Houston’s car-based development is hitting a dead end
Connecting ‘walkable centers’ requires a high-quality transit system, practical regulations and political will
As the presidential election shows us that a lot of people are disgruntled about the state of things in the country, surveys and events are showing us that Houston residents are ready for something different about the way our city grows into the future. We clearly want a constantly improving quality of life, and this includes improved quality in the way we move around our city.
Our car-based plans are approaching a limit, something Mayor Sylvester Turner recognizes when he expresses a need for the city to develop a new paradigm for growth. Our population has reached a point where mobility requires acknowledgement that the historic travel right of way cannot really be expanded significantly, if at all.
The mayor has embraced the idea of “Complete Communities” and has asked transportation planners to think about better ways to use our existing right of way and to consider greater availability of multiple kinds of high-quality transit service in existing travel corridors. This is the right direction for Houston.
A number of key principles guide the new Complete Communities paradigm. The secret to healthy, happy, prosperous neighborhoods and communities is a thriving network of many walkable activity centers of many sizes where people live, work and play, connected to each other by highquality transit service, with easy access to healthy food and nature.
In 2013, the city published the findings of The Urban Houston Framework Focus Group, a set of public dialogues to explore equitable access to housing, transit and economic prosperity. The project identified hundreds of potentially walkable centers, arranged them by size and set out guidelines for improving them.
Key to exploring the possibilities of “Complete Communities” is understanding that even the most complex neighborhoods must be connected to other neighborhoods with different amenities to offer. Reliable, comfort- able transit vehicles must make those connections. Because most transit riders are pedestrians at the beginning and end of their trips, the transit station areas need to accommodate pedestrians and provide walkable access to many amenities, goods and services. The station areas should move toward complexity to serve the much less dense areas two, three and four blocks away.
So how will we achieve Complete Communities?
Today, 39 neighborhoods already have reliable and comfortable light rail stations and these should be the priority focus areas for transitoriented, walkable — and bikable — development at many scales.
As things stand, caroriented development regulations are mandatory in the city (except in the Central Business District, the only place where a relatively free market operates) and urban development — the kind that fosters walkability — is only available as an option through the Urban Transit Corridors ordinance. That has not produced significant appropriate development for