Mind the Gap

Plan for Texas-sized rail system missing pieces

When the economic stimulus bill was signed into law, $8 billion was set aside for high-speed rail. Although rail helps reduce carbon emissions, it also plays a role in urban planning. Professor Robert Lang at the Metropolitan Institute has noted previously that proposed high-speed rail plans closely conform to the megapolitan areas that he mapped out.

The analogy is that high speed rail is the "subway" of future megacities. However, in Texas, the proposed map seems slightly askew. Logically, the Texas Triangle cities of San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and Fort Worth are interconnected, strangely Houston is left out.

It is interesting to note also that the South Central plan connects North Texas to Oklahoma City. Professor Lang has long suggested that OK City could merge with The Metroplex to form a third center of gravity for a megapolitan area. To many Texans, that notion is about as crazy as Houston and New Orleans forming a mega city, which brings me to plan 2 for Texas.

In the so-called Gulf Coast plan, Houston is the end/start point for a system that runs all the way to Atlanta. While this may make sense to somebody in Washington, the citizens of Houston consider themselves Texans before any other affiliation.

The founders of Southwest Airlines realized this decades ago when they drew a "Golden Triangle" connecting Houston, Dallas,-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio on the back of napkin as they sketched out a business plan for their new airline.

It remains to be seen if any of these plans will come to fruition, and even if they are attempted, high-speed rail could go the way of the Trans-Texas Corridor. .:.

Boom, Crash, Presto

Creative Class' Florida envisions how crash will reshape America... and Texas

Not everyone favorite's urban theorist, Richard Florida always manages to be provocative. In the coming March 2009 issue of The Atlantic, Florida's cover story discusses how the boom will reshape the urban topology of America.

He notes that in a recent survey of 381 metro areas by Moody's Investor Services, 302 were already in recession, 64 were at risk, and only 15 were continuing to expanding. Guess where?

"Notable among them were the oil- and natural-resource-rich regions of Texas and Oklahoma, buoyed by energy prices that have since fallen; and the Greater Washington, D.C., region, where government bailouts, the nationalization of financial companies, and fiscal expansion are creating work for lawyers, lobbyists, political scientists, and government contractors."

That may no longer be true, but it means Texas and our energy kith and kin to the north got some reprieve from the heartache affecting most of the country.

Also worth noting is a fantastic map detailing data for hundreds of cities including population change since 1860, patents issued since 1975, and income change since 2001. .:.