Election season is in full swing here in Houston, and for the first time since 2010, an incumbent mayor is not eligible for reelection. Unfortunately, our charismatic executive, Annise Parker, is coming to the end of her third and final term in office.
Although I do not yet have the fortune to vote in this country, Houston’s mayoral elections are still particularly important to me. The city is a prominent example of the strong mayor-council form of municipal government, so the chief executive can have an immense influence on the operations of the city. Indeed, past Houston mayors have used these powers to almost single-handedly build parks, amend the city code and establish (or disestablish) mass transit plans.
It’s the issue of mass transit that has me particularly concerned with the next mayor. While I’m hesitant to condition my support on a single issue, I firmly believe that nothing is more important to the future of the city of Houston than establishing a proper, metropolitan transit system that is proportional to a city of its size. Five meandering light rail lines is simply not enough, although they do provide an essential and necessary framework for a larger system. The bus system reimagining is not enough, even though it fixes many inconsistencies that have built up over the decades. New freeways will never be enough, and the possibility of expanding many of them any further is nonexistent. Houston is on track to surpass Chicago in population – a city that benefits from an extensive rail system that is hundreds of miles long. Of the nation’s ten largest metropolitan statistical areas, Houston easily lags the most in mass transit, beaten by dense Northeastern cities (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington) and even its similarly-built Southern counterparts (Dallas, Atlanta and Miami).
So where do this year’s candidates stand on Houston’s crippling mass-transit indecision? Since I haven’t yet found a good summary of their positions anywhere on the Internet yet, I figured I would create a handy guide here for reference. The candidates are listed below in descending order of performance on a Houston Public Media poll from May (premature but still somewhat revealing). While there is still a ways to go before November, any candidate who takes metropolitan transportation issues seriously should have at least said something about rail by now.
- Former Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia (D) has obviously not been in a position to comment on transportation issues during his tenure. Therefore, I’m reluctant to apply the same scrutiny to him as I will to other candidates who have performed direct executive and legislative functions within municipalities. Promisingly, he notes on the front page of his website that “the city is seeing more violent crimes, serious financial challenges with few remedies left to use, and infrastructure and transportation issues that desperately need a fresh approach.” The wording is vague, but the implication is there – presumably, a “fresh approach” means looking towards solutions that ween Houston off of its much-beloved automobiles. Unfortunately, however, Garcia has been mostly silent about Houston’s pressing infrastructure issues; he has not even commented on the controversial ReBuild Houston public works program.
- Texas Representative Sylvester Turner (D) has a bit more to say about public transportation – he is, after all, a legislator, and he’s run for Mayor before. His 1991 campaign resulted in a close loss to Bob Lanier, who was a vocal opponent of rail and succeeded in killing an ambitious monorail plan put forth by Metro. As a state legislator representing District 139, which sprawls across suburban areas of northwest Houston, Turner has straddled the fence on Texas Central Railway’s proposed high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas, which would pass through the area. Ultimately, Turner supports high-speed rail – as he should – but seems somewhat vulnerable to the NIMBYism of his constituents. The rail corridor must go somewhere, and simply asking that it be pushed to a more expensive alignment in a questionable effort to protect “property values” and “safety” (where are the studies predicting such impacts?) is an unreasonable approach to transportation planning. His concern is understandable but misplaced. Still, Turner has assisted HSR in the Texas House by helping gut anti-rail legislation – he is far from an enemy of the proposal. Turner has not said much about transportation on his website, but this blog post from May is promising. It seems that Turner will align with urbanist interests, although to what extent remains uncertain. This 2003 interview is also very promising, and it shows a strong commitment to expanding mass transit throughout the metropolitan area. I appreciate Turner’s ability to see beyond the system’s humble beginnings – he definitely understands that rail to the suburbs and airports will eventually be built as long as some lines are laid in the first place, however short they are. He also recognizes the necessity of mass transit to further Houston’s economic interests.
- The candidate that excites me the most on infrastructure is former U.S. Representative Chris Bell (D). Bell makes his position on mobility issues quite obvious on his website:
As Mayor, my approach will be to build on the options we currently have, and expand them in different ways that recognize we have scarce financial resources. In addition to the light rail, I will work with METRO to consider the feasibility of a new modern system, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) for areas not covered by rail.
(…)I will also work with the County to look for more options for commuter rail as well as reaching further out with expanded park and ride options. As our city continues to grow and expand, we simply can’t build more roads to relieve congestion. We have to expand our public transportation options and as Mayor I will work to make that happen.
Thank God for this man. Even though he polls third, Bell seems to be off to a decent start and has a solid resume to work with. I appreciate his willingness to invest in Bus Rapid Transit, which he discusses at some length in this blog post on his website. BRT is certainly a necessary component of any long-range transportation plan for Houston, and I agree that it has the potential to work just as effectively as light rail at a fraction of the cost. Bell displays consistent interest in long-range transportation planning, as he notes in this Chronicle article.
- City Council Member Stephen Costello (R) has positioned himself as a moderate candidate in a field of Democrats, championing his legislative experience and namesake civil engineering firm Costello, Inc. Costello’s landmark legislative achievement, the ReBuild Houston program, is eliciting some significant controversy yet has made appreciable headway in tacking the city’s enormous street infrastructure problems. Of course, Costello does not fail to emphasize surface infrastructure investment on his website, where it is listed as one of his three main priorities. However, his website makes no mention of public transportation whatsoever, and he has been similarly silent on the issue in his capacity as a councilman. I worry that Costello would fail to embrace rail as mayor due to his close ties with suburban real estate developers and the city’s enthusiastic road-building engineering and construction firms (one of which is his own company). In addition, his slightly conservative leaning leaves him even less likely to endorse mass transit solutions. The fact that he hasn’t said anything about it so far should be enough to dissuade any transportation-minded voter from endorsing him.
- Attorney Ben Hall doesn’t even seem to have a functioning website at the moment. The only comment on public transportation I can attribute to him is from the aforementioned Chronicle article, where he advocates “a twofold approach to reducing congestion that involves both facility and behavior modification initiatives.” That doesn’t really seem like an endorsement of anything.
- Former Kemah mayor Bill King (R) is the race’s most conservative candidate – which also makes him the most likely to lose. Predictably, King has taken a hard line against the light rail system. As a frequent columnist for the Houston Chronicle, King has penned a number of opinions that reveal his position on mass transit with more clarity than any other candidate in the race. I have to at least admire King’s willingness to discuss these issues, even if I could not possibly more strongly oppose his views.King’s criticism of the existing light rail system is extensive. In this 2010 article, he discusses a number of apparent issues with the design and engineering of the lines themselves. However, these issues are pretty pedantic – King grossly overexaggerates the impact of small details like school zones and noise on adjacent neighborhoods. Indeed, he seems willfully ignorant to the fact that opting for multi-lane avenues and dismissing the transit-oriented development that light rail makes possible would be far worse for walkability and resident comfort in these areas; emphasizing mass transit reduces the impact of auto-centric urban planning and vastly improves the pedestrian realm. His comment on 90-degree turns is somewhat contradictory as he states that it is the result of “of attempting to build an at-grade system through already densely populated and developed areas,” even though that’s what he argues successful mass transit relies on in this 2014 article. King says that Houston doesn’t have enough density for mass transit, but even if it did, apparently we shouldn’t be building any because of squeaky rails? As if that were somehow more of a nuisance than the enormous roads and freeways our car culture has demanded for so long.
The 2014 article itself is painfully unimaginative, opting for a conservative interpretation of mass transit that resorts to the same tired arguments about density and congestion. King is at least correct that mass transit will not appreciably reduce congestion on the city’s freeways, but that was never the point. A good mass transit system offers an alternative to driving for those who want an easier commute. But besides that, King’s assumption that mass transit is impossible in Houston is deeply flawed because he ignores the existence of park-and-ride. No sane person would advocate for a mass transit system without taking into account the popularity of automobiles. Any well engineered system would attempt to strike a balance between driving and riding – something that Houston is already doing somewhat well with the Park-and-Ride/HOV system. While I respect King, his arguments become irritatingly facetious towards the end – yes, cities like New York and Washington have worse congestion than Houston, but that’s not because they decided to invest in mass transit instead of freeways. Instead, they realized that roadbuilding cannot simply continue unabated; freeways can only become so wide and only so many can be built. Instead, offering an alternative form of transportation can help strike a balance in commuting. Houston is quickly approaching the point where it will have to make the same decision.
King is probably unaware of another sprawling, auto-centric city that has nearly perfected the park-and-ride commuter rail system: Perth, Western Australia. Interestingly enough, Perth is actually one of Houston’s international sister cities, and it has a similar legacy of suburbia. With a population of 2 million sprawled over nearly 2500 square miles (which translates to a population density that is only 22 percent of Houston’s, although the 2500 square mile figure probably includes a lot of rural land), Perth has developed a strikingly similar dependence on the automobile, complete with a well-developed system of metropolitan freeways that lead to a comparatively small central business district. Consider this paper, which bluntly states that “Perth is one of the most car dependent sprawling cities on the planet with low urban density.”
King would assume that a rail system would be impractical in a place like Perth, but the opposite is true. Perth currently boasts a five-line commuter rail system totaling almost 108 miles radiating out of the CBD. The system attracts over 60 million trips per year (that’s over 170,000 rides per day, or over five times Houston’s average daily ridership of 39,000) and is well-integrated with a bus network that delivers an average of 230,000 rides per day (also beating out Metro’s buses – and this is in a city with less than one-third the population). The system is robust and fantastic. Just skim this exhaustive paper detailing the Perth success story – rail works so well in this car city that even conservative politicians have promised to expand the system. They even address King’s talking points almost directly:
However Perth’s rail story has proven that rail can be delivered in existing very low density urban environments with long urban corridors. The northern suburbs and southern railways are both examples of new thinking to enable the development of public transportation that responds to the local conditions by adapting the traditional model of mass transit – which achieved mass through penetration into high urban densities – to a low density model of bringing the masses to the railway stations from surrounding areas by bus and car. This has provided a new model for rail which has become a touchstone for the industry nationally (Waldock R, 2007).
Perth is a shining example of the route Houston should take. We would do well to follow their lead and implement a similar system that works with the car culture. And while I share some of King’s concern that a light rail system is not sufficient for Houston, it does act as a fundamental framework for a wider network. Indeed, Houston is actually denser than Perth, and the Inner Loop is an appropriate environment for at-grade rail. We need to build out that system and then look to a more expansive model that adapts the park-and-ride system to a higher-speed, higher-capacity rail network.
King is not just all talk, however. He has proposed some alternative mobility solutions, most notably in this 2010 opinion piece. I do think some of his ideas are interesting and practical – particularly the extension of rail out to Fort Bend County (which seems to stand in opposition to his 2014 opinion that rail won’t work at all in Houston) and a Downtown trolley system. However, most of these “solutions” are just short-term patches on a fundamentally flawed transportation system. Improvements to dangerous intersections and a few freeway bottlenecks here and there will have a temporary positive impact on congestion, sure, but in the long-term these changes will do nothing to fundamentally change the way Houstonians get around their city. Even the multi-billion dollar reconstruction of the Katy Freeway into the world’s widest highway only had a temporary impact on commute times; if that gargantuan project failed to shift the status quo, it’s obvious that incremental improvements to sporadic chunks of infrastructure will also fail. I’m also skeptical of King’s proposed “smart streets” (which uncomfortably co-opts an alternative name for the urbanist “complete streets” initiative), which would turn local thoroughfares into awkward freeway-avenue hybrids. While congestion is certainly an enormous issue in poorly planned areas like the FM 1960 corridor, shoving high-speed traffic into commercial corridors is an offensive affront to walkability and accessibility. King is essentially endorsing the stroad, except at a higher speed. These areas would be better served by high-frequency long-range bus service, which also has the potential to improve their aesthetic character.
Honestly, I don’t know why any transit-minded citizen would consider voting for King. While he is a respectable writer, King seems ignorant of the potential for mass transit and unwilling to embrace a creative solution to Houston’s greatest problem. We need innovation in order to solve our mobility issues, and King simply opts for the same old arguments in defense of a waning car culture.
Hopefully, a greater number of candidates will come out with stronger positions on mass transit. It’s definitely surprising that so many of our potential mayors have been so silent on such an enormous issue. It’s time to recognize that Houston has been moving far too slow on mass transit. For a city of our size, 23 miles of passenger rail is a pitiful amount – and we don’t even have a single commuter line!
I refuse to support any mayoral candidate that can’t look beyond the road-freeway paradigm towards a more innovative solution to our mobility problems. Potholes and police aren’t everything. Houston is a city vying for an increased profile on the world stage, yet it lags so far behind the infrastructure of its competitors that it almost eliminates itself from consideration entirely. How can we compete with Toronto and Singapore when we can’t even push ourselves to invest in some buses on Post Oak? How can we distinguish ourselves in an era when even Los Angeles, the inventor of auto-centric urban planning, has abandoned that vision? What can we say to international visitors who have to dump $60 on a taxi ride from the airport because we don’t care enough to do what every other major city in North America has done and roll a rail line out there?
Please vote in this election and made your voice heard. Houston needs a new vision for transportation – and only a few of your choices are willing to make the right decisions.
Alternate Amnesiac 