Addendum edit: November 26th, 2009
When I initially published this blog entry, I identified the owner of the Washington Wave jitney service as Erik Ibarra. That information is incorrect and is hereby retracted. The actual founder and President of the Washington Wave jitney service is Lauren Barrash. The Washington Wave jitney service is in no way owned, operated by, or affiliated with Mr. Ibarra or his Eco Shuttle service. The Wizard formally apologizes to Ms. Barrash and to Mr. Ibarra for any confusion that may have resulted from my error.
(What follows is the resuming of my original blog entry)
Apologize for not blogging for several weeks, but I've been busy mostly on the social front.
The Washington Wave site notes that this service is the first jitney service offered in Houston in 15 years. Why is that? Much of that has to do with the barriers to entry caused by the the restrictiveness of the jitney ordinance (Chapter 46, article 6 of the City of Houston ordinances), which state that a would be jitney operator cannot operate a vehicle that is older than five years old, on top of a pile of other fees that have to be paid and rules that have to be followed. It's not hard for people to imagine that such barriers to entry make it very hard for anyone to break even on operating a jitney service, much less turn a buck.
Moving onwards, the weekend that Randal was in town, my 20 year old Honda CRX with 192,000 miles started having problems with the clutch. A consulting with my mechanic that I've been with for the past 12 years confirmed that pretty much the entire clutch, clutch cable, and probably the transmissions seals were all shot.Getting the car repaired was a cool $900, but I now have a car that can probably last another 100,000 miles if I so desire, and I've been finding I'm getting about four miles per gallon better gas mileage since the transmission work was done.
I was able to make it to and from my car mechanic's shop via Metro bus. Metro has the #81, the #82, and the #53 all at my disposal. No $130 million per mile rail lines, along with the disrupted businesses, nor the 1,500 foot radius condemnation zones needed, but here was the kicker. It was Friday afternoon and a Metro bus was stalled, dead in its tracks at the corner of South Shepherd and Westheimer. The bus driver had put out a set of blocks to indicate an out of service bus. I asked her what was the problem with the bus and she said there was a battery problem. The lost lane of traffic, not to mention the fact that her bus had broken down at the corner of a very busy major intersection, was a recipe for a major traffic tie up. Vehicles were backed up at least 50 deep back along Westheimer.
Fortunately (for me at least), there was another #81 bus just a block and a half up the road, so I waited until the next bus showed up and went home. However, the trips back and forth took 40 minutes for a five mile trip, which meant that the bus traveled an average speed of 7.5 miles per hour. On both the trip home and back the next day, fellow passengers looked at me and complained about how slow the bus was. Granted, these routes were navigating Westheimer during busy afternoons, but those passengers were looking at me as though they were hoping I could do something about the situation.
This got me to thinking about the idea of elevated transit. Last week at the HPRA meeting, Barry had an engineer from Tubular rail speak (or perhaps tout is the better word) on his product, but he didn't get away without having to answer a bunch of questions on the safety of his concept.
This has gotten me to thinking that there seems to be this idea out there that if a social decision is made to elevate transportation, it must be in the form of rail transit. But what about the idea of simply building an elevated road via double decking a thoroughfare, and allowing only buses, bicycles, and pedestrians to access it? Granted there are issues (there always are), including the cost of building anything that is grade separated, which would probably double the cost of a road built at grade.
A double decking of a thoroughfare would have to be at least 4 lanes wide, 2 wide lanes for buses, a middle lane for maneuvering, perhaps a four foot wide buffering strip for planting of vegetation, flowers, or scenery, and outside lanes for pedestrians and cyclists. There could be overhead cover provided for cyclists and pedestrians to allow for shelter against rain. Bus stops could be placed at gaps between the buffers every one-third of a mile.
A host of issues that would arise include resistance from neighborhoods (i.e. would such a project be politically feasible), constructing stairs or elevators for egress, where to put support structures for elevating a road, building the road high enough for vehicles to pass underneath, worries that such a structure would be a visual eyesore, and possibly water drainage. Costs per mile for 60 feet of elevated roadway would probably run at somewhere around $10 - 20 million per lane mile or $40 - 80 million per mile. If there were to be an elevated busway built over a freeway, then additional costs would incur from having to cross over the freeway. Here is a webpage that shows what an elevated busway might look like.
On the positive side, there would be no need for acquisition of additional right of way, but rather simple easements. There would also be no electric stray current leakage to worry about which is a substantial contributor to maintenance costs of rail lines, and some construction costs would be saved via not having to provide electrical power stations or infrastructure. Traffic congestion would ease on the streets below and motorists would not have to worry about unsafe at-grade trains going through our busiest intersections every 3-6 minutes. It's also conceivable that some property owners would build extensions to an elevated bus way from their own buildings.
If an elevated, exclusive busway were to be built over Westheimer, that would conceivably cut the travel time that I experienced a few weeks ago in half. Placing a bus stop every one third of a mile would have meant 15 bus stops to sit through on the way to Shepherd, which at twenty seconds a stop would mean a stop time of five minutes. Given that there would be segregated traffic with no stops at intersections or traffic lights to worry about, the bus could probably average 30 miles per hour between stops. That would result in an overall five mile trip of 15 minutes, or an average speed of 20 miles per hour. That would cut the overall travel time on that bus trip by more than half, and faster trips mean more transit riders. I could conceivably make a work trip to downtown within 30 minutes from where I live, and if I could do that, then I would consider regularly taking a bus to work.
A separated guideway along the elevated busway for cyclists and pedestrians would allow for getting around town without having to tear up the existing infrastructure and current business owners just might be able to survive the construction.
It's admittedly implausible that elevated busway will make it into the public discourse, but what such an idea goes to show is that in order to make public transportation (or via other methods) attractive to anyone is that transit has to be able to compete with automobiles in terms of speed, convenience, and overall safety. That means for the smart growth crowd to get what it wants, then the entire City of Houston would have to be completely redone and that's not going to be cheap. I would imagine it would be cheaper to do that via elevating the roadway, but that all depends on what you're after - improving mobility, or reshaping people's behavior.
Wizard