The value of transit

Today I wanted to take a few minutes to talk through the effect that transit has on cities, and to illustrate one of the least appreciated aspects of the car-only infrastructure system.

When land prices are high, there are only two ways to develop that land profitably: you can either charge extremely high rent/sale price, or you can build high density.

The limit to building densely, however, is parking. Consider the requirements in the City of Houston: 2 parking spaces per home, about 1.3 per bedroom for rental property, and 2.5 spaces for every 1000 square feet of office space (which you can imagine as just under one space per office). These requirements are more or less on par with national averages.

The challenge is this: when a property owner or developer wants to build something, they must leave valuable land aside for surface parking, or pay the extreme cost of structured parking (which has been hovering around $20,000 per space in recent years). Thus, if you have tons of acreage in the suburbs you can go ahead and build cheap surface parking everywhere, and in the process create a landscape that is only navigable by car, and rent/sell units at a reasonable price. In already developed areas where land is more restricted, redevelopment potential is severely limited by parking requirements.

Big businesses have the capital resources and financing opportunity to deal with this. Smaller businesses have a harder time. There’s a huge capital cost for all that parking (in additional land required and the paving, even surface parking costs several thousand dollars per space), and many businesses don’t need it. Parking is over-supplied in most parts of Houston, and all you need to do to prove this to yourself is count the number of empty parking spaces in front of your favorite neighborhood store.

Now, if you’re in downtown Houston there are no parking requirements. Yet there’s still an abundance of parking, even surface parking, in an area where land prices are astronomical. Why is this? The market demands it. The businesses in the area need to be accessible, and the only way they can be reached is by car. So the market provides parking without any requirements at all.

This shouldn’t come as a shock to any conservative. Think about it, who knows best how much parking is really required for a business to operate? The business owner! This is why I think there should not be parking requirements at all. They aren’t needed! Businesses will provide as much parking as they need to operate, and no more. Why should they be required to provide more? It’s a waste of money and land.

Now then, the reason I brought this up was to illustrate the value of transit. Let’s imagine for a moment that Houston had a high-speed, high-capacity transit system which connected its major employment centers and suburban areas. There are two important factors to consider in an ideal transit system:

First, it’s important that we imagine a high-speed transit system, one in which a trip from Beltway 8 to Downtown would take 20 minutes or less.

Second, it’s important that we imagine station areas, even in the suburbs, as both a park and ride facility and the anchor of a ‘neighborhood center’, which would include a market driven mix of uses in higher densities than exist currently. The area best served by transit is the area within 1 mile of the station, where walking, biking, carpooling / drop-off, and ordinary single-passenger driving all make station easy to access for almost everyone. The areas up to about 2 miles away from the station would likely also be well served from a park + ride perspective.

This kind of a system would provide hundreds of thousands of Houstonians an opportunity to get to and from work and other major attractions (like the airports?) without driving, if they chose.

Consider the map below. I’ve highlighted in dark red circles the major employment clusters in Houston, the bright red lines represent conceptual transit corridors (not specific routes), and the yellow circles represent 1 mile radiuses for transit-served neighborhoods. Note that some of the yellow circles aren’t centered on a high-speed corridor, but are within the current METRO light rail plan. Lastly, the outer yellow highlight represents an approximately 2 mile park + ride zone.

This kind of system creates tremendous new economic opportunity for Houston. How? It frees up land that’s currently needed for parking for more economic uses like office space. Consider this photo:

In the photo above I’ve highlighted the blocks that are completely or almost completely surface parking or vacant. If more than half of Houston’s workforce was able to reach downtown or any of the other major employment districts without driving, and the major employment districts had at least a basic surface circulation system to extend practical walking access to the high-speed line (METRO’s light rail expansion should significantly improve circulation in Downtown, Uptown, and Greenway Plaza), huge amounts of land that have until now been uneconomic to develop would be available for market uses.

Why? Because if they didn’t need the parking (because people could get there without a car) they could build space that would cost significantly less. Lower operating cost means more opportunity.

Not only the major hubs would benefit. If parking was determined by the market in all of Houston, developments around station areas could become denser without becoming unaffordable. Tremendous opportunity would be present in the vicinity of each station, opportunity to locate new businesses and new housing.

Lastly, there’s tremendous national demand for both live/work and car-optional lifestyles. Providing a greater range of choices to the people of Houston can only help our existing business community attract and retain top talent.

Again, this is just one of the ways that transit systems create value for a city, but it’s one of the least appreciated. Next time you hear someone argue about transportation costs, temember that the cost of not having transit is wasted land and reduced opportunity for business incubation. Those may not be reflected on the contractor’s budget, but they’re critically important for the future of our region.