David Crossley

Learning to love light rail

President, Houston Tomorrow, Sep 27, 10.

Tagged with transportation, transit, houston, light rail

There are so many people in the Houston region who write and talk about transit in a negative way that a growing number of other people, infected by years of this stuff, are having doubts about the urban light rail system now under construction.

We need to get over that and quickly, so here’s a little primer - and instead of me writing yet another view of what the urban rail system is all about, let’s just use the one that’s in Mayor Parker’s Transition Task Force on the Metropolitan Transit Authority Report of the Light Rail Punchlist Committee:

The light rail system METRO is building is an urban system, serving trips inside and immediately outside Loop 610. It is intended to put major destinations inside the urban core within walking distance of stations.
The light rail system is not intended to bring suburban commuters into the urban core; the park-and-ride bus system and proposed commuter rail lines are intended to do that. However, the light rail system can connect those commuter systems to additional destinations.
The light rail system is also intended to serve as a high-capacity spine for the bus system, replacing bus lines with higher speed, more reliable, higher capacity service. Once light rail lines are completed, bus service will be restructured to feed into the light rail lines.

Let’s have some more, from the same document,

The light rail lines will connect: Major concentrated employment centers Universities Relatively dense, walkable existing neighborhoods Corridors with high existing transit ridership Cultural institutions and special event venues Areas in the urban core with high development potential Bus service to other parts of the region Future light rail extensions and commuter rail lines

Is it clear that this is urban stuff, not sub-urban stuff? The term Sub-urban (less than urban) does not necessarily have much to do with geography, or the distance from the original urban core, but more to do with the form of the development.

Less than urban means not very walkable, at least in terms of getting to places to get goods and services on foot. It means there is more space between residences, and usually more space between commercial places. Schools and offices tend to have space around them, and people don’t walk between them, but drive.

Spread out sub-urban form is hard to serve with light rail because the number of riders available is widely dispersed and people tend to be dependent and accustomed to driving for everything. Most people who use transit to commute from the sub-urban areas to the job core in Houston drive to a park and ride lot.

Park and ride transit is intended to bring suburban commuters in to the urban core, which Houston’s service does at a pace every day that would put it in the top ten commuter rail systems, if it had rails. And by the way the park and ride system is arguably in the top ranks of the best commuter transit service in the US, delivering mostly nonstop, quick trips to workplaces.

And while we admire the splendid commuter transit service, let’s not forget that the Main Street light rail line is the most successful modern light rail line in the US in terms of ridership per mile. As Metro board member and regional transit genius Christof Spieler noted last week, Houston’s 7.5 miles of light rail investment is far less than Dallas’ investment of 48 miles (16%), yet the larger rail network only carries one and a half times the boardings of Houston’s Main Street line. When the next five lines are built, we’ll have 37 miles, still less than Dallas, but more than twice as many riders.

The reason is that our light rail plan is an urban system, connecting big and small centers, as prescribed above. Much of the Dallas system operates as sub-urban commuter transit, which is expensive and doesn’t serve as many people as an urban system can.

But Spieler notes that good transit is regionally connected.  Commuter transit needs to connect to the urban transit system.

While commuting is important, other kinds of trips matter, too. For the average driver, less than 25% of the trips are about commuting to and from work.

Spieler states this as a strong point of the Main Street line, which has high ridership throughout the day - an indication that it serves many non-work-related trips.

We are moving toward a much more extensive regional transit system, but in many ways we haven’t agreed where or how to do that, partly because of the array of baloney that oozes through the blogosphere and and televisionland, and even in print. So here’s an agenda any rational self-interested sub-urbanite should subscribe to:

First, if you live in the sub-urbs somewhere and you can’t use the park and ride service, you should start by complaining about that. Nothing could get you onto transit for trips to work faster than expanding the park and ride system at both ends. That means the HOV lanes have to originate in places they don’t now go, and they have to go to destinations they don’t now go to.

Park and ride service to downtown is fantastic, and with that, the light rail, and the local bus system, some 35% of commuters to downtown jobs use transit to get there and get home. And in the short time they’re on the bus, they can sleep or read or even think.

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Full Story: Why we should all love the light rail system
Source: Houston Chronicle The List, September 27, 2010

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