TOMORROW A Publication of Houston Tomorrow Summer 2011 Volume 3 / Issue 1 Houston’s 2nd Transit Era Is high-speed rail 65 light rail on the way? neighborhoods TOMORROW TOMORROW STAFF Editor, David Crossley TOMORROW Associate Editor, Jay Blazek Crossley Summer 2011 Volume 3/Issue 1 Tomorrow is a publication of HOUSTON TOMORROW HOUSTON 3.0 1 BOARD OF DIRECTORS If we play our cards right and don’t lose our nerve, we can become Daniel B. Barnum, Chair one of America’s best-connected, walkable cities. Mark Nitcholas, Treasurer Janet Redeker, Secretary HOUSTON 1.0 - TRANSIT BEGINNINGS 2 Steve Barnhill Jody Blazek, CPA Houston began as an urban place with its earliest developments Anne S. Brown based on transit and walkable neighborhoods. Peter Hoyt Brown, FAIA David Crossley R. Kent Dussair TODAY’S TRANSIT SERVICE 4 Tom Ferguson Against all odds, a pretty good - and pretty smart - transit system Trey Fleming has evolved over the years. Barry Goodman John Gordon David Gresham THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD 6 Ana G. Hargrove Five new light rail lines that connect activity centers could put Winifred Hamilton, Ph.D. Houston in the forefront of ridership on modern rail systems. Robert Heineman, AIA Castlen Kennedy Carol Lewis, Ph.D. 65 TRANSIT NEIGHBORHOODS 8 Arturo G. Lopez The light rail system envisioned for 2016 or so will serve 65 neigh- Miki Milovanovic borhoods with development potential for about 30 square miles. Janet Redecker Joel E. Salazar Scott Sallman A REGION FOCUSED BUT IN FLUX 10 Marina Ballantyne Walne, Ph.D. Plenty of places have sufficient job and population density to support Fabené Welch good transit service, but decades of sprawl make the future tough. BOARD OF ADVISORS Denton A. Cooley, M.D. THINKING AHEAD 12 Jonathan Day Gayle DeGeurin Some visions for future regional transit are expensive and fail to Jack Drake connect most centers. But there is a hopeful multi-modal solution. C.W. Duncan, Jr. John Duncan Howard W. Horne, Sr. FUTURE SERVICE FOR THE HOUSTON REGION 14 John L. Nau III A comprehensive proposal for regional transit service that reaches Martha Claire Tompkins most evolving communities and job centers. E.D. Wulfe RESEARCH COUNCIL OTHER PLACES 16 Winifred Hamilton, Ph.D., Health How transit works in other regions that compete with Houston. John Jacob, Ph.D., Land and Water Steven Klineberg, Ph.D., Sociology Carol Lewis, Ph.D., Transportation OTHER TECHNOLOGIES 17 Bob Randall, Ph.D., Food Bus Rapid Transit and streetcars are making significant inroads. Marina Ballantyne Walne, Ph.D., Education INSTITUTE STAFF TRIANGLE TRANSIT 18 David Crossley, President Interest in connecting the great urban centers of the Texas Triangle Elizabeth Proctor, Development & Operatioins Jay Blazek Crossley, Programs & Research megaregion is focused on high speed rail. Paula Webb, Accounting Volunteers: Phylicia Coleman, Kathryn Edwards, Alan Halter, NEIGHBORHOODS AS SMALL TOWNS 20 Suhag Kansara, Erica S. Lee, Joselyn Rushton, Roha Teferra People would like to live in small towns. Can we begin to envision FUNDING our neighborhoods as such places? Houston Tomorrow is funded by several regional foundations, including Houston Endowment Inc., The Brown Foundation, The Anchorage Foundation, Cover photos: High speed rail train, Central Japan Railways, station area, Metro Anchorage Foundation of Texas, The Fondren Foundation, The Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation, and The Felvis Foundation, as well as TOMORROW is a publication of the Greenspoint District and through individual contributions. 3015 Richmond, Suite 201 Houston, Texas 77098 Tel 713.523.5757 Fax 713.523.3057 [email protected] The entire contents are available at houstontomorrow.org Houston Tomorrow is a 501(c)(3) exempt organization that is eligible to receive deductible contributions. It’s all about access, equity, and efficiency, about connecting people to jobs, goods, Houston3.0 services, fun, food, and all the rest. It’s a new game - but we’ve played it before For nearly 13 years at Houston Tomorrow, we’ve been researching, analyz- ing, writing about, discussing, and using transit service, trying to get a han- dle on what works and what doesn’t. One of the things you learn early is that Houston wasn’t designed around cars, but around a massive streetcar system, long before people had cars. The neighborhoods built around the streetcar stations were walkable and compact. We call this long period that lasted until about 1940 Houston 1.0 Houston 2.0 began with the advent of cars and the Interstate Highway System, with public money and policies aimed at moving people out to the edges of the region and redesigning their lives and environment DIGGING INTO THE DETAILS At the first Sky Farm Transit Retreat, Jay Blazek around the idea of driving everywhere. Crossley explains the logic of a proposed express bus line. Looking on at top right In April 2010, we held a transit framework retreat at Sky Farm, my fami- is Christof Speieler. In the foreground, left to right, Tom Dornbusch, Bob Eury, ly’s place in northwest Austin County. During an intense day around a long and Robin Holzer. There were two retreats, and the other participants in one or table, we looked at maps, photos, presentations, charts, and graphs, and more of them were Ed Browne, Andrew Burleson, Mike Hochschild, Jon Boyd, Clark Martinson, and Zakcq Lockrem. filled long rolls of newsprint, pinned to the walls, with sketches and words. A framework of principles and goals emerged that first day, as well as from one of the centers. the beginnings of a conceptual approach to regional transit service. Funda- For transit-planning purposes, this map suggests a relatively near term mentally, we agreed, it’s all about access and equity and efficiency, about action plan: connect the next biggest centers to each other and to the connecting people to jobs, goods, services, fun, food, and all the rest. light rail system. It turns out there’s more than one way to do that. (Note: While the ideals of the participants are reflected in this magazine, Many in Houston have explored the feasibility of commuter rail on the the final product is Houston Tomorrow’s and does not necessarily reflect in old railroad lines that are now used almost entirely for freight. There are a detail all the opinions of individual participants.) lot of problems with this approach. One is that it mostly would serve The most basic principle was that transit service should first be avail- downtown, because that’s where all the old rail lines went in the early able where the people are right now. That is, in the places where suffi- days. Another is that it’s very expensive for the number of riders project- cient numbers of people are gathered every day for some reason, whether ed, because it goes through places that aren’t densely populated and ar- they live there, work there, are visiting there, or all of those things. We rives at a place where only seven percent of the jobs are. One reason for agreed that the lowest hanging fruit is to connect the biggest such place that expense is that the right of way and the infrastructure belong to pri- to the closest other big place. vate companies working to make a profit and not eager to share. That’s been accomplished; downtown, with 150,000 jobs, is connected But the public owns massive amounts of right of way and infrastruc- via high-frequency light rail service to the Texas Medical Center, with ture that already connects all the homes, jobs, services, and so on. The 80,000 jobs. Both places also receive tens of thousands of visitors every day. freeway and state road networks are obvious places to deploy a whole new The next big center is Greenway Plaza, and after that Uptown/Galleria, kind of transit service: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). and the University of Houston/Texas Southern University complex. All of Most freeways already have transit service in them. But that service op- those places will be connected by light rail in the next five years or so. erates mostly in the morning and late afternoon to take people in one di- At that point, hundreds of thousands of jobs in the 8-county region rection at each of those times, and then mostly to downtown. BRT could will be connected and hundreds of thousands of people will be a bike ride connect all centers, in all directions, all day with a few stops in between. - or walk - from a light rail station. And one of the benefits of BRT is that it can be done relatively quickly. Metro’s light rail strategy is to connect big activity centers and our Additionally, the idea of frequent local service is very strong. group was in full agreement with it. But what happens beyond five years? We believe the creation of a transit-connected urban zone is coming, and Houston Tomorrow has been analyzing job and population data for that the beginning of Houston 3.0 is just around the corner. How far into many years, and in 2010 Jay Blazek Crossley created a breakthrough map the region that zone extends is a matter of public policy - and lots of nerve. (pages 10-11) of the 25 biggest job centers in the region that also shows the Note: On the back cover you will see that Metro is a sponsor of this maga- number of people who live within five miles of those centers. It’s an aston- zine. That does not mean Metro had input into the issue or any sort of deci- ishing map. The first thing you notice is that all but one of the centers is sion-making influence on its content.