I caught this post via the Houston Chronicle from Keep Houston Houston entitled A funny thing about transit. It was a most interesting post coming from Keep Houston Houston.
The Wizard has noted before that I can in fact reach my downtown job from where I live via Metro bus. It's just that it would add 1 hour of time to my round trip commute to do so and I've decided that it's not worth my time to put up with a 1 hour and 45 minute round trip work commute every day.
I subscribe to the Journal of Urban Economics, ergo I know there have been plenty of studies that have been done to estimate what the value of people's time is on transit trips. The learned literature strongly suggests that the in time spent in transit is valued at some 40-50 percent of their per hour wage rates, while time spent in accessing and waiting for transit vehicles is perceived at a considerably higher rate.
Another part of the transportation mobility equation for me is that I have social interests that would be a bit hard to satisfy via transit, but not by my car. My social interests are almost all located between my work place and my home, ergo I don't have to drive much in order to live what for me is a reasonably satisfying life. Now if I were to get married that would be another story.
So, KHH has much of it right, but not all of it. Transit does limit your mobility to the extent that you only get to go where Metro goes, so it alters your lifestyle in that extra dimension. It sucks up your time and it is not 24x7. Transit also limits at least some of your shopping opportunities vis-a-vis a car because it's very difficult to haul that 52 inch plasma screen TV onto a Metro Bus or rail car. Allowing jitney competition would aid in transit mobility, but it's still impossible to understand why 30 miles of rail lines have to be built when Metro already has a bus network that runs into the thousands of miles, and where we could achieve close to the same thing rail would offer via adding dedicated bus lanes to major thoroughfares which would remove much of the speed and reliability problem that transit vehicles have to contend with.
Always remember, it's added mobility, not mobility substitution that we're after. As for why the votes for Metro Solutions came from the inner city and not the suburbs, maybe that has more to do with the idea that folks in the inner city might be able to reach the Medical Center via a $1.5 billion train that would run from the Hillcroft transit center, but a suburbanite will not be able to take a train that runs from Katy to Kingwood.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at September 21, 2009 11:12 AM