Houston Strategies today suggests abandoning three of the planned light-rail lines in order to free up funds for other projects. In place of those lines, he suggests improved bus service, and investment in the commuter rail and improvements to the commuter bus system.
His suggestion is that we cannot afford the investment in the north and east sides of Houston’s core, because they don’t have the clusters of employment and commuters aren’t interested in getting there (so they don’t need circulatory access if they got to work via transit).
I respect Tory’s opinion on these matters, and I think he does make an extremely important point that we need to be investing more in our commuter transit system. However, I think he is making a few critical bad assumptions.
BAD ASSUMPTION #1: The price is too high.
Projections have wavered all over the place on the per mile cost of the light rail system. Originally it was expected in the $20/40M range, now people are claiming it’s going to pass $100M. The reality is, nobody knows what it will cost exactly, and they won’t until it’s built.
In conversations I’ve had with the engineers currently working for METRO, they’re telling me the cost for ‘typical’ segments of light rail are in fact coming in at about $30 million per mile. Where the costs shoot through the roof are places where the City of Houston is expecting METRO to pay for things like a new bridge on Harrisburg Blvd, or for the complete reconstruction of streets where METRO is only building in the median (or in some cases, beside). These “one-off” costs send the per-mile figure through the roof.
Should METRO be responsible for paying all these associated costs? Sure! Why not? Those streets need to be rebuilt anyway, METRO is as good at building streets as anyone else. But those costs shouldn’t be considered part of the cost of transit, because they aren’t.
When you get right down to it, light rail is about the only form of transit being built around the US right now because it’s the only one that gives passengers what they want: vastly more comfortable and reliable service than a bus, even if it isn’t much faster. Commuters need reliability more than they need speed. And the only better alternative, subways, cost a whole lot more.
BAD ASSUMPTION #2: METRO won’t have any money left after this.
No way. METRO may have tied up its current bonding ability, but there is no way METRO is going to sit for 20-30 years without looking for new funding sources and mechanisms. Besides that, METRO’s core revenue base (sales tax receipts) is going to continue to expand dramatically as it has over the past several years. That’s where METRO gets the majority of its money anyway.
BAD ASSUMPTION #3: METRO is the right party to operate Commuter Rail
Probably not. Commuter bus service within the City of Houston? Sure. Commuter Rail outside the city? I doubt it. Why?
In a metropolitan region as large as Houston’s, we’re talking about dozens of key jurisdictions who need to be involved in what is really an intercity transit system, not just a commuter service. How many people are really going just to and from downtown, after all?
A bigger, broader, authority, more akin to the North Texas Tollway Authority, is what Houston would need to do this publicly. Why all of our various agencies are so keen on not cooperating when the Dallas area has shown us for a generation how to do it, I will never understand. But history aside, Houston is never going to fix its transportation network without comprehensive improvements at a regional level.
BAD ASSUMPTION #4: Commuter transit is the solution to low cost commuting
Probably not. Certainly transit plays a part, but the fact of the matter is you cannot serve that large of a percentage of a city the size of Houston with any kind of rapid transit. Much more important than any long-distance commuter links are the local level transportation choices people make. Before Houston can really reap the benefits of mass transit, it needs to commit to making the city’s local transportation networks multi-modal. Vastly higher percentages of people take transit when they can walk to it. Without walkable urban nodes you won’t have a high-performance transit system, ever. The link between transportation and land-use is undeniable, and until land use is part of our equation, no amount of transit investment will serve the citizens to its full potential.
Now, I’m not advocating zoning here. In fact, I think the traditional zoning model is one of the worst things to happen to cities in the US this century, and I doubt that it lasts to the next century. In the long view of history I believe strict zoning laws will be seen as a funny episode we went through lasting about 100 years while the world was over-enamored with cars. But land-use planning, mainly with the goal of providing appropriate infrastructure (i.e. local street and sewer grids) with the deliberate intention of promoting density in well-located nodes throughout the region, is critical to the success of our transportation investments, freeways included.
BAD ASSUMPTION #5: This is an over-subsidized waste of money.
I’ll save the sermon for another day, but the idea that transit is too heavily subsidized is a joke. You want to see a subsidy? Talk to TxDOT.
For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon. This is just one example, but there is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their true cost, but most roads we have analyzed pay for considerably less.
So, our dear freeways pay about 16% of their own costs, where transit typically pays 30-40% of its own costs. Then, freeways open up huge quantities of land to heavily subsidized single-family housing, that cost more in services than they pay in taxes[pdf], and don’t even pay their mortgages reliaby enough to prevent bail outs for their lenders.
Meanwhile, transit investments in places like the East End of Houston help to spur massive redevelopment of an infill nature, using infrastructure that is already in place, and helping to support the schools and public services that are already required in these under-developed older areas.
A Better Way
Now, all that said, I think that aside from these bad assumptions in his blog post, Tory is right on the money. We do need to improve transit service in Houston. But there is a better way to do it than by redirecting METRO’s efforts. The existing light rail plan needs to be built, and commuter service needs to be improved as well. To achieve both, I have four recommendations:
#1: Help METRO capture some of the value it creates
The beauty of light-rail is that it sends property values sky-high. METRO should get a cut of that. METRO and the City of Houston should put a TIRZ over each of the light-rail corridors, extending about 1 block off each of the line segments, and about .25 mi out from each station point. The total value brought in by the TIRZ should be split to two recipients, METRO (to help pay the capital cost of rebuilding city streets – the same incentives suburban developers get on a routine basis) and a Houston Redevelopment Authority. That authority should use the transit-TIRZ money to help assemble land for redevelopment, especially in proximity to the stations, and also should invest in urban ammenties like smaller neighborhood parks around some of the station areas. This could accelerate the tranformation of the rail-corridor neighborhoods and help METRO stay awash in cash at the same time.
#2: Work with Harris County and TxDOT to create a regional rail system
METRO should participate in the development of stations and the connections to a regional rail system, but in the end this needs to be designed as part of a future state-wide passenger rail network. All sorts of funding mechanisms exist to power it once you consider it as part of a state-wide network. This is, of course, only if the system is to be publicly owned and operated. Private companies have provided rail tranportation for ages, and could return in the form of a joint venture with the state (much the same way toll roads get built). This could help provide private capital, a much needed boost to funding when the state’s coffers aren’t exactly running over.
#3: Focus METRO’s efforts on local circulation improvement and better express bus service
At the various suburban park and ride stations there should be more express bus service to more employment centers. Places like Westchase and the Energy Corridor don’t get enough service from enough places. Those centers aren’t prime candidates for a first generation rail system, but should be included eventually. In the mean time, the major employment centers should be the focus of a major local service improvement effort. Each one should be treated as a hub, where lots of fast, reliable local bus routes converge, and where transfers are available on express busses that go to any of the other major centers with 3 stops or less.
#4:Improve the connection between land use and transportation investments
This doesn’t mean zoning. What it does mean is continued refinements to our development code, the biggest key element of which is the adoption of some form-based development paramters. These do not need to be cumbersome, unwieldy codes. The singular focus should be on setting sidewalk and building entry standards that allow people in any employment or commercial center or corridor to either arrive by transit or PARK ONCE and walk comfortably between destinations for convenience trips. If everyone in Houston worked in a place where they could walk comfortably to at least one convenience store and a couple of restaurants, our collective VMT might drop tremendously and transit-ridership might surge high enough to pay even more than the 30-40% of its cost that it pays now.
It’s important that we continue to make our transporation system more efficient and effective, the key is not to get so focused on the needs of the moment that we fail to design for the long-term.
Comments always welcome and appreciated!
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , bus, commuter rail, develoment, finance, Houston, infrastructure, light-rail, METRO, networks, redevelopment, single-family, subsidy, taxes, Texas, TIRZ, transit, transportation
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7 Comments
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Wow. A lot here. Matching your numbers
1) FTA estimates, and costs are costs: money that can’t be used elsewhere.
2) Metro is already baking that sales tax growth into paying off the bonds for these LRT lines. I doubt there is any political will to let Metro raise their tax.
3) Agree on a regional need. But no matter who the ultimate authority is, Harris County will have to cough up a lot of money, and I think Metro should be a big source of that.
4) I agree with accommodating more people in core density, but the vast majority will always be in the ‘burbs for schools and bigger, cheaper, newer houses – and they need commuter options.
5) You ignored the toll revenues on 99, which are expected to fully cover its costs.
There will still be *plenty* of room for infill development along the Main, Universities, and Uptown lines. Certainly enough to cover us a decade or so until we can get back to building the other lines. Given the limited developments along the Main line, it doesn’t look good for the N, E, and SE lines.
Recommendations:
1) Agree
2) Maybe. I don’t see statewide rail being viable. Regional could work. A friend told me at lunch they had rail from College Station to Houston in the 90s while he was at TAMU, and it was a disaster with few riders – so even regional rail looks speculative once you get a ways out.
3) Agree!
4) Urban Corridors initiative and new regs coming out soon address this, but see my previous #4 point: there is a limit to the demographics willing to live in the dense core.
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Tory,
As for assumption #4, I don’t mean to imply that investing in local transportation should be limited to the core. I specifically am concerned about the lack of attention paid to serving places like Westchase, the Energy Corridor, and places outside Houston like Sugarland and the Woodlands, where employment is already heavily clustered in a suburban setting.
In those locations no transit is going to be very effective in this generation, but given better service on the commercial corridors linking them, more people could get to and from those places with a short drive, bike ride, or walk on the end from their home to the node itself, then once they are there they wouldn’t need to drive again in order to chain trips together. Basically, we need the suburban centers to be more “park once” oriented in preparation for future growth that brings more density and can support transit someday.
On assumption #5, my point is more the second part of the quote from TxDOT, there isn’t a single road in Texas that pays for itself. Tolls help, but they don’t generate any revenue to pay for the non-tolled roads that people have to use to get to and from the toll roads. Thinking that cars somehow are not a subsidized drain on the state budget is incorrect. All transportation is subsidized heavily.
As for the limited development on the Main line, a lot of that has to do with the novelty of being close to rail in Houston. As the system expands there will be a great deal more transit-accessible parcels and the amount of development will pick up. Speculators in Midtown have really hampered the redevelopment potential of that area, something a better coordinated TIRZ / RDA directly linked to the rail could help with.
For recommendation #2:
I think we’re entering a whole new generation of travel. In the early 90’s when Amtrak quit running between College Station and Houston a flight to Houston cost less than $100. Now it can cost as much as $600. And clearly the cost of driving has increased, thus making a round-trip by an individual quite expensive no matter how you go.
Also, the major cities in Texas have grown a lot since the early 90’s, and have all got better local transit and denser cores than they did back then. As the cores have more to offer and the transit access to more of the city improves, rail becomes much more viable.
I don’t think inter city passenger rail in Texas is quite ready yet, but I think the regional commuter systems we build now need to be aligned to accommodate future inter city service. If the demand never materializes we never build it, if the demand does, we’ve already laid the foundation.
Recommendation #4:
Well, we’ll see how well the Urban Corridors Initiative works. It certainly is a good idea, but I don’t know if the implementation will be very effective. More important is implementing standards to improve multi-modal capcity in the burbs. Bikes and pedestrian mobility is in some ways MORE important there than it is in the transit-served core.
Houston could easily implement some simple improvements to its sidewalk and building entry requirements *city-wide* without the hassle of an urban corridor overlay.
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Good points. As far as subsidies: I confirmed with Alan Clark of HGAC that *all* state highways built in Texas are paid for by the gas tax and pretty much only the gas tax. Individual roads may not generate enough “gas tax miles” to pay for themselves, but there are no subsidies for state highways overall. The local street grid is non-optional, and therefore properly paid for with local property taxes. Even if you don’t drive, you derive value from that street grid to your land with freight and mail deliveries, police, ambulance, trash pickup, fire trucks, construction vehicles, etc.
> I don’t think inter city passenger rail in Texas is quite ready yet, but I think the regional commuter systems we build now need to be aligned to accommodate future inter city service. If the demand never materializes we never build it, if the demand does, we’ve already laid the foundation.
Agreed.
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More on subsidies. Half-penny per passenger mile for cars, 61 cents per passenger mile for transit.
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=476
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This is a great discussion. But I have to say that this notion of “everybody” living inside the Loop or in the “dense core” is really just baloney and is making all discussion not work. Judge Emmett is doing the same thing, saying that the only choice is everybody inside the Loop, or everybody out on his new Grand Parkway. No one except the authors of Chapter 42 are actually planning or advocating for all density to occur within the Loop. Certainly not me. I live there.
As Andrew has noted, there are many places in the region that are either urban or becoming urban, and some of them are not even inside the Loop (Uptown, Westchase, Greenspoint). The second tier (The Woodlands, Sugar Land) are growing and changing.
So the old picture of one core is just gone, gone, gone. And the idea that employers might decide to have facilities at one of the other centers is a good idea.
I don’t mean to overstate this, but who is it that’s interested in confining growth to the central core? Bob Eury? Not even him. He’s the author of the original polycentric plan (http://livablehouston.com, click on Bob Eury at the left).
This idea disperses congestion, gives people all kinds of choices, and implies there are smaller centers as well.
So we’re looking for a core urban transit system that connects the big centers (and I think what we’re doing now with light rail is good, is all we can do, but is essentially local and is not the core system I’m talking about, which no one else is talking about at all).
Then we want circulators and collectors for those stations, and so on. A “commuter” line from Sugar Land shouldn’t be some giant diesel train that goes from there to the Medical Center twice a day. It should connect several places via 59 to the Uptown/University junction.
Well, this goes on…
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In conversations I’ve had with the engineers currently working for METRO, they’re telling me the cost for ‘typical’ segments of light rail are in fact coming in at about $30 million per mile.
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You evidently haven’t seen the updated METRO numbers. All are over 30 mil/mile
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No way. METRO may have tied up its current bonding ability, but there is no way METRO is going to sit for 20-30 years without looking for new funding sources and mechanisms. Besides that, METRO’s core revenue base (sales tax receipts) is going to continue to expand dramatically as it has over the past several years.
Before Houston can really reap the benefits of mass transit, it needs to commit to making the city’s local transportation networks multi-modal. Vastly higher percentages of people take transit when they can walk to it. Without walkable urban nodes you won’t have a high-performance transit system, ever.
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METRO has been eliminating routes and eliminating the trolleys because they don’t have the money to operate them. METRO itself isn’t expanding the bus system as they promised in METRO solutions. They don’t have the money! To even imply that they do is just not accurate.
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METRO is the right party to operate Commuter Rail
Probably not. Commuter bus service within the City of Houston? Sure. Commuter Rail outside the city? I doubt it. Why?
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METRO did not even contact the owner of the rail to see whether the tracks were available for commuter use. METRO made an inaccurate assumption and lost the bet. This is a key point working against the METRO solutions plan. They have to be able to work with other entities for implementation and they just aren’t doing that.
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So, our dear freeways pay about 16% of their own costs, where transit typically pays 30-40% of its own costs.
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LOL METRO would love to be at 3o-40%. They are not even close to that range. Bus routes are subsidized between $15-20 per passenger trip and light rail is approaching $40. Even METRO’s own numbers show they are recouping less than 20%.
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Bus routes are not even close to being subsidized at $15-20 per trip. Show me recent numbers on that.
I wasn’t able to find a recent exact figure on the subsidy, but the word from METRO has been that when a bus route reaches about a $6 per passenger trip subsidy they axe it.
With fares starting at $1, the fare must cover at least 17% of the cost for METRO to even operate it. Park and Rides with fares in the $2.50 or so range are doing better than that. Busy bus routes don’t carry a heavy subsidy, and the really busy ones can break even.