I just got out of work after a long day, and I’m waiting at the bus stop. My bus is late. It should be be by at 6:07 or so, but it’s 6:20 and I don’t see it yet. It turns out it will get here at 6:23, but I don’t know that yet, so I’m a bit anxious.

Why is my bus late? I don’t know, but it’s in the nature of local buses to be late. Before it gets to me, the 9 needs to loop around Gulfton, with plenty to slow it down. Every traffic light, every traffic backup, every rider fumbling for his change, is a delay waiting to happen. At mid-day, with fewer riders and better traffic, the bus is more reliable. But the 6:07 isn’t. I tracked arrival times for a while: 6:16, 6:18, 6:05 (or was that the 5:40, running late?), 6:21.

And of course, I can be late just like the bus can. A phone call, a last email to answer a question, and I’m late. If I were taking the train and watched it pull out of the station just as I showed up, I’d wait for 6 minutes and catch another. With the number 9, I’m sitting there for 30 minutes.

I take the bus because I’m lucky. It happens there’s a METRO route that stops a block from work and two blocks from home. And it’s a pretty quick run, express for about half its length. For me, the bus is less money to spend on a car, a nice walk in the morning, and an extra few minutes that I can spend working rather than riding. Most of the entries on this blog are written on the number 9; I grab the seat with the extra legroom just behind the rear door and pull out my laptop.

But the fact is that for most people, their trip isn’t that simple. A local bus — slow, unreliable, intimidating to new riders — will never be the mode of choice for all but a handful. Local bus service is an important social safety net, a mode of last resort for those who can’t drive due to income, age, or disability. I know many people who take light rail; I know few who take local bus.

There are things METRO can do to improve bus service. In fact, they’re working on some of them: “signature” express bus service in some busy corridors, a number to call for updated, real-time arrival times. But as long as the buses are running in traffic, they will be unreliable. The Rapid service in LA has gotten a lot of press as an alternative to rail. I rode it; I got a parking ticket because the bus I was on got delayed so much by traffic and people getting on that the bus behind us caught up and passed us. In LA, they think of the Rapid as a feeder to rail, and they’re building more rail lines. BRT solves the reliability issue with reserved lanes, but now you’re spending nearly as much as you would for rail. In building transit as in riding it, there’s no free ride.

On some days, like today, I wonder about taking the bus. I watch the cars go by, sit on the big concrete block that stands in for a bench, look at the time again, and hope I don’t get rained on. I don’t blame METRO. But don’t tell me that we should just run more local buses instead of building rail or BRT. When the train coming? 2012, I hope, and six minutes after that, and six minutes after that, and…

Board our forums here, in your own comfy chair.

The third entry on the Gulf Coast Institute’s blog makes an important distinction:

…transportation researchers are supporting much more attention to “access,” or the ability to interact, as a different goal from “mobility,” or the ability to travel.

In Houston, we’ve always thought mainly about mobility. Here’s an HGAC map from 1989 (there’s a collection of them here) that illustrates the point nicely. The color coding represents speed (an earlier version of the Houston Real-Time Travel Map) and the grey lines represent travel time from Main and McKinney:

This map, in other words, measures how fast we can move through the city.

But mobility isn’t the real goal. I didn’t get up this morning and think, “I want to travel.” I woke up and thought, “I have to go to work.” I don’t care how far I can travel in how much time; I care about how long it takes me to get to my job.

Here’s a map by Transport for London that measures that (the original is on page 57 of this pdf). The brighter the color of the place you live, the more jobs you can get to in 45 minutes:

This map measures access. And access is what people want.

The ideal for a city isn’t how fast one can travel — rural Montana trumped every U.S. Metro area in that regard. The ideal is being able to get to a lot of places — jobs, colleges, stores, restaurants, theaters — in a short amount of time.

Every place has access zone around it — the places which you can get to in, say, 20 minutes. In some places, that zone is a lot bigger than it is in other places. But the key measure isn’t the size of that zone; it’s how much stuff is in that zone.

Houston’s actually doing pretty well by that measure. We’re low density — there’s less “stuff” per square mile — but high speed — so the zone is big. But it’s also possible to get the same effect by being low speed and high density — New York, for example. The ideal would be high speed and high density, but that’s pretty much impossible outside of sci-fi. The worst case is low density and low speed — Orange County comes to mind.

These are nice maps. But they’re more than that. What we measure plays a big role in shaping what we build. In Houston, we’ve been measuring mobility, and our biggest transportation projects — mainly expansion of existing freeways — are designed to improve that measure. In London, they’re measuring access, and they’ve been building projects — like improved road and transit links to new office developments in the Docklands — to improve access. We’re trying to speed up existing traffic flows, but we’re ignoring new ones, just like we ignored office growth in the Galleria 30 years ago (while we were busy drawing maps of travel time to Downtown) and have to live with the consequences now. If we think about transportation in terms of connecting people to where they want to go — not just in terms of moving cars or buses — we get better results.

Happily, HGAC has been drawing more useful maps recently — though still not as comprehensive as what TfL does. But are the policy makers looking? We should talk about access, and measure access and build for access. Access is opportunity and quality of life. Mobility is just speed.

Our forum is full of stuff. And you can get there with only one click.

The Chronicle has an excellent article today on Wallis, TX, population 1,300, and what changes are in store for it as Houston suburbs expand westward:

“I would say we’re mostly a bedroom community,” Salazar said. “Most people think the future of Wallis is in State Highway 36’s hands but, quite frankly, I believe it is really dependent on the growth of FM 1093 that’s going to make or break Wallis.”

Texas 36 is the ribbon that runs straight through downtown — a business district that essentially comprises two blocks now — and connects Interstate 10 at Sealy to U.S. 59 at Rosenberg.

FM 1093, conversely, is just a two-lane road from Wallis to the Grand Parkway, where it begins running alongside the Westpark Tollway and eventually becomes Westheimer.

Metro still owns the abandoned rail line that runs along FM 1093 to Wallis and beyond, and Salazar is confident a widened road will keep inching westward. Fort Bend County officials already are talking about expanding the tollway to serve Fulshear and Simonton, just across the Brazos from Wallis.

At 610 and Westheimer, you’ll pass a sign saying “Fulshear 28.” Wallis is another 11 miles out. Since Fulshear isn’t suburbanized yet (although there are some subdivisions) Wallis may be waiting for a while. The Houston-Galveston Area Council doesn’t forsee population growth this far out before 2035.

But Salazar obviously understands how growth works: it’s all about transportation. Wallis was founded as a station on the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe railroad in 1880, and the San Antonio & Aransas Pass came through 7 years later. Both of those railroads became highway corridors: the GC&SF, still an active BNSF line, is paralleled by Highway 36 (above), and the SA&AP became the route for FM 1093. METRO bought 58 miles of the SA&AP right of way from roughly Kirby out to Eagle Lake (another 30 miles past Wallis) in 1992. METRO never cared about Wallis; it was the inner part of the corridor they were interested in. But now part of Wallis’ future is in METRO’s hands. And utlimately Houston politics may decide whether METRO sells this right-of-way to the Harris County Toll Road Authority, making Wallis Houston’s newest suburban frontier. Meanwhile, the Trans-Texas Corridor may make it past Wallis, too, perhaps bringing distribution warehouses and industry with it.

Ultimately, Wallis’ future isn’t in the hands of individual families looking for new place to live. It’s in the hands of developers deciding whether and where to build new tracts of houses, and those developers pay attention to transportation projects. If the Houston area decides to invest more transportation money in already developed areas and less in open fields, than Wallis in 20 years may look much like Wallis today.

Leave your sprawling thoughts in our forums.

I just noted that Houston has now completed 105 miles of HOV lanes.

Here’s the punch line: we aren’t going to build any more.

There was another HOV lane planned, along Westpark from 610 to Beltway 8. This was the corridor where METRO has planned heavy rail in 1983 and monorail in 1991. After Mayor Bob Lanier cancelled the monorail project, Metro asked the Federal Transit Administration to transfer rail funding to an enhanced bus program; among the projects included was the Westpark HOV, which would have been the first free-standing HOV lane in Houston. METRO put the project out to bid in 1997. But then Lee Brown replaced Lanier, and the project was moved to the back burner. In 1999, with METRO’s attention now focused on the Main Street light rail line, half of METRO’s right-of-way was sold to the Harris County Toll Road Authority. The result was the Westpark Tollway, which opened in 2004. (Once again, the best source for all of this is Erik Slotboom’s Houston Freeways.)

The story of Westpark is appropriate because the future of HOVs is now all about toll roads. For over a decade, libertarian think tanks like the Reason Foundation have been pushing the idea of High Occupancy/Toll Lanes (HOT lanes). Now that idea is catching on across the country, and Houston is in the lead. An HOT lane is, depending on how you think of it, an HOV lane that single-occupancy vehicles can pay to use or a toll road that multi-occupant vehicles can use for free. The first Houston HOT (which TXDOT calls Managed Lanes) will be the Katy Freeway’s four center lanes, which replace the Katy Freeway HOV lane. Similarly, the 290 HOV lane will be replaced by an HOT along Hempstead Highway, and 288, which never had an HOV, will be getting an HOT. METRO is already letting double occupancy carpools use the ordinarily 3+ I-10 and 290 HOV lanes for a fee, and plans to let single occupancy vehicles into all existing HOVs for toll.

Toll roads, of course, are nothing new; they’ve been around since the 1700s. And letting multi-occupancy vehicles use toll facilities for free isn’t new, either; it’s been the case on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge since 1971. The new wrinkle, though, is congestion tolling. The idea is the tolls vary by time of day based on demand. Ideally, that the tolls are always set at a level that keeps traffic in the HOT moving at full speed, but with a full load of cars.

Ideally, HOTs can benefit solo drivers, carpoolers and transit riders alike, which is why Houston Strategies’ Tory Gattis is a big fan of them (search for “HOT” on his blog for lots more). But so far Houston’s implementation isn’t living up to that.

The Katy Freeway’s proposed HOT policies will exactly replicate the HOV lane’s policies. The Katy HOV was the only one in Houston that didn’t allow 2-person carpools; 2-person carpools will have to pay a toll. The HOV lane was open rush hour only; carpools will travel free in the HOT only during rush hours. One of the fundamental limitations of the HOV was that it didn’t help people who commuted outbound in the morning; even though the HOT will be di-directional carpools will travel free only in the rush direction.

The Katy’s HOT won’t improve on the HOV’s facilities, either. The direct ramps that currently exist from the HOV to the Northwest Transit Center (PDF schematic, PDF schematic #1) and the Addicks park-and-ride (PDF schematic #2) are being replaced. But no new ones are being added. Buses headed to the Kingsland Park-and-Ride will have to merge across 4 lanes of traffic, and there are no new park-and-rides being built as part of the project.

The bottom line: the Katy HOT may well reduce bus and carpool use. The fact that anyone willing to pay can get the same speed benefits as a carpool, a vanpool, or a bus rider may cause some people to return to driving alone. And if congestion pricing doesn’t work right — if the tolls are set at a level where HOT lane traffic sometimes slows — bus travel times become less reliable. This project is increasing trip quality for solo drivers and either keeping it the same or reducing it for transit users and carpoolers.

290’s HOT is still under design, but it isn’t looking any better than I-10. Currently the 290 HOV has three direct ramps to transit centers; as I noted last year the HOT will have only one. And the same agency that set the restrictive carpool policies on the Katy will be making the rules on 290.

The Westpark Tollway is a prime example of opportunities lost. METRO maintains 3 park-and-ride lots along Westpark. The Tollway would be an excellent way to extend HOV-quality bus service to those lots. But none of the three has direct access to the Tollway (the picture at the top of the post is the Tollway aloofly passing the Hillcroft Transit Center). And this is a corridor where METRO owned the land, and thus had some power.

The HOV lanes were something of a stepchild, unloved by transit advocates and resented by freeway advocates. I fear the same will happen to the HOTs. The people pushing hardest for HOTs – Reason, HCTRA, John Culberson – have not shown any particular interest in transit. For them, the “HO” in “HOT” is a form of political cover that makes toll roads sound transit-friendly. And METRO has not shown any particular interest in optimizing the HOTs, either. METRO paid TXDOT to strengthen bridges on I-10 for future rail. That’s nice, but any rail in that corridor is at least 20 years off and it seems unlikely that HCTRA would give up a toll lane, however strong, for it. Transit users would have gotten a much more immediate and certain benefit from a new Park-and-Ride in Katy with a direct ramp to the HOT. We have an excellent suburban bus system; it is foolish to forget it and dream only of distant tracks.

It is clear that we are at the beginning of a big change in Houston commuter transit. The last 20 years were the HOV era. Now comes the HOT era. The question is whether this is progress.

———————-

Single occupant comments are free all day in our forums. But if you’re unhappy, do something: it’s important to remember that many decisions have not been made, and others can be un-made. HOT policies on the Katy and on the future tollways are set by the Harris County Toll Road Authority, which is run by the Harris County Commissioners, who we elect. While the 290/Hempstead plan is well along, there’s still plenty of time to add direct connectors, especially with some political pressure. TXDOT just set up a field office for 290 where anyone can ask questions and make comments. The 288 plan is still early. And METRO does have significant input on what happens, and they, too, are available for public comment and accountable to elected officials (in particular the mayor of Houston).

The most important single destination on the University Line is Greenway Plaza: the 5th largest activity center in Houston, with 65,000 jobs in the Greenway Plaza complex itself and in the other office buildings clustered around it. Serving Greenway well is key to making urban transit work in Houston.

Here’s a great aerial view, courtesy of Erik Slotboom of Houston Freeways fame. In this picture, you can see the Southwest Freeway up the center, Westpark to the left of it, and Greenway Plaza to the right. You can’t see all the office buildings here — some are behind us, some are hidden beyond, and some are out of frame to the right – but what you see is the core of the employment area.

If rail is on Westpark, the best we can do with a station location is probably Edloe and Westpark. The Westpark alignment is the red line, the station is the red and white box, and the yellow circle is the 1/4 mile walking radius I referred to yesterday:

The problems here are obvious. A few of the Greenway buildings are within the radius. Getting to them, though, requires a walk across a rather desolate overpass. That can be helped with an expensive new air-conditioned skywalk, but still most of the Greenway area – the buildings to the right, and the buildings further to the right you can’t see –- is out of walking radius.

Earlier this year, councilwoman Anne Clutterbuck proposed another option: elevate the rail line above the southbound freeway frontage road. Such an alignment could include an elevated station at Edloe:

That’s quite a bit better. Our 5-minute walking radius now reaches well into the office complex. But look at the other side of that circle: it’s made up almost entirely of the freeway, frontage roads, and parking lots. We’re wasting half of our prime ridership area.

How to fix that? Maybe we could shift that circle north, say to Richmond and Edloe:

We’re still serving the buildings along the freeway well. But we’re also serving the buildings north of Richmond, along with numerous apartments. The Richmond alignment also lets us serve the office buildings along Richmond to the east with an additional station — something that’s more or less impossible from Westpark and difficult from the frontage road.

Station placement really does matter. The difference between a 5-minute walk or a 10-minute walk can be the difference between a transit rider and a car commuter (some studies indicate only 50% as many people will walk 10 minutes to transit as will walk 5). It’s easy to say that Richmond is only a 5-minute walk from Westpark. But that means that places north of Richmond that are a 5-minute walk from Richmond are a 10-minute walk from Westpark. Of course, that means there are other places that are 5 minutes from Westpark and 10 minutes from Richmond. But around Greenway Plaza (as in Neartown) the places closer to Westpark are a lot less dense than the places closer to Richmond.

In transit planning, there’s always a tension between what’s easy to build and what’s easy to ride. But political fights and construction inconveniences are one-time things. Inconveniently located stations are forever. Putting a station further from jobs means that hundreds — or likely thousands — of people every day have further to walk twice a day, every day. It means hundreds of additional cars on the freeways. These yellow circles aren’t just lines on a map; they’re very real.

Comment in our forums.

According to METRO surveys, 40% of the people riding the Main Street light rail line weren’t riding buses before. That’s one of the more interesting tidbits from Frank Wilson’s State of Metro Address last month (it’s online here, but it seems to work in Internet Explorer on Windows only). Some people may be startled. I’m not surprised—I know several people who didn’t ride transit before 2004 and now ride the train frequently – but it did leave me wondering about who’s riding, and why.

We know the Main Street is a success. Before construction, METRO predicted 40,000 daily riders in 2020; we reached that milestone 15 years early. Ridership continues to trend upwards:

[click on any graph for a larger version]

There are a few obvious spikes in this graph: high “novelty” weekend ridership at first, the bus route changes in 2004, Katrina refugees in 2005. And there are seasonal trends: unsurprisingly, November and December, with many holidays, average lower weekday ridership. But every month has had average higher weekday ridership compared to the same month the previous year; for the past year that increase has averaged 12%.

That’s the big picture. But thanks to automatic counters on the trains, METRO has more detailed figures, which they sent me when I asked. Here’s some of what they show.

Stations

The busiest stations are those that serve major employment centers: Dryden, Main Street Square, TMC Transit Center, and Memorial Hermann-Houston Zoo. Other busy stations are bus transfer centers (Wheeler, Preston, and Downtown Transit Center, along with TMC Transit Center) and park-and-ride lots (Smith Lands and Fannin South).

Over a quarter of METRORail ridership, though, comes from less busy stations. These stations either serve underdeveloped areas (Ensemble/HCC, McGowen, Bell) or primarily recreational destinations (Museum District, Reliant Park, and Hermann Park – Rice U). The former could see significant ridership increases if the empty lots surrounding them are developed; the latter account for only 7% of weekday ridership but 15% of weekend ridership.

Station spacing is a major issue in transit design. More stations mean that more destinations are accessible, but they also result in slower trips. At 35mph, each station adds about 30 seconds to the trip. Thus, eliminating the Ensemble/HCC, McGowen, Bell, Museum District, Reliant Park, and Hermann Park – Rice U stops would reduce the travel time from one end of the line to the other from 31 to 27 minutes, and reduce Main Street Square to TMC transit Center from 20 to 17 1/2 minutes. Would that encourage more people to make that trip? Possibly. But it would also eliminate stations that account for 16% of trips. And presumably the people not boarding at those stations won’t be making a return trip later, which means we lose around 30% of trips. Would the faster travel time make up for that? Probably not.

Rush vs. non-rush

Like most transit systems, METRORail experiences distinct rush hour peaks. I know from personal experience that rush hour trains, even through they run every 6 minutes and many run as two cars instead of one, are standing room only. But while late night and weekend trains are not as crowded, I often find myself standing then, too.

Unfortunately, I don’t have hourly breakdowns for boardings. But I do have the weekday/weekend splits:

Overall, METRORail gets a slightly lower percentage of its ridership on the weekend than the system as a whole. As the park-and-ride figures suggest, That’s probably an indication that more rail ridership comes from people with weekday-only jobs and access to a car than local bus ridership does.

Passenger origin

As I’ve noted before, many rail systems get a high percentage of their ridership from Park-and-Ride. Even with only two park and ride lots (the METRO pay lot at Fannin South and Medical Center contract parking at Smithlands) park and ride passengers account for 30% of weekday trips. Nevertheless, that’s a low percentage compare to other systems, and park-and-ride riders are outnumbered by people arriving by bus: the three bus transit centers count 50% more boardings than the park-and-ride stations, and there are significant volume of bus transfers at other stations (like UH Downtown and Preston) as well.

The weekend park and ride totals (22% of total Saturday trips and 20% of total Sunday trips) are increased by recreational activities. In fact, there’s additional weekend park-and-ride boardings from people who park downtown (especially in the streets and parking lots around Bell station). Special events contribute even more riders (130,000 people rode light rail to the Rodeo in 2006), but METRO does not count them in its “typical day” statistics.

Volumes

With a few assumptions, we can use station boardings to find out the number of passengers passing each point along the line every day, On a simple suburb to downtown line, we’d expect the highest ridership volume would be just outside downtown, with the volume dropping off past each suburban station. But METRORail serves two employment centers. Thus, an “average weekday train” would have 13 people on board after leaving Fannin South, 34 after Smith Lands, and 48 after TMC transit center (multiply those numbers by 4 or 6 for a rush hour train). As people get off at the Medical Center, somewhat fewer get on to go downtown. By the time the train gets to the Museum District, it’s down to 39 people. Then it starts to fill again, to 45 people after Wheeler. They start to get off Downtown: 41 people are left after Downtown Transit Center, 23 are left after Main Street Square, and only 11 are still on board when the train pulls into UH Downtown. Of course, almost none of the people who started the trip finish it. The average trip on the 7 1/2 mile METRORail line is only 2 1/2 miles.

Conclusions

Coverage of car wrecks and expansion and politics has overshadowed the most important story about light rail in Houston: it works. Ridership not only exceeds expectations but is trending upwards. Trains are full. Riders are going to a wide range of destinations and they’re spread out along the length of the line. More than 10% of all METRO trips occur on only these 7.5 miles of track.

In fact, METRORail works because it is urban and runs in streets and stops often. The ridership is coming from buses and pedestrians, from many stations, and from the two dense activity centers it serves. That’s encouraging, since that’s what the lines METRO is planning to build next will be like. We are on the right track.

Reach your own conclusions in our forums.

It’s an inevitable part of life in Houston: every once in a while, the rain bands pile one on top of another, the rain keeps coming, the bayous rise, the streets flood. The morning commute is a shambles; people get to work late or not at all, and the lucky ones stay home marveling at the pictures on TV and listening to a long list of closures.

Does it have to be like that? Show me any flooded intersection or frontage road or rail line and I can tell you how to fix it, given enough money and cooperative neighbors.

But that gets to the big question: do we build for the two days a year it’s flooding badly, or do we build for all the other days? That’s no small difference. Building elevated instead of at grade rail, for example, doubles the cost. Is that worth it for several hours more service a year? And do those hours do any good if all the streets around the stations are flooded? Ultimately, we lose more productivity to football parties and Solitaire than to flooding.

Property damage, of course, is another matter. There are things we can do to keep neighborhoods from flooding. As it turn out, letting streets and freeways flood is one of them; water in your street is water that’s not in your living room. And of course safety is another matter entirely.

When it comes to transportation, there’s hardware and there’s software. Hardware is concrete and asphalt and rails. Software is signs and operating procedures and public information. Hardware is a flooded underpass. Software is a flood gage in that underpass triggering a warning sign and a loud reminder on TV that it really isn’t a good idea to drive through flooding. For that matter, software is contraflow lanes and phased evacuation and staging buses. In transportation, unlike with Microsoft, software is cheaper than hardware.

Part of living in Houston is figuring out how to deal with a flat and rainy place. But that doesn’t means we make everything floodproof. Sometimes the solution is just to stay home.

How was today in our neighborhood? Tell us in the forums.

11 years ago, I spent a summer in London. I lived in Earl’s Court and worked at South Bank University. To get to work, of course, I took the Tube. And to pay for my Tube travel I bought a weekly pass. It was an obvious choice: I’d spend at least 2 pounds a day just to travel to and from work; a weekly travelcard cost me 11. It was also convenient: I bought a card once a week and otherwise I never had to worry about change or ticket machines. And it was predictable: I knew exactly how much I’d spend on travel on travel every week.

Aside from all the practical benefits, my travelcard meant freedom. I could go wherever I wanted in central London, any time, essentially for free. Dinner, museums, the theatre, It was a wonderful way to live.

So why does METRO want to get rid of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly passes?

The first official reason is economics: time passes offer considerable discounts. The cash fare for a METROExpress bus from zone 4 is $3.50; a yearly pass holder making that trip 10 times a week pays only $1.90. A local monthly pass holder pays 83 cents for a 1 dollar trip. Those discounts are greatest for suburban park-and-ride users and for people who buy yearly passes — the very people who can probably pay the most. METRO thinks that’s unfair, and I agree. But there’s a simple solution: increase the cost of passes.

The other reason METRO gives is cheating. That’s clearly an issue for day passes — someone who’s made all their trips for the day can simply pass the card onto someone else or even sell it. It’s obviously not a problem for longer period passes: you want to keep your card for the next day. And I imagine smart cards — which, unlike the current tickets, won’t have balances or expiration dates stamped on them — would reduce cheating: would you buy a pass off of someone on the street if it looks exactly like a ticket with zero balance? And cheating would be discouraged simply by raising the cost of day passes: right now, anyone riding the bus twice a day is buying a day pass, and a lot of them are done using those passes early in the day. If the cost went to $3 — three trips — fewer people would buy passes, and cheating would be reduced. And frequent riders would still benefit.

METRO makes a compelling case for increasing the costs for riders currently using passes. But that doesn’t require eliminating passes. Passes are not simply discounts; they’re a convenience, a financial planning tool, and an incentive to use transit not just for the commute but for other trips. Monthly passes also make it much easier for employers to offer transit benefits to their employees. Cities across the world — and nearly every major transit system in the United States — offer period passes. There’s good reason for that.

Most transit systems have used new fare technology to introduce more fare options to make transit more convenient and encourage more transit use. In New York City, for example, the MetroCard introduced free transfers and period passes to a system that had been based on pay-per-ride. METRO is proposing the reverse: using 21st century technology to implement an 1880s fare system.

Transfers are always free in our forums.

And here’s your chance to tell METRO what you think:

Meetings and Notices

MEETINGS
Metropolitan Transit Authority
Public Hearing
FY2007 Business Plan, Budget & Fare Restructuring
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
1900 Main, 2nd floor Board Room
12 noon and 6 p.m.

Metropolitan Transit Authority
Board Of Directors’
Finance/Audit Committee Meeting
Thursday, September 21, 2006
1900 Main, 2nd floor Board Room
9 a.m.

Metropolitan Transit Authority
Board Of Directors’
Future Programs Committee Meeting
Thursday, September 21, 2006
1900 Main, 2nd floor Board Room
9:15 a.m.

Metropolitan Transit Authority
Board Of Directors’
Government & Public Relations Committee Meeting
Thursday, September 21, 2006
1900 Main, 2nd floor Board Room
9:30 a.m.

Metropolitan Transit Authority
Board Of Directors’
Human Resources Committee Meeting
Thursday, September 21, 2006
1900 Main, 2nd floor Board Room
9:45 a.m.

Metropolitan Transit Authority
Board Of Directors’
Operations Committee Meeting
Thursday, September 21, 2006
1900 Main, 2nd floor Board Room
10 a.m.

Metropolitan Transit Authority
Board Of Directors’
Executive Session
Thursday, September 21, 2006
1900 Main, 2nd floor Board Room
Following Committee Meetings

Metropolitan Transit Authority
Board of Directors’
Regular Board Meeting
Thursday, September 21, 2006
1900 Main, 2nd floor Board Room
1:00 PM

NOTICES
PUBLIC HEARING NOTICE
Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, TX (METRO)
FY2007 Business Plan, Budget & Fare Restructuring

METRO’s FY2007 Business Plan, Budget and Fare Restructuring will be the subject of a public hearing to be held on Tuesday, September 19, 2006, at 12:00 noon and 6 p.m. in the METRO Board Room on the 2nd Floor at 1900 Main Street in Houston, TX.

METRO’s FY2007 Operating & Capital Budgets are available for public review prior to the hearing at METRO headquarters at 1900 Main Street on the 14th Floor by contacting Rose Gonzales at 713-739-4834.

We don’t have zoning in Houston, right?

A Chronicle article this weekend points out otherwise. There’s one land use that the City of Houston does mandate: parking.

The city has ordinances that require new or remodeled buildings to have a certain number of parking spaces. For stores, that’s 4 spaces for every 1000 square feet (for restaurants, that number is 8, for bars, it’s 10). That means, for example, that a typical 15,000 square foot drug store must have 60 parking spots.

If you have a new CVS in your neighborhood (and who doesn’t) keep in mind the expanse of concrete around it is required by the city. We are building parking for some theoretical maximum parking demand. And when have you seen 60 cars at a CVS? When have you seen your local grocery store parking lot completely full? Houston streets fill with water more often than Houston parking lots fill with cars. Is not finding a parking place really a worse disaster than a hurricane?

But why should we care? Because parking is never free. Parking comes at a very real cost to the building owner: aside from the cost of paving, there’s the cost of the land: Midtown property goes for $50 a square foot, so that’s almost $20,000 a parking spot.

Parking comes at a cost to the city, too. Every parking spot is a bit of land that can’t be occupied by a store or a restaurant. It’s land we build streets and utlities for but don’t get any sales tax revenue from. More importantly, it deadens the city. In Midtown, the city rules amount to requiring half of all lots to be occupied with parking (assuming one story buildings and no garages). That’s in addition to the 40% of the land that’s taken up by the streets, leaving only 30% of the land for uses that are actually worth going to. As a pedestrian, you have a certain distance you’ll walk. The more parking, the less you can do within that range.

In fact, the most vibrant areas of the city are those that don’t have enough parking. The Rice Village, the Montrose, and the north end of Downtown all require some hunting for a spot or paying for a valet. Does that stop people from coming? Obviously not. They may be annoyed not to find a spot right away, but they come because these places are interesting and cool and fun to be in, and that’s exactly because they aren’t 60% paved.

My point here isn’t that we should get rid of cars. If we dropped parking regulations tomorrow, most businesses, and all businesses in car-based suburban areas, would still provide parking (though maybe not quite as much.) If they didn’t, their customers would stop coming. Drivers are not a persecuted minority. We don’t really need such strict parking requirements. And in some places in Houston — Midtown is one of them — they simply don’t make sense.

There is hope:

City officials say they hope to make it easier to build urban-style developments in Midtown and other neighborhoods near transit corridors, such as the Main Street light rail line. While special rules for particular neighborhoods may be legally questionable, they said, rules linked to conditions such as proximity to transit might work.

This is the goal of an urban transit corridors initiative that began last month with a conference at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Wulfe, Rosenberg and others said city officials seem committed to making this approach work.

We’re already making special rules: Downtown, the Texas Medical Center, and Greenway don’t fall under the standard parking requirements. And it makes perfect sense to say that businesses and institutions within a short walk from a transit stop don’t need as much parking as those that are accessible only by car. The city’s urban transit corridors initiative will likely deal with this. That’s long overdue.

Comment in the forums.