Rights of Way

The Houston-Galveston Area Council maintains something called the Regional Travel Demand Model. It divides five counties in the Houston region into more than 5,000 zones, some as small as a single block. It tabulates trips from each of these zones to every other zone — some 2.5 million trip combinations. From a little 20-block section of Montrose, it says, there are 3.07 trips to Rice University, 2.19 trips to the Pennzoil Place tower, and 1.20 trips to a subdivision on the north side of Hughes Ranch Road, in Pearland. And then it projects this information forward by 25 years. The model asserts that it knows where people in that neighborhood will work, where they will eat, where they will shop, and where their friends will live in 2045.

This kind of projection seems audacious. But that is the nature of transportation. The infrastructure we design today will take years, even decades, to build, and it likely will last far longer. Every dollar we spend on a road, a sidewalk, or a rail line is a prediction of the future: an assumption of what future Texans will want or need. 

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