Passenger Rail Service to DFW Airport has a Long Way to Go

From: Fort Worth Star-Telegram

July 10, 2009

Officials of the Fort Worth Transportation Authority and Dallas Area Rapid Transit had a pleasant meeting Wednesday. They’ve been in negotiations about planned passenger rail service from their cities to the north end of D/FW Airport, and part of the reason for this meeting was that they’ve reached a partial agreement.

But don’t be fooled. There are still plenty of unsettled issues between the agencies regarding the future of regional rail service, particularly with regard to the DART-owned Cotton Belt line from north Fort Worth through Grapevine.

DART board members passed a resolution last year making it clear that Cotton Belt service will be done their way or no way. They can do that because they own the line.

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U.S. better at avoiding traffic jams; Houston's not

From: Houston Chronicle

July 7, 2009

WASHINGTON — Drivers are spending less time stuck in rush-hour traffic for a second straight year, the first-ever two-year decline in congestion as high gas prices and the economic downturn force many Americans to change how they commute.

In individual cities, Los Angeles traffic is getting better but is still the worst in the nation. Washington's is getting worse, now ranking second.

The average U.S. driver languished in rush-hour traffic for 36.1 hours in 2007, down from 36.6 hours in 2006 and a peak of 37.4 hours in 2005, according to a study being released Wednesday by the Texas Transportation Institute. Total wasted fuel also edged lower for the first time, from 2.85 billion gallons in 2006 to 2.81 billion, or roughly three weeks' worth of gas per traveler.

The records go back a quarter-century, to 1982.

The last time traffic congestion had declined was in 1991 amid a spike in oil prices during the first Gulf War.

This time, demographers attributed the decrease to a historic cutback in driving as commuters reduced solo trips, took public transit or carpooled after gas prices surged toward $4 a gallon and then the economy faltered. The housing downturn beginning in 2006 also has played a factor by reducing U.S. migration to far-flung residential exurbs.

But it won't last, assuming the economy recovers.

"Congestion won't be as bad as before for a while, but it will still be very frustrating, very unreliable and it will take a lot of time out of your day," said Tim Lomax, researcher at the Texas Transportation Institute, which is part of Texas A&M University. "The average traveler still needs 25 percent more time for their rush-hour trips."

The Los Angeles metropolitan area, with its car pool lanes and emerging mass transit, shed two hours of wait-time in rush-hour traffic. Still, its sprawling freeway system remained the nation's worst for congestion, with drivers wasting an average of 70 hours in 2007.

Other large metro areas showing congestion declines were San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and Seattle.

In contrast, the Washington, D.C., area had more bumper-to-bumper traffic, surpassing Atlanta as the second worst in congestion. With the Washington regional economy faring relatively well, drivers heading to work in the nation's capital and surrounding suburbs wasted 62 hours in rush-hour traffic in 2007, up from 59 hours.

Houston, Las Vegas, Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., had worse or equally bad traffic compared with the previous year, victims of a fast-growing population that outpaced roadway capacity.

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What Happens Once You Get Off the Train?

from Dc.StreestsBlog.org

By: Ryan Avent

July 8, 2009

Economist Tyler Cowen responds to my recent take on Ed Glaeser's recent HSR column:

My question is simple: how could you take rail from Dallas to Houston and cope once you got there? San Antonio I can see, at least provided you will camp out in city center (a mistake, but that's a question for a different day). I am willing to be converted, but what are the odds of such a line attracting significant patronage, with or without ongoing subsidy to the fares and not just to line construction? Or is the vision that everyone takes the train and then rents a car on arrival? According to Matt Yglesias, the plan won't even directly link Houston to Dallas. By the way, here are some of the other planned links from Texas. Will people really take trains from Houston to Meridien, Mississippi?

I don't really understand why Tyler thinks this is a problem. People fly between cities all the time, and airports, unlike rail hubs, are miles from central business districts. So what will people do once they've taken a train from one city to the next?

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Texas and America's four great growth waves

From houston strategies

April 9, 2009

Let's talk about the really big picture - like 200+ years of American history. It seems to me there have been four great growth waves in our history. In each case, there was an attractive new frontier, which not only drew migrating waves of people seeking new opportunity, but also developed large new bases of industry, wealth, and power.

1. The Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC corridor: America's original land of opportunity, wealth, and power. NYC was the big winner, and DC and Boston still do quite well.
2. The rise of the agricultural and industrial Midwest, including Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and St. Louis. The fall here has been a hard one as manufacturing moved abroad, but Chicago still stands as a world class city produced during the region's heyday.
3. The great westward migration, mostly focused on California, but with ancillary growth in adjacent and west coast states. This migration started well before WW2, but really took off after the war, and produced two top-tier mega-metros, LA and the San Francisco Bay Area, and several successful second-tiers like Seattle, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.
   

These waves are not clearly distinct, but overlap each other. As one region starts to level off, the next region is beginning its growth wave. And that's the situation now as California shows clear signs of leveling off: gigantic tech and housing crashes plus economic and domestic outmigration as tax, cost-of-living, housing, and regulation burdens rise.

The fourth wave is increasingly clear: Texas and the new South.

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TX Smart Growth and Houston Urbanism

From houston strategies

June 29, 2009

In case you missed it, Governor Perry vetoed a smart growth bill that came out of the recent legislature (Houston Tomorrow, Kuff, HRG). Setting aside all of the negative impacts that have come from smart growth plans elsewhere (the CA housing bubble, among others), and as relatively toothless as it was, I roughly agree with Perry and the Austin Contrarian that it was a misguided attempt to impose a state solution on what is fundamentally a local problem.

Where I disagree somewhat with AC is his comment on TXDoT and community control of their transportation. While the agency has run a bit roughshod, transportation is fundamentally a network that connects places, and that means it needs a master architect with control rather than every locality going their own way. Think about how master-planned communities prefer cul-de-sacs over street grids - nice for residents, totally unhelpful for people trying to pass through. Imagine that approach on a larger scale. Cities decide they don't like pass-through traffic so they constrict incoming boundry roads to 2-lanes - or worse put big tolls on them. Imagine if Bellaire could decide they don't like the 610 loop and they tore down the segment inside their city limits? Everybody wants the big infrastructure somewhere else - NIMBYism run amok is what we'd get. TXDoT has to have the power to break through those NIMBY barriers, even if it's not always pretty.

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An Empty Victory: When urban planning fails to live up to expectations

From Dallas Urban Core

July 8, 2009

As the current severe recession shuts down countless buildings and spaces everywhere, it is a good time to take stock on why some real-estate ventures succeed and others fail. The generous financing available the past five years not only led to lots of construction but also enabled the consideration and speculation for new models of development. Many large-scale buildings and instant communities were planned and built to a degree never seen before. Urban concepts that were confined to academia not long ago were suddenly put to the test as built projects. For example, entire abandoned airports were transformed into attractive neighborhoods with commercial town centers. Many cities seized industrial brownfield sites as a way to regenerate urban life by masterplanning dense mixed-use districts. After decades of rapid suburban development, the central city was due for a comeback, as demographic developments, pollution reductions and changing tastes conspired to make downtown living look enticing. It was just a matter of finding an ambitious project to kickstart it all.

Dallas was no different. Having for a long time failed to populate its dowtown with any residents, the city made a concerted effort (i.e. gave lots of tax incentives) to refurbish and even repurpose vacant office buildings into top-of-the-line apartments and condominiums. It even subsidized a neighborhood grocery store to get residents to stay. Yet these efforts were modest compared to one of the largest new mixed-use developments just outside the central business district, Victory Park. The brainchild of Ross Perot Jr. (the son of the former presidential candidate), Victory was advertised as the the premier masterplanned urban community, designed for the on-the-go single professional who desired place to live, work, shop and play. Anchored by a state-of-the-art basketball arena and a luxury condo-hotel, Victory was going to be a district defined by high-rise apartments, fashionable street retail, trendy restaurants, and a public plaza surrounded by gigantic and moving digital projections. Apparently, what Dallas needed was an instant Times Square, complete with a glassed-in television studio at the corner to highlight the crowded pedestrian-filled sidewalks that are common in the city (...uh huh). After an early flirtation with a low-rise, historicist architectural theme, it was decided for this district to appear distincitively contemporary, with multiple glass skyscrapers of at least 25 stories, bamboo landscaping and reflecting pools with cleaned.

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High Speed Rail Dallas to Houston

from DC.StreetsBlog.Org

By: Rayan Avent

July 6, 2009

Ed Glaeser is a fantastic economist. He has done magnificent work analyzing the economics of urban growth and written indispensable papers on the connection between housing regulations and migration.

But when the man picks up his pen to write a piece for public consumption, he tends to take complete leave of his senses. I realize that this is a common affliction among economists, but Glaeser suffers from a severe case of the syndrome.

In a Friday piece in the Boston Globe, Glaeser takes on the administration's push to fund construction of high-speed rail corridors around the country. In doing so, he combines the cognitive failures of every amateur train hater with a serious lapse in critical thinking.

He begins by making two very valid points: transit agencies are currently suffering serious and unfortunate shortfalls, and transportation funding generally is allocated where it's least needed -- to states with low levels of population, population density, and congestion.

But then he rapidly goes off the rails. Glaeser writes

Now the administration wants Americans to envision high-speed rail lines in the wide-open spaces of Texas.

For most workers in America’s sprawling metropolitan areas, no train is going to drop them within walking distance of their home or job. In Greater Houston, only 11.6 percent of jobs are within three miles of an area’s center and more than 55 percent of jobs are more than 10 miles away from the city center.

Of course, Texas has four of the nation's fastest growing metropolitan areas, all within a few hundred miles of each other -- an ideal distance for high-speed rail. Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are currently home to some 16 million people, and those metropolitan areas have added 3 million people since 2000 alone. Congestion is an issue within those metropolitan areas and will continue to worsen as they grow.

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