Monthly Archives: January 2007

Well, except for me, that is.
From Christof’s excellent site in Houston,
this is the kind of discussion we needed to have here in 2000 and again in 2004. Of course, I believe we were about to have this kind of planning in late 2000 for a May or November 2001 election, until Mike Krusee forced Capital Metro to hold the election in November of 2000, before they were remotely prepared to do so. In 2004, nobody bothered to look at the line’s routing and figure out whether it served the needs of choice commuters (people who aren’t willing to ride the bus today). Again, except for me. So here’s a recap, with a new exciing picture at the end.
Note the references to 1/4 mile being the typical capture area for a rail stop (despite what you hear from people who think the typical commuter will walk the 1/2 mile or more from the Convention Center stop to their downtown office building).
Here’s a similar image I’m working on for Austin. I’m no photoshop wiz, obviously, but this might be the best I can make this look, so here you go. The original image comes from “Mopacs”, a poster to the Skyscraper Forum. I’ve drawn in the 2004 commuter rail route in yellow (just barely penetrates the picture on the lower right); the 2000 light rail route in green; and the maybe-never streetcar route in red. Note that the streetcar doesn’t have reserved-guideway, as I’ve noted before, so it’s really not going to help much in getting choice commuters to ride.
Click for full image if you don’t see the yellow route!

The big building you see just north of the yellow line is the Hilton Hotel (not a major destination for choice commuters; anectdotal evidence suggests that a large percentage of workers there actually take the bus to work today).
Note that the walking distance from the yellow stop to the corner of 7th/Congress (rough center of the office buildings on Congress) is a half-mile, give or take which, as I’ve pointed out before to the derision of people who don’t study transportation, is about twice what the average person will walk to a train station if they have to do it every day. Capital Metro knows this, of course, which is why their shuttles are planned for not only UT and the Capitol, but also for downtown; their only error is in repeating the Tri-Rail debacle by forgetting that choice commuters don’t like riding the bus.
Also note in the upper reaches of the image, the other two critical employment centers downtown – the Capitol Complex and UT. Notice how the green line (2000 light rail) goes right next to them as well. What you don’t see is further up to the north, the green line continues up the only high-density residential corridor in our city – that being Guadalupe Blvd., so in addition to being able to walk to their office _from_ the train station, a lot of prospective riders would have been able to walk to the train station from their homes.
That’s what Mike Krusee took away from Austin, folks. And it ain’t coming back once commuter rail opens; there’s no way to operate anything like the 2000 light rail proposal cooperatively with this worthless commuter rail crock.
Update: Here’s the other aerial photos from “Mopacs”. Worth a look.