Jettison the biases and stereotypes before you head to Houston, my brother-in-law cautioned me last month as I prepared for APTA Expo 2014. "It's really grown up; it's a real city now," he offered.
He was right, using the North American yardstick of urban qualification. The Grateful Dead once dismissed Houston as "too close to New Orleans," but in the 21st century Texas's largest city – and the fourth largest U.S. conurbation – has a critical mass measured by more than just skyscraper grouping and over-the-top (still lingering) Texas triumphalism.
To alter Gertrude Stein's phrase: There is a "there" there in Houston. Not coincidentally, it includes urban rail transit.
Serving as co-host, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County (Metro) officials skipped over the recent postponement in opening two new LRT routes, one of which will directly serve the George R. Brown Convention Center, where APTA met this month. (See photo, below right.) That's fine by me: I'd rather Metro "get it right" than "get it right now." Seeing the soon-to-open right of way and stations was satisfying enough.
Courtesy of Houston resident David Collins, I set up lodgings 10 minutes away by foot from the Convention Center, proceeding to explore Houston proper and attend the APTA Expo mostly without use of an automobile. I did take a taxi from the airport to my lodgings (and a shuttle bus heading for home), and joined my brother-in-law's daughter, now a Houston resident, on a long car trip to the city's outlying reaches and to a restaurant that, quite naturally enough, served the best Tex-Mex food I've had in a long time.
But those trips aside, I walked, not just to and from the APTA Expo but to locations in nearby East Downtown, now known as "EaDo" as the up-and-coming neighborhood revamps itself on an accelerating scale – reminding me of a Mile-Square City in New Jersey of about 25 years ago or so. Houston has injected human scale into its big ambitions, be it Discovery Park or actual neighborhoods.
Or light rail transit, pleasingly on the minds of many residents, even those not yet using LRT on a regular basis. David Collins, a longtime Houston resident and an EaDo "pioneer," is charting out what his future LRT stop will be once Metro opens the two new lines, now expected in April 2015. He is more than comfortable with LRT as a civic amenity, a net plus, and not a negative, a money-losing sop to indigent or elderly or disabled, which anti-rail partisans love to claim. And he isn't (yet) a regular user.
Neither is my niece, who works in more typical car-country Houston southwesterly toward Sugar Land, Tex., and thus naturally drives to and from work. But on Game Day in Houston, be it King Football or, at times, basketball or even baseball, she and her friends opt for Metro LRT as often as not. Imagine that: Urban rail transit for someone other than commuters – you know, "those people."
Not that Metro lacked for commuters and others on the Tuesday morning I rode, traveling in a loop spanning the initial Red Line (recently extended) between UH-Downtown and Fannin South stations. Most of my trip was outbound during the morning rush, but plenty of Houstonians boarded, or departed, on numerous stops all along the route. Some made bus transfers; others headed for a nearby work or hospital complex. Outbound traffic tailed off only at the final two stations: Reliant Park, serving renamed NRG Stadium, home of the NFL Houston Texans, and Fannin South. Returning inbound after the rush hour peak had passed, the two-car LRT consist wasn't packed, but it was anything but empty, again generating on-off, on-off traffic all the way back to Main Street Square, where I got off to (gasp!) walk to the Brown Convention Center and the day's APTA activities.
Host Houstonians, enabled and encouraged by APTA's opening ceremonies, still led with triumphalism on full display, revisiting a glorious past of oil wealth and (stage-show enhanced) NASA space exploits, mock-debating whether the first words on the moon should have been "Unincorporated Harris County" instead of "Houston, [the Eagle has landed]."
Even a Baby Boomer like me thought the history parade was tired, even old, and inconsistent with the rest of the conference's repeated (and in my view, valid) references to the up-and-coming millennials and how they are driving rail (and bus) transit ahead in forceful style. It's a force and a style Houston, to its credit, is harnessing with considerable success, and a harbinger for other U.S. cities, which need to do the same.
To their credit as well, once past the boasting, Houston Metro officials, Mayor Annise Parker, and Houston Demographics Kinder Institute Ph.D Stephen Klineberg did observe that the city needs to adapt, big-time, to the 21st century's changing population, changing needs, and overreliance on the automobile.
Acknowledging the sprawl already in place, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, addressing APTA attendees at the Opening Ceremony, asserted, "We cannot keep building concrete dreams farther and farther out." I came home reassured that Houston is receiving that message, and doing something to revise and reverse that trend. If only other U.S. metropolitan areas will do the same.