Road activist Cox joins Lanier’s anti-planning team

David Crossley, Jan 12, 08.

Tagged with urban planning

Road activist Wendell Cox is being brought into Houston next week to talk to Houston City Council members on behalf of the new anti-planning effort led by former Mayor Bob Lanier, developer Richard Weekley, and construction executive Leo Linbeck, Jr. The purpose of the group, called "Houstonians for Responsible Growth," is to stop what they call "more extensive planning and regulations" in the City of Houston.

Cox has been involved on the anti-transit side of a number of transit referenda around the country. The San Antonio Express-News said, "On point after point, his paper on sprawl is incoherent or irrelevant, making it a perfect complement to his many papers on light rail." The Atlanta Journal Constitution calls him "A self-proclaimed (though untrained) transportation expert who makes his living writing propaganda for pro-road causes." About Houston's light rail line, he says "Its role is to consume money and to give the local 'railigious' an altar at which to burn incense." Former Metro chair Robert D. Miller said "Cox's arguments simply don't make sense."

Cox has been extensively linked to developer Michael Stevens, who led the effort to defeat the Metro Solutions plan referendum in 2003 and is a leading proponent, as chair of the Governor's Business Council Transportation Task Force, of a massive road-building effort in Houston and the State.

Next week we will post more about the Lanier group's new effort to kill the citizen-led planning effort for Houston's future, and their consultants' efforts to kill transit expansion, as well as looking into the issues they raise and the meaning of the current push for a general plan.

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