I completely agree with your points, but I just wanted to point LA's transit system is MILES ahead of us, and they are improving a lot. They have BRT, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail, an excellent bus system, everything. and they have just under 1.6 million daily boardings, compared with Houston's roughly 276,000 daily boardings. While LA's population is far greater than that of Houston, its transit ridership is even more proportionately larger. And LA is more foward thinking than us apparently, as they are rapidly moving ahead with rail expansion and new bus and BRT lines. Good for them.
Weighing in here as someone who actually has worked on developing an LRT line. DonnyMost is correct that LRT isn't necessarily an option for relieving congestion but it is about future development. It helps but due to existing development patterns it often isn't convenient to suddenly have the traffic that was using a freeway suddenly move to an LRT. What LRT does well though is create a corridor that that helps foster development. Generally that is why LRT lines are developed to connect a couple of existing nodes with the idea that those will attract initial ridership and the line becomes an amenity to attract future higher density development. This has been the case with the San Jose and Denver lines. In that sense LRT isn't so much addressing a current problem as it for building for the future. This is important when you consider that the negative consequences of continuing to sprawl out, increased commute times, more use of gasoline at a time of high gas prices. Also given limited budgets, land prices and NIMBY it is very difficult in most US cities to just expand freeways in the US. It is unrealistic to expect that US cities can just build their way out of congestion by adding more freeways. A rail line though can transport as many people as a freeway while using far less space, especially when you consider all of the land needed to build on and off ramps, feeder roads, embankments for safety and drainage around a freeway. Further you can build a rail down an existing major road such as in Houston whereas to build a freeway you have to uproot existing roads. LRT also provides benefits immediately upon construction as an alternative to cars to the destination nodes that it connects. Also practically every new rail line that has opened in the US in the last 30 years has rapidly exceeded its project ridership. That is the case in Minneapolis which I worked on, San Jose, Sacramento and Denver which I studied as part of the Minneapolis LRT planning team and the case of Houston. Clearly there is a large interest in rail and a willingness to use it once it is built. As for the benefits regarding greenhouse gases from LRT from most of the studies I've seen there actually aren't that much currently. Bigtexxx is right that LRT is mostly powered by electricity from fossil fuel sources. Also while during rush hours when trains are running with a lot of passengers the amount of energy expended per passenger on a train is far less than a car. That ratio flips though when there are few passengers on a train. Besides greenhouse gases though there are other environmental benefits to LRT versus cars and freeways. Roads have other environmental affects besides just greenhouse gases. Their hard surface creates a lot of runoff that can cause erosion and flooding problems. The runoff from roads is also highly polluted with oil from cars and trash. Rails don't have that problem because they can be built on permeable gravel surfaces. Also since LRT is running on electricity the trains themselves aren't polluting the air. Also since their power sources can change just by building a different kind of electricity plant. It is much harder to change cars enmasse to non emitting engines. Since you have lived in the Twin Cities for only four years I can tell you that it wasn't that long ago that the transit system here was pretty crappy. The building of the Hiawatha LRT line was a long struggle and it originally was going to be built in 1977 and didn't actually open until 2004. While Houston is far larger than the Twin Cities in the 1980's and 1990's the Twin Cities density wasn't much different than Houston and was, and has continued, to sprawl out. The opposition towards building more rail and public transportation in the Twin Cities has largely been along the same arguments as in Houston. It wasn't an accident that the Twin Cities are considered to have good, and its not all that great, public transportation but from a lot of work.
I'm assuming you're being serious, so I'll go ahead and answer your question: I've lived alongside the metro rail for about 3 years. I've probably used it maybe once or twice during that span. Most times I see it, it looks mostly empty anyway. I think it's just a novelty and wishful thinking that it'll ever catch on. On the other hand, you pretty much have to use freeways to get anywhere in Houston or travel to other places. The metro rail isn't a true mass transit system, more like guest tour past some of the hot spots of the city. /argument
<iframe width="480" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KFy1r-oK_yk#t=2m40s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Actually, it has the second highest ridership per mile in the US. Those trains aren't empty. It has already caught on. Of course, and I support building freeways, but the only reason why we rely on freeways so much is because we spent billions of dollars building them when we didn't really need them. It's the exact same thing that we are doing with METRORail now. We are building infrastructure that we can build around in the future.
This is silly. The American cities with effective mass transit all rely heavily on rail. New York, Chicago, Boston...all rail. True, they are all very different from Houston. However, even Dallas has expanded their rail system. That train from Dallas to Fort Worth is a nice option. If they expanded it to Love Field, it sure would ease my trips to Fort Worth to attend hearings.
Again, I'm all for our street car where it makes sense.. Downtown/Med Center/UH. But,light rail will never serve the reality of Houston since an overwhelming majority of our homes and jobs are spread over 500 square miles. One man's 'sprawl' is another man's dream home. Single family housing gives families a defensible private space, free from the encroachment of neighbors top and under and side by side. Show me any study where high density living is preferred over single family homes by anywhere near a majority. Most sociological studies show higher density living cause more stresses on families. Most government housing agencies are tearing down their high density housing and developing lower density public options. There is no reason now for personal commuter cars not to be getting 50 miles a gallon or running on batteries other than the fact people prefer larger cars and seem to make the economic choice to pay for them. When the City of Houston starts worrying about greenhouse gasses we can just shut down the city. We make our living (and it's better than most) creating the stuff. I'd feel all guilty about it too if China wasn't opening thousands of coal fired generation plants every year. It does not matter what we do, the planet will warm and we will adapt or die. But we could run our buses on LNG now. We could promote efficient electric cars now. We could electrify the HOV lanes so electric cars and delivery vans could run all day, we could promote natural gas electric generation..... all things that would have much more effect over a much larger footprint than commuter rail. Commuter rail for Houston is an academic 'mindset', driven by an envy factor, that does not not really solve anything for us. Doing what we do, being who we are, more efficiently, makes more sense than trying to force and retro-fit a different identity when ours is already set for 500 square miles and 3 million people. If you want to be socially active and promoting change, work on things that might really matter, because no one in Houston is going to walk a half mile to a train. They will drive to it.
The idea of light rail is nirvana for central planners, you can see it in the posts here. Utopian visions of a well managed society.
You equate 'so expensive' with quality of life? You really think the quality of life is better in New York than most places in the United States? What is your definition of quality of life?
I think everyone is for Houston having a comprehensive and effective rail system. However, a light rail down Richmond isn't necessarily part of that. I don't understand why some people have a hard time with that simple concept
I have now lived in three places with well developed light rail/subways and two without. New York, Eastern NJ, and Calgary all have robust and well-used rail. Houston and Nashville and more or less backwards when it comes to modern public transportation. Since I left Houston, we've gone from a two car to a one (or no) car family. At first it was weird, but now i am happy i dont have to deal with a second depreciating asset in the garage. I like walking to the train in the morning, but NY, Hoboken, and Calgary are pretty anti-obesity so daily exercise is just a normal part of the day. Also, i can see how 100 degree weather kills people's motivation to spend any time outside. You can throw on a jacket up North when it gets cold, but in Houston, you cant just strip down. Climate is definitely a factor. ANOTHER problem with Houston is that is will always be the blob that ate East Texas. The sprawl leads to office buildings and shopping centers being located in the middle of nowhere, which means the average non-downtown/non-galleria worker has no desire to fund rail that wont help their horrible commute. Its too bad the downtown renaissance was crushed with Skilling and Lay...the birth of the Westchase Energy Corridor probably didn't help the city planners' dreams either. Its a pickle.
8,000,000 people by 2025. You cannot keep building freeways or tollways to accommodate. Harris County is the fastest growing county in the nation. The difference between LA and Houston is Houston will, at current projections, reach 20 million before LA. Opposing the rails is a form of procrastination. From 2000-2010 Houston Metropolitan grew by 26% compared to 3% in LA. Get it done!
Per mile? That is so misleading because these routes aren't very expansive. If 12 people ride for 1 mile, the ratio is greater than if 50 people go 5 miles. I disagree that we don't need freeways. Look, the highway system was already in place before most of us were born and the city is still growing. To fund expanding the light rail system that only goes through select spots seems pointless. For those of us who live on the outskirts, we do not really benefit, since we still have to drive to these areas. Even when I did live in the inner-city, if it wasn't too far I just walked unless it was dark or bad weather, and the busing system was never an issue for me.
Let me put it another way, we only have the 14th highest ridership despite being the 4th largest city in the US. Case.Set.Match.
