Soon-to-be-former Metro Chair David Wolff riffs off of a Chron editorial that lamented the lack of connectivity between Metro and some new bus routes in Harris County and makes the case for expanding Metro’s service area.
The first steps toward this expansion of service have already begun. Forward-thinking leaders such as Harris County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia have worked with us to provide Park & Ride service to areas outside Metro’s present boundaries through an innovative approach involving interlocal agreements. Commuters outside the Metro service area in Baytown and Pasadena now travel daily into Houston using the same fare cards, rate schedules and service features as commuters from Cypress and Missouri City. Metro will soon be offering a Park & Ride option to the south on Texas 288 through an interlocal agreement with the transit provider for Brazoria County. Ongoing discussions with officials from Fort Bend County for Park & Ride service are also under way. The emphasis has been on showing these communities what we can do for them before asking them to join our full-service area and tax base.
Metro has little influence over how area jurisdictions receive or spend transit dollars. Nevertheless, the logic for a seamless regional approach — avoiding Balkanized service such as that found in the San Francisco Bay Area inefficiently “served” by no fewer than 13 disparate transit agencies — is inherently compelling. Sufficient common ground must be found among our area’s governmental entities as Metro constructs its five new light-rail lines. We must begin contemplating how to utilize the walking distance “delivery system” that the light rail system will create by 2013 as the framework to which commuter rail from outlying areas can be connected.
Certainly, the goal should be for all forms of mass transit in the region to connect to each other, and for things like fares and schedules to be unified and coordinated. Wolff cites DART as an example of another transit authority working on this. As it happens, the DMN has a story about how that is going.
Dallas Area Rapid Transit is considering ways to bring new cities aboard without requiring them to pay a full cent of sales tax, which has been a core membership requirement since the agency’s founding more than a quarter-century ago.
That full-penny requirement, which in recent years has meant more than $200 million a year in sales tax contributions from Dallas alone, has been the biggest obstacle to the agency’s growth. One fast-growing suburb after another has chosen to stay out of DART rather than surrender all of its discretionary sales tax revenue to pay for bus and rail service.
DART president Gary Thomas said preliminary discussions have begun among his board members and leaders in cities that border the agency’s 13 member cities.
“When we started DART in 1983, it didn’t make sense for some of these outlying cities to be part of a regional system,” Thomas said. “The revenues in those cities were not sufficient, and neither was the likely ridership. But here as we find ourselves with a lot of first-ring suburbs as part of the agency … and we have gone way beyond that.”
The situation is largely the same here. The challenge will be figuring out how to make it work across all the different boundaries and governmental entities. The natural impulse is to defend one’s own turf, but the more that happens, the less cooperation there will be. This isn’t going to be easy, that’s for sure.