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 Jamaica, 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

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 Southeast Asia. Check out my photos of a motorcycle pack in Bangkok, taken from the back of a tuk tuk, and these two photos from Siem Riep Cambodia, 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.

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.

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

As the NPR story relates, the Porters purchased the house as a rental and occasional weekend beach house. The problem is that over the past 25 years, the Gulf of Mexico has eroded the local beach heads dozens of feet, sweeping grasses and dunes with it. The Porters, along with some other locals, now have housing that sits just yards away from the shoreline. That in turn puts them on the beach which is in violation of the Texas Open Beaches Act, which states that the beach is effectively a park.

Brooks told me a while back that the problem is that the beach erosion is not entirely a natural phenomenon, due to acts from the Army Corps of Engineers and other entities. He and the wife intend to stay put.

As the NPR story correctly concludes, this is a big looming problem. To quote NPR:

How this case gets resolved could set a precedent far beyond Texas. What if rising seas threaten one day to swamp skyscrapers in Manhattan or entire towns in Florida? Whose responsibility will it be to move buildings out of the way? Who will take the hit for the lost property value?

Mr. and Mrs. Porter have fought this battle for 10 years now. Stay tuned.

Sigh...

Wizard.

The Wizard has been counseling the Floodway Coalition in this property rights battle. I've spoken to some influential people about the matter, and was responsible for giving them some ideas which they have put into practice. Recently, I learned that Council members have seen those signs. I will leave it at that.

And so it was that in the past six weeks, an amazing turn around has come to pass where Council members have in fact come to officially revisit the issue. I have helped go over the revised Chapter 19 ordinances. The Wizard finds himself both puzzled as to why the Mayor is wanting to cement the ordinance revisions quickly, and strongly believing that a vote on this ordinance should be delayed, if for just a short time. The whole matter would not be so bad if Council were only revisiting Chapter 19-43 (the floodway ordinance itself), but the problem is that parts throughout the entire ordinance have been revised, which makes going over the volume of material and making sense of it all a vastly more complicated task. I've spent some 10-15 hours going over the ordinance and there are probably 2-3 pages of questions that I have come up with, much less what other interested parties will spot.

Without going into much detail, there is some language that probably does not need to be in the ordinance. Because of the volume of revisions, I have some doubts that busy, term limited Council members may not fully catch all of the revisions of what is now on offer. The ordinance could still have some unforeseen consequences, which is what the initial changes voted on in 2006 caused, and which are at the root of what started the controversy to begin with. Council members really should listen to what the people who have been the most active and have become far and away going the most educated citizens in this city over the past two years have to say on this issue. To Council's credit, they have stated that they are waiting for a response and the Wizard helped FCOH thrash through the revised ordinance to help put together that response.

I should say here though that the experience of having gone over the proposed revision of the ordinance has given the Wizard a new appreciation of how much effort it takes to get some hopefully decent legislation passed into law.

Credit must be given to Council and the Mayor, which did the right thing and took out the most destructive aspects of the current ordinance which were at the heart of the fight, including the 50 percent substantial damage clause, the no build provision on vacant land in the floodway, and some other onerous regulatory burdens that were laid on improved land with currently existing structures.

What is good is that we were given some time to look over the ordinance and come up with recommendations on changes. The Floodway Coalition probably will not get everything they want, but it seems clear to the Wizard that Mayor White finally realized that the issue was not going to go away and wants to settle the issue - equitably for all parties involved - once and for all.

Wizard

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.

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

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

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

Amongst the property rights disasters include the loss of $38 - $70 million per year in tax revenues. O'Connor and Associates pegs the City's property regulatory takings at $1.9 - $3.5 billion. Diesel says that the loss to Houston could be bigger than the entire tax base of any city in Harris County except Pasadena.

The Wizard first told this story back in June 2007. It only took Houston's paper of note four months to catch up on the story.

The Wizard spoke to Pat O'Connor and told him that information in real estate markets on the effects of the Floodway Ordinance changes were not well known because the City of Houston made this ordinance change in secret. And one wonders why - pray tell - would the City do that? This is alluded to in the report published by KHOU-TV and which can be read here.

Look for the Floodway Coalition's Nancy Wilcox to speak at the upcoming American Dream Coalition conference on May 17, 2008. The Wizard knows that lawsuits are pending...

Wizard

The Cityville apartments just east of Parkland Hospital offer more than 260 new rental units in a row of brightly colored buildings.

But so far, not much is going on with the ground-floor retail space. Only one space, containing a small sandwich shop, is occupied in the 42,000-square-foot strip along Medical District Drive.

snip

Such mixed-use developments with shops and apartments are all the rage with developers.

Although the apartments have been a hit, somebody forgot to check with the shopkeepers.

snip

Often it's not the developer but city officials who want to include shops in apartment complexes.

snip

"We are really seeing the city planning departments pushing for those types of projects," Mr. Willett said.

"It's a good idea to have multiple uses with a property," he said. "But you still have to have the critical mass and population density to support it."

snip

"There are areas that deserve urbanization and areas that don't," Mr. Ashmore said. "This romantic notion of creating all these mixed-use villages all over the city still comes down to demand."

One wonders whether some of these developers will try to fob off their failures on the taxpayers.

So what is the Wizard's solution? It should be a requirement that planners, City officials, and other interest groups who push to create these failures should be required to pay for those failures out of their own pocket books.

Wizard

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.

==============================================

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

And now the data is in for 2007 from all four of the world's major sources of climate tracking (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS). The worldwide temperature drop from 2006 to 2007 was 0.65 - 0.75 centigrade. Apparently, that is the largest single year drop since record keeping began and enough to wipe out all of the global warming that has occurred since the late 19th century.

For my .02 worth, I've long had a gut feeling that solar activity, or perhaps changes in heat coming from the core of the earth, would overwhelm any climate change effects from human activity. All one has to do is think of what the atmospheric conditions are like on other planets to see how huge of a role the Sun plays in our fragile and pathetic existence.

One person I know wrote me back:

Interesting year-to-year change, which will, depending upon the point of view of the specific advocate, will be:

Let's face it, we simply do not know a whole lot about short-term, by which I mean periods of hundreds of years) climate change on Earth, despite the
large number of people who appear to be saying that they do.

Another wrote to me saying:

I've seen quite a few folks agree with you on that - ie. that the human effect on climate change is small.

Another wrote:

No. They have already changed the banner from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change."

It's the same way with pollution. No matter what we do to improve air quality, "Experts" will continue to claim pollution is worsening. It's called Political Science.

Sigh... I can only see the arguments getting fiercer if the world actually does enter an era where the earth starts cooling.

Wizard

To put some perspective on this issue, the Wizard consulted his library and specifically, Richard Murray's Change and Governance in Houston for some answers as to what Houston had in terms of its governing structure before. Houston was granted its initial charter in 1905. As Murray recounts, Houston's first form of government was a commission style government composed of a mayor and four aldermen. City administration was parceled out between the aldermen, for example one alderman might be responsible for taxes and land while another was responsible for water. The mayor had veto powers, limited appointment powers, and budget preparation authority. Needless to say, this balkanized city administration, made aldermen turf lords over their part of city administration, turned the mayor's veto power into a reactive tool rather than an agenda building tool, and in general led to a fragmented and patronage laden form of government.

Various reforms were implemented formally during the 1930's, but they often weren't exercised for various reasons. Houston then went through a city manager form of government starting in 1938, which lasted until 1947 when the start of the strong mayor form of government was implemented. As Murray notes, the civic and business elite of the late 1940's wanted a form of government which reflected - but did not direct - growth and development. And they got what they wanted.

But what about today? Ubu Roi's post to the BlogHouston thread largely spells out the problems anyone council member has had to face in trying to challenge a sitting mayor over the past 60 years. I would add that if a sitting mayor did not (or does not) particularly want to deal with public complaints, then the mayor can appoint council members to a committee where CM's can put up with the complaining from citizens, but then see a mayor simply shelve anything that committee does by not acting on it or putting it on the formal agenda. I would argue that one of the groups I am working with right now faces this very problem.

Additionally, in order for council to stand up to a sitting mayor, 10 votes have to be mustered in any issue. Considering the mayor's power to set the agenda, as well as dole out goodies to council members, that is an awfully steep mountain to climb for anyone trying to fight back against the city. True, citizens can try to use the rather archaic initiative and referendum power to place charter amendments up for a vote at the hustings, but as we have seen with the Revcap and the "rain tax", the council can either confuse the issue by offering up a counter amendment out of its own granted power, can refuse to implement the charter change, revisit the issue and possibly subvert the intent of the charter change, or simply contest in court for years on end as it has with the Revcap.

One somewhat bright aspect of Houston's government, as was noted in the BlogHouston post, is the role played by Houston's elected city controller. Steven Craig noted in an academically published paper that Houston has succeeded throughout its history in avoiding bankruptcy, something that the somewhat similarly sized Philadelphia nearly succumbed to in 1991, but which still faces what the Pew Trusts calls a quiet crisis.

Craig believes that the primary difference between Houston's avoiding financial catastrophies (even during the oil busts of the 1980's) and Philadelphia's not doing so lies in that Houston had an independently elected controller. Houston's controller has to certify that monies are in the budget this year, whereas Philadelphia's controller had (through the 1980's and early 1990's at least) to certify that there were monies available for the previous year's budget and was an appointed figure to boot. Hence Craig contended that this led to a creeping increase of debt which eventually to a near municipal collapse.

But what about Houston's mayor? Another clue as to the mayor's power is to examine how much money people are willing to raise or spend in order to acquire the job. Hotly contested mayoral elections result in candidates raising and spending several million dollars apiece, while city council district posts often are won with campaigns where winners raise between $30,000 - $200,000. At large seats often take over $100,000 to win, but Peter Brown's spending of some $500,000 of his family fortune twice to gain at at large seat is something of an anomaly. The vast differences in amounts spent to gain offices gives away a huge signal in Houston's political markets as to where the real power lies in Houston city government.

So, what to do, if anything? There is no doubt that Houston's government has some real strengths. Decisions certainly can get made and implemented, unlike the chaos and corruption which has seemingly gripped Dallas. I do think that the 5 at large members certainly help with making sure that there are members of council whose jobs are to address issues of substance to the entire city, rather than merely to a district constituency. The problem we run into over time is when there are murky or contested issues, such as the soccer stadium, annexations, flood and drainage, or any rail plans that Metro throws out there. Is there a true consensus on contested issues? For example, recently the Chronicle ran a story where Metro and the congressional delegation told the FTA that there was an overwhelming consensus for rail plans, but that ignores the fact that the 2003 Metro Solutions ballot plan passed by a 52-48 margin.

It also doesn't help that a particular district council member cannot really set any kind of agenda at all for his or her own district without acquiescing to the mayor. In effect, this reduces council members to becoming mere advocates for their areas.

Therefore, I would suggest the following:

1) As I wrote before, extend term limits to 10-12 years in order to reinvigorate political competition.

2) Give council members something to bargain with! I would suggest that each council member be granted the power to place one item on the city agenda perhaps every week, every other week, or maybe once per month. Of course, a spending limit would be placed on what each council member can put on their agenda items. Perhaps council members could, in return for abstaining from putting items continuously on the agenda, be permitted to "save up" for one or two big items over time if they were something of importance for their district or their own agenda. The mayor would continue to have the power to set the rest of the agenda. This would encourage some log rolling and horse trading.

3) Give council members some say over municipal boards and administrative oversight. Leave the mayor with administrative powers over departments so that one person oversees city administration. The mayor would continue to appoint council members to committees, but in return council would have the power to compel the surrender by administrative department heads of full and complete information on committee items. As a modest and simple check, I would suggest that council either be granted the power of having to approve the mayor's board appointees by simple majority. Removal of board members or administrative department heads could be done, but it would take a substantial supermajority (perhaps a minimum of 75 percent) to accomplish.

Alternately, council members could be granted the power to appoint a minority of board members with the mayor holding the majority. District council members who happen to have a board exclusively in their own area would naturally have more to say over that board.

4) The city council is set by charter to expand by two seats once the city's population reaches 2.1 million. These two seats are set to both be district council seats. Why not make one an at large seat and keep the other as a district seat to strengthen the overall legislative agenda so that it does not get balkanized?

5) Keep the budget approval process as it is today. Keep the city controller's role as it is today.

I would think that these reforms would allow broad agendas to continue to be advanced, while allowing council members to take a stand against a mayor if a particular agenda item is really going to hammer their constituents or if something really seems murky. It would also pave the way for a truer kind of consensus of government in our fair city.

Wizard

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 politica