Who is battling the worst commute in Houston? Tera Roberson & Jennifer Reyna, KPRC
Our region is growing so fast, commutes are getting longer and longer for many people. KPRC Channel 2 News crunched drive times from the north, east, south and west to find out who is sitting in traffic the longest.
My guess is that the bulk of you stuck in this morass have heard the My Metro ad for Catherine, the ballet dancer. It's a touchy-feely ad about what Metro considers to be their demographic and it's illustrative of why the agency is not a serious transit solution.
The fact is, Catherine is one-tenth of one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent of Houston's commuters. But she's exactly who Metro is targeting. Not the 99.999% of people who need to get to/from work every day, but people who view the train as a wedding chapel or a way for tourists to go from downtown to NRG during the Super Bowl, or as a vehicle for Inner-Loop land developers to pad their pockets.
What Metro is decidedly not, is a commute solution for the overwhelming majority of Houston commuters.
Then there are the freeways themselves, designed on the "wheel and spoke" system they are hopelessly congested and becoming more and more so as people continue to move into the areas surrounding Houston. (Not the city center, which is a problem)
Of late I've been reading a lot about the problems with the US transportation system and I've come to the, admittedly somewhat radical, conclusion that our biggest mistake was turning it over to our government. In short, the government is a horrible transportation planner, because their goal is not (as they profess) to provide transportation options to the masses, but to ensure that their sacred patron cows get fed.
In that vein, Metro is not trying to serve the transportation needs of Houston, but trying to ensure that the smart-growth set has their wish-list boxed ticked. Metro wants a shiny train because a few people, often of the bat-shit crazy David Crossley persuasion, feel that having one makes a city "world-class". In fact, they couldn't be more wrong.
Metro-rail is the leading example of "world-classiness" in a city that is full of them. In fact, there is nothing with a higher "world-classiness" shine on it than the mumble-something miles of track that actually don't go anywhere.
This is because (and this is going to be hard for city "brights" to swallow) Houston is NOT a world-class city. It's a global hub for energy development sure, and a shining star in the world of medicine, but as a city Houston is decidedly regional in nature. In fact, watching government for as long as I have the only conclusion can be that both Houston, and the media who covers it, are decidedly small-town, full of cronyism and possessing an inferiority complex so-large it might have it's own gravity field.
In fact, America only has two "world-class" cities. New York and San Francisco, each for different reasons and each facing their own crisis of leadership. Everyone else is just fighting to be the leading light of the second team.
And Houston is failing at that.
The problem with finding a solution is that neither side seems to have enough mental capacity to understand that the solution is not either a.) the Crossley solution i.e. everyone but he and his friends give up their cars, move inside the loop and survive in a ghetto-like morass of high-rises and body odor or b.) the Culberson plan where everyone has a car but insufficient, poorly designed infrastructure to allow them to move.
I would argue that the ultimate solution lies in trying to find a blend to the two, with the acknowledgement that there are some people that you are never going to convince to not take their car to work, and those who would happily do so if the Danger Train was somehow converted into a transit solution instead of a serial killer.
Would there still be congestion? Of course, because even with the best-planned and executed transit systems people have a desire to drive. London has a wonderful system that (most times) can get you where you need to go. When vacationing abroad I never buy a car. I walk, ride and can get wherever I need to go relatively quickly. But London is still one of the more congested cities in the world.
Nothing is going to change that in Houston, but were Metro a competent organization at least there might be an "opt-out" option, something that is lacking now.
