Why Richmond makes sense
There are two way to build transit: either you build where the people are, or you build where the space is. The latter is politically and technically easier. The former way is the way to get ridership.
Case in point: Houston’s Main Street light rail line. It’s extraordinarily successful: the current ridership of 40,000 a day is at the high end of METRO’s pre-construction forecast for 2020, and represents the highest ridership per mile of any modern US light rail system. The reasons are simple: the line connects Houston’s two biggest employment centers, major universities and colleges, cultural institutions, and walkable neighborhoods. It stops often, and the stations are where people want to go: right in the heart of Downtown, in the densest part of the Medical Center, right next to the museums, on streets with sidewalks and trees and bike lanes. It would have been easier, and cheaper, to build in the median of 288, but nobody would be riding.
The same logic applies to METRO’s next major rail project, the east-west Universities line. This corridor has a lot in common with Main Street: it connects Downtown and the Medical Center with Post Oak and Greenway Plaza; it serves UH, TSU, and the University of St. Thomas; it offers destinations like museums and restaurants; and it passes relatively dense and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods.
Here, too, METRO has an alignment choice. On one hand, there’s Richmond, congested and constricted but right in the center of Greenway Plaza, a block from the University of St. Thomas and the Menil Collection, passing by dozens of restaurants and cafes on Montrose, Shepherd, and Richmond itself, and in the heart of pedestrian- and bike-friendly neighborhoods. On the other hand, there’s Westpark, where METRO owns a convenient strip of land that passes by strip malls, light industry, and the fenced in back sides of neighborhoods. The choice again: easy to build, or useful?
Like the Main Street line, the Universities lines is not about connecting the suburbs to Downtown. We’ve already built park-and-ride lots and an HOV lane in this corridor that carry commuters in buses and well as a rail line could, and in July that service will get even better as the HOV lanes gets extended right to Midtown. What we need now is transit that serves the neighborhoods and businesses and institutions in the center of the city.
METRO is getting ready to start a public process to determine what the best location for the tracks and the stations of the Universities line is, and how the line can be built to maximize its utility while minimizing its impact. So far, no matter what you may hear, METRO has not decided anything. But I can speculate. Here’s what the Main Street to Post Oak section of the Universities line might look like:
I look at this and I can imagine dozens of reasons I’d ride: with a station a block from my office, I would commute to work this way. I’d use light rail to shop at the Galleria and eat at the Hobbit Hole and go to the Menil and see a movie at Greenway and visit friends in Neartown. And I would not have to worry about traffic jams or parking.
To quantify that, here’s another map. Yellow circles represent easy walking distance around stations. Red dots are office buildings. Green dots are apartment complexes. Purple lines are connecting bus routes. Green lines are bike paths.
There is no other place in Houston (aside from Main Street) where a transit line can connect so much in such a short stretch. This is the logical next step. The challenge now is to do it right — the decisions we make will literally be poured in concrete. Whether transit helps neighborhoods or harms them, whether people ride or stay in their cars, whether a transit line succeeds or fails, depends on lots of little decisions about station locations and alignments and left turn lanes and street trees and so on. Those decisions are best made in a public process where transit planners develop options, quantify impacts and costs and ridership, and present that information to the public to come up with a design based on technical analysis and everyone’s input.
Unfortunately, another process is underway: a political process whose major aim is to deny METRO and the public the option of considering all the alternatives. Politics is not my thing, but I do know that private meetings, misinformation, and backroom political pressure aren’t the right way to make public policy, and I know that it makes no sense to take options off the table before we’ve even fully evaluated them.
This is our city; this is our money; this is our future. We are making decisions that will shape Houston for the next 50 years. Let’s have an honest and informed and public discussion (you can start in our forums). Let’s insist that METRO do their job and do it well; let’s insist that they listen to everyone and consider every option. Let’s do this right.
See Tory Gattis at Houston Strategies for more.