(courtesy Gulf Coast Institute)

In the Chronicle, Rad Sallee reported on one man’s quest to get the University Line on Westheimer instead of Richmond. Rad pointed out some of the problems with that idea, and so did Kuff. I feel no need to repeat all of that. In fact, I can sum up the advantage of Richmond over Westheimer in one sentence:

Greenway Plaza is on Richmond.

The single most important destinations for transit are major employment centers (including universities). Dense residential neighborhoods are important, and so are retail, restaurants, and entertainment. But for a transit line to be useful it must serve jobs, and Greenway is the fourth largest dense concentration of jobs (60,000 of them) in Houston, behind Downtown, Uptown, and the Texas Medical Center. Those are the big red blobs on the map above — and they’re all on METRO’s 2012 system.

Wes Mikulich, who prompted the article and created www.railonwestheimer.org, is on the right track when he says that urban transit is different from suburban commuter transit. But then he misses the point entirely:

Greenway Plaza is mostly private offices. This means that the same people every day are going to Greenway Plaza during rush hour, which makes it ideal for regional commuter rail, not a local streetcar like the University line. Consider where workers may be commuting from — say, Sugarland, or the Woodlands, or if they live close, West University. The people who live in West University need to travel north on Kirby, Buffalo Speedway, Edloe, and Weslayan — a train running on Richmond simply won’t be able to service them. And the people coming from great distances need a regional transit solution, not a local one such as our University streetcar.

It may be true that the majority of the people who work in Greenway are suburbanites. But there are 500,000 people living inside the loop, and they work, too. No, they don’t work in the suburbs. And here’s the kicker: the population inside the loop is much denser than the population in the suburbs. There are quite a few people who work in Greenway and live in urban neighborhoods, and it takes fewer miles of transit to reach then than it takes to reach the suburbanites.

And the suburbanites who work in Greenway need urban transit, too. We can (and do) provide them with commuter bus service. But they will not take it if they need a car to do whatever else they need to do during the day. A meeting Downtown? An appointment at the TMC? Drinks after work in Montrose? Shopping at the Galleria? An opening at the MFA? If there is no way for them to do that stuff on transit, they need to take a car to work. For a suburban transit user, urban transit is their means of getting around during the day.

Finally, let’s look closer at Greenway. It’s not only a major employment center; it’s a major population center, with blocks upon blocks of apartments. Who lives there? Students at UH and Rice and Baylor College of Medicine. Young professionals who work Uptown or Downtown. The kind of people who will be able to use the University Line to do what they need to do anyway.

Here’s a graphic from the University Line DEIS that illustrates the point. It shows where Greenway needs to be connected to. Every dot is the opposite end of ten trips on an average weekday that either started or ended in Greenway. Ten Neartown residents going to work in Greenway in the morning would show up as one dot in Neartown. Ten Greenway employees grabbing lunch at Maria Selma would show up as another dot in Neartown. Ten UH students leaving their Greenway apartments to go to class would show up as one dot at UH:

The lesson is that most of the cars that you see on the street in Greenway aren’t going very far. In fact, as David Crossley has pointed out for a few years now, there’s actually a lot of trips from one major activity center to another (note all the dots Downtown and Uptown.) Suburban transit will serve those widely scatted dots at the edges of the map. We need urban transit to serve those dense clusters in the middle.

Should there be rail on Westheimer? Eventually, yes. Westheimer may be the best way to connect Uptown to Westchase, and there’s a lot of residential density as well as some office towers on the way. With current redevelopment plans, that density will soon stretch inside the loop to Highland Village. So rail on Westheimer may be next. But we need to get to Greenway first.

You should get to our forums with your thoughts.