Christof Spieler

Will commuter rail fail?

Newly-confirmed METRO board member, Apr 09, 10.

Tagged with transportation, transit, houston, commuter rail, metro

Editor’s note: Christof Spieler was confirmed as a METRO board member on Wednesday. This article appears in the current issue of Cite Magazine, but it was written several months before his nomination. The article was made available as a link to a pdf on OffCite, a Rice Design Alliance blog related to Cite magazine.

Rail has traditionally stirred controversy in Houston. But one thing is clear. There’s a broad political consensus in favor of commuter rail. The clarity ends there. A dozen different corridors are under consideration; out of several possible central station locations, none connects easily to any of those corridors; at least three different agencies are vying to design and operate the system, but nobody knows how to fund it; and it’s not clear how commuter rail will connect to the existing transit system.

Perhaps the most important question, though, is the simplest: what exactly do we mean by “commuter rail”? The answer to that question will play a large role in determining the shape of Houston’s future.

The technical definition of commuter rail is “a mode of mass transit that operates on the national railroad network.” It differs from Amtrak in that it serves trips within a metro area, not between cities. It differs from light rail (like Houston’s Main Street line) and heavy rail (like the New York subway or Washington, D.C.’s Metro) because it can share tracks with freight trains.

The 21 U.S. systems that fit the definition of commuter rail offer dramatically different levels of service. Some offer over 100 trains a day; others, only six. Some stop directly in the middle of huge central
business districts; others drop riders 30 minutes and two transfers away from downtown. Some suburban stations are in the middle of walkable neighborhoods; others are just parking lots off a highway. Those differences are reflected in ridership: the busiest system, the Long Island Railroad, accommodates 331,600 riders a day, while Nashville’s Music City Star carries only 800.

So the question is not whether Houston needs commuter rail. The question is what places need to be connected, what level of service needs to be provided between those places, and how commuter rail will connect to other transit.

Unfortunately, a lot of the discussion of commuter rail shares a widespread misconception of Houston as a city where most people work Downtown and live in the suburbs, and where most traffic is commuter traffic. In reality Houston is a multicentric city. The Texas Medical Center, Greenway Plaza, Uptown, Westchase, Energy Corridor, and Greenspoint each has as many jobs as other cities’ downtowns. ... Only about a quarter of the trips on Houston’s freeways are work trips, and many work trips occur outside of rush hour.

Serving a multicentric city requires frequent two-way service that connects not just to Downtown but to other activity centers as well. Unfortunately, that’s not what has been proposed.
...
The initial set of alternatives, explored in a study currently being conducted by the City of Galveston, proposes a Galveston-to-Houston line with trains that would operate only three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, with no midday or weekend service.
...
An infrequently available, rush-hour only, Downtown-focused system will not be very effective. The entire 250-mile [Houston-Galveston Area Council]-proposed line would carry only 36,000 people a day—fewer than the 7.5-mile Main Street light rail line.
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An ineffective, expensive commuter rail system will not improve the region. Rather than rush ahead with a system based on preconceived, often faulty assumptions and driven by political urgency, we need to engage in a discussion about what we want to accomplish and how best to do that.
..
The decisions that will be made in the coming months and years about commuter rail will determine our vision for the future, a vision of what the Houston region will look like 10, 20, 50, even 100 years from now. That is the most important question of all: what kind of city do we want to be, and what sort of transit will support that?

Full story: Setting Up Commuter Rail to Fail? (pdf, 1.2 mb)
Source: OffCite, April 9, 2010

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