New Geography

Author: Tory Gattis

  • Transportation fantasyland in DC

    I want to pass along this Wall Street Journal op-ed on some of crazy transportation goals starting to get traction in Congress. The main excerpt:

    Messrs. Rockefeller and Lautenberg aim to “reduce per capita motor vehicle miles traveled on an annual basis.” Mr. Oberstar wants to establish a federal “Office of Livability” to ensure that “States and metropolitan areas achieve progress towards national transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals.”

    What does this mean? Most travel is not for its own sake. So reducing the total miles traveled — whether the length or number of trips — means people would have to reduce the activities they want and need to do. People would be “coerced,” in effect, to live in less desirable places or work in less desirable jobs; shop in fewer and closer stores; see their doctor less frequently; visit fewer family members and friends.

    There are three likely ways this could work. The cost of travel could be increased by raising the prices of vehicles or fuel; travel time could be increased by not expanding the highway system; or superior alternatives to the private car could be developed. The most likely way to increase the cost of travel would be by increasing fuel taxes perhaps to as much as $4 per gallon, as some have suggested.

    Allowing congestion to increase travel times would be politically easier. In the name of “multimodal planning,” for example, road-use taxes could be diverted, as Messrs. Rockefeller and Lautenberg suggest, to “increase the total usage of public transportation.” But public transportation (where it’s available) typically takes twice as long as automobile travel, so it’s not practical for many Americans.

    Moreover, public transportation (passenger rail services, subways, buses, light rail) requires heavy subsidies, while roads mostly pay for themselves through fuel taxes. Our roads would be even more self-sustaining if 20% of the federal fuel tax were not already diverted to public transit from the federal Highway Trust Fund. Messrs. Rockefeller, Lautenberg and Oberstar want to grab even more money from the trust fund.

    Americans have always valued their independence and mobility. One way to reassert their rights would be to abolish the misnamed Highway Trust Fund, which finances highway construction and maintenance. Let the states decide what roads they need and how to finance them. The present system expires on Sept. 30 unless Congress reauthorizes it. Let it die.

    Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Texas) has in this regard introduced the “Highway Fairness and Reform Act of 2009,” which would explicitly allow states to opt out of the federal financing system. A companion bill has been introduced in the House.

    If a significant number of states opted out of the federal system, it would collapse and responsibility for roads would revert to the states. The vast majority of road users would benefit from such a change. And, if “livability” standards were deemed desirable, local preferences would determine them, rather than federal “greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals.”

    You go, Kay. As I’ve said before, the personal vehicle is now a permanent part of our culture, but the engine technology will evolve to meet climate or energy needs. Transit is not a realistic answer for the vast majority. But beyond that, the Feds really shouldn’t be in the transportation game any more. They built the interstate system – now leave local transportation decisions and funding to the states. That includes high-speed rail, which can be done by consortiums of states if they really want it. But, as Reason recently pointed out, inter-city buses make far more sense:

    As I’ve said many times before, I am a life-long rail fan who has ridden trains on four continents. As a transportation professional, however, it’s incumbent on me to advocate meeting transportation needs in cost-effective ways. Before we spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on inter-city passenger rail, I think it behooves us to take a closer look at the potential of inter-city bus travel.

    …

    Besides considerably lower fares than Amtrak, much wider geographic coverage, and a much smaller carbon footprint, inter-city bus service has something else going for it: negligible cost to taxpayers. The Nathan study puts the federal subsidy per passenger mile (averaged over the 10 years from 1996 to 2005) at 0.1 cents. Amtrak’s figure is 19.2 cents. Those numbers are consistent with federal subsidy figures in the 2005 U.S. DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics report “Federal Subsidies to Passenger Transportation.”

    I rest my case.

    He even mentioned some of the luxury bus services with wifi popping up around the country – especially in the northeast – that appeal to a different demographic from Greyhound. How come we can’t get one of those for the Texas Triangle?

    This post is cross posted at Houston Strategies

  • Debates on Airport Rail

    Running a little behind this week, so I just wanted to pass along this story from USA Today on domestic airports adding rail service. People love the service, of course, and many airports are doing it, but later in the article they get to the economic irrationality of it in America’s decentralized car-centric cities (as opposed to Europe and Asia).

    Still, airport-rail ridership in the USA is woefully low compared with other countries, says Andrew Sharp, director general of the U.K.-based International Air Rail Organisation. In many European and Asian airports, 20% to 30% of travelers get to and from the airport using rail. In the USA, ridership typically ranges from 2% to 5%, he says.

    …

    Ongoing debates

    Like most large construction projects, airport rail proposals face stiff headwinds. Opponents challenge funding sources and new taxes and cite preferences for cars and buses. But the central argument in most debates has centered around ridership, specifically whether airports have enough demand to justify millions in cost.

    BART’s connection to SFO, completed in 2003, has yet to reach BART’s initial ridership forecast and is still not profitable. Prior to construction, BART projected there would be 17,800 average daily boardings to and from the airport by the year 2010. As of this month, SFO ridership was at about 11,000.

    Frank Sterling and Juliet Ellis, activists in the Bay Area, also questioned BART’s plans to spend $500 million for Oakland International’s people-mover and its decision to charge $6 for the service vs. $3 for the current shuttle bus.

    “The proposal to charge double that for the new connector might drive away customers, unless it delivers twice the value,” they wrote in a recent newspaper commentary, “Can East Bay residents afford this?”

    Then they use some of my favorite arguments from past posts:

    These are appropriate debates, Coogan says. Some cities are better off sticking to buses, he says. For example, LAX’s FlyAway Bus, which provides non-stop rides to various neighborhoods in Southern California, is more convenient for many travelers than the metro.

    For some cities, it’d be wiser to spend scarce funds for extending metro to public transportation-friendly suburbs before considering airports, Coogan adds.

    “How often does a person go to work? And how often does a person go to Paris in a year?” he says.

    More on these arguments here, here, and here (near the bottom). As I said in one of those posts: I agree, and I’ve said before that the market here is a niche one plenty well served by buses: young singles who can’t get a ride to/from the airport. Business travelers will almost always rent a car or take a taxi. Families won’t schlep their luggage on transit. Most others will have friends or family pick them up or drop them off. And our off-site airport parking is dirt cheap. The ridership drivers just aren’t there.

  • America’s Four Great Growth Waves and the World Cities They Produced

    There have been four great growth waves in American history. In each case, there was an attractive new frontier, which not only drew migrating waves of people seeking new opportunity, but also developed large new bases of industry, wealth, and power. These waves have also created top-tier world cities in their wake. The first three of these waves were:

    1. The Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC corridor was America’s original land of opportunity, industry, wealth, and power. New York was the big winner, and DC and Boston still do quite well.
    2. The rise of the agricultural and industrial Midwest, including Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and St. Louis. The fall here has been a hard one as manufacturing moved abroad, but Chicago still stands as a world-class city produced during the region’s heyday.
    3. The great westward migration, mostly focused on California, but with ancillary growth in adjacent and west coast states. This migration started well before World War 2, but really took off after the war, and produced two top-tier mega-metros – Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area – and several successful second-tiers like Seattle, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.

    These waves are not clearly distinct, but overlap each other. As one region matures and starts to level off, the next region starts its growth wave. And that’s the situation now as California shows clear signs of having peaked: gigantic tech and housing crashes plus economic and domestic outmigration as tax, cost-of-living, housing, and regulatory burdens rise and a dysfunctional government teeters towards financial collapse.

    The fourth wave is increasingly clear and follows the same California model of a single focus mega-state and an ancillary region: Texas and the new South.

    Just as California had its pre-war growth surge, Texas had its first real growth waves with the 20th-century post-Spindletop oil boom. California had the dust bowl migration of the 30s, and Texas the oil boom migration of the 70s. But the real super-surge has become clearer in the new century as California hands off the baton to Texas. This growth wave really covers much of the South, but Texas is the 800lb gorilla vs. states like Georgia and North Carolina, just as California dominates over Washington, Nevada, and Arizona. Texas even looms over Florida, which certainly has experienced incredible population growth to become the fourth-largest state, but has had considerably less success with building industry, wealth, and power. Florida’s wealth – like that of Arizona – comes in part from people who built wealth elsewhere but moved or bought a second home there. Neither place is home to many Fortune 500 headquarters, an area where Texas has excelled.

    California had its agriculture and oil barons before WW2, but the real story there was the post-war rise of the entertainment, defense, aerospace, biotech, trade and technology industries. In a similar way, Texas’ oil tycoons are just the tip of the coming surge of wealth and power in industries such as technology, health care, biotech, defense, trade, transportation, aerospace, finance, telecom, and alternative energy in addition to traditional oil and gas (in fact, Texas is the #1 wind power state).

    The great cities emerging from this new wave are Atlanta, Dallas-Ft.Worth, and Houston. They dominate the census growth stats (Houston story), and all indications are that Houston will pass Philadelphia in the 2010 census to join Dallas-Ft.Worth in the top 5 metros along with New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. DFW and Houston are even approaching the combined San Francisco Bay Area population of 6.1 million, and Texas passed California and New York for the #1 ranking in the Fortune 500 HQ rankings last year.

    Want more evidence? Check out this impressive video on the DFW-Austin-San Antonio-Houston Texas Triangle with an overwhelming list of statistics that make the case. In the video, they refer to the region as the 18m-strong “Texaplex” – a play on the “Metroplex” nickname for Dallas-Ft. Worth. You can also see their Texaplex informational brochure here (pdf).

    When you look at it in this historical context, it’s clear Texas and the new South will be the focal point of America’s growth for at least the next few decades. History also says at least one, and possibly more, truly top-tier world cities will emerge from this wave – and it could be argued that some have already. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day hubub and crisis-of-the-moment, but take a minute to stand back and see the big picture. Those living in or moving to Texas and the new South are part of a great historical wave that’s just starting to really take off, the same as being in Chicago at the turn of the 19th-century or in California after WW2. Pretty cool, eh?

    Tory Gattis is a Social Systems Architect, consultant and entrepreneur with a genuine love of his hometown Houston and its people. He covers a wide range of Houston topics at Houston Strategies – including transportation, transit, quality-of-life, city identity, and development and land-use regulations – and have published numerous Houston Chronicle op-eds on these topics.

  • Is Texas Really on the Brink?

    I recently recieved this this link to a short essay and some stats titled “March 31, 2009

  • The Opportunity City weathers all storms

    In the dark early-morning hours of September 13th, Hurricane Ike scored a direct hit on the Houston region with 110mph winds, a 13ft storm surge, and a gigantic eye 80 miles across. While Texas gets its fair share of Gulf hurricanes, this was the first direct hit on Houston since Alicia in 1983, 25 years ago.

    Before the strike, nearly a million people along the coastal areas were ordered to evacuate (out of six million in the metro). The evacuation went far smoother than the infamous Rita evacuation three years earlier, which gridlocked roads, left thousands of vehicles stranded without fuel, and ultimately directly or indirectly killed about 100 people. This time, only coastal areas at risk from storm surge were evacuated, while the vast bulk of the urban area more than 50 miles inland was encouraged to “shelter in place.” It made all the difference. Those who stayed were able to evaluate and react to any damage overnight, then choose to stay or leave as they awaited power to return, comfortably knowing the state of their home. Those who left before the storm were, of course, restless to know their home’s condition, but faced challenges returning due to a regional gas shortage as well as the outage of most traffic signals.

    Coastal areas around Galveston, Bolivar, and Clear Lake suffered substantial surge damage, flooding buildings and tossing boats up on land, but the primary problems in Houston revolved around down trees and the power outages they caused. Nearly 2 million homes were without power in the storm’s aftermath, and most stayed without power for one to two weeks, even with thousands of repair crews coming in from all over the country. It’s hard to really understand how fundamental electricity is to modern living until you go a while without air conditioning, cooking, hot water, refrigeration, lights, TV, or the internet (followed by horrendous rush hours without traffic signals the following week as people returned to work).

    Houston was greatly blessed to get our first cool front of autumn just two days after the storm – several weeks earlier than usual – bringing relief to millions without air conditioning across the region. The trauma of that experience has sparked a regional debate on the merits of burying our power lines, which increases reliability and has better aesthetics, but can cost an order of magnitude more while being harder to diagnose for repair and susceptible to flooding, a common problem in tropical Houston.

    The mayor’s repeated theme both before and after the storm was “Neighbors helping neighbors,” and Houston rose to the challenge. Immediately after the storm passed, people checked on each other and assisted with debris cleanup, piling it in neat mounds in front of each house (estimates are the city is hauling off enough tree debris to fill four Astrodomes – the mayor is even holding a contest for creative uses for the debris). Many people fired up BBQ grills and cooked meat from thawing freezers, feeding all comers. People lacking lights and TV instead chatted in their yards with their neighbors and looked up at a star-filled sky made brilliant by the lack of city lights. Many mentioned that camaraderie as one of the silver linings from the storm. Despite looting fears, crime actually dropped dramatically after the storm (helped by a temporary night curfew). Even the venerable New York Times ran a story on Houston’s strong spirit after the storm. Here’s just one example of a touching story I heard about one of the many local churches that stepped up to help:

    …one church’s senior pastor who received a phone call from someone he didn’t know living back east. The caller said they could not find their elderly parents and were desperate to find out if they were ok. So this pastor got in his car late that night, with a load of food, water and ice and drove across town to find the parents. He drove up to the house and knocked on the door. They were fine, but without electricity or phone, so he called their kids on his cell phone and said, “Here, someone wants to talk to you.” After the call the parents said they didn’t need anything but across the street there was someone who really looked like he did. So the pastor gave all of his food, water and ice to the neighbor. The next day he came back with more food and water only to find that the neighbor had distributed what he received the night before to his neighbors. The church volunteers returned each day until the electricity came back.

    Area leaders also stepped up, with The Economist saying, “Credit should go to city officials like Mr. White (city mayor) and Mr. Emmett (county leader), who exuded competence and calm.” Harris County Commissioner Ed Emmett received widespread plaudits for pulling an all-nighter to untangle complex recovery logistics directing hundreds of supply trucks. Mayor White admitted to using “harsh language inappropriate for Sunday school” to cut through bureaucracy and get emergency supplies moving, raising his already-high local approval ratings.

    City and county leaders can also be credited with some good “lessons learned” from previous disasters. In addition to better evacuations since Rita, aggressive drainage infrastructure investments since Tropical Storm Allison’s massive floods in 2001 resulted in greatly reduced street flooding across the city even with 10 to 20 inches of rain over two mornings. During Alicia in 1983, blown gravel from downtown skyscraper roofs blew out thousands of windows. Since then, gravel roofs have been banned, and less than half of one-percent of downtown’s windows blew out during Ike.

    Today, in the city (not the coast), the main remaining signs of Ike are shredded commercial signs and plywood replacements for some office tower windows. Damage estimates are about $8.5 billion for the four million people of Harris County, substantially more than either Alicia or Allison, but manageable vs. the $125 billion value of residential structures in the county. The total for Texas may exceed $50 billion. Surprisingly, energy infrastructure held up very well, with minimal damage to refineries and offshore oil rigs. The combined downtime from Gustav and Ike created fuel shortages in the southeastern U.S. fed by pipelines from Houston, but they were alleviated relatively quickly as capacity came back on line.

    As Houston recovers from Ike, it continues to face three additional “storms,” with the housing and credit crunch as well as oil prices dropping from $140 to less than $70 per barrel. Despite these strong storms – in many ways stronger than Ike – Houston continues to hold up well. Conservative oil companies still require new projects to break even at prices substantially below $70, so they are still growing and hiring. Houston’s port, space, and health care industries (the Texas Medical Center is the world’s largest medical complex) are also somewhat insulated from the nation’s economic woes. In part because Houston lacks the restrictive controls on home building found in many cities, the city never really had a housing bubble. Overall homes continue to appreciate modestly as opposed to sharp drops in much of the rest of the country.

    Of course, we are still part of the Union and the world economy, so we’re slowing down too. But Houston and Texas continue to outpace the national economy; Texas is unlikely to join the lengthening line asking for a federal bailout. Every day I see a steady stream of out-of-state license plates as people overcome any fear of hurricanes (are they really any worse than earthquakes in the West or blizzards in the North?) and continue to migrate to our resilient Opportunity City.

    Tory Gattis is a Social Systems Architect, consultant and entrepreneur with a genuine love of his hometown Houston and its people. He covers a wide range of Houston topics at Houston Strategies – including transportation, transit, quality-of-life, city identity, and development and land-use regulations – and have published numerous Houston Chronicle op-eds on these topics.

  • Tory Gattis