- Houston Among Top 10 Most Expensive Cities in the World for Construction, Finds New Report [HBJ ($)]
- Greater Houston Partnership Director: Economic Recovery Slow but Steady for Region [Community Impact Newspaper]
- HP, ABS Campuses Begin To Take Shape in Springwoods Village [Houston Chronicle]
- Central Market at 3815 Westheimer Rd. Reveals $10M Facelift That Includes Chocolate Factory Bean to Bar [HBJ]
- Houston-Area Transit Ridership Grew by 4M Passenger Boardings in 2016 [The Urban Edge]
- Win for Uber as Texas Ridesharing Rules Bill Passes Through Senate [HBJ; previously on Swamplot]
- Mapping Where Houston Saw the Most Violent Crime [Click2Houston]
- Smelly Sargassum Seaweed Shows Up on Galveston Beaches Again [KHOU]
Photo: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Re: Central Market
What a fun party! Drinking champagne in River Oaks with a bunch of H-E-B execs around
Is that a crime map or the map of congressional districts?
The KPRC map is junk. Would be better off just providing a data table.
4 MILLION more passenger boardings in 2016? Surrrrre. WINK WINK. Whatevvvvver you say. WINK WINK
@ Uh-huh Right
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They probably counted every homeless person riding for free. Every day, every station. Plus, all of the rodeo 1-stop boardings from Fannin South to NRG Park station and the return. No boarding left behind to get to the magic 4M number.
More boardings on local transit is completely believable. 2016 was the first full year of Metro’s “New Bus Network.” Service was re-allocated away from sparsely-populated neighborhoods and beefed up where more people live in west and southwest Houston. On top of that, local bus became a seven-day-a-week service — remember when buses used to disappear from most of the city on weekends? It was really low-hanging-fruit type stuff and it would have been an embarrassment if ridership did not go up.
I agree with slugline. There are valid reasons for the increase in boardings, which sound like a lot but are only +4.65% year-over-year.
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FYI, a boarding is counted every time that a person steps across the threshold of a transit vehicle. Homeless people that ride transit for whatever reason aren’t being counted based on the amount of time that they occupy a seat.
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To put things in perspective, that means that if I’m a P&R commuter and I have to make two transfers each way every day of a five-day work week to get where I’m going, I count for 30 boardings per week and 1,500 boardings per fifty-workweek year. It’d only take 60,000 of me to account for all of METRO’s users. That isn’t to try to generalize about their user base, but it is to demonstrate that not all boardings are created equal and that the circumstances of even some modest fraction of super-users can easily help to make these big numbers possible.