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.
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