Pedestrians should be given priority on Rice campus
Earlier this month, I spent a week in Houston for a bit of a summer hiatus. As someone long fascinated by cities, probably the single most important indicator of a great place for me is one in which you can move around comfortably outside of a car — a simple metric that speaks volumes about a city’s priorities, values and culture well beyond the transportation network.
Because it’s not my intent to pile on Houston in this space, I’ll start with listing some of the things Houston has going for it to this end.
Thanks to its infamous lack of traditional zoning, there are lots of neighborhoods in which residences are mixed in with cafes, grocery stores and bars in a style cities elsewhere in the country are now trying to emulate. On a visit a few years back, I was impressed that this place built on oil and long synonymous with the automobile had adopted a bikeshare program well before many others in the country had gotten on that bandwagon. It’s also working hard to improve its transit system to combat congestion and connect its sprawling landscape.
Yet despite progress on a number of related fronts and at a time of growing awareness of the importance of making our public sphere more accessible by non-motorized means, Houston remains a place whose landscape is dominated by fast-moving cars and highways. And this time around, the city somehow felt even more hostile to people on foot than the last time I visited.
Perhaps it was the slight high achieved from the fumes of the cars speeding past me, but just about everywhere I looked in Houston, I found unintentional metaphors in my surroundings: from the strips of overgrown grass trudged through after sidewalks abruptly ended to the many loops driven around an otherwise appealing outdoor café looking for a parking space. (Although the restaurant was just a few blocks from where I was staying, walking there wasn’t presented as an option.)
The most potent symbol of all I found along the crushed limestone walking and running path around Rice University, one of the perks I most looked forward to about my Houston trip. The 3-mile, live oak-lined route is for me one of those rare places in the steamy South where I actually look forward to going for a run in the middle of July. Its appeal was confirmed when I arrived to find it, per usual, in heavy use by a broad constituency.
I was less than a minute into my run, however, when I had to stop and snap a picture of one of the signs scattered at intervals along the path: “This is a sidewalk,” the sign read, followed by a cartoon image of a car, followed by the instruction: “Pedestrians Yield to Traffic.” It was almost a haiku. Never mind the outdated conception of “traffic” on display here. More troubling, to my view, is the underlying assumption embedded within this simple phrasing that the burden for achieving safe conditions falls squarely on the shoulders of the most vulnerable users in the equation.
There were no similar directives (that I saw anyway) directed at drivers pulling into or out of the driveways. There is also the minor matter that the instructions would appear in direct conflict with Texas law. And then there’s the fact that this tremendous pedestrian amenity is located in one of the most-walked sections of a modern American city, on the campus of one of the nation’s foremost academic institutions, in the heart of Houston’s renowned medical district.
If any place should grant pedestrians priority, it would seem this would be it.
The attitude reflected here stands as an inconvenience for someone like myself who simply prefers to explore my surroundings on foot. But it’s truly problematic when taking into account the large and growing constituency of people in Houston (by some measures now the most diverse city in the country) and beyond who have no choice but to get around that way.