Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc
The city is reliant on cars because the population is spread out. Those freeways are utilized by commuters in far flung neighborhoods and suburbs. There is no other viable alternative. Houston is not a compact metro with a dense centralized population where mass transit can effectively serve the region as well as freeways. A commuter rail might work for larger suburbs; Woodlands, Sugar Land, Katy, Galveston, etc but there's a lot of politics involved and the city is already expanding light-rail but that's limited to the inner loop area.
|
For $7 Billion, how much of non-urban, non-transit friendly, and flood-prone suburban Houston could you remove?
The answer, on property acquisition costs, using the average price of a home in Houston is roughly 24,000 properties, housing in/around 70,000 people.
Obviously there are demolition costs etc.
But, you get to withdrawl some of the most expensive services from water to garbage from areas that are inefficient to service.
I've never understood why this sort of thinking isn't an option.
I pointed out in discussion about a Toronto subway extension, that one could move the entire suburban 'downtown' it was destined to serve to the existing subway terminus for less money!
If Houston is inefficiently laid out (and it is), then rather than spending billions trying to service a giant mistake........better to spend those billions erasing the mistake.
What's left will be far more cost-effective to serve in an environmentally responsible way.
If you add what Houston has in its other medium/long-term infrastructure budgets from water/sewer, to transit, to parks/community centres...........you have a good 20 Billion to play with.
Better off to relocate 120,000 people and 1 major demand-driver (a post-secondary school, a hospital, a mall) .....
This will free up all that highway capacity you need.
Then spend much more strategically on modest capacity expansion/service-frequency upgrades for the existing transit infrastructure, libraries/parks etc.