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It's a 100 x 100 mile area. I grew up there and drove 5 miles to high school, through sprawling neighborhoods. Retrofitting a transport system to replace the

It's a 100 x 100 mile area. I grew up there and drove 5 miles to high school, through sprawling neighborhoods. Retrofitting a transport system to replace the need for cars is virtually impossible.

Jedd 9y ago
> 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.
- tbihl 9y ago
  I addressed parent's comment (parallel your own) and your concerns, but you beat me to submitting.
- erispoe 9y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- lightcatcher 9y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/us/houston-highway-resilience-snapshots.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/us/houston-highway-resili... cites the area of Houston as 600 sq miles (= 1550km^2) and the area of the Houston metro region as > 10000 sq miles (= 25900 km^2). Twice the size of Sydney metro area. The Houston metro region is the region for which we're talking about transit.
- jhayward 9y ago
  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.
  - Jedd 9y ago
    > 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'.
    - jhayward 9y ago
      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.
tbihl 9y ago
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.
dragon_greens 9y ago
How about busses instead of train or subways?
maxerickson 9y ago
Was there a safe route if you wanted to ride a bike? 5 miles is a pretty short ride. Seems like the morning temperatures would be fine for most of the school year (and the afternoon temps would only be really high a few weeks total).
- BrentOzar 9y ago
  > Was there a safe route if you wanted to ride a bike? 5 miles is a pretty short ride. Houston is humid subtropical, with oppressive levels of humidity even into November: https://weatherspark.com/y/9247/Average-Weather-in-Houston-Texas-United-States-Year-Round https://weatherspark.com/y/9247/Average-Weather-in-Houston-T... (Source: former resident)
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    So a bike is only a great option 1/2 of school days?
vijayr 9y ago
If one could drive a car, one could also drive a bus, no? Maybe trains are harder, but buses should be possible?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  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.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    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)
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Dallas is building a light rail system. I was reading about it in relation to this discussion: http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dart-has-spent-5-billion-on-light-rail-is-it-worth-it-8380338 http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dart-has-spent-5-billion-... 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.
  - rjbwork 9y ago
    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. And it always does, unfortunately.
alkonaut 9y ago
> 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, ...).
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Houston doesn't have explicit land use restrictions: https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-houston-really-does-have-zoning-sort-of/ https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youv...
gonewest 9y ago
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. [1] http://www.newgeography.com/content/005538-visualizing-houston-s-population-density http://www.newgeography.com/content/005538-visualizing-houst... [2] http://web.mta.info/mta/network.htm http://web.mta.info/mta/network.htm

It's a 100 x 100 mile area. I grew up there and drove 5 miles to high school, through sprawling neighborhoods. Retrofitting a transport system to replace the need for cars is virtually impossible.

Jedd 9y ago

> 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.

tbihl 9y ago
I addressed parent's comment (parallel your own) and your concerns, but you beat me to submitting.
erispoe 9y ago
> 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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
lightcatcher 9y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/us/houston-highway-resilience-snapshots.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/us/houston-highway-resili... cites the area of Houston as 600 sq miles (= 1550km^2) and the area of the Houston metro region as > 10000 sq miles (= 25900 km^2). Twice the size of Sydney metro area. The Houston metro region is the region for which we're talking about transit.
jhayward 9y ago
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.
- Jedd 9y ago
  > 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'.
  - jhayward 9y ago
    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.

tbihl 9y ago

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.

dragon_greens 9y ago

How about busses instead of train or subways?

maxerickson 9y ago

Was there a safe route if you wanted to ride a bike? 5 miles is a pretty short ride. Seems like the morning temperatures would be fine for most of the school year (and the afternoon temps would only be really high a few weeks total).

BrentOzar 9y ago
> Was there a safe route if you wanted to ride a bike? 5 miles is a pretty short ride. Houston is humid subtropical, with oppressive levels of humidity even into November: https://weatherspark.com/y/9247/Average-Weather-in-Houston-Texas-United-States-Year-Round https://weatherspark.com/y/9247/Average-Weather-in-Houston-T... (Source: former resident)
- maxerickson 9y ago
  So a bike is only a great option 1/2 of school days?

vijayr 9y ago

If one could drive a car, one could also drive a bus, no? Maybe trains are harder, but buses should be possible?

maxerickson 9y ago
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.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  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)
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Dallas is building a light rail system. I was reading about it in relation to this discussion: http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dart-has-spent-5-billion-on-light-rail-is-it-worth-it-8380338 http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dart-has-spent-5-billion-... 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.
- rjbwork 9y ago
  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. And it always does, unfortunately.

alkonaut 9y ago

> 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, ...).

maxerickson 9y ago
Houston doesn't have explicit land use restrictions: https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-houston-really-does-have-zoning-sort-of/ https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youv...

gonewest 9y ago

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. [1] http://www.newgeography.com/content/005538-visualizing-houston-s-population-density http://www.newgeography.com/content/005538-visualizing-houst... [2] http://web.mta.info/mta/network.htm http://web.mta.info/mta/network.htm