By David Crossley

Look at the map on this page. See the solid dark line that includes Main Street and the Astrodome? What’s inside that line is the area that extends from the Near Northside to the Dome and goes west to Montrose and east to Highway 288. This is what James Calaway, CEO of the Center for Houston’s Future, calls the “super core.”

The idea is to turn that super core into Houston’s truly urban area, containing the light rail line. Now see the dashed line outside it? That line is the shape and size of Manhattan.

This map is something to think about. Manhattan has 1.5 million people living in it. The Houston super core has about 60,000 people living in it.

Anybody who’s familiar with Manhattan is going to immediately realize what an incredible opportunity the super core concept is. Houston has around 3,000 people per square mile, while Manhattan has over 50,000 per square mile.

Scale is something we don’t think about much in Houston. Very few people here realize that eight of America’s most populous cities can fit inside Houston’s city limits. In other places where they talk about “the region,” they’re seldom talking about a metropolitan area that’s as big as the City of Houston itself. When we talk “region” here, we’re talking about at least the eight-county metropolitan planning area, which is some 8,500 square miles, bigger than Massachusetts, or the 13-county area, which is the size of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut combined.

One place where this scale thing is clearly not well understood is in talking about future rail service. For instance, one of the areas Metro is studying now is the North Hardy corridor, which extends from downtown Houston to The Woodlands. That discussion has now extended west to the Kuykendall area and if Metro were to build the amount of rail that people would like in that corridor it would be something in excess of 45 miles, including a leg to Bush Airport.

The whole North Hardy Corridor is about 12 times as big as Manhattan. Manhattan has 75 miles of urban rail transit serving 1.5 million Manhattanites and no telling how many just in the city for the day. More than 70 percent of trips in Manhattan are by public transit. The North Hardy corridor would have about 45 miles of rail, serving 375,000 people. What percent would use the rail system? Two? Three?

In a rational world, you would either provide urban rail service to places where lots of people and/or jobs already are, and do it without leaping five miles at a time (at about $60-$80 million a mile) over places where essentially nobody lives or wants to go, or you would provide it to places where you intend to focus future growth, with the rail stations not separated by vast distances. But because we have so little grasp of scale here in the wild open spaces, we find it very hard to do things in a rational way.

Certainly there’s a small leg in the dense Near Northside where the current rail line could be extended, and it also makes a lot of sense to focus some growth in the Southeast Corridor, where ten percent of the city’s population lives and some 25 percent of existing transit trips end or originate. In fact, if you added 45 miles of rail to the Main Street line inside the Beltway and included the Near Northside, Uptown, Greenway Plaza, TSU, UH, and Hobby Airport you’d pretty much finish the transit system for the urban areas.

Now imagine building a rail system that not only reaches from Downtown to The Woodlands, but also to the places I just mentioned plus Katy, Sugarland, Tomball, Clear Lake, and maybe Galveston. That’s around 220 miles, times, say, $70 million a mile, a system that will cost $15.4 billion. And of course not everybody goes in and out of downtown, so you’d need service around the Loop and the Beltway, another 135 miles, another $9.5 billion. And then if you add the 170-mile Grand Parkway… Well, you see where this is going.

It’s all a matter of scale.