Urban Corridors

Analysis

David Crossley, Dec 09, 08.

Tagged with transportation, urban planning, urban corridors

UPDATE: Urban Land Institute (ULI) proposes urban standards. On Wednesday, February 25, 2009, the Urban Land Institute’s Urban Corridor Planning Assessment Group delivered recommendations for a proposed ordinance on the City’s new light rail transit corridors. Among the highlights was a call for a minimum 6-foot pedestrian clear zone that exceeds the 5-foot standard the original Urban Corridors report proposed.

UPDATE: Livable Houston meeting - The Urban Corridor Pedestrian Realm. A group of around 50 planners, engineers, architects, transportation employees, community transportation activists, and others gathered at a Livable Houston Initiative meeting on February 25 to participate in a public discussion of the work to draft an Urban Corridor ordinance currently under consideration by the Mixed Use/Transit-Oriented Development Committee of the City Planning Commission. Houston Tomorrow held the public forum to give Houstonians the opportunity to evaluate and discuss a revised (as of Nov. 21, 2008) portion of the ordinance that specifically addresses the pedestrian realm, particularly those areas near future transit stations.

An important study and set of recommendations are being discussed by the City of Houston Planning Commission’s Mixed Use Committee to determine how the City might manage the growth of about 50 new light rail station areas in 2012.

The project, in the works for two years, is called “Urban Corridors” and is managed by the City of Houston Planning & Development Department. In a nutshell, Urban Corridors deals with the need to make changes to some of the City’s many prescriptive development regulations in order address growth around the 67 or so light rail transit stations Houston will soon have.

The key difference between transit-oriented development (TOD) and car-oriented development is that the former must prioritize the safety, needs, and comfort of pedestrians, people who get on and off the train on foot. Current regulations are more geared to the convenience of people driving cars.

The first problem in moving toward TOD is that such urban-style development is essentially illegal in the City except in the Central Business District. That has not always been true. The City, of course, originally developed n highly convenient, walkable urban fashion around a vast streetcar system. The various public plans to convert to a car-based transportation system didn’t get going for more than 100 years, until the end of World War II. The 60 years after that saw the deployment of a rich – and expensive – public freeway system that enabled development of cheap land at the periphery, which kept moving outward.
The City’s regulations, passed in 1982, called for a development form that accommodates cars, primarily by requiring developers to set their buildings well back from the streets in order to produce plenty of parking and the opportunity to widen streets as necessary without impacting the buildings.

Transit-oriented development, however, wants a different form, in order to make amenities, goods, and services available to people on foot, as well as walkable residential opportunities. So making that legal is one of the many challenges facing the Mixed-Use committee, the Planning Commission, and City Council face.

Other issues include minimum standards for pedestrian areas, perhaps requiring more right of way or easements on private property; consideration of what the boundaries are for areas said to be TOD; and which of the many recommendations should be mandated for the public good, and which should be incentivized somehow to induce developer participation in the TOD agenda.

Go to the City’s Urban Corridors site
Go to the Implementation page

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