New City, New Routine (Part 2 of 2)

When I started spending half of my time in Houston, the following list of questions helped me move beyond its stereotype as the quintessential driving city to identify the options for reducing my dependency on the family car:

1. Where are you now, and where are you going? In an expansive city like Houston, this question is fundamental. If you are considering joining a carpool to commute to and from work, but your office’s location requires a car to attend meetings or go to lunch, a carpool may not work for you. In my case, my home in Houston is too far from my office to consider using alternative transportation for my daily commute. On the other hand, my office is located in Rice Village, a dense, mixed-use retail center. So, once I arrive, I can walk anywhere I need to go.    
2. What modes of transportation are available, convenient, and safe? Houston’s options for alternative transportation are relatively limited, although expanding. 

• Walking is an option in some neighborhoods, but the city is so spread out that it is not viable as a primary mode of transportation.
• The bus system, Metro, is making efforts to court new users through the light rail system. And, a public-private partnership recently launched a free bus route downtown called the Greenlink. However, the overall system continues to suffer from a public perception of inefficiency and inconvenience.
• Houston’s car share options are limited to “by the hour” rental cars and companies like Relay Rides whose members share their personal cars with each other. 
• On the other hand, it offers public access to more electric vehicle charging stations than many U.S. cities.
• The City recently launched a bike share program downtown. But, its scope is so small that it is only convenient for people who live and/or work downtown. 
• All in all, cycling appears to be the best choice in the city core, because it allows longer travel distances than walking, and it is more convenient (and, possibly, safer) than taking the bus. The only down side to cycling is the low percentage of streets with dedicated bike lanes. However, the Houston Bikeway program is slowly enhancing the cycling infrastructure.
3. What kind of transportation are other people using? Whether walking, cycling, or taking the bus, increasing the number of users often results in increased safety—both in terms of reducing car collisions and reducing the risk of crime. 
4. How much time, money, and effort are you willing to invest in an alternative mode of transportation? The answer to this question will vary from city to city and from person to person. Based on my responses to the above questions, my best options for reducing car dependence in Houston include: 
• living and working in areas of town that offer safe options for walking and cycling and a safe link between the two; 
• walking to services and amenities that are close to home and work; 
• cycling during the day to destinations that are slightly farther away; and, 
• using a combination of cycling and the light rail to travel to and from downtown. 

In order to meet these criteria, I would need to move closer into the city core, and I would need regular access to a bike. Neither of these requirements are realistic investments at the moment. So, for the time being, I have limited my attempts to reduce car dependence in Houston to taking advantage of the walkable nature of my office’s location.

In spite of the fact that I haven’t been able to meet my original goal of dramatically reducing car dependency in Houston, these four questions have given me a better understanding of what options are available today—and what might become available in the future. This exercise has also prompted me to start looking more seriously at the cycling infrastructure in Austin to see how it might fit into the mix of transportation options I use in that city.

Try using these questions where you live and travel. And, let me know if they helped you identify new ways of moving around the city, or if they just reaffirmed your initial assumptions. 

New City, New Routine (Part 1 of 2)

Cars are so dominant in the American transportation landscape—with a few exceptions such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco—that it can be daunting to seek alternatives.  Most of us are also creatures of habit. So, once we find a mode of transportation that suits our daily routine, we tend to use it for all of our trips, even if another mode of transportation would be more convenient.

I am just as much a creature of routine as the next person. And, while it has taken me a few months to develop a system that allows me to move around Austin with minimal reliance on our family car, I have realized that I self-limit my transportation options to an either/or question:

Should I take the bus?

   

Or, should I take Car2Go?

I was recently shaken out of this rhythm, however, by moving part-time to Houston, which is more than twice the size of Austin in terms of both population and land area.

Source: Google Maps

As I considered the best way to move around there, I was faced with a quandary: How could I continue to reduce my car dependency in such a different city?

In the second installment of this blog post, I will outline the questions that helped me evaluate my options.

Tracking My Trips: July 2012

The results from the second month tracking my daily travel are in.

In July, I spent 10 days in the Baltimore/DC metro area, 10 days in Austin, and 10 days in Houston — three metropolitan areas with very different transportation mixes. I was surprised to see that, in spite of spending 1/3 of the month in Houston (a city that is notoriously difficult to navigate in any form of transportation other than a car), I improved on my trip profile in alternative forms of transportation, dropping from 48% single occupancy car trips in June to 35% in July.

Trip Profile in July:

	Car	Transit	Walk	Other (air, car share, carpool, cycling)
My Trips	35%	18%	36%	11%
U.S. Average	83%	2%	10%	4%

Two longer trips during the month may have artificially increased the overall numbers: a train ride from Baltimore to DC and a roundtrip between Austin and Dallas using Zipcar. 

For example:

• These two trips account for 60% of the carbon emissions I avoided over the course of the month. Using EPA estimates of average passenger car CO₂ emissions, I more than doubled my avoidance of CO₂ from 32,000 grams in June to 82,000 grams in July – roughly equivalent to taking 4 cars off the road for a day.

• On the other hand, these trips were also likely responsible for lowering the average daily health benefits from increasing the number of trips I took using alternative forms of transportation. In spite of the change, I still scraped by with an average of 141 calories burned per day in transportation-related activities (1 calorie above the Surgeon General’s recommendation). And, I averaged the minimum recommendation of physical activity: 30 minutes per day.

• As relatively fast modes of transportation, these two trips may also have helped reduce the difference between my overall monthly average trip time and the baseline (the trip time in a single-occupancy car) from an average of 32 minutes a day in June to 22 minutes a day in July. 

Interestingly, in spite of the high cost of the train ticket and Zipcar reservation, on average I saved $1.36 per day in the cost of gas and mileage in July, a moderate improvement to my revised average savings in June of $1.22 per day.

But, as I experienced in July, there is no such thing as an average month. 

I am learning that location plays a large role in determining trip profile. In August, I am splitting my time between Austin and Houston. We’ll see how that affects my ability to maintain a similar array of cost savings, offset carbon emissions, and health benefits associated with active transportation.