Testing Transit Options
The Comical did a little test of transit options from a randomly chosen suburb. I'm surprised they printed the results:
Five Houston Chronicle reporters assembled in a randomly chosen subdivision one morning last week to conduct a race to the newspaper's main office on Texas Avenue downtown. One reporter drove alone from Quail Valley, two carpooled, a fourth rode an express bus and the other drove to the Fannin South Park & Ride and hopped on the train.That bolded paragraph would be more useful if the Comical told us the total times of the other transit options, or how much longer the train commute took than the other options.The solo driver and the carpool pair, each using U.S. 59, arrived in a parking garage near the newspaper within a minute of each other and rode the same elevator down, walking into the newspaper simultaneously. The bus rider arrived 15 minutes later, while the train passenger came in last, rolling in after a commute of 1 hour, 15 minutes.
The Chronicle calculated the expense of the commute by adding parking fees and transit fares and estimating a cost of 37.5 cents per mile driven. The bus was the least expensive. Still, the rail option seems to have fared poorly.
Transit trains in other cities are often successful because they serve a dense inner-city and far-out suburbs, where trip time can equal or beat driving alone, city-center parking is limited and therefore exorbitantly expensive, or good bus service is unavailable. None of those factors exists in the Houston area.
With such a short rail line, a $2 parking fee and plentiful downtown parking, MetroRail offers few incentives for most solo auto commuters to change their habit. During the first week of revenue service, according to Metro, an average of 313 cars per weekday parked at Fannin South, one-fifth of the lot's capacity.
Here's another surprising concession from the Comical:
For now, MetroRail appears mostly to attract commuters who live close to the tracks and riders on leisure excursions.Imagine that.
Metro gets its chance to spin, of course:
John Sedlak, a Metro vice president, said Chronicle reporters happened to pick a light traffic day to conduct their test. If it had been raining or there had been a wreck on the freeway, the transit riders would have beat the drivers, he said.Doubtful."Transit is trying to provide reliable trip times on a regular basis to our passengers," he said. As rail is built farther out, "absolutely it will compete with a private automobile trip."
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/17/04 23:31 | Danger Train | Technorati
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Comments
But the commuter who took the train got to relax and read the Comical without getting a headache. I get headaches when I read in the car.
Posted by Cathy @ 15:23 on 01/18/04
And having now read the article, let me add that I find it impossible to read on a bus -- it wobbles too much.
Posted by Cathy @ 15:27 on 01/18/04
You're right about the bolded paragraph not being very useful.
From the four sub-stories on the Chron website, I pulled together this information:
The commuters all left at 7:45am.
The two sets of drivers -- the solo and the carpool -- arrived together at 8:30am [45 minutes].
The bus passenger arrived at 8:52am [67 minutes].
The train passenger arrived at 8:59am [74 minutes].
Posted by Steve Casburn @ 19:16 on 01/18/04
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