Off the Rails
By DL Haydon
Photo by Madelyn Keith
From the happy perspective, the Houston METRO Rail’s Red Line extension opened two months ago. Two additional extensions should open near the end of this year.
But Houston was supposed to have five rail line extensions open two years ago. Apologies if that bit of news is less chipper. Thanks to a handful of federal investigations and funding problems, the East End/Green Line and South East/Purple Line will open two years late -if we’re lucky. According to METRO, “funding issues” are why the University/Blue Line and the Uptown/Gold line are on hold. Indefinitely, mind you.
The working extension goes north from UH-Downtown and roughly follows I-45 to the 610 loop. It’s also a day late and a dollar short. Unless you live there, or are going to the Houston Community College at its tip, there’s little reason to ride. The denizens of northside can ride the rails from their homes, through downtown and end up smack dab in front of the Texas Medical Center. That’s great. What about getting from Second Ward to Montrose? What about jumping from Sharpstown to the University of Houston? No such luck, which is a shame. A metropolitan city needs quality infrastructure, which includes fast public transportation. There is no loophole.
But let’s back up. The METRO Rail sucks right now, but it’s not the first time we’ve dealt with mass public transit. Houston had a streetcar system from the early 20th century to the 1940′s. Just like the METRO Rail, it ran into drivers, dealt with inflation and even had a hybrid bus/streetcar system. So what happened? Cheap cars and cheaper pavement. Around 1940 the mayor of Houston was involved in a proposition for a multi-lane highway to Galveston (AKA the Gulf Freeway). In exchange for getting the hell out of the way, the company that ran the streetcars, Houston Electric, accepted $50K and some bus perks. The city dismantled the rail lines.
Let’s face it, urban sprawl was a race streetcars couldn’t win. But that was back before the Earth got seven billion people, before Houston accepted 150,000 refugees from Katrina and well before people realized that freeways aren’t sustainable. Today, we’re (allegedly) smarter about our transport. The METRO Line should be our evidence. But if you look at the last 10 to 20 years, Houston was dragging its feet towards mass public transit. We’d look like a bunch of bleeding heart socialists if Houston had proper infrastructure! Whatever would the neighbors think?
Pothole covered roads. Decaying bridges. Virtually non-existent sidewalks. Houston is the poster child for why the US isn’t actually number one anymore. Yet if you suggest the legislature spend much needed funds on public transit, Austin suggests more toll roads on freeways . Right: more crumbling concrete will get rid of all the crumbling concrete. Legislative logic.
Not that METRO is putting up a good fight. Allegations of corruption, the CEO resigning in 2024 and the bad production speed of the rail cars ordered from Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (Spain) are more than enough ammunition for METRO’s opponents. Even their PR department drops the ball. A short glance on the GOMETRO.org website reveals quotes like: “While other cities have taken decades to expand their mass transit systems, Houston is taking on the challenge in just a few short years,” among other optimistic outlooks and polite lies. But it took 60 years after the dismantling of Houston Electric’s streetcars just to get the Red Line. It’s taken over a decade since then just to start construction on extensions. And only one is finished, which is part of the pre-existing line.
The website got one thing right however: “The expanded light-rail system is an essential element of the city’s plans to meet the transportation and environmental challenges of today and tomorrow, easing our growing traffic congestion, improving our air quality and changing the way Houston moves.”
Not everyone in Texas agrees, which is why the path to rails is such a cluster bomb. Houston (Texas in general) doesn’t get to have nice things. If we did, the deadlines on the rail extensions wouldn’t get pushed back perpetually. Nice things require funds and empathy. Instead, we get members of the U.S. House of Representatives who fight federal funding for public transit out of some misplaced sense of profit, resign office amid scandal, get found guilty of conspiracy/money laundering (but end up serving no time) and end up dancing on television.
Detractors who don’t have political interests tend to point out cities with public transport “suck anyway.” Start a Craigslist political post about this topic if you want proof. The reply to this is simple: show the data. Show the data for cities that suffer from having a public rail line. If you look at everybody else, the evidence is contrary. Look at Europe in general. Look at Japan specifically. Look at the cleaner air. Look at their productive work force. Look at their lack of unsightly congestion. Sure, people in Chicago complain about their heavy rail system, but where would they be without it? The same goes for Dresden, Germany. Glance at a map of their rail lines. It’s like someone in the engineering department designed a demon-summoning circle. The rail crisscrosses everywhere there. But it works.
Then there are those vocal groups who do support the METRO Rail but for the wrong reasons. The yuppies, the double income no kids types and even our dear, sweet entrepreneurs support the rail lines as though they all swore off cars. The truth is many see some kind of potential in the METRO Rail to transform Houston’s “fringes.” Probably from the current industrial and low-income housing landscape into some sort of overpriced, synthetic, urban rich-kid wonderland. As though the post-modern, minimalist, $500K condos weren’t already spreading like fungus.
The right reason to support public transport stems from pure, simple, infrastructure needs. Rail is a prerequisite for a metropolitan city. Non-negotiable. Unless, of course, the city wants public perception to see it as a congested and poorly-planned hellhole. Yes, businesses come and go thanks to the rail’s arbitrary ley lines, and drivers tend to challenge the light rails’ right of way. We don’t have the patience (or geography) for a subway system, so there isn’t much alternative. As for heavy rail? God, if only. High-speed, large occupancy train cars raised above street level like the Chicago L system would be great. But that’s a pipe dream when Houston can’t even get the METRO Line to finish on time and budget.
What would an ideal rail look like for Houston? Ignoring all the proposals for pretty architecture and underground tracks, an optimum situation includes rail access to airports. Ideal means a straight shot to Galveston Island. Perfect goes from one end of Beltway 8 to the other.
Dare to dream and we might get a commuter rail that connects to the light rail, that connects to a Union Pacific railroad that links up with a railroad headed to Austin or Galveston, respectively. Though it’s more dream than dare, considering we have only 12.8 miles of rail and that took more than a decade. Linking up is a fool’s errand until METRO, and Houston in general, gets its ducks in a row.
So…it’s come to this.
A good start. Keep digging on this, please. “Cheap pavement” reinforces peoples’ impression that the roads are free; they are not. Road maintenance is extremely expensive and Houston’s excessively wide roads means that maintenance is extremely costly. There is a lot to talk about re: Metro’s funding scheme and political opposition, but the bottom line is this: more highways subsidize people living in suburbs and hollow out Houston’s tax base. It’s suburban sprawl; not urban sprawl (although hard to tell the difference in Houston where most of the city is suburban). Until density is high enough—and Houston is walkable enough—to make not having a car desirable, any number of trains will remain a curiosity and buses will be exclusively for the poor.
Houston has mandatory minimum street widths and parking requirements: get rid of those and buses and rail transit would be more economical.