> Retrofitting a transport system to replace the need for cars is virtually impossible.
You aren't going to manage to fit a nice public transit system (of any kind we know today) on a sprawled city like Houston, but you can do it gradually while changing the density at the same time.
First and most important: fix zoning so that businesses (i.e. work) is where people live. You don't want a city center and some industrial areas, and separate areas with residential buildings.
Next: increase car- and fuel taxes. Add tolls, bus lanes. All of this will slowly make public transport more attractive and long commutes less attractive. This will mean people prefer working closer to their homes (so businesses might setup where people live instead of where other businesses are). Housing prices will go up only in places with good public transoport etc.
Next: stop having school districts determine where people go to school. That system only makes people buy expensive houses next to other expensive houses - because the rich parents have long made sure there is a good school there. Now both parents have to drive a long way to work instead - just so they could get a decent school.
And so on and so forth. There are dozens of reasons cities are badly planned and sprawled, and a few US cities suffer from ALL the diseases and have been for decades (school districts, poor zoning, too cheap gas, ...).
> Retrofitting a transport system to replace the need for cars is virtually impossible.
This is a very pessimistic take on our capabilities.
Retrofitting modern (past century technology) transport systems onto cities that are a ~ 1,000 years old is things that many cities have managed to do. Almost any capital city in Europe would make a good example.
Can you elucidate on why doing it in Houston is 'virtually impossible'?
> It's a 100 x 100 mile area. I grew up there and drove 5 miles to high school, through sprawling neighborhoods.
TFA suggest that a million cars within the Houston Metropolitan Area were destroyed. According to wikipedia this is ~ 4,300 sq km.
You've suggested that Houston is 100x100miles ... which is about 25,000 sq km.
You can't both be right.
For reference, Sydney metro area is estimated at around 12,000 sq km - three times the size of Houston. Australia's renowned for low population density (equating to relatively high cost of public transport infrastructure per person) ... and yet.
> Retrofitting modern (past century technology) transport systems onto cities that are a ~ 1,000 years old is things that many cities have managed to do. Almost any capital city in Europe would make a good example.
These cities have always been pretty dense. Density around transit stop is the critical dimension of successful transit systems. Building infrastructure is a pretty trivial problem in comparison of changing the density distribution of a whole metropolitan area.
It can be done, however, with enough political clout. Many American cities have a big advantage: large straight streets. Car lanes can be converted to transit lanes for cheap, but it's politically very hard to do.
The US Census Bureau says that the greater Houston metro area is 10,062 square miles.
It is usually a bad idea to be pontificating when one does not have command of the basic facts. It is really quite annoying to have people who understand nothing about Houston except what they've seen on video or read in an article making claims about deficiencies of one thing, and superiority of others, when they really don't have any non-superficial knowledge at all. It's not helpful.
> It is really quite annoying to have people who understand nothing about Houston ...
I don't deny that I'm ignorant about Houston.
My point was that there are plenty of cities around the world, larger, older, flatter, hotter, lower population density, higher / lower rainfall, etc that have implemented effective public transport systems.
It's possible that Houston has intractable and unique challenges.
However the handful of places that are claimed to be 'impossible to retrofit public transit systems' seem to be found in the USA (a country with 5% of the world's population, but the bulk of the wealth).
It's possible, also, that the narrative - and this may well have fed civil designs so far - has also fed this belief that public transport just isn't suitable for 'some cities'.
I doubt you can find any city with "effective public transport systems" that meet or exceed Houston in any 4 of the categories you name. Of course Houston doesn't get a break in any of those categories (age, perhaps, excluded).
We'll have to haggle on a definition of effective public transport but it would be fun to pursue the details a bit.
Within the city limits alone, Houston population is 2.3 million people at a density of 3830 people per square mile. NYC is 8.5 million people at a density of 28356 people per square mile (ref [1]).
MTA New York City transit has an operating budget of $10.9 billion, annual ridership 2.4 billion rides, 6407 subway cars, 4451 buses (ref [2], second chart only, although technically I believe one could include other infrastructure).
NYC claims to achieve "four out of five" rush hour commuters on public transit (ref [2], 4th paragraph from the top).
So let me hand wave and suggest the annual cost for equivalent success in Houston can be calculated by scaling NYC costs based on population difference (ratio of overall trips) and density difference (ratio of infrastructure needed for dense enough coverage of routes and stops). I fully expect some debate whether this model is really appropriate but it's what I came up with on a single cup of coffee.
Which means annual cost for Houston transit just within the city limits would be:
C = $10.9 bn * (2.3 / 8.5 millions of people) * (28356 / 3830 people per sq mi)
C = $21.8 bn per year
That's 2x the cost of the NYC system supporting about 1/4 of the population, or roughly 8 times the cost per capita. Per capita cost for Houston residents is $21.8 bn / 2.3 million = $9,478. Impossible for a minimum wage worker.
I'm excluding the cost of establishing the infrastructure in the first place. There would need to be large bond measures to raise the cash to build out the stops, install rails, buy the buses and subway cars, and so forth. Paying back interest on those bonds would be an additional per capita cost whether levied as tax on individuals, on the fares, or on businesses.
Note I ignored the wider metro areas in both cities for the same reasons as given in ref [1]. Presumably the least dense and therefore most problematic costs occur in the outlying regions and are not captured here.
To amplify, for others reading this comment, it's not just about the area. There's a much more fundamental problem than the enormous expense that would be required to put transit over such a wide area. Namely, you don't have any of the sort of clustering around would-be transit stops that is needed to make them work.
That in turn means that you have fewer riders, because they have to drive (or walk several miles in ditches or dangerous sidewalks along the sides of boring, high speed roads with no shade in Houston climate) to the station. Even people who want to live close to the station are likely to find themselves unable, as the parking for all those drivers will be prioritized in the immediate vicinity of the station. And all those people, despite using transit, are still having to pay the enormous costs of owning and operating a car (an expensive proposition, even with all the built-in subsidies).
At the same time that the transit is dealing with fewer riders and a need for tons of parking, it will need to deliver fast trips, very frequent service, and very low prices. Why?
Well, in a place like NYC, you can assume transit, and decide: do I need to own a car? Isn't the totality of owning a car, having to store it, and having the stress of operating it in the city really a losing proposition? And then you hold onto those transit customers by (hopefully) not providing them sufficient disappointment to reconsider.
In Houston, where you would be driving to any transit stop, the question is completely different: having already gotten in my car and onto the highway (and paid for the car in the first place), should I get off the highway, pay for parking (hopefully), park, walk across the parking lot, pay for a ticket, wait for the next train to show up, sit next to someone in a train that's not able to climate control against extreme Houston conditions, wait through all the stops, hope the driver doesn't take a break at one of the stops (I wish I weren't serious about this), get to my stop, walk out, and (somehow)travel another mile to my destination without my car? Or should I just sit in traffic for 20 minutes and arrive at my destination, where there's ample free parking for Black Friday every day, with room to spare?
And that's not even the end of it. If in Houston, against all the odds, you decide to take transit, any walking you have to do in this thankless sequence of events is going to be done on heat islands (made for the cars), in boring environments (made for the cars), with no shade (keep trees away to keep the cars safe), and with no people (no one else crazy enough to join you.)
Maybe if we just allowed tolls and gas prices and parking fees to rise enough, rather than subsidizing them, the people of Houston would see the error of their ways and quit driving there. But they wouldn't stick around either; everyone with available resources would abandon the city en masse for a place that still supported their happy motoring way of life. Then you'd just leave the poor people behind, which would make urban poverty look like child's play by comparison.
What if we stopped the automobile subsidies nationwide by force of congress and a strong President? Once again, everyone with means would flee, but this time they would flee to a place that could survive without cars. So, in the first situation they go to Dallas, and in the second they go to New England.
Now, I don't know what Houston looks like, I've never been there, but you never gave a reason for the impossibility of Houston transit. Your post is based on your assumption that you would have to drive to any transit stop. Why would you have to do that? What makes Houston so unique in that a transit infrastructure is impossible?
Houston is hot. There are few trees, sidewalks, crosswalks, or other improvements that could make pedestrian travel easier. Relative to other cities at similar latitudes (e.g. Cairo or New Delhi), Houston's residents are rich, fat, and unaccustomed to walking. Therefore they are much less willing to walk or bicycle. Asinine development habits created neighborhoods with no through streets, so any local trip is about 60% longer than the Cartesian distance.
There are many cities in USA that also need more public transit, in which it would be much easier than in Houston to encourage that. People who care about public transit don't live in or care about Houston.
I lived in Northern Virgina, just outside DC for ten years. You can look at the surrounding cities' skylines and based solely on the size of office buildings, number of apartments, etc, you can get an idea of where the Metro stops are. The Metro opened 40+ years ago and the buildings clustered around them. Now opening additional lines - like the comparatively new Silver line - is easier because the infrastructure is there, they just have to extend it to the right places.
In Houston, outside the downtown core, things are distributed all over the place. Since there are less "obviously right" neighborhood choices to expand into, you need parking for people from nearby but not close aears. Oh, and since there isn't already the infrastructure, every inch of tunnels have to be dug, track has to be laid, staff trained, etc.
Extending an existing system is relatively cheap compared to starting one from the ground up.
Is that more concrete? (no pun intended.. this time)
Most of the time when people talk about "Houston" they're really talking about Houston + suburban sprawl. Pearland to Kingwood is 40 miles. The area is huge, and there aren't common trip starts and trip ends.
I'll compare to two cities I do know that have more public transit:
* SF/Bay area handles similar distances with BART and Caltrain. Try to imagine the bay area (and transit) if there was no bay, the western part of the peninsula was as heavily developed as what's along the bay, and the metro area went further inland. Although the bay causes many transportation woes, it does linearize transit which means more overlapping commute patterns
* Chicago. Buses and trains within the city supported by density and the huge fraction of jobs in the Loop area (small geographic area, huge fraction of jobs). Metra rail serves the suburbs, and taking Metra generally involves driving to a Metra station.
I don't think that Houston is unique; it is my focus because it is the article's. I think there are many places in the US where transit infrastructure is hopeless. I don't say impossible because I have no doubt that we could get Houston to the point of functioning if, for example, we diverted 10% of the military budget to fixing Houston for the next 10 or 20 years. But I would agree that it is functionally impossible, because there exists such a multitude of places in the US where money would be better spent.
I also don't state that you have to drive. Looking back:
>That in turn means that you have fewer riders, because they have to drive (or walk several miles in ditches or dangerous sidewalks along the sides of boring, high speed roads with no shade in Houston climate) to the station.
I portray the walk to would-be transit as really unpleasant. I wholeheartedly believe that it would be. Given the option, I expect a lot of people would choose to drive to transit. You could refuse to build parking around the stop. As a general rule, you should do just that, but in Houston I think you're going to lower your ridership even further by doing so.
To be clear, I don't think all walking to transit is unpleasant. Not even in hot climates. I've spent months happily walking to the subway in Madrid on 90-degree days. I've spent weeks happily walking 20 minutes to work along highways in Dallas on 105-degree days. What's different about those two places?
In Madrid, there were interesting things to look at along the way, trees, and other ways to stay cool.
In Dallas, those 20 minutes were the entirety of my journey, and the heat was dry (as in Madrid). There were sidewalks that felt safe, despite the fact that they were scarcely more than an accessory to keep the bike-ped people happy when the new roads went in. Incredibly unpleasant with the lack of trees or anything to look at, sure. But they felt safe.
Surely there are parts of the Houston area that could go walk-able. Those places could pick up density, and people could choose to move there. But you'll always have the scars on the landscape from these past 70 years where people were unleashed to lay waste to whatever nature surrounded the city, pushed ever forward by cheap oil and subsidized parking and driving. With the options available in America, I don't think you'd ever get enough people interested in Houston to make significant headway on undoing all the bad development.
If you're interested in further explanation, let me know and I'll try to put up a blog post, where I can use pictures to further explain myself.
I think the idea is that you build transit and the land next to the transit stops becomes more valuable. Apartment buildings get built there, shops move there, and so on. Takes a while, but in a fast-growing city it should be doable.
Also, not all transit is the same. Buses require a lot less infrastructure. If Google and Facebook can make buses work (using nicer buses), why not other big companies?
They sort of tried this idea with the LRT running from downtown out to the medical center. The idea was that parts of midtown would revitalize around it but that didn't happen.
Houston is a fast growing city, but it grows at the outer edge. It's the only major metro I know of where you can see large multistory buildings downtown condemned and sit empty for years (decades?) just because the land isn't worth enough to anyone to redevelop.
This city is not geographically constrained, has little to no planning and no zoning. It shows, but a lot of people who live there like inexpensive detached homes even if they have to drive for almost everything.
The problem is establishing a level of service good enough to get significant numbers of people to choose the bus. Over a large area with moderate population density.
If waiting for the bus takes longer than it would take to drive, people are going to acquire a car as soon as they can.
It's a chicken and egg problem: people wont' stop driving until there is an alternative, and until people stop driving you can't build the alternative.
A good start is pulling out some selected suburban areas and equipping them with high speed rail, hoping that new centers will build around those instead, with people that don't need cars (highrise buildings, pedestrian friendly areas)
It doesn't seem to be working all that well yet. Expensive on a passenger mile basis with not all that many riders. But not hopeless either.
I guess optimistic transit corridors are something that is a good fit for federal spending. Ever bigger cities aren't really good for anybody, but they also seem to be self reinforcing, where a bunch of economic factors work better when density is already high.
You aren't going to manage to fit a nice public transit system (of any kind we know today) on a sprawled city like Houston, but you can do it gradually while changing the density at the same time.
First and most important: fix zoning so that businesses (i.e. work) is where people live. You don't want a city center and some industrial areas, and separate areas with residential buildings.
Next: increase car- and fuel taxes. Add tolls, bus lanes. All of this will slowly make public transport more attractive and long commutes less attractive. This will mean people prefer working closer to their homes (so businesses might setup where people live instead of where other businesses are). Housing prices will go up only in places with good public transoport etc.
Next: stop having school districts determine where people go to school. That system only makes people buy expensive houses next to other expensive houses - because the rich parents have long made sure there is a good school there. Now both parents have to drive a long way to work instead - just so they could get a decent school.
And so on and so forth. There are dozens of reasons cities are badly planned and sprawled, and a few US cities suffer from ALL the diseases and have been for decades (school districts, poor zoning, too cheap gas, ...).