On Houston's future 3 hour commutes

This past week, Houstonians learned from the local media of a series of high profile departures, or of people who are looking for jobs elsewhere, to escape from the twilight of Mayor Bill White's administration.

One, somewhat lower profile figure who apparently has recently left City employment was one, Ray Chong, who was Deputy of Traffic and Transportation in the City public works department. The Wizard knows that in addition to Mr. Chong's overseeing of various studies that he was one of Bill White's point men in the Ashby High Rise issue.

But it is about what was perhaps the last of Mr. Chong's studies that is the subject of this post. Smart Growth and planning proponent David Crossley notes that Mr. Chong made a presentation where he asserted that the average commute time in the Houston area in the year 2035 will be three hours!

That's right gentle readers, the City of Houston's recently departed Traffic director stated that Houstonians will face 3 hour commutes in a mere 26 years time. Of course, Mr. Chong and company made a presentation with a mobility study (or should we call it an immobility study?) to back up that assertion, but that still doesn't erase the basic assertion.

Now, if one thinks rather deeply about such an issue, one comes to realize that there is an enormous amount at stake for millions of Houston area residents when a high level City bureaucrat makes such a statement.

The current Houston area 2035 plan envisions spending some $77 billion in public funds over the next quarter of a century on road related projects and transit. However, Mr. Chong stated that he and his team incorporated all of those projects into his studies and still came to the conclusion that Houstonians will be wasting three hours of their day in a quarter of a century commuting back and forth to work. In other words, Houstonians and their public officials will be spending upwards of three billion dollars per year, every year, for the next 26 years, but despite that enormous sum of public monies being spent, Houstonians one way traffic commute will skyrocket from 26 minutes in 2005 - 2010 time frame to 90 minutes in 2035! That, gentle readers, is a very powerful statement - in a matter of one generation, Houston's transportation system will effectively get overwhelmed and collapse, despite spending tens of billions of dollars on transportation related projects and issues. That is a statement that many influential Houstonians, like members of the Greater Houston Partnership or just about any local elected official - including the Mayor, would not like to see made public.

If you take the report seriously, then the report states that the amount of roads of all classifications within City of Houston limits will rise roughly only 10 percent, while the job base will rise from 1.5 million to 2.1 million, a nearly 40 percent rise. Mr. Chong's report also projects that City population rising from 2.1 million to 2.7 million. On the face of it, Mr. Chong's prognostications may seem to be true. It points to a future of Houston neglecting to do enough to keep up its transportation network with the demands that the future populace will place on it. That however, is on the face. The Wizard knows that such a sky is falling type catastrophe is not going to occur.

First of all, one has to take in the magnitude of what Mr. Chong is asserting. Yes, it is true that urbanized areas that have higher populations do exhibit higher work travel times and greater traffic congestion, but the Wizard has traveled far in this world and has seen a lot of cities. Two years ago, I spent 9 weeks in London, a city whose metropolitan area has roughly twice as many residents as Houston does, in a smaller geographical area (and hence with a population density several times higher than that of Houston), with demonstrably narrower roads and much higher reliance on slower public transportation. The result? London has an average commute time of 42 - 51 minutes. This study states that in outer London, the commute time, where cars dominate, is 30 minutes, while in inner areas of London where public transportation dominates, the commute times are roughly 55 minutes. Meanwhile, in the 2005 U.S. census study cited above, New York and Chicago have commute times of 38 minutes and 33 minutes respectively.

The point being made here, if I may be so blunt, is that what Mr. Chong is saying is garbage. It overlooks that real estate developers and landlords, as well as employers and employees, all make decisions as to where to locate. Very few people will tolerate making a 3 hour daily commute, much less a 2 hour commute, and they will adapt accordingly, often by deciding to leave a little earlier or later to get to their jobs. The average length of a commute by car is roughly 7.5 miles, while a commute by public transportation is about 5 miles. Mr. Chong is then saying that traffic flows throughout the entire area will drop to an average of about 5 miles per hour for vehicle traffic!. This is nonsense.

Instead, a far, far more likely scenario of what will unfold in the future is that the Houston area will probably continue on its current pattern of slow densification combined with some suburbanization. Such a pattern would go a long way to mitigating most of the catastrophic horrors envisioned in this mobility study. I could foresee my 20 minute morning commute and my 25-30 evening minute commute lengthening by 5-10 minutes in a worst case scenario, but even if it did then all that would do is prompt me to either move closer to work, or to switch jobs.

One item that Mr. Chong's story may be more to the mark on is the assertion that public transportation's share of commuting trips will drop from 3.8 percent to 3.3 percent. One big story that has not been reported by the media concerning recent controversies surrounding eminent domain issues and cost estimates behind Metro's North and Southeast corridors is that in its FY 2010 report to Congress, the FTA is stating that spending $897 million on the North Corridor rail alignment is going to result in a mere 7,500 new riders being attracted to using transit (see page 221 of the report). The Southeast Corridor rail alignment is projected to cost $911 million and is expected to attract a mere 4,500 new riders to transit (see page 227 of the FTA report). Yes gentle readers, you read that correctly. The FTA is telling Congress that it is recommending helping Metro spend $1.8 billion to attract 12,000 new riders to rail transit, a figure that works out to spending $150,000 to attract a new rider to transit. Meanwhile, my yet to be completed FY 2008 - FY 2009 ridership numbers are indicating that Metro lost 10-20 percent of its ridership over the past year. If we continue to pursue such policies, then it is quite plausible that Houston's transit agency will end up bankrupting itself merely to substitute rail transit for bus transit, but not gaining any meaningful market share of transportation trips or doing anything to alleviate traffic congestion. Indeed according to Metro's federal enviornmental impact statements, the agency intends to cut off road lanes available to vehicle traffic along most of the routes where it wants to run rail.

With that aside, reports like this mobility study remind me of how ridiculous it is to write studies and plans that portend to see 30 years or more into the future, something that has been cemented into modern day American metropolitan urban planning, when we will have no idea of what the full picture of future conditions will be like. The reader should be reminded that the London Underground's first rail lines were built in the late 19th century to as a response to extremely heavy traffic congestion along roads in London that were causing traffic flows to slow down to the point where a wagon of vegetables would spoil because it was taking an entire day for a wagon driver to cross the length of the city. Hence, there is a good argument to be made that it is far better to make transportation spending decisions on a case by case basis, based on observations of heavy and rising traffic congestion, and on a shorter time scale of perhaps 10 years, than it is based on some grand vision of what you think the far future is going to be like.

A final disclaimer and something to think about: The Wizard will be of retirement age in 2035 and most likely won't be doing too much daily travel anyway! :)

Wizard

On Houston's finances and Richard Vacar

This past Saturday, the Houston Chronicle published an editoral on the City of Houston's finances. The editoral from Houston's newspaper of record generally offering praise for Mayor Bill White's handling of the City of Houston's public monies in a worldwide economic downtown. The Chronicle's editorial board wrapped up their assessment of the Mayor's financial wizardry with a statement that

With little more than 7 months remaining in his last term, Mayor White has deftly steered Houston through both fiscal and tropical storms. His successor will have a tough act to follow.

Hmmm. The Wizard decided to make his own assessment of the City's finances. I spent part of this evening gazing into my crystal ball, from whence I found the City of Houston's fiscal year 2008 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (aka CAFR).

Amongst the items of interest are:

1) The status of the City's pension plans. There are three plans listed; one for the firefighters, one for the police officers, and the Municipal Pension system that covers everyone else. The status of these plans can be read on page 123 of the report:

A) The actuarial value of the assets of the firefighter's pension plan was $2 billion in 2004 and $2.633 billion in 2008. The accrued liabilities in 2004 were $2.266 billion in 2004 and $2.892 billion in 2008. Overall, the funding ratio of the firefighters plan improved from 88 percent to 91 percent.

B) The actuarial value of the assets of the police officer's pension plan was $2.394 billion in 2004 and $3.005 billion in 2008. The accrued liabilities in 2004 were $2.875 billion in 2004 and $3.858 billion in 2008. Overall, the funding ratio of the police officer's plan dropped from 83 percent to 78 percent. In 2002, the police officer's plan was funded at a ratio of 90 percent.

C) The Municipal Employees pension plan had assets of $1.501 billion in 2004 and $2.194 billion in 2008. The accrued liabilities in 2004 were $2.634 billion in 2004 and $3.128 billion in 2008. Note that the liabilities in 2004 were $3.278 billion. Overall, the funding ratio of the MEPS plan was 57 percent in 2004 and 70 percent in 2008.

One wonders how much of an improvement executing a lien against the downtown Hotel of the Americas improved the HMEPS balance sheet? Better yet, the City is keeping its funding ratios more or less the same, but the dollar values of the mismatch between assets and liabilities is growing. Is the City accruing pension and other liabilities that it cannot afford?

2) On page 246 of the report, one can read about the amount of general bonded debt outstanding owed by the City. In the time frame between 2004 and 2008, the amount outstanding rose from $1,979,786,000 to $2.926,444,000. On page 209 of the report, the CAFR states that the amount of taxable property went up from $103 billion to $135 billion. Per Capita debt levels went up from $985 to $1325 per City resident.

It seems to the Wizard that property values are not increasing at a rate that would sustain continued bonding to accrue, especially since we are in a recession.

2) On page 226 of the Adobe file (or page 196 of the City CAFR), one can read that the total primary CoH net assets have fallen from $5.371 billion in 2003 to $3.891 billion in 2008, a drop of about $1.5 billion. The Wizard is not an accountant, but it seems that during Mayor White's tenure as Mayor, the City devoured its accrued capital (in all of its forms) in order to keep the ship of state afloat.

3) On page 229 of the document, the City states that general revenues from property taxes went up from $639,888,000 in 2003 to $829,837,000 in 2008. The difference between property taxes from 2007 - 2008 was a rise in property taxes collected from $738,578,000 to $829,837,000. According to the Mayor's revenue cap, it seems that Houstonians may be in for a bit of a refund if Council actually follows the cap.

It was also noted recently that Richard Vacar, a longtime powerful administrator of the Houston Airport system retired abruptly. ABC's Mya Shay broke the story and the Chronicle is following it.

Speculation on Vacar's retirement has focused on Vacar's involvement with airport operations in other cities and country, denoting that a non-profit was involved on the deal. Kevin and company talk about it here, wondering about transparency issues or shoddy deal making that would reflect on the Mayor.

A better question to ask is why did the Houston Airport system start working on such deals with airports elsewhere in the first place? The motive for that, gentle readers, can be discerned from the 2001 City Revcap battle and Mayor White's counter charter amendment, which the seems to have prevailed in court. The Mayor's charter amendment offered a cap in increases in revenues from property taxes and drainage fees to the lower of of 4.5 percent per year, or the increase in population and indexed inflation.

It should be obvious to readers that any monies to be gained from the Houston Airport system would not fall under the Mayor's Revcap charter amendment, whereas it would have under the citizens Revcap. Ergo, it would make sense for the City to aggressively pursue such avenues for increased revenues to come into City coffers since they would not be covered by the Mayor's charter amendment.

I am at a loss in explaining why the Mayor canned Mr. Vacar. That is a job for the media to uncover. Better yet, will one of Houston's fourteen City Council members work up the political courage to confront the Mayor, a man whose administration is seeing the twilight of its rule, at the Council table and ask a simple question: Why Mr. Vacar was abruptly asked to take a walk?

Sigh... Such are the joys of taking a job that is so inherently political in nature.

Wizard