Nearly two years ago, we drew on a number of obscure, little-read documents on METRO’s downtown light-rail plans to post some thoughts on downtown’s coming traffic/train/pedestrian mobility nightmare (needless to say, we did not buy into the rosy conclusions of some of the documents, especially when drilling down into those documents raised concerns that have still not really been addressed).
There was little public followup on the concerns raised in the documents, although rumor has it that some of downtown’s power brokers were then and are now concerned about the potential impact of METRO’s light-rail follies on downtown mobility (especially downtown parking garage access, since the goofy at-grade rail system will be gobbling lanes and affecting traffic in/out of many garages).
The City of Houston recently got into the action, producing its own “study” of the planned Capitol/Rusk light-rail alignment on four downtown parking garages. Their (unbelievable) conclusion: The Capitol/Rusk light-rail alignment will have no appreciable impact on the operation of those four parking garages.
The document in question was produced by the City of Houston Public Works & Engineering department in December 2010. We have posted the public’s document to scribd for broader public access (for some reason, these sorts of documents frequently require some effort on the part of the public to obtain; just ask Tom Bazan about difficulties obtaining documents related to METRO’s light-rail adventurism).
We would like to encourage readers to have a read, and then to come back and discuss.
After a quick survey, a number of items stood out for us:
- The study “did NOT measure the impact of LRT on the downtown street network.” We would suggest this renders it of limited utility (of course, had the study been broader in scope, all of the issues we raised in our last post would have come into the fore, and downtown property managers might have raised objections. Best to keep them and the public in the dark, we suppose). In all likelihood, more than four downtown parking garages will be affected by running at-grade rail down busy streets like Capitol and Rusk, crossing other busy streets in the process; those potential impacts are also ignored/whitewashed.
- As noted in our previous post on downtown mobility, actual Basis of Design documents concede that maintaining 6/12-minute headways for the planned Capitol/Rusk light-rail tram may not be possible (which would, of course, have snowball effects on the entire downtown mobility ecosystem). This is a more significant problem for the planned at-grade system than planners let on, which is probably why most documents (including the latest “study’) prefer to ignore such issues
- Buses represent an imperfect simulation of a light-rail tram.
- Existing traffic signal timing was not altered, even though the existing Main Street light-rail tram currently enjoys signal priority. As noted above, the Capitol/Rusk alignments present significant challenges in terms of mobility, and will likely affect signal timing (with effects that cascade throughout downtown at street level).
- In quite a number of cases, the average delay entering/exiting garages actually declined during the light-rail simulation! Yes, you read that right — we are supposed to believe that the exercise to simulate the elimination of one lane of traffic for a rail station and one lane of traffic for a light-rail tram that occupies most of a block every six minutes actually improves the ability to get in/out of downtown parking garages in a nontrivial number of instances!
In all honesty, we didn’t find this study particularly compelling or helpful. The parameters seemed to be narrowly confined so as to produce the preferred political outcome (we know the current mayor is in favor of the light-rail plan crafted by OLD METRO, and we know that public works grew increasingly political in the last administration). And the public remains largely in the dark as to the impact of running at-grade rail down the important Capitol/Rusk corridor.
What have we missed? Gotten wrong? Gotten right? Please leave your thoughts in the comment thread.
