Can Houston reduce car dependence?

Experts shed light

Vilas Bhuchar, Jun 21, 10.

Houston area public transportation experts shed light on Houston’s current transportation system and the city’s potential to reduce its dependence on cars during a panel discussion following a screening of Beyond the Motor City, a PBS documentary, last Thursday evening at the Museum of Fine Arts, according to CultureMap Houston.

Panelists included Robin Holzer of the Citizens Transportation Coalition, David Robinson of the City of Houston Planning Commission, Jeff Taebel of the Houston-Galveston Area Council, and Christof Spieler, director of technology and innovation at Morris Architects, lecturer at Rice University and member of the Metro board. The discussion was moderated by Camilo Parra of the American Institute of Architects Urban Design Committee, notes the story.

The panel discussed issues facing Houston area planners and citizens, including current policies that make the city dependent on cars and the long-term implications of today’s infrastructure decisions, according to the story:

The city forces buildings to be built away from the sidewalk, which makes neighborhoods less walkable. There are also requirements that every building owner provide parking, but there is no provision for a bike rack or even a path to the front door. States Spieler, “A lot of the regulations we have are wrapped around this idea of car dependency.”

The issue of quality connectivity is never going to be more or less relevant — there is a notion of permanence with all of our infrastructure decisions. Recounts Spieler, “A few weeks ago, I was in Philadelphia and took a train up to New York City, and that line I was riding down was grade separated and electrified in the early 1900s. And the infrastructure that engineers built back then is still carrying hundreds of thousands of people to their work, to go on their everyday lives.

“The decisions we make now will last for a long time. This light rail we’re building will influence how our city grows and is built for the next 50, 100 years. So I think another one of the lessons I want to drive home is that it matters how we do this. It matters if we do it well.”

Taebel added that Houston has “the bones of a very good system,” but needs to adapt its land use and planning to really allow the system to maximize its potential, and panelists emphasized that grassroots and local input is vital for continued improvement and change, according to the story:

“Planning isn’t something any of you should expect the government to do for you,” Spieler insists. For his part, Robinson is working with the most visionary members of the Neartown community to conceptualize what the train stops will look like and how Richmond Ave. will appear with rail down it, asking questions like, “How wide will those car lanes have to be?” and, “Why is it that the City of Houston will not build a 10-foot wide lane if that might give back a few more feet to the pedestrian right of way on the sidewalk, which we want to enhance?”

To solve these questions, the panelists advocate working from a grassroots standpoint on the level of a neighborhood association, a civic club or non-profit organization, to determine what an individual area demands. Explains Spieler, “If the Metro board has a group come to us and say, ‘We’ve already built a consensus around a project,’ that’s pretty powerful — politicians understand a force like that.”

And Holzer reminded participants that they can make local change as early as this Tuesday morning by attending a Harris County Commissioners meeting, according to the story:

“We can make changes locally,” Holzer emphasized as an introduction to her announcement of Tuesday’s downtown meeting of the Harris County Commissioners. The 9 a.m. meeting is the one public opportunity for shaping the capital improvement plan for the next five years, involving the allocation of between four and five billion dollars. Between now and the Tuesday morning meeting, Holzer advocates contacting the county judge and local county precinct commissioner to voice particular opinions.

Spieler also noted the irony of the U.S. falling behind the rest of the world and said funding is not being used efficiently, adds the story:

“We are totally behind,” laments Spieler. “And what’s ironic about that is that we were so ahead. The streetcar was invented in the United States. The electric railroad was invented in the United States — 100 years ago, we had the fastest trains in the world.”

Although available funds for transportation are miniscule in comparison to those of half a century ago, Spieler points out that money is being used — just not wisely:

“It’s not that we’re not investing in infrastructure at all. It’s not that the Katy Freeway construction was free. We are actually spending a lot of money on infrastructure, but where we’re putting that money is not always right. Shouldn’t we be building sidewalks in Montrose where people are trying to walk rather than people having to step out into the street lanes because there literally isn’t a sidewalk?

Or should we be building new roads through empty fields? A lot of the time now, we’re doing the latter. Part of what we need to look at is just our priorities right now. Our funding is not set up to make intelligent decisions, and it’s not set up to make those decisions quickly either.”

Finally, panelists agreed that creating and connecting different senses of “place” is really what their discussion is all about, and market forces are already showing that pedestrian-friendly environments are the way to go, concludes the story:

The aim is to curate a high quality environment along the roadway that promotes pedestrian and retail culture. After all, the economy is quite directly linked to the city’s transit landscape. Holzer cites an excerpt she read in a report from Harris County this week, stating that while property values in the remote, mostly vacant parts of the county continue to plummet, the value of of lots in the Inner Loop continues to soar.

“I like to think that if the county can figure out that markets are shifting, then perhaps our public investment in county infrastructure should follow that,” Holzer hopes. Adds Spieler, “We’ve had more residential units under construction along Richmond between Main St. and Greenway Plaza than the master-planned communities on the edge of Houston.”

Why are people willing to pay more to be inside the city? The panel agrees on the importance of the notion of “place” — that people simply want to live in places they enjoy being in. Concludes Spieler, “This is about making places that people want to be in, and then putting in place connections to other places they want to be in.”

Full story

More information on Blueprint America and a sneak peek at Beyond the Motor City:

Watch the full episode. See more Blueprint America.