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.

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%.

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…

http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=476

> 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.

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.

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.