Texas Transit Association

All around Houston’s Museum District, officials are banking on light rail and the growing number of attractions to bring more visitors. Last year, 10 museums in the district and the Houston Zoo attracted nearly 6 million people - more than the combined attendance of all the city’s major sports teams.

The Museum District is in a time of transition as area museums position themselves for the future. In July, five more museums will join the district, bringing the total to 16. Two new entries, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, join three established centers, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum, the Rothko Chapel and the Houston Center for Photography. At the mammoth Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, officials are discussing another major expansion. The still-undeveloped plans to build a large space to house contemporary art comes two years after the museum opened its $ 126 million Audrey Jones Beck Building. The museum ranked sixth in attendance among the nation’s art museums last year. Most museums are within walking distance of four Metrorail stops under construction. METRO officials have worked closely with museum representatives to design rail stops in the area.

Peter Marzio, president of the Museum District Association, is more skeptical that Houstonians will initially use the rail system to get to the Museum District. “The notion of taking mass transit to go to something like a museum, I don’t think that’s part of people’s psyche yet in Houston,” he said. “But if you ask me, 15 years from now we probably won’t be able to imagine having existed without

Laney called traffic gridlock in Texas cities “a permanent condition” that “threatens our state’s principal urban economies. “Texas won’t successfully move into the future on roads and highways, but must adopt other modes of transportation to move people and products, state lawmakers were told Thursday. “We must be more innovative,” former Texas Transportation Commission Chairman David Laney told the Senate State Affairs Committee.

Laney, appointed last month to the Amtrak board by President Bush, acknowledged that the Texas-Mexico borders bad roads and bad infrastructure are “unique” and that his advice “is not intended to disregard their needs.” But his pitch was clearly to direct transportation planning and funding to larger urban areas, primarily Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. Highways in those cities have reached capacity, he said, adding that by 2025 60 percent of the state’s population will live in those urban centers. “We’re doing the entire state a disservice by not adequately investing in our urban transportation systems,” Laney said.

And Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Dallas, who chaired the hearings here Thursday, called the transportation woes in Texas a “crisis,” and said lawmakers and policymakers need “to not only focus on highways.”

Sen. Kenneth Armbrister, D-Victoria, had a contrary view. “Texans still like pickup trucks,” he said, adding that calls for alternate forms of transportation amount to a “build it and they will come” theory. The political reality, he said, is “what gets support is what people want.”