In the debate about whether to expand and improve Houston’s public transportation system, it is important to set community goals for transit that are realistic.

Many people who oppose the November Metro referendum argue that the major priority of public transit should be to make life easier for people who don’t use transit - drivers. If a transit plan doesn’t appear to do this, opponents say, then more roads should be built instead of transit. The goal, they say, should be to reduce traffic congestion. But that should not be a high-priority goal of transit operation, and it is probably impossible to achieve with any transportation strategy.

Anthony Downs, one of the nation’s top authorities on growth and transportation, flatly told Congress a couple of years ago that rush hour congestion can’t be reduced, and certainly not by expanding roads. Market doctrine says that people will use something that is free until it is gone, and likewise, free travel space will be used until it is full.

The most common approach in attempting to reduce congestion is to add more lanes. But evidence is overwhelming that adding more highway lanes produces a dynamic generally known as “induced demand.” That is, if you make it possible to travel faster in a roadway, more people will use it and many will decide to live further away from jobs as a result. Soon the road is full again. Houston is a terrific example of this. Even though for a period in the 1990s our region was spending more on roads than any state except California, travel delay increased by 97 percent , according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

Transit’s highest purpose is to provide citizens with more mobility choices. People who choose to live in a situation where transit makes a car generally unnecessary, simply don’t participate in congestion; they avoid it. Each of those people, of course, is also not contributing to congestion.

It’s important to keep in mind that around Houston’s 200th birthday in 2036 our population is expected to be 8 million, that same as New York City. Growth of congestion is the thing to worry about, and the most rational course is to determine ways to avoid it, not to be a congestion player.

We can only have more choices if we give ourselves two things: more convenient communities and workplaces, and high-quality public transit.

The first of those, more convenient communities and workplaces, is what’s meant by urbanity. Urbanity is about a world in which things are close together, with the sidewalk as the principal means of transportation within the urban place, and with the urban places connected to each other by transit.

Urbanity can be in many places all over the region, but its primary concentration has to be in the central city, radiating from Downtown. We already are seeing in Houston’s downtown a massive reconstruction of our central business district. With the opening in January of the Main Street rail line we will quickly see urbanity spread down through Midtown, jump Herman Park, and pick up again in the Texas Medical Center, which is a small city in its own right (more jobs than downtown San Diego).

Urban commercial and residential places are stunted by the need to move and store cars. Parking areas push productive uses apart. Streets inconvenience and even endanger the primary denizens of the city, pedestrians.

In not-quite-urban places like Uptown/Galleria, the stores and services could easily accommodate more people, and thus more transactions, but more people cannot come because the only way to get there is by car. The desire, or demand, of many people to get to these places is inhibited by the difficulty of access. And, of course, the space given over to parking cars there is space not being utilized for economic development.

The people who want a more urban lifestyle are at least 30 percent of us, maybe more. That percentage is definitely growing as our demographics change radically in the next 20 years or so. People who live and work in the urban zone are the most efficient users of tax money, infrastructure, and land in the region. Twenty-five percent of the City’s residents inside the Loop live on only seventeen percent of the land. Only a small fraction of that urban market is being served today.

Encouraging as much as possible of this efficient urban dynamic should be a high priority in the Houston region, because it can remove from the suburban system a huge group of people who are perfectly willing, even eager, to live a far more compact urban lifestyle. But in order to provide this demographic group with the ability to make the urban choice, the most urban portions of the region need safe, convenient, high-quality transit.

People who live in rich, complex cities will walk fairly long distances, even for fun, but there are limits. For the society to enjoy the economic and cultural benefits of a large urban place, people need to be able to go further than they are willing or able to walk, and the ideal conveyance is a sort of horizontal elevator. At its best, that’s what rail transit feels like and even buses can be made to operate in this way.

When the next phase of Houston’s transit extensions is complete, we will have a modest rail and extensive bus system that provides car-free movement among most of the major destinations and dense population centers in the region. Then we will see the land around those transit stations – assuming they’re put in the right places – start to reach for levels of residential then commercial urbanity we’ve never imagined in Houston.

All those people circulating around the urban zone by foot and transit will not be stuck in congestion and will not be driving cars and contributing to congestion. People who work in the urban zone but don’t live there will find they can leave their cars further from downtown, the Medical Center, and other places and take transit in to work, knowing that there are plenty of places to walk for lunch. There is good trolley service all over downtown and we should see more of that in other places soon.

For large numbers of us, driving a car today is not a choice, but a requirement. The proposed expansion of our rail transit system offers a new choice to a lot of people who want it, and does it at a cost that is about half the cost of expanding just the Katy Freeway, a project that some highway professionals believe will accomplish very little and do nothing to transform the city in a positive way.

We are not just deciding whether we’ll finance the building of 22 miles of rail transit and much more bus service in November. We’re deciding whether we want to allow the region to have a great urban city that attracts the young and creative professionals who drive metropolitan economies. We’re deciding whether our rapidly aging population will provide convenient choices for seniors, who will soon be a huge portion of our citizens. And we’re deciding whether we’re going to offer ourselves more choices than we have today, in a 21st century city that supports diverse lifestyles.

David Crossley is President of the Gulf Coast Institute, which leads the Livable Houston Initiative. For more information, go to www.livablehouston.org