In the August 7th, 2008 edition of Houston's newspaper of note, Leslie Casimir wrote the story of how it takes Houstonians Pablo Camarillo and 72 year old Margaret Jenkins hours of their precious time during their busy days in order for them to get to work. The Chronicle included an online map showing Mrs. Jenkins' torturous daily commute to her home off of Airport Boulevard on Houston's south side to her job on South Loop West.
Mrs. Jenkins' daily commute, the Chronicle reported, takes an estimated 83 minutes. The Wizard decided to punch in Mrs. Jenkins' home and work locations on Google Maps, using the terms 3300 Airport Blvd and 2616 South Loop as the two end locations in order to determine the distance between her home and job. Google Maps reported that the fastest trip was what I expected. Simply take Airport Blvd in a west bound direction until you hit 288, then turn north on 288. When you reach the intersection of 288 and South Loop, turn west and around. The distance is six miles and Google Maps estimates that the trip takes 9 minutes, right in line with what Mrs. Jenkins says in the story. She says the trip by car takes 10 minutes.
Clearly the story generated a firestorm of comments on the Chronicle's website. Tory writes about the issue here. Tory asks whether we have our big government transit monopoly priorities straight?
The Wizard believes that there may be an answer to Mrs. Jenkins' and Mr. Camarillo's dilemma that doesn't involve having a monopolistic government transit agency spend $100 million or more per mile on rail lines, not that any of Metro's proposed rail lines would not help either Mr. Camarillo or Mrs. Jenkins get to their jobs since they won't run where they need to go anyway. That solution involves loosening up the City of Houston ordinances governing the operations of jitneys.
Jitneys are a form of transportation that are widely used in poorer countries, in places that don't have billions of taxpayer dollars to fund grandiose transit monuments. The Wizard has taken jitney trips in several countries, including the Philippines (where they are called Jeepney's), and in Thailand. Steven Baron extensively discussed the use of jitneys in Houston in his book Houston Electric. In that book, Baron notes that Houston City Council outlawed the operation of jitneys in 1924, at which they had captured nearly 25 percent of the passenger market in Houston. However at the 2008 American Dream Coalition conference in Houston last May, I heard Alfredo Santos tell of his story where he started operating a jitney illegally. HPRA President and public activist Barry Klein helped Mr. Santos get legal help, which eventually led to the overturning of the jitney ordinance some years ago and their legalization.
So why aren't jitneys more widely used in Houston? Well, whenever something is legal but rarely used, the Wizard immediately starts suspecting government interference and sure enough, if one decides to pay a visit to the City of Houston ordinances governing the operation of jitneys (Chapter 46, Article VI), one immediately notices some very serious regulatory barriers to entry that would be jitney operators face in entering the competitive field for transportation. Notably:
1) A vehicle used for jitney operations cannot be more than five years old! So, my 19 year old Honda which has over 180,000 miles on it, and which could continue to be safely operated for years to come could not be used as a jitney vehicle.
Imagine if Metro was told that their $500,000 buses, which are usually designed to last for roughly 12 years and 500,000 miles of operation, could not by law be allowed to operate for more than five years? Imagine if Metro's $3.2 million rail cars, which usually last for some 30-35 years with some overhauls, could not be allowed to operate for more than five years? The public would go completely bananas.
2) Jitney vehicle operators must submit an operating plan to the City, including a fixed route and fares. Jitney operators are not allowed to travel elsewhere unless they submit a new route to the City. That means that jitney operators and would be passengers are not allowed to negotiate fares, something that is standard practice in other countries.
It also means that jitney operators cannot fully utilize the full flexibility of their vehicles by servicing an entire area of town and potentially capturing more customers with door to door service. I've been on a number of bus and jitney trips abroad where vehicle operators stopped off on the side of the road or wandered off course on behalf of some passengers. Imagine if a Domino's Pizza franchisee opens a store in your area of town with intentions of servicing a 4 mile radius area around the store, but then is told by the City that they can only service homes or businesses that are on a handful of streets and nowhere else. How many Domino's stores would now be in existence?
3) Jitney operators face bonding and insurance requirements that Metro does not. Under the Texas Tort Claims Act, your life is only worth $100,000 if you suffer injury or death while involved with any kind of accident with a Metro vehicle. It should be obvious to everyone that jitney operators don't enjoy such governmental immunity.
There are more, but no doubt that the usual rationale would be offered as to why these regulations are in place and that is that we need to protect the public. It should be equally obvious to everyone that this ordinance doesn't protect the public from anything, but was instead written to protect Yellow Cab and Metro from market competition, not to help the citizens of Houston get around more quickly or conveniently.
Jitneys also present another problem, this one in the political marketplace. Jitneys don't allow politicians to spend billions of dollars in cost overruns on big transportation make work projects, they don't allow for photo opportunities or to put their names into the history books, nor do they help politicians obtain millions in campaign contributions. They also would drive lovers of government transit berserk. However by lifting lifting the regulatory barriers to entry to jitney operations, the City just might allow a solution to come forward which could allow Mrs. Jenkins to get to her job in 10 minutes and to succeed where taxpayer funded public transit fails.
Are you a class warfare type who is worried that Mrs. Jenkins might have to pay $10 for her twelve mile round trip back and forth to work everyday? Good! All that goes to show is that you don't know how much Mrs. Jenkins values her time. Who knows? She just might be willing to pay that kind of money so that she can get 2 hours and 20 minutes of her day back. Who knows, maybe a friendly jitney operator may decide to cut a deal and price discriminate for her so that she could get a round trip for $5 per day, but we won't know unless City regulations are loosened up.
Next, I write about having lunch with Bill King.
Wizard
The Wizard's world has many secrets. Unfortunately, one of those secrets was blown this past week, once again by Wall Street Journal, which recently featured a friend of the Wizard who is in a beach front property rights battle down in Surfside. This time, my secret that was compromised is that one of my neighbors drives an electric car. He was featured in a Journal story entitled "You Know Gas Prices are high when Texans start driving golf carts", carried in the July 31, 2008 issue of the Journal and which can be read here.
My neighbor featured in the story, Andrew Kunev, actually lives in the part of our compound next to mine. He's been here for some time now and I pass by his three wheeler, white colored Zap Zebra Sedan, parked just inside our compound gate nearly everyday. The car always has a bit of an unbalanced look to it, which would cause me never to consider buying a Zap, but I've never seen any performance problems whenever I've seen him on the road. I saw him zooming eastbound along Westheimer last Friday evening as I was coming home from work. Mr. Kunev can be seen at 1 minutes 3 seconds, 1 minute 40 seconds, and 2 minutes 12 seconds in the Journal's online video, which accompanies the story.
Another encounter I have had recently is that I have seeing a teenager in the neighborhood north of where I live driving around on an electric scooter while I run workouts. He goes pretty fast down the street - probably 20 miles per hour - but the scooter makes a lot of noise. Nonetheless, he told me once while stopped at an intersection that he was coming back from the grocery store, something obvious from the fact that he was carrying two small bags in a backpack while on his scooter.
These stories have got me all pumped up about the idea of owning my own electric car, possibly as a project. Many years ago, I owned a green colored Volkswagen Rabbit convertible, much like this one. One idea I have is to go look online for an old VW convertible and convert it into an electric car. I love convertibles and am starting to hanker for another one. I spotted one website actually sells custom converter kits for doing it. Here are some photos of cars whose owners have done the job. Another idea would be to convert my current car into an electric car and buy another gas powered one.
The Wizard doesn't drive all that much, ergo I sorely doubt that on most days I would tax the capacities of an all electric car. My job and most amenities are within easy driving range of an all electric vehicle. I would probably keep a gasoline powered one for longer trips.
The Wizard believes that General Motors is making a mistake with the Chevrolet Volt, that being that at first GM was telling the public that the Volt would be in the $15-20,000 range. Then we heard that the Volt would run $30,000 - $35,000, but now we are hearing that the Volt might retail at $40,000. $40,000 is rather steep for most families.
The Wizard thinks that what Mr's Peters and Kunev are the ones on the right track. Their vehicles cost only $7,000 - $18,000. The main worries are how well the batteries will hold up over time (and when they will need to be changed), along with inclement weather and safety issues.
Still, this is low cost, non-gasoline dependent mobility, which can scale and which is within the price range of most developed economy families right now. I know from much travel and experience that motorcycles and scooters are a heavily used form of transportation in Malaysia and Thailand, where annual incomes are in the $200 - $5,000 range, much lower than those found in the West. Familiarity, along with preferences and tastes will count for much, but the Wizard thinks that solutions like this may be a realistic part of our mobility future.
Wizard.
Between December 2006 and April 2007, I was sent to the UK three times by my Big Evil Company employer. The first trip was a stop over on my way to Algeria, while the latter two trips were made to backfill for my counterpart while he took time off for knee surgery and for paternity leave. I spent a total of nine weeks over in the Sceptered Isles.
While I was on the other side of the pond, it was impossible not to notice the amount of environmental hysteria that was being broadcast in the news, whether watching the BBC or reading the newspapers. Hardly a day went by where it seemed that there wasn't some reference to the Kyoto Treaty or that the Labour government was working towards some commitment to cutting greenhouse gases and telling the public that it must have shared sacrifices and belt tightening, all in the name of the Greater Good.
Well, lo and behold, here were are in July 2008 and we now hear of the news that in a recent by-election, the Labour Party lost a stronghold Parliamentary seat in Glascow. For those of you who are not quite up to snuff on your British politics, the world - very broadly - breaks down like this. The Labour Party has long held a very strong grip on Scotland and the north, while the Conservatives do better in southern England. To reiterate, this is a generalization, but as a broad picture statement, it does hold true. Hence, the fact that the Labour Party lost a long time seat to the Scottish National Party is quite a shocker.
As things stand now, the Labour Party majority in Westminster is now down to about 60. When Tony Blair first ascended to power in 1997, Labour had 418 seats. Now Labour has under 350 out of some 646 seats. It is in this context that the loss of a seat in Labour stronghold does not bode well for the Party come 2010, which is when the next general election must be contested. However, it may well be that there may need to be a coalition government formed in order to maintain a majority in the next general election.
But circling back to Labour's woes, much of the political commentary has been centering on the idea that people are starting to get fed up with paying high taxes on fossil fuels, all in the name of environmentalism. One adviser to the Labour government, Richard Parry Jones, warns that if Labour does not ditch its heavy taxes on automobiles, then UK voters are going to throw them out at the next election.
This is a fate that has happened to the Socialists in France and in Germany, where Sarkozy's rightists outright defeated the Socialists and Angela Merkel came to power via a grand coalition. As as this article points out:
In recent years, almost all of Europe's social democratic parties have lost in national elections. The collapse of support for Gordon Brown and his policies reveals a general decline of Europe's social democracy as a whole.
There are many good reasons for the deterioration of the centre-left's political influence and power. But perhaps one of the most crucial is the abandonment of their traditional core value of progressive optimism. After all, the left used to derive large amounts of its popular appeal from a firm belief in social and technological advancement, a political philosophy of societal optimism and hope. During the last couple of decades, however, it has eagerly adopted a green ideology that has replaced its confidence in future progress with the ever more intimidating prediction of climate catastrophe and environmental disaster, culminating in calls for economic sacrifices and collective belt-tightening.
In short, Britain's Labour Party has discarded its "progressive" principles for environmental fear-mongering and salvationist rhetoric in the expectation that voters would accept that only government control, central planning and higher taxes could prevent global disaster.
...
Eighteen months ago, Labour's David Miliband proposed the introduction of carbon "credit cards" that would be issued as part of a nationwide carbon rationing scheme. He suggested the allocation of an annual allowance for basic needs such as travel, energy or food. Two days after Labour's disastrous defeat in the local elections, the whole scheme was hastily abandoned.
Motorists in the UK are paying the highest fuel taxes in Europe, an average of almost £900 annually. In the name of climate change mitigation, the government has progressively increased fuel, road and car taxes. It has burdened companies with a so-called Climate Change Levy and introduced an emissions trading scheme -- costly policies that have had damaging effects on British competitiveness, energy prices and living standards. As a direct result, a record number of people, particularly Britain's poorest, oldest and most vulnerable, are increasingly falling on hard times. As many as five million households, more than 20% of the UK's population, are today living in "fuel poverty."
Progressives in America have, in many ways, followed a similar pattern. It used to be in the early years of the 20th century that progressivism meant that there was a belief in scientific and technological progress that would make our world a better place. This belief would be coupled with some kind of redistributive and social safety type measures to uplift the poor and catch those who had fallen through the cracks. Instead, it seems that Progressivism now substantially means that technological advancements are not to be pursued because of fears or objections to science and technology. Instead, we are told that we have to cut back, all in the name of saving the planet from some imagined environmental catastrophies, damned the cost.
All the Wizard has to say is that Progressives had better take a look at what has happened across the water and pause, lest they find that voters decide eventually to drive them off of political agenda.
Wizard
Recently, it came out that Harris County Metro was promoting a nation wide effort for Americans to use public transportation. I was not aware of this, but I did find out about it via BlogHouston.
Unlike 95-96 percent of Houstonians - and probably nearly all of the loudest promoters of public transportation in this City - the Wizard actually decided to take the bus from home to work this past Friday. In reality, I had been thinking of doing this for about two weeks. I've been doing some research, collecting data on transit speeds on various bus routes, wait times, and so forth. What I have been doing when I go on bus trips is that I write down how long it took for me to access the transit stop, the time I get on the bus, record all stops, the amount of time the bus stops, and time of arrival when I get to where I am going.
Without going into a blow by blow account of my trip on Friday, here is an overview of my trip to work and back home. I live about 9 miles from downtown and happen to have a bus stop at the corner of Westheimer and the street I live at. Of course, when it comes to public transportation, all roads really do lead to downtown, ergo if one does not have a job in downtown like I do, and some 93 percent of people who live in Harris County do not, then the possibilities of transit working for anyone in an urban area diminish substantially.
Here are the general details of what happened.
Going to work
1) I walk out my front door at 7:17:50 am. The bus stop is about 2/10th's of a mile away from where I live. I reach the bus stop at 7:21:12 am, so my walk to the bus stop has taken me 3 minutes and 22 seconds. I see a Metro bus at the next light, but it is not the route I want to take. As it is, that route will also get me to work and might have gotten there as fast as, or faster, than the route I took today. As it is, I let the #53 go by and wait for the #82.
2) The #82 arrives at 7:27:10am. As I get onboard and waive my Metro Q-Card, I keep thinking to myself that I could be nearly half way to work by now if I had taken my car. I also think that I am paying $2 for a round trip today, whereas my cost of gas is about $3. As for the opportunity cost of my time, well gentle readers, that is another story...
3) The #82 is standing room only, so I stand for the first two miles until we get to the Galleria. Most are minorities and working class people. I am the only one dressed in slacks and shirt. There, several people get off and I sit down.
4) At 7:37:05 am, we cross 610 Loop. I would have been reaching my workplace by now in my car.
5) At 7:44:49am, we reach Lamar High School and St. John's private school. There to my surprise, seven students get off the bus and start walking towards Lamar High School. I have seen Lamar students get on the bus in the afternoon, but somehow didn't expect this in the morning.
6) At 7:57:20am, we pass Numbers night club. At 7:59:15am, we reach Louisiana and turn left towards downtown. On the way, I see Houston Police pointing speed guns at drivers along Louisiana. We reach Polk at 8:04:10am. My walk to the office is seven minutes.
Results: My overall trip time door to door was 54 minutes, which is what I was generally expecting. That means my car saves me about 50-60 minutes per day in a round trip.
The actual time in transit was 37 minutes. There were a total of 37 bus stops made, which took a grand total of approximately 602 seconds (ten minutes and two seconds). That works out to an average stop time of 16.27 seconds per stop, but some stops were substantially longer than that. The stop for the light at Kirby and Westheimer, for example took, 62 seconds. If I had taken the #53 instead, I may have gotten to work faster.
The average stop time for the #82 is actually less than for some other bus routes I have taken. For example, for the #15 Fulton bus route, I discovered that the average stop time was about 21 seconds per stop. I did this while doing research in response to the public comment period for the North Corridor rail transit line.
The average speed of my entire trip was 10 miles per hour, if you count walk time and wait times. If you count only time in transit, the speed of the bus was approximately 14 miles per hour. That also happens to be the average speed of travel of the Main Street rail line.
My trip home
1) I left my job Friday evening at 5:55pm. I reached a covered bus stop on Smith at 5:58pm and wait. It rained on Friday. That reminded me that 30 years after being voted into existence, a large percentage of Metro's bus stops still do not have covered shelters at them. The #53 has a bus at the light, but I was on the other side of the street and traffic was steady. Once again, I let the #53 go and decide to take the #82 home.
2) 6:02:10pm, board the next #82 bus. The bus currently has about 15 passengers, including 2-3 professional types. I later discover the professional types all get off at Wesleyan. The bus starts in transit at 6:03:06pm.
3) 6:12:00pm. The bus turns onto Elgin, which of course turns into Westheimer. This time many more people get on and off at random stops and there are several people who request bus stops along the route. I have been finding that Metro buses stop an average of about once every quarter mile. In contrast, the planned light rail lines will have a stop roughly every three fourths of a mile to one mile. I suspect that travel speeds would be faster for a bus than a train if Metro were to run supplemental limited stop buses along the proposed rail lines that were to stop as infrequently as trains do.
While I sit on this trip writing down my times, I found myself occasionally staring out the window and starting to dwell on the thought of public transportation being an amenity of an urban area. Maybe it was the fact of actually being on a bus and taking it to work which concentrated my mind on this matter, rather than writing abstractly from an analytical view. Amenities of all kinds have costs related in producing them. The key is to minimize amenity costs in order to achieve results, especially if you are using public monies for the amenity. Otherwise you wind up with sunk costs and ultimately tax increases in order to pay for the amenity. It should be noted that for the first 22 years of the agency's existence, Metro - incredibly for a government transit agency - never got into financial trouble. Transit agencies that only run buses never do. Once a transit agency crosses that line and starts building big rail networks, the thoughts and worries about where are we going to get more money never quit. Since the rail line was built and talk started of building rail lines in all directions, there has been nothing but talk on how are we going to pay for this. Get used to that.
The increased costs of fuel for Metro from the $1.83 per gallon contract they signed five years ago to updated market prices will cost some $30 million per year, which amounts to increasing the system wide subsidy costs to carry patrons by bus by about 6 cents per passenger mile. In contrast, building the rail line for the North Corridor will result in spending about $3.50 - $4 per passenger mile to attract a new transit rider using light rail as your means of doing so.
And no gentle readers, there is no fuzzy math in that statement. I did not say that the cost would be $4 per gallon of fuel, I said the social costs are about $3.50 - $4 per passenger mile to attract a new rider to transit using light rail as your means of doing it. I arrived at that calculation assuming each and every new rail boarding would result in a five mile trip (which is about the average distance a transit rider travels when taking public transportation), using Metro's own stated forecasts (Metro states that the corridor has 19,000 bus boardings now and will have 29,000 boardings after rail is built), their own cost estimates ($677 million), and the FTA's own mandated cost structures to arrive at that figure. Furthermore, Metro says 55 percent of the riders for the North Corridor alignment will be bus riders arriving at train stop via bus, so instead of getting to take a bus straight into downtown, they will have to probably transfer to the rail line in order to complete their trip.
Imagine having a four seat sedan as your car and that you pick up three of your co-workers to go back and forth to work, driving 10 miles back and forth, or about 5,000 miles per year in the process. Now imagine having to trade up to a five seat Lexus type minivan because another co-worker who happens to live nearby (say a mile away) wants to join your car pool. Then imagine the cost of making that switch would cost you an additional $17,500 - $20,000 per year over and above your current transportation costs. That's what we are getting into when we trade up now from buses to light rail. So would you make that switch and buy that minivan, or would you consider trying to do something cheaper, or do nothing at all? If your answer is yes you would buy that minivan, then that also is what Metro, the Houston Chronicle, and the rail constituency want to do.
Note that none of these figures incorporate losses to patronage from bus routes which have had their routes truncated, rerouted, or eliminated in an effort to accomodate the demands that rail will place on the agency. Metro lost some 23,000 - 25,000 boardings on the 16 main bus routes that intersect the Main Street rail line after the line was built. Expect more of this if the other five rail lines get built. Once again, all we are doing is trading up, and what an expensive trade up that is.
Proper pricing of amenities via using private markets for transportation, which is what actors in the free market and private sector would have to do in order to survive, would cut all of this out. That in turn would allow us to get rid of this notion that everyone should live at the expense of everyone else.
4) The bus reaches 610 Loop at 6:34:40pm and reaches the Galleria 1 minute later. When it does, 14 people get off the bus.
5) I get off the bus at 6:48:40pm. It takes me 90 seconds to cross Westheimer because I don't have the green light when I get off the bus. I get to my front door at 6:54:05pm.
Results: The overall time from door to door is 59 minutes and 5 seconds. The actual time in transit was 45 minutes and 34 seconds, reflecting heavier traffic. There were 38 stops made on the way home. The time spent at stops was 816 seconds, or 13 minutes and 36 seconds. The average time spent at stops was 21.5 seconds.
The average speed of my trip home, door to door, was 9 miles per hour, if you count walk time and wait times. If you count only time in transit, the speed of the bus was approximately 12 miles per hour. I have so far found on traveling four different bus routes that the average travel speed of a Metro bus in transit is some 12-14 miles per hour. If Metro were to introduce a Rapid Bus or Signature bus line down Westheimer, that would eliminate about 75 percent of the bus stops along my bus route and cut the time in transit down by somewhere around 7.5 - 10 minutes in each direction.
One of the things I wrote in my reply to the North Corridor Supplemental Final Environmental Impact Statement was that simply running a bus straight to Northline Mall with the same number of stops as the planned rail line would take approximately 19 minutes. That almost certainly matches the speed of the proposed rail line which would have its own dedicated lane verses a bus which now has to operate in mixed traffic; ergo there would be little or no travel savings to be reaped by spending all that money by building a rail line. What's worse is that Metro plans to cut off road lanes along Fulton (and has floated the idea of doing that to Richmond Avenue), which will cause greater traffic congestion along the route.
One other thought went through my head. The cost of building an at grade light rail line from my home to work would probably cost at least $1,200,000,000, if not far more. It would involve widening and acquiring property along all of Westheimer. Even worse, a rail line traveling 15 miles per hour in transit would have only saved me time on my work trip home. It would have traveled at the same speed on my way in.
Enough for now. I will be going to a visitation this evening for a young colleague who unexpected was taken by a sudden illness. It is a reminder of how cruel life can be. My ADC stories will resume next week.
Wizard.
Sorry gentle readers that I have not been at the blog lately, but there has been much going on, both at the work front and at the activism front. I had to go into work three times off hours within the past week. No, that's not fun.
I will be spending the next week or so writing about what some of the speakers at the Houston American Dream Coalition conference had to say on the various topics that were covered at the conference. The American Dream Coalition has DVD's for sale for people who may be further interested in what featured speakers had to say.
My first speaker to be featured is Lolita Buckner Inniss, a law professor at Cleveland State University, who spoke about the topic of form based codes or FBC's. Ms. Inniss teaches property law and practiced for over a decade dealing with municipalities and zoning issues.
Ms. Inniss has written some academic papers on the issue of form based codes, and about the idea that FBC's are presented as an alternative to zoning and its perceived problems, including physical decay, segregation of ethnic, racial, and economic groups, and being implicated as a reason for aggavating economic downturns. Inniss argues that FBC's are not the panacea they are sold as. She argued that:
1) FBC's try to do by design what used to be originally spontaneous.
2) New Urbanism or Smart Growth, at its heart, is a very contested notion. There are several flavors of New Urbanism.
3) FBC's imply that they will allow a reliance on community involvement in urban development, but Ms. Inniss argues that most of the community is left out of the so called community involvement most of the time.
4) The supposed tool for community involvement is called the Charrette. Pardon my French, but having lived in Houston all my life, this word which is used everywhere but Houston, is apparently a fact of life in urban planning. This word, which somehow conjures up images of beret wearing neighbors sitting at a cafe, sipping coffee and planning what the future will be like, is also sometimes known by another term, the Charade. More on Charrettes later.
Ms. Inniss went on to say something that the Wizard has long known about Cities, namely that they were not about social activities and only occasionally about political ones. Cities have always been about the money. If you look at the lens of history, cities were where the rich lived. The poor lived in rural areas.
Ms. Inniss went on to say that land use was, before the advent of zoning, governed largely by servitudes, nuisance law, and easements. Ms. Inniss made the commonly issued argument about nuisance law, namely that it is limited. Facts and objectiveness is often in doubt. Differing aesthetic tastes and judgments often throw a wrench into its use.
Ms. Inniss then went on to say that zoning codes coincided with a period of tremendous economic growth. Population crowding, pollution from the Industrial Revolution, and increased social mobility all probably played a role in the rise of zoning. She argues that there were class conflicts, where the poor and middle class had access to areas of wealth and power. One early promoter of much of this stuff was Ebenezer Howard, who advocated garden cities, green belts, and so forth. What is less well known is that Mr. Howard also advocated the abolition of private ownership of property on the grounds that it was a cause of overcrowding. Planning would get rid of that.
Post Zoning Challenges
Professor Inniss wrote that FBC's are prescriptive, not proscriptive. FBC's are proscriptions on designs, but they are not telling you what to do with your property. Her observations are that the poor or minorities are usually left out of the Charrettes, and that usually planners and elites will get what they want out of the community involvement process.
I also learned another word in the land use lexicon and that word - yes, Virginia - is called responsibilization. Responsibilization apparently is government inspired imposition of autonomy for land use decision making. In practice, what this really means is that government abdicates responsibility while still retaining control of land use. Claims are made of deregulation of land use and privatization, but often the free market is not really allowed to function to its fullest form. Put in another way, if FBC's work as intended, then responsibilization means that local governments say that we are in charge if it works as desired, but if it doesn't and social ills or undesired results occur, then it was because you were in charge.
Ms. Inniss summed up her talk by saying that FBC's are often an ad hoc process approach to land use. It does not represent unplanning or unzoning of land use. FBC's are often used as an alternative to planning or zoning by people who may not be accountable for decisions made and who may not represent many members of the community.
Next up, Mai Nguyen, professor at the University of North Carolina, and a co-author of an interesting paper entitled Who Sprawls the Most?
Ciao for now.
Wizard
It's been a month since the Wizard published something on his blog. This was not on purpose, but it was due to the fact that some important documentation arrived on a policy matter that has required study. I am actually still working rather feverishly on that issue, but there was the matter that some have talked about the American Dream Coalition conference which was held here in Houston the weekend of May 16-18, 2008.
I was credited with being a sponsor of the conference, given that I paid for a substantial portion of the bus tour that the Antiplanner has written about on his blog, both here and here. It turned out that there were 75 people who opted to take the bus tour, which necessitated that we rent out two buses. That in turn required that there be two tour guides.
The story on where we decided to take these out - of - towners is a story in itself. The Wizard, along with a few others, received an email some 3 months ago requesting that we help make financial contributions towards the conference and that we would plan for the bus tour. The Wizard, along with Barry Klein, and Dave Hutzelman, went round and round in circles trying to work out a schedule that would be able to fit in everything that we would want to show people. Discussions dragged on for days and emails flew back and forth. Dave wanted desperately to show off the downtown tunnels, while Barry wanted to show off historical aspects including the Houston Ship Channel. Talk raged about whether we should tour the refineries, to discuss policy aspects of Houston being the place where the oil and gas are processed. Incredibly, Barry even wanted to go all the way out to see the San Jacinto Monument! Meanwhile, the Wizard shook his head and wondered how in the hell we were actually going to get all this done.
The first shoe fell when Kathleen told us point blank that we needed to be back at the hotel by 4:00pm sharp. This was for the benefit on conference attendees who would be desiring to shower up and get ready for the evening forum on land use and light rail. So, given that we would realistically have 8 hours with which to conduct a tour, and that we would need to plan for lunch, we then narrowed down our ambitions, which was what I had been telling Barry we needed to do anyway.
Barry and Dave still were trying to push for their agendas when the Antiplanner himself stepped into the debate. He wanted to see a city which had (and still has) an aggressive road construction program in place, coupled with loose land use policies. If we could talk about what it is like and show off features of a City with no zoning, that would be great. He also greatly desired to see a privately planned Master planned community. The reason for seeing the latter was that there were almost certainly going to be people on the tour who had never seen such communities before and he wanted for conference attendees to see them.
And so now the gauntlet had been thrown down. The debate had been focused. With that, the Wizard went to work. We briefly discussed showing off the Woodlands, but the Woodlands had been started with federal money, so my thoughts turned elsewhere. There were a number of master planned communities we could have chosen from, however one idea I wanted to discuss is our use of toll roads, ergo I wanted to talk about toll road policy. That led me to Sienna Plantation, with its newly constructed Fort Bend Parkway nearby.
With these ideas in mind, we hammered out a route which would include the following:
1) Houston as a non-zoned city. We would discuss features of Houston's non-zoned environment including deed restrictions. We would tour the Heights, a part of town that was originally built around the streetcar and which had turned into a backwater before being revived over the past 25 years. We would tour Washington Avenue, an area that is undergoing redevelopment under market pressures. We would travel briefly along Braeswood and talk about the property rights battle stemming from the Floodway Ordinance. We would also show off a city which is experiencing a monstrous boom in development.
2) We would show off current controversies, including Ashby Highrise and Metro's light rail lines. At the same time, I decided to start off the tour by going down San Felipe, where tour attendees would see Inwood Manor and the Huntingdon, as a backdrop to the Ashby controversy.
3) We would go through some of Houston's gritty neighborhoods and its wealthy ones.
4) I succeeded in shoe horning in the I-10 / Katy Freeway expansion. Barry knew of a restaurant in the area that would seat over 300 people. We would eat there.
5) We would then go out to Sienna Plantation in the afternoon via the Southwest Freeway. This would show off Houston's massive freeway system. This was the long way there, but we would come back via the Fort Bend Parkway on the way back. We would spend some 60-90 minutes at Sienna.
I drove the route and had it all figured out in my head. I made contact with the Johnston development people, got names and numbers, and potential speakers. All was well....
Or it was until the Antiplanner started insisting that we have a boxed lunch just 10 days or so before the tour. The Wizard however sidestepped that problem by simply not finding out where we could get such a large order on short notice. It didn't help that I have a full time job. I can't go spending all my time chasing this stuff down.
The second wrench occurred just one day before the bus tour. Since we were having two bus loads of passengers, that necessitated that I drive the route with Barry. All was well until we hit the Main Street rail line near Fannin and Rice University (circling around after touring Ashby). My original route, made with Barry's own input, called for us to tour the light rail line towards downtown to show off distressed areas of the alignment. Instead Barry insisted that we travel south to show off the Texas Medical Center, then the Astrodome. We would then circle back and travel along Harrisburg, the Ship Channel, circle around 610 Loop, and so on. In effect, he was trashing his own original plan.
Sigh... The joys of local activism.
I tried to tell Barry this would not work. Remember, we were under a deadline! I had already done this once before and I had it already worked out! My arguments, as always, fell on deaf ears. We drove through everything Barry wanted to see and the trip took 6 hours in my car. The buses, I reasoned, would be 50 percent slower. So reluctantly he gave in and cut out the downtown tour, along with the Ship Channel, Broadway, and 610 portions of the tour. Instead, we simply traveled south along the rail line, hit 610, then traveled east to M.L.K., then tour the proposed rail lines, including showing off signage from those opposing the alignments.
With that, all was well until the tour started. About 20 people did not get out to the buses on time. We waited at the hotel until 8:15am before starting. We started down San Felipe (showing off the condemned pocket park near Ed Wulfe's development at San Felipe and Post Oak), before stopping again! This time, the Antiplanner told us to wait until some 10 more people were ferried to the buses from the hotel via taxis. This made many of the tour attendees angry, so they proceeded to take out their anger on - you guessed it - their tour guide! That ended up causing the tour to not get off until past 8:30am and we were some 20 minutes late getting back, but once we got going the tour turned out great.
And yes, the Wizard did serve as tour guide. Wendell Cox was on my tour bus and the Antiplanner joined for the afternoon portion of the tour. I received compliments 14 times during the conference from people who were on my bus. They particularly liked how I went into historical aspects of the City and background as to what was going on. They absolutely lapped it all up.
And so it was. It made me feel like a million dollars. The next blog posting will be on what I thought was good about the conference.
Wizard
I had the week off from the day job a couple of weeks ago and took the opportunity to attended an April 9, 2008 TexITE luncheon where Councilman Peter Brown was the featured speaker. And it was a speech to remember.
Mr. Brown started off by saying that he has been a member of the ITE since 1995, when he mentioned that some of its members had started getting caught up in New Urbanism. He stated that he has worked in some 25 states with master planned developments and 130,000 units.
He stated emphatically that he represents the City of Houston. He insisted that the Houston metropolitan area needed a "strong central city", but as have so many other speakers who have made this claim, I should note that he failed to explicitly explain why is it necessary to have one. What's so special about a particular municipality when both homeowners and businesses are footloose?
Mr. Brown stated that the efficiency and character of the built environment must go together. He also said that Houston must become a Sustainable City. For those of you that need some help reading between the lines, this means that Houston must have urban consolidation, despite the fact that Houston has been gaining density at a rate of about 500 people per square mile per decade since circa 1990. In this encoded language, this means that we must have more compact development, use less energy, meaning that we have to get away from autos and use public transportation regardless of its decline in use. In other words, it's no longer the City's job to merely provide police protection, fire suppression, or other services. It is now the City's job to compel you to cut down on how much energy you use regardless of your own habits or desires.
There is now a new Council committee called the Committee of Sustainable Growth. Of course, Mr. Brown is the chair of this committee and I would not doubt that some of his "Smart Growth" friends are advising him.
Mr. Brown says that we recycle only 7 percent of our waste, while Seattle recycles much more. He forgot to mention that recycling was one of those fads that started in the 1980's, but municipalities everywhere quickly discovered that recycling was largely a money waster. In fact the City of Houston, which started a recycling plan under former Mayor Kathy Whitmire, has tried on a number of occasions over the past 15-20 years to get out of the recycling business because it was consuming taxpayer dollars. However, recycling is politically popular, ergo the City continues to waste taxpayer dollars doing it because the taxpayers like wasting their taxpayer dollars this way.
Read this post as to why recycling is often a money waster:
Well one of the reasons they want you to take your recyclables to a depository is because curbside recycling is extremely energy inefficient. And seriously money losing in most places unless landfill fees are exorbitant like in NY, CA or Seattle. I think in SanFran you have to sort your recyclables. In Texas, Austin has a weekly curbside program which loses money. In Houston we have a biweekly curbside pickup which loses money, and is only available in the closer in more dense areas, maybe 1/3 of the city area. The trucks squander so much fuel that the money from selling recyclables doesn't pay for fuel costs. This is even worse in lower population density cities like Nashville and 'burbs because of the distance between pickups. Houston was losing intolerable money from this when it was weekly, so they changed to biweekly. Unless you're in an area where land for landfills is extremely tight, and pop. density is high like in major cities on the coasts, curbside recycling is window dressing, a "feel good" solution causing more waste than saving. It's not a matter of Nashville being behind San Jose at all, just reasonable economics for the local situation. The political entities there are saying to you to combine a trip to the store with a trip to the depository and save fuel. I do this with glass since Houston does not take glass at the curbside.
Mr. Brown informed the audience that the City of Houston now has a comprehensive mobility plan and a comprehensive drainage plan in place. A "Green Building Code" will be getting adopted, though he did not go into details of its contents. There are definitive plans for Interconnected Green Belts and flood control plans. At the same time, CM Brown lamented that the City has no source of money for flood control.
Mr. Brown is convinced that new resources for transportation infrastructure funding will be available at the federal level. He reemphasized that Houston needs a plan.
Mr. Brown supports the Texas Triangle Bullet Train connecting DFW, Austin & San Antonio, and Houston. He says that costs will be $21 billion, a figure I'll believe when I see it. He said that Southwest Airlines is probably dropping their opposition to such a plan because there is no money to be made on short haul air traffic. As was to be expected, Mr. Brown emphatically supports dramatically increased light rail and commuter rail expansions. Of course he would because he will be dead before he has to ask taxpayers to bail out Metro when the cost overruns come and bus service goes to pot to continue rail service. All this for a form of transportation that will probably never achieve more than 10-15 percent of work trips no matter how high the price of fuel becomes.
One item I should interject here about a Texas triangle train. One needs to remember that such a scheme will only be built within the boundaries of Texas. As such, people should not expect that a financially strapped federal government, which will be feeling the full brunt of the baby boomer entitlement burden coming within the next decade, to fund such a scheme simply because you are asking that 49 other states fund it without getting anything in return. It will need to be done either privately or be done from the confines of the Texas Legislature.
CM Brown says Dallas is 10-15 years ahead of Houston when it comes to rail, but he failed to mention that rail has done nothing to improve traffic congestion, which is as bad as Houston's. He also didn't talk about the recent massive escalations in rail costs which have sent shockwaves throughout the Dallas political classes and have driven Dallas's rail expansions into the ditch. He said Houstonians will not tolerate eminent domain for new roads. That's good to know because if we are going to have the much ballyhooed 3.5 million new residents show up by 2035, then we will probably have another 2 million or more vehicles on our roads.
Mr. Brown says that Houston must be pro-growth and development, as only 15 percent of new area population and 23 percent of new area jobs are landing in Houston proper, as the people and jobs are going outside city limits. Strangely, moments later he proclaimed that "there is a great migration where people are moving back to the central city". The creative classes want an exciting, vibrant lifestyle and we need to improve the "Quality of Place". I suppose that we are to have no more of those quiet, boring, suburban bedroom communities with good schools and lots of open space which might attract new residents.
Mr. Brown said we have reactive and complaint driven government, where for example a developer says they need a pair of lanes for their new development in order to make it work. This is not efficient, Mr. Brown proclaimed. Instead, "we need to do things like figure out where the high density development is supposed to go". Mr. Brown didn't mention the idea that developers might be the ones whose job it is to figure out where high density development might go, nor did Mr. Brown go into details as to why a developer might need a pair of road lanes to get their new developments to work.
Transportation planning: Area planning will require overlaying TX-DOT's plans, TIRZ maps, and the city's plans. Houston will soon have a classification of city streets, which he says have led to "insipid neighborhood layouts", though Mr. Brown did not go into detail as to what constituted insipid neighborhood layouts. Mr. Brown is not happy with current transportation modeling at H-GAC, claiming it is primitive. Other cities have "much more advanced" modeling.
Mr. Brown then said a major goal of Houston's comprehensive mobility plan is to substantially reduce per capita vehicle miles traveled ! He said Houstonians spend $12,000 per year in auto expenses. He derided that Houston is a cheap city to live, saying that despite cheap housing costs, Houston is very expensive, partly because taxes are high. There is a trade off between housing and transportation costs. "We need to find a balance", presumably through even more planning. Major Thoroughfares are to be rationalized, efficient, and neat. Mr. Brown did not go into any further details as to what the City was going to do to compel its citizens to not travel so many miles, regardless of what their means or travel desires were.
Mr. Brown has traffic calming on his agenda, as well as road dieting. In case you need translations of these terms, these are part and parcel of the Smart Growth agenda, terms which mean that roads need to have lots of money spent putting various barriers in the way for pedestrians, which in turn cut down on vehicle speeds and mobility. Road dieting means cutting down on road lane miles and redeploying them for bikes and walking. In other words, Mr. Brown wants to make Houston more automobile hostile, build up traffic congestion, and make it slower and more difficult to get around so that people will walk more. In other words, this means making Houston look like London.
If you need a clarification of what "road dieting is", imagine this. Westheimer inside 610 Loop is mostly two lanes in both directions with no medians. Now then, imagine taking the outer 5 feet off of the outer two lanes and redeploying them for (seldom used) bike paths. That wipes away one full lane off the street configuration. Then with the remaining three lanes, use the center lane as a turn lane and put an occasional pedestrian island on it. This leaves us with only one full lane for vehicle traffic in either direction.
Don't laugh. I went to a Metro meeting some months ago on the Wheeler / Richmond rail alignment where Metro is looking at allowing only one lane of traffic to operate in either direction during off peak time travel hours. All this in the name of "promoting a pedestrian realm".
Here are just a few of hundreds of photos I took of London when I was there in 2007:
1) This photo shows a 300+ year old neighborhood where there is only on street parking and which only has one lane for cars.
2) This photo is a window ad at a real estate firm where two apartment flats are for sale. The first is for $1,850,000 and the second is for $1,500,000.
3) This apartment was going for $850 per week. The apartment below was going for $800 per week, which is about the average apartment rent in London right now.
The difference between carrying a 30 year $150,000 mortgage at 6 percent in Houston and a $600,000 mortgage in London (the average price of a home in London is about 300,000 pounds) is $32,400 per year, enough to purchase and maintain 5-6 cars per household. My colleague whom I went to London to backfill for is a Scotsman who lives in Aberdeen. He cannot afford to move to London because the UK government takes too much of his salary away in taxes and the City is too expensive for him, his wife, and their 3 kids, even though he is probably making $100,000 per year and would be living in a national capital which has a legendary public transportation system which is heavily subsidized.
Mr. Brown says that Dallas has a comprehensive development plan, but strangely, in order to come up with this new plan, they had to do away with antiquated zoning which was getting in the way of the new plan. Mr. Brown didn't mention stories like this or this when talking about Dallas's latest plans.
Houston does not do fiscal impacts on development says Mr. Brown. People are fed up with taxes and we need to promote development. My take on these remarks is that these studies are often used to justify whether "development pays for itself", presumably meaning that if a developer spots a market for single family homes somewhere and wants to build them, the City could then stop this development on some theoretical grounds that the infrastructure will be too costly to implement and that the development will not contribute enough tax monies to justify planners permitting its construction. In other words, such grounds could be used to deny where people live, where development is located, what type of development it is, and its attendant satisfaction of market participants on the grounds that this development is somehow detrimental to municipal finance of all things. In other words, such a device could be used to hinder development, if that development is presumed to be of the kind that is somehow not to be desired.
The questions started: One engineer who had spent his entire career in traffic engineering, talked abaout the traffic and transportation department, which was dissolved in the 1990's, but is now in PW&E and part of a giant bureaucracy. Gonzalo Camacho was also there. He said that 30 percent of early morning rush hour traffic is school traffic. People move to the suburbs for better schools and cheap housing.
Mr. Brown's response: "We need a Marshall Plan for schools and health care!" Great - yet another plan. That must have been the twentieth time Mr. Brown used the word plan in his talk. He lamented that the City spent lots of money in the Clinton Park area to revive it and make it desirable to live there, but then HISD closed the elementary school so parents won't want to live anywhere near there. Of course the answer to this planning error requires yet more coordination and even more planning so that these mistakes don't get made again.
So there you have it. Mr. Brown fully intends to implement the entire tool set of "Smart Growth" policies to make Houston more congested, full of green belts, with lots of planners doing lots of comprehensive planning which will probably make your life as a Houstonian more expensive and inconvenient. Rising costs will also drive more people out to the urban fringe, regardless of what people's attitudes are towards accomodating new growth. Rising housing costs may stem from an increasingly inelastic and unresponsive housing market, as well as pouring more resources into expensive rail transit projects which are far away from where most people live and work, and do not go where people want to go.
And so it was. This is the City that Peter Brown and his friends want to have. I drove home to put some cotton swabs in my ears to stop the bleeding and started writing. Tomorrow's another day.
Sigh...
Wizard
This past week, the FTA issued letters to one, Mr. Frank Wilson, CEO of Harris County Metro, informing him that the FTA has moved the North Corridor and Southeast light rail alignments back into preliminary engineering status for fiscal year 2009. Of note, Metro stated in its FEIS for the Southeast alignment (see page 50 of this document) that a light rail component would cost $329 million (2006 dollars). The FTA PE approval letter now states, two years later, that the updated cost estimate is up to $663 million for the alignment. As for the North Corridor alignment, the FEIS for it stated that the North Corridor would cost $354 million (see page 50) in 2006 dollars. The FTA letter now states that the alignment will cost $677 million in year of expenditure dollars. The FTA administrator and outside auditor wrote in the accompanying report that Metro's estimated annual increases of 3.25 percent were optimistic because of volatility in commodities markets, uncertain scope of the project, and items like utility relocations. In other words, the cost of these two alignments has gone from $682 million to $1.34 billion in inflationary dollars, a rise of 96 percent. If you factor in inflation, the project's cost rise is about 63 percent and the outside auditor says these numbers are optimistic.
Folks, the word is now official. This 30 mile of the Metro Solutions Phase 2 expansion will cost over $4 billion - which I had predicted 4 months ago - and Metro will go bankrupt ponying up a mere one third of that money. Houston Chronicle transportation beat writer Rad Sallee wrote on March 28, 2008 that there is a problem with the Harrisburg rail alignment crisscrossing Union Pacific rail tracks. No problem if the money can be found to build an overpass. With the cost escalations however, this means that the 4 mile, 4 stop Harrisburg rail alignment will cost $500 - $600 million and will presumably be replacing a local bus route with many more stops. It will only cover a short stretch of the #50 Harrisburg bus route, which in 2007 carried a mere 4,192 riders per day. This is down some 20 percent from the pre-Main Street rail line peak patronage Metro achieved with the Harrisburg bus route in 1999 of 5,499 riders and in 2000 of 5,277 riders.
As for travel forecasts for both proposed rail alignments, Metro stated in its FEIS for the North Corridor in 2006 that a rail alignment would draw 14,000 riders per day. That's right folks. $677 million for 14,000 riders per day. For the Southeast alignment, Metro forecast in its FEIS that a BRT alignment (not a light rail alignment) would draw 13,900 riders per day. It's quite possible that light rail would draw more riders. Either way, we are looking at two rail alignments whose capital costs approach 50 percent of the entire cost of the Katy Freeway refurbishment and expansion, but will probably only carry about the equivalent of two lanes of passengers and do nothing to expedite the movement of freight or goods. Transit ridership is up about 10 percent over 2007, but transit still carries only 4-5 percent of work trips and only 1-2 percent of overall trips. Moreover, transit patronage is up for both bus and rail.
Mobility is what matters, not mode. There is a very strong argument to be made that patronage would also improve if Metro simply installed dedicated bus lanes, decreased the frequency of stops to improve bus travel speeds, and increased headway frequencies to cut down on catastrophic wait times. This could all be done at a fraction of the cost of $130 million per mile light rail lines.
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But enough of today's troubles. The purpose of this post is to talk about a wonderful book that every transportation fan should have in his or her library and that book is Steven M. Baron's Houston Electric - The Street Railways of Houston, Texas.
Baron, a rail fan, writes that the book - which he published in 1996 - was a time consuming process and gives much credit to a number of streetcar enthusiasts who are no longer with us. The amount of material Mr. Baron managed to uncover was tremendous, considering that hard evidence on Houston's streetcar system is very scarce. He still managed to publish a book that is 223 pages long, including footnotes and sources. I should thank Mr. Baron for his efforts.
Baron starts off, appropriately, at the beginning. In 1868 Houston was, in his words, a 1 square mile hustling place with nothing but dirt roads which of course turned to mud when it rained. Nearly everyone walked. That is when Houstonians were greeted to the news that a horse car would be utilizing some old tracks from the Houston Tap & Brazoria Railroad which had been built years earlier, but had fallen into disrepair. Mule pulled cars started operating along Houston roads. Mules were preferred because they were steadier than horses and did not frighten or bolt. Baron goes on to describe the schemes which various early pioneers tried to get regular rail service into operation during the 1870's and 1880's.
Baron says that many figures were involved in the initial construction of Houston's early streetcar system, but perhaps the one man who was best known and identified with it was Henry MacGregor. MacGregor, who was born in New Hampshire but moved to Houston as a young man, became a secretary of the Galveston City Railroad, then later bought out and became general manager of Houston's budding streetcar lines (along with William Sinclair) in 1883. He had a swath of real estate holdings and eventually became involved in the effort to widen the Houston Ship Channel. He left MacGregor Park along with North and South MacGregor Way (which lie on either side of Braes Bayou, south of the University of Houston) to the City in his will. MacGregor and Sinclair took over a company called Houston City Street Railway, which had received a state charter in 1870, but regular service did not really start until years later. HCSR faced competition from another rail line, but Sinclair and MacGregor stepped in and acquired the assets of both companies.
Things went well until April of 1888 when another trio of ambitious men received a franchise from the Houston City Council to start a competing streetcar system. For a while in 1889, Houstonians experienced the drama of two companies laying track, a battle where City Council members led both sides and which led to legal fights, injunctions, and a handful of arrests. Despite this, Houston lamentably still had chronically muddy roads.
This state of affairs improved dramatically in 1891 when enough capital and technological expertise was available to electrify the streetcar lines. In scenes that were reminiscent of the Main Street rail line, Baron describes how service was often dangerous. Still, the electrification of the streetcar lines were a tremendous boon to the city, even in the midst of the nationwide depression of the 1890's.
Streetcars in Houston, as they did in every city of the world, also aided and abetted suburbanization and sprawl, just as the automobiles which succeeded them did. In a letter written in 1893 to the newspapers, a person who signed the letter "A Poor Man" wrote:
The adoption of electricity as a motor by the streetcar company in Houston is a blessing to the poor people of this city, because it allows a man of limited means to rent a house or to build a home in the outskirts of the city where rent is cheap or lots can be bought for a very small price, and live there and at the same time get into town early enough to attend to business. Rapid transit is the only thing that can enable a poor man to own his own home.
Real estate was big business after the 1890's and no savvy developer would really want to develop without streetcar access. Most famously, the Heights was developed with the streetcar in mind, but most other neighborhoods were also.
Baron also describes the strikes from labor unrest, management difficulties, and financial problems which plagued HCSR until out of state bondholders created a reorganization plan which brought the engineering firm Stone and Webster into the management picture. S&W brought capital, expertise, and some financial stability to the management of Houston's streetcar system and in fact provided management services all the way until the system went through its final shutdown in 1940. S&W helped oversee bus services during WWII and for some years afterwards. S&W reorganized the company and renamed it Houston Electric Company. The streetcar company was known by this name even after Houston Lighting and Power came along, and which in fact contracted to sell power to HEC in the 1920's, an idea that alleviated HEC from having to produce its own power. He also tells of the innovation and design of the Birney car and the resulting cost savings that were reaped by HEC because of the ability to do away with a conductor needing to be on board the vehicle.
In November 1914, a booming Houston, fresh with a new ship channel and flowing oil fields, witnessed a new competitor into the transit picture - the jitney automobile car. Baron goes on to write how competitive pressures from jitney cars drove HEC management absolutely crazy for the next decade, as jitneys eventually captured some 22 percent of the market. It didn't help that inflationary pressures from the First World War crippled finances, as did rising capital expenditures. Efforts to raise fares were usually met with petition drives from Houstonians opposing the measures, which often passed in elections.
Intriguingly, in 1920, the City of Houston hired a traction consultant named John Beeler to do a thorough study of Houston's transportation system. Beeler wrote, amongst many other things, that two-thirds of the streetcar routes were losing money. But he also wrote:
One of the reasons why the jitney bus has made such inroads into the railway business is because it saves time... The public demands rapid transportation.
Beeler went on to note that the average speed of travel achieved by streetcars was about 9 miles per hour, whereas the jitneys were averaging 14 miles per hour. Successive ordinances were implemented to subject jitney cars to ever increasing regulatory measures over the following decade. They were opposed by jitney drivers, but in 1924 City Council unexpectedly shutdown and banned jitneys altogether.
Baron goes on to state what is well known in historical and transportation circles in Houston, namely that the streetcar network reached its apex in 1927 with 90 miles of routes. What few know however is that as early as 1924, Houston Electric started trying out substituting or supplementing shuttle and commuter bus services to neighborhoods instead of going through the massive capital expense of extending streetcar tracks. The now affluent Southampton area of Houston got bus service, as did Harrisburg alignment in February 1928 - ironic considering that Metro now is going to spend huge sums of money to bring rail back to the street. The famous Bellaire streetcar route was abruptly replaced with bus service in September 1927 because the track was falling into poor condition. By 1929, Houston Electric was operating some 70 buses on 16 routes. Meanwhile, the City of Houston was implementing a paving program on its streets and was requiring that Houston Electric pay for paving of lanes where its streetcar tracks were, which proved to be another massive drain on HEC's coffers. The Depression proved to be a hard blow to HEC, with patronage and farebox recovery plummeting and transit losing patrons to an ever growing fleets of private automobiles. Baron includes a telling photo, dated approximately 1938, where a streetcar is pictured going south on Fannin, but which is seemingly lost in a crowd of ever increasing automobile traffic.
The story Baron tells is one that Houston's streetcar system did not abruptly collapse. Instead, the story that emerges from his book is that Houston's streetcar network experienced a steady switch from streetcars on rail to buses from the period of roughly 1924 - 1940. The company executives at HEC knew something that so many people who argue and fight over transit today do not, namely that the capital costs of running buses was - and always will be - a tiny fraction of the expense of trying to maintain and extend streetcar rail networks. They knew as early as the late 1920's that the future belonged to the bus. Moreover, the per capita number of rides that people took on transit had been in steady decline for decades. The peak ridership per person was in 1913 where people took over 220 rides per year on streetcars. This number had declined to 159 per year by the late 1920's and decline accelerated over the decades of the 20th century and into the 21st. Baron writes nothing about alleged conspiracies to put streetcars out of business and replacing them with buses.
Baron tells the story of how Houston's new bus network served Houston during WWII. It was ironic that Houston dismantled its streetcar network just before the war, as patronage went from 56 million in 1940 to a record 130 million in 1945, a figure that has never been equaled. Conceivably, this surge in ridership, caused by wartime banning of automobile production and gas rationing, might have helped HEC keep its streetcar network alive until perhaps the early 1950's, but nearly all cities except for a few older cities in America dismantled their rail lines as the 20th century moved onwards.
Baron has a chapter on the aftermath of the dismantling of Houston's streetcar network, telling readers that patronage continued to decline during the 1950's and bus headways were steadily lengthened. Municipal ownership was discussed as early as the late 1950's. He tells of Bernard Calkins's valiant efforts during the 1960's to keep bus service running, but Calkins was unable to reverse declining ridership and had to sell out to National City Lines. He tells of the City of Houston's purchase of the bus system from NCL in April 1974 for $5.3 million, with the new company being named HouTran. Metro was voted into existence in August 1978 and, armed with a 1 percent tax on commerce, the rail plans started coming immediately, heedless of the fact that transit only was carrying 1-2 percent of all travel trips in Houston. In 1988, Baron notes that Metro carried 76.9 million passengers on 980 buses on 106 routes. In 2008, Metro is on track to carry about 112 million boardings using about 1,000 buses on a similar number of routes. On a per capita basis, there has been practically no change in the past 20 years in per capita ridership despite the fact that gasoline is now nearly $3.50 per gallon.
Baron's general history of transit comprises about half the book. The later half of the book describes individual neighborhoods and the lines which served them. In what can only be described as a godsend, Baron also includes yearly patronage and farebox numbers that HCSR and HEC achieved in their years of operation. This alone makes his book a wonder to read.
In summary, the Wizard think this book should be required reading by every political figure, both elected and appointed, in America. I think that every political interest group should also read this book. I think that every person who voices or writes an opinion on public transportation in this country should also be required to read this book and should keep their mouths shut until they do. There just might be a small chance that the world might become a far more rational and saner place if they did.
Wizard
In today's edition of Houston's newspaper of record, transportation beat writer Rad Sallee notes that Harris County Metro has achieved record boardings. I had noted that a while back on Tory's blog, but I have yet to post the latest boardings statistics on my spreadsheet. Fare collection is also up. In general, I like this.
The easy explanation for this is that we have $3 per gallon gasoline. I posted my observations on Metro and posed an observation to an internet board which I belong to in conjunction with another poster's remarks that transit ridership for SEPTA in Philadelphia is also up, mostly on its commuter routes. The observation I posed was, whether price increases in gasoline or other transportation fuels will drive increases in transit patronage, and if so then how much?
The result was a fascinating conversation which centered around such issues as the marginal rate of substitution of motor vehicle use to transit, the income elasticity of demand, and the cross price elasticity of demand for transit use. The general thread of the discussion centered on the marginal cost of transit trips.
The level of discussion was of a far higher quality than that which I normally encounter when visiting local internet boards and blogs, given that fair number of these people are transportation professionals and journal published Ph.D's with no particular ax to grind. Well, they have no other ax to grind other than the simple wish to spend public monies only if absolutely necessary, and then as cheaply as possible lest their profession be given a really bad name. Many of these people are outraged at some of the projects which have been fobbed off on the taxpaying public.
The result of my posting of the Metro statistics and the other gentleman's SEPTA story from Philadelphia resulted in a discussion thread that went something like this:
One of the opening posts in the discussion thread was made by Steven Polzin:
In general gas prices would be a meaningful mode choice factor for a small number of all travelers and their impact on overall ridership could easily be overwhelmed by local factors such as economy, service changes, fare changes, parking cost changes, etc. Remember some of the impact of gas prices is not economic but folks showing a concern about global warming, energy independence, sending more $ to the mid east etc. that influence decisions. Thus part of the impact of high gas prices, to the extent that it exists, may bean emotional response not an economic one. The media and to a lesser extent the industry have fed a perception that gas prices have/will contribute to greater transit ridership. Looking at the numbers would suggest caution when setting these expectations.
The thread of the discussion went into such topics as how much to people value their time verses what amounts of money they were willing to pay in order to get somewhere more quickly and conveniently. Discussion also centered on whether longer transit trips were part of the equation of increased transit patronage.
Mills and Hamilton cited that Keeler and other researchers in the 1970's whose work indicated that people valued their commute time at roughly 30 - 50 percent of what their wage rates were. Charles Lave came to a similar conclusion which he published in this 1979 article in The Atlantic an article which discussed the high gasoline prices of the era when combined with various governmental laws which rationed gas through price ceilings and caused people to wait in line for gas instead:
But an increase in waiting time is, in fact, an increase in the real cost of gasoline: studies of transportation choice have established that commuters are willing to pay about 40 percent of an hour's wage to save an hour of travel time. That is, the increase in waiting time was equivalent to a real price increase of 50 to 100 percent, and motorists responded by reducing their weekday travel by about 15 percent. If this had continued, their long-term response would have been even greater since they would have had the time to make more important adjustments, such as changing automobiles or residences.
Mills and Hamilton go on to state that people value wait times, transfer times, and access times at much higher rates than those of times actually spent in transit. In particular, they state that wait times for vehicles are absolute killers for patronage, being put at some 2-4 times greater than one's average wage. Clearly one way to increase transit patronage is to make sure wait times are cut down to a minimum. The other is to find ways to increase the travel speeds of the vehicle, perhaps through bus routes with fewer stops or through dedicated bus lanes. It also points to the idea that people are willing to pay some rather high fuel prices before giving up their vehicles.
But what about the idea that higher fuel prices will cause people to abandon trucks and cars and instead patronize mass transit? One big clue for whether people will do this can be to see what has happened in Europe. This BBC story from 2003 indicated that outside London, only 11% of British people got to work by public transport, only 5% of commuting was by national rail. Only 3% cycled to work, while one in 10 walked. Prices for gas in Britain in 2003 were about $6.50 per gallon, while today they are about $7.50 - $8.00. The per capita income in Britain is some 10-20 percent lower than here in America, so there is not a terribly great difference on the income elasticity of demand figures.
Intriguingly, Metro's increased patronage numbers may be coming from the fact that since Houston has a booming economy, Houston may be drawing in more poor people in addition to wealthier income groups. In article in the New York Sun, noted urban economist Edward Glaeser writes that New York draws a lot of poor people and he states that one of the reasons why it does is because it has a large public transportation network. In a more formalized paper published recently in The Journal of Urban Economics (which I subscribe to), Glaeser speaks more thoroughly to the issue of the role of public transportation drawing people to cities and urbanizing poverty. Amongst the amazing interpretations of a model he works through, he writes that:
Let WRich be a rich person's opportunity cost of time, F be the fixed time cost of public transportation, and C be the fixed time cost of driving you get:
...
Alternatively, if WRichF < C then some rich people will take public transportation. In this case, a four ring city can be one outcome. In the inner ring, the rich take public transportation. In the next ring, the poor take public transportation. In the third ring, the rich drive and there may be a fourth ring where the poor drive.
Glaeser finds that proximity to public transportation does well at predicting the location of the poor in cities.
My thought is that if fuel prices were to increase to circa $7-10 per gallon, that Metro's patronage figures would increase from 4-5 percent of work trips to perhaps an overall range of somewhere around 10 percent. Perhaps Metro's annual boardings would increase to 200-300 million per year from the 100 million they are at now. However, those numbers are still not enough paying passengers to enable Metro to stand on its own two feet.
This is frustrating to me because my real dream for public transportation is that I want public transportation to be able to pay for itself and not have to be considered something that can only be provisioned by government. Houston had private bus service operated by Bernard Caulkins all the way into the early 1970's, when the Arab oil embargo caused gas prices to climb 4 times. That in turn required a doubling of fares which caused patronage to drop by one third. Still, despite a sales tax regime that approaches half a billion dollars, Metro struggles to draw as many riders as Mr. Caulkins did in the 1960's. Once Metro was voted into existence, one of the first items on the agenda was to start building trains everywhere. Since then, we have gotten so used to this crap that nobody anywhere ever seems to have remembered how the world once really was.
Private provision of public transportation would destroy the rationale for taxation. It would also:
1) Put paid the question once and for all as to whether rail or buses are cheaper to own and operate.
2) Destroy the rationale for the 1,500 foot radial condemnation zones around train or BRT stations that Metro now wields and the potential for political corruption.
3) Put an end to the ever twisting and changing rationales that the public wants out of public transportation. Instead, a private actor would simply concentrate of providing good service and making a profit while moving people from one place to another. Tory alluded to this when he wrote:
Metro is a public agency subject to the will of the voters. It started out as subsidized alternative transportation for the poor and disabled. Then people wanted commuting alternatives (the HOV buses). Then they wanted local rail. Now, given the local boom of $100 oil, they'd like to see some freeway congestion reduction by attracting more riders out of their cars.
4) In a similar vein, getting government out of the provision of public transportation would put an end to the political battles where various groups try to capture the agency for their own purposes, whether they be money and patronage, urban reengineering, downtown groups wanting rail lines to cover up for the fact that their property is expensive, for shelling out to run rail to airports through neighborhoods where Metro previously refused to place more bus stops because of a lack of patronage, $300 million intermodal transit temples, or any other idea they may come to mind.
5) Public transportation would not be considered a jobs program with the specter of unionization by government workers who can't lose their jobs.
6) A private bus company would probably buy cheaper equipment and look to do things like put maps at bus stops. We would no longer see large 50 seat buses running around empty anymore.
7) One thing people might remember was that in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus that was operated by a private bus company. Blacks then protested the bus company by refusing to use the company's services. If blacks were to try that same political tactic today over some issue, Metro could care less. It doesn't help that the Black elite of today is in on the handouts for contracts.
8) The compadres at BlogHouston would not have Dick Nixon Metro to kick around anymore. I could write about more interesting issues, like when cellulose ethanol will become economically viable as a transportation fuel.
More than anything, privatizing public transportation would take the politics out of the equation, which would bleed off all of the intensity of the entire debate.
And so it goes. It's getting late and tomorrow's another day.
Wizard
On February 13, 2008, the Wall Street Journal published a fascinating story on a largely unnoticed revolution going on in American transportation. American railroads are, for the first time in a century, making massive new investments in their infrastructure. Better yet, not one dime of the $10 billion (with $12 billion more planned) is coming from public coffers. From the story:
For the first time in nearly a century, railroads are making large investments in their networks -- adding sets of tracks, straightening curves that force engines to slow and expanding tunnels for bigger trains. Their campaign is altering the corridors of American commerce, more so than any other development since interstate highways spread to the interior.
The story goes on to say that this burst of new private development of railroads has been driven by a massive burst of finished consumer goods coming in from Asia. These goods add to the usual cargo that freight rail carries, such as coal, grain, and chemicals. Compare all of this to the slovenly inefficiencies of Amtrack or light rail inner city transit. Moving goods is cheap. Moving people - at least in the economically affluent part of the world - is expensive.
This development, the story goes on to say, is generating development along the pathway of the railroads, but the development is primarily commercial in nature. Also, the railroads and freight trucks complement each other, where trucking companies find that sometimes they can ship goods long haul over rail rather than doing it over the Interstates.
And speaking of the Interstates, I was reading a story in this weeks' issue of The Economist of China's massive spending on transportation projects. The print edition carries a side story on the effects that America's Interstate Highway system had on productivity while it was being built. The Interstates were initially estimated to take 12 years to build at a cost of $25 billion. At the end, it took 37 years and cost (in 2006 dollars) $425 billion.
Question: Was it worth it? According to Ishaq Nadiri and Theo Manuneas, yes it was. America went through its greatest and most long lasting economic boom during its history after WWII and the Interstates had quite a bit to do with raising that productivity and making America a vastly wealthier country. Broadly speaking, Nadiri and Manuneas say that the greatest gains were reaped early on in the program and declined slowly as time went forward. The gains of the late 1950's were 31 percent of America's economic productivity growth, 25 percent by the late 1960's, and down to 7 percent by the late 1980's as more money was spent on road maintenance. One out of every five dollars was also being siphoned away from road building to build rail transit and bike paths. Freight costs in 32 of 35 industries dropped by an average of 24 cents for every dollar spent on the system.
Could something similar to the Interstates been done privately? The Interstates had incorporated into them some 14,000 miles of toll roads, mostly in the Northeast. Conceivably, a far seeing Governor and Legislature in some states could have launched state wide initiatives using toll roads, but it would have taken multi state cooperation to achieve a similar result to the Interstates. As it is, now that the Interstate system is complete, I wonder whether it would not be such a bad thing to turn most of it over to the states and either curb or shutdown collection of the federal gasoline tax the way that the Republican Congress of 1994 wanted to do? Entertaining ideas.
Wizard
Well, well, well. The Wizard suffered a cratered hard drive a number of days back and subsequently found that his available backups were not exactly up to the task of restoring their contents. Sigh... life goes on.
As it is, my quality of life has returned to its normal excellence, all without a dime of taxpayer monies or time wasted with worthless political rhetoric. Some of this was achieved by shopping this weekend at three of my favorite places, Frys, Borders, and Home Depot. I also purchased two new pairs of running shoes from a place I have done business with for nearly 20 years.
And speaking of worthless rhetoric, On Thursday, February 7, 2008, Houston's newspaper of record published the findings of a panel of so-called experts from the Urban Land Institute and their ideas for Houston's future. Tory writes about it here. I am on a fresh install of Windows as I write this, so I cannot access the PowerPoint of the group's "findings". Still, I shall deal with their points as made by the Chronicle and Tory.
1) Houston needs more housing in downtown.
Answer: The marketplace will answer that question, not a panel of people who possibly might have been hired by some downtown Houston landowners and interest groups, conceivably at taxpayer expense. As it is, the 3,500 or so people who live in downtown Houston live in housing whose cost gradients are going for at least $235 per square foot, if not higher. The office space in downtown Houston currently has gradients of $275 or more per square foot. Meanwhile, would be homeowners can buy in some areas within 10 miles of downtown Houston which have price gradients of $70-$90 per square foot. Doing so and driving a car into downtown saves them many thousands of dollars every year in housing costs. As such, the Wizard believes that the market for housing in downtown Houston is probably saturated and will remain a small niche market. The same market forces which left downtown dormant after nightfall as late as the late 1990's have returned to some degree and will probably stay that way. Funny, but some people who have written about this don't seem to understand this idea.
Meanwhile, there is no compelling reason why Fry's, Home Depot, or other companies should locate downtown. Doing so would put them at a cost disadvantage vis-a-vis with their marketplace competitors. Land is valuable thanks to the agglomerated economies of scale afforded via the construction of skyscrapers, which allow dozens or hundreds of firms needing office space to bundle together (like law firms who would like to be just down the street from the City and County government and court houses) and outbid manufacturers or retailers for access to downtown property via renting floors of such towers. Moreover, for many there is no compelling reason to locate near downtown for access to the port or to rail heads, as there is no advantage to be found for most to do so.
2) Houston's competitors are (insert city here).
Houston's size, as is the size of most cities in a market economy (and yes, 1/3rd of the U.S. economy is in the political economy), will be determined by the size of its markets. The factor payments flowing into Houston thanks to $90 per barrel petroleum and $7 per 1,000 cubic foot natural gas are incredible. If you can't make some money right now, then there is something wrong with you. Naturally Houston should be expanding.
Still, it would be nice if we could attract some other non-fossil fuel firms, or if our current incumbents would show enough foresight to start buying up land so that they can control cellulose ethanol production from offices located in Houston. In general however, I am not a big believer in the idea that Houston is competing against cities like Sydney.
3) Houston should consider planning for its ad-hoc sewer system.
Ah! Now these guys are onto something. Staying on top of your infrastructure is a very wise thing to do. Too bad the political classes here in town seem more interested in building sports temples rather than deal with sewage.
4) Houston must start shelling out billions to run rail to the airports.
Oh, my goodness! If this one didn't give away who paid for this report, then I don't know what would.
The Metro Solutions 2003 ballot language called for the taxpaying public to shell out for rail to both Hobby and Intercontinental. Naturally, the rail lines lead to - you guessed it - downtown Houston. Tory's thread questions how far this would be. The Wizard works downtown and drove to Intercontinental in December 2006 when taking a business trip to London and onto Algeria. The distance of the drive along I-45? 25 miles. It took me 55 minutes in 5pm Friday evening rush hour traffic with 1 freeway accident to make it to Intercontinental. The Metro Solutions ballot language states that a hypothetical route would be 21.5 miles.
The cost of a light rail route to Intercontinental? That would be a minimum of $3 billion. We would be giving up a Katy Freeway refurbishment and expansion - all 18 lanes (with room for two more), 350,000 daily vehicle capacity, and tens of thousands of freight trucks - for such a project. Meanwhile, Metro stated in its 2006 North Corridor FEIS that the first 5.4 miles of LRT transit from downtown to Northline Mall would attract 15,000 riders per day.
Folks - shelling out for rail to the airports is a recipe for disaster. If the downtown interest groups - which in every expanding city are sick of people running away from them because sprawl makes their land less valuable - politically demand and insist on dedicated public transportation to the airports from downtown Houston, then build a pair of dedicated bus lanes to the airports and run buses along them. It will save the taxpayer a ton of money.
In a future post, the Wizard will give gentle readers some pearls of wisdom regarding the phenomenon of cities which have run rail to their airports.
5) H-GAC needs to distribute transportation dollars based on quality of life criteria.
I have a question to ask: Define quality of life for me? If shelling out billions of dollars to run rail to the airports results in more traffic congestion because that money was not spent on creative ideas like tunneling under freeways, then that results in a diminishing of my quality of life. One of the reasons why people have been sprawling outwards from urban cores for generations is to get away from the historically narrow streets and inadequate transportation infrastructure which existed in Central Business Districts. Sprawl helps alleviate congestion, not cause it. Anyone who doubts this should do what I did and spend a good 10 weeks in London (or better yet, Bangkok). There you will see the results of narrow roads from antiquity, complemented with dense development. Average speed of travel around London? Try 8-13 miles per hour.
Moreover, trying to insert language that transportation dollars should be doled out on non-quantifiable issues like "quality of life" detracts from dealing with concrete problems, such as measuring that a freeway is backed up for 8 hours per day and that vehicle traffic is slowed to 20-30 mph during those time frames. Maybe it is time that we should start considering adding some more lanes somewhere, right?
So the Wizard's verdict? I'd accept the recommendations on sewage and non-zoning and file the rest of this report into the rubbish bin. We'd all be better off for it.
More Fireballs, Lightning Bolts, and Hell Storms to come.
Wizard
I received the following email today. I will share it in its entirety, the only comment being that the Los Angeles MTA has spent $11 billion (inflation adjusted) on rail transit since 1985, only to achieve the same number of boardings it achieved 22 years ago.
Wizard.
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Riding the Silver Line bus rapid transit from Boston Logan Airport into downtown Boston last weekend via a Big Dig tunnel -- a quick ride, on a bus with luggage racks -- got me looking at the transportation performance of the Big Dig project.
Answer, from recent professional presentations: enormous reductions in traffic congestion. Apparently, the traffic engineering in the new tunnels eliminates weaving and bottlenecks. T-Ops is working 24 X 7 with cameras and other sensors. b> The bottom line number is 62% improvement in traffic flow.
See recent illustrated document attached in pdf, an end-of-year edition of Peter Samuels' Toll Roads News - found here.
There is a Powerpoint presentation in PDF showing performance graphics by ITS engineer Dan Baxter from last October here.
Dan Baxter and Peter Samuels describe the financial mismanagement
as well.
For those who want more, there is lots of detail in this screen scrape of an article by the same Dan Baxter in Roads & Bridges magazine from June 2007.
Big believer
Despite setbacks, "Big Dig" potential benefits are stratospheric
- By Dan Baxter
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Boston's Central Artery/ Tunnel project, nicknamed the "Big Dig." Records of project planning activity date all the way back to 1982, and as of 2007 all sections of the project are now open to traffic.
More than $14.6 billion has been expended, and recent projections put completion closer to $15 billion. As with all highway projects, the Big Dig journey passed through planning to design, then on to construction and finally into operations and maintenance. The similarities with other highway projects stop there. The Big Dig has been unique in many ways, not all positive, including unparalleled cost escalations and highly publicized construction problems. Prior to completion, the only positive news has been a few construction achievements well known in the industry and the management of traffic during construction. New measurements and projections of project benefits are now available and an assessment of the true value of the project is possible. Even if the project does eventually achieve its original goals, will the highway construction industry ever see another mega project like the Big Dig? If there is another mega project with the scope and cost of the Big Dig, will it be managed differently based upon lessons learned? Looking back at the Big Dig, what really went wrong and what really went right?
True to traffic
With the final cosmetic touches now being put on the largest mega project in U.S. history, it is now possible for the first time to speculate how history will judge the project. As with every human endeavor, nothing is in reality a total success or a total failure. A Big Dig scorecard needs to consider costs, schedule, quality of construction and tangible benefits to the public. At a staggering $14.6 billion for 7.5 centerline miles of highway, the cost of the project is over $300,000 per inch. At that rate, achieving a positive benefit-to-cost ratio for the project will require unprecedented benefits. However, the facts emerging show the numbers may be closer than you might think.
The Big Dig has had more ups and downs than the numerous ramps that drop from the surface into the labyrinth of new subterranean highways. The most recent blow to the project came in August 2006 when a fatal accident resulting from a ceiling failure became the latest in a series of project problems to make national headlines.
Although it has been consistently maligned in its hometown newspaper, the news from the Big Dig is not all bad. Some monumental construction challenges have been met and mastered, including the soil freezing and tunnel jacking required to complete the I-90 extension to the new Ted Williams Tunnel. Now that the facilities are fully open to traffic, it is clear that the excessive daily traffic congestion and related air pollution that once gripped downtown Boston has been substantially reduced. A large portion of the vehicle delay disappeared with the giant concrete and steel elevated freeway that for two score years blackened the fourth-story windows of adjacent Boston buildings.
When it comes to traffic, the promise of the project planners to vastly improve traffic flow was kept, and even exceeded. A popular sound bite used by project critics during the design phase was "it will be obsolete the day it opens." Traffic data collected and compared with "before" conditions have proven the critics who voiced that position wrong. Dramatic reductions in travel time and increases in traffic flow have now been documented in a new study recently published by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority (MTA). The study was conducted independently of the Big Dig construction management consultants. The study, titled Economic Impacts of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project, performed by the Boston-based international transportation and economics consulting group EDR, stated that "the original 1990 environmental projection was that the `Big Dig' would improve traffic flow by 40% by 2010. Today, the project exceeds that with a 62% improvement in traffic flow. This was accomplished while overall traffic volume grew by 23.5% since 1995."
Improved traffic flow is only one part of the picture. New public parks, reconnected neighborhoods, revitalized commercial activity and an aesthetic face-lift unparalleled in American municipal history have prepared Bostonians for a brighter socioeconomic future.The Rose Kennedy Greenway and the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge will transform the path of the old Central Artery into an extraordinarily beautiful stretch of parkland crisscrossed by sidewalks and streets that reconnect the city to its waterfront. The bustling crowd of locals and tourists that can be seen every day walking about at the Faneuil Hall Marketplace will soon be able to stroll farther east through the R.K. Greenway to parks like Christopher Columbus Park that sit at the bay's edge. Dramatic increases in the value of downtown, South Boston and Seaport District real estate have been realized and are projected to soar with the completion of the greenway. As spectacular as the traffic improvements and urban area transformations may be, they are not sensational enough to capture national headlines. The Big Dig's unexposed benefits are every bit as real as the costs and problems so readily exposed by the broadcast media.
Sign from above
In spite of the realization of the key kept promises, the Big Dig is as beleaguered as ever, and new fears about structural integrity have eroded the public's perception of the project into a mired mess of mixed reviews.
After enduring more than a decade of political firestorms and media bashings, the past two years has seen a series of successful and meaningful ribbon cuttings. The opening of new tunnel sections and connector ramps, the world's widest cable-stayed bridge and numerous public parks only temporarily lifted the spirits of the remaining project partisans. Those spirits must certainly have fallen again with the concrete ceiling panel that killed a motorist last year. The tragedy started a new series of searing public commentary and politically charged lawsuits.
In the days following the disaster, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney "knee-jerked," went on the offensive and publicly questioned the safety of the tunnels. As the top elected state official, his lack of confidence prematurely trumped lesser bureaucrats who were responsible for determining the actual cause of failure and dealing with the problems. The reaction was predictable if not understandable as the Big Dig has always been an easy target for criticism. Defending the Big Dig project in the light of this catastrophe might appear to be political suicide in the short term. However, joining the ranks of critics may erode long-term credibility when it is time to take credit for the benefits.
The accident that killed Milena Delvalle of Boston's Jamaica Plain was caused by the failure of an epoxy-based anchoring system that held a large concrete ceiling panel in place. Reports from the scene indicated that there was no evidence of epoxy on some of the anchors that were lying in the debris on the road. A cursory search of public project records reveals that ceiling panel installation methods have been the subject of claims and changes and formed the basis of a value-engineering effort managed by the management consultant, a joint venture of Bechtel and Parsons Brinckerhoff. The causes of the failure have been reported to be a deadly mix of poor workmanship, flawed inspection and questionable decisions by project management that ultimately reduced the factor of safety to save time and money.
The investigation found that the failed anchors were among the first to be installed using the epoxy method, with the implication not that the oldest anchors failed first, but that the first anchors were installed by crews inexperienced with the method. Although there is no way to prevent motorists from having accidents due to human error, there is no excuse for a purely structural failure due to nothing more than the weight of an element under normal stress conditions.
As each month goes by absent of more failures, the August 2006 tragedy looks more and more like an isolated problem. People in the construction industry know that history is peppered with tunnel collapses. Less than a month after the Boston accident, a highway tunnel linking the cities of Guangnan and Yanshan collapsed in southwestern China, trapping 25 workers. Unfortunately, like so many other "firsts," the Big Dig is the site of the only highway tunnel collapse in memory to occur shortly after the tunnel was opened to traffic.
Structural failures over the past two years provide a roadmap to the No. 1 thing that has gone wrong with the Big Dig. Since project inception, the highly privatized program management of the project has had amazingly minimal public-agency oversight, placing the true power of the purse strings and key day-to-day decision making in the hands of the management consultant.
Highway construction projects a fraction of the size of the Big Dig have had twice as many public-sector managers. Privatization itself is not the problem, because without privatization mega projects are not possible. The problem ensues when the privatized management is forced to operate outside their realm and role in order to fill a vacuum. When construction problems occurred, Boston political adversaries and the media have had the upper hand over the Big Dig management consultant, which is constrained both by its position as a private firm and its responsibility to deal in technical accuracy rather than shooting from the hip.
In the case of the tunnel leaks in 2004, the strong condemnation by the Boston Globe essentially went unanswered for six months. Six days is too long, much less six months. The Big Dig has needed both a political and a public-agency advocate empowered and motivated to respond quickly to quell the rush to judgment. Future mega projects need more than engineering and construction leadership. Advocacy in the ranks of the politically elected leaders and appointed agency heads must be cultivated and maintained to establish ongoing public confidence and accountability.
Money to move
The second thing that went wrong was the magnitude of the cost escalation. Some cost increases would be expected, but quadrupling costs point to either incompetence in estimating or intentional lowballing.
The reality of the Big Dig is that from the start, schedule compliance was favored over budget adherence. Management spent money to keep the project moving, knowing that failure to overcome obstacles in individual contracts would have a ripple effect throughout the project. In the mega project environment, the whole is split into many smaller parts that must fit together in both space and time. If one contractor's schedule slipped, several other contractors could claim a delay. Public-sector and political accountability also would have gone a long way to address the continuing issue of cost escalation. The decision to blame the management consultant for underestimating true project costs during project planning may have provided a convenient scapegoat to deflect political accountability. However, it also had the long-term detrimental effect of exposing the management consultant to media pressure to which it could not respond and eroding the public confidence in the privatized program management of the Big Dig.
When a technical problem occurs that rightly requires the management consultant's action, even their best efforts are met with skepticism. The lesson learned is that you can't have it both ways. If you use your program manager as a scapegoat in the media, you can't expect the public to accept your total reliance on him when problems arise.
Still glossy
The advocates of this project in the 1980s produced glossy brochures that focused primarily on elimination of the habitually congested elevated portion of I-93 in downtown Boston. One particularly powerful brochure was the "Now you see it, now you don't" piece that included a photo of the jammed Central Artery on the cover and an artist's rendering of a new park-like setting in the same location. The primary benefits described in detail were transportation related, and the secondary benefits described much more vaguely had to do with reconnecting neighborhoods" and creating new green space for Bostonians to enjoy. It is now possible to compare the promises of the project's visionaries with the realities of the as-built project.
A justification for the project was certainly that operation of the existing highway had become unacceptable by any standard. The 14-hour-long peak hour average speeds on the elevated Central Artery had dipped into single digits, reflecting one of the worst operational conditions in the world. Due to the extremely poor existing conditions, the contrast b
