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.

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