A lot rides on I-45 widening project
More than a dozen neighborhoods to be affected by decade-long work
Birds flitting in and out of the grass and trees along this strip of marsh pay no heed to the roar from interstates 45 and 10 on the horizon, but to Houston Parks Board officials the sound is an ominous reminder of what could come.
Defenders of this longsought “linear park” that leads from the Heights to downtown Houston now see a threat from the Texas Department of Transportation and its mammoth, once-in-a-generation project to relieve chronic congestion along I-45 and on the broader downtown highway system.
The project, already years in the making, reflects unprecedented levels of listening by TxDOT, which fairly or not has a reputation of building through communities rather than with them. Yet concerns linger over this pristine spot on White Oak Bayou, which TxDOT would crisscross with seven new spans under the current version of its ambitious plan to build Houston’s freeway of the future.
“If that happens, the gateway to White Oak Bayou Greenway will be a freeway underpass,” said Chip Place, director of capital programs for the Houston Parks Board.
The parks board and
nearly two dozen other groups — joined by elected officials — have raised these and a number of other issues with the freeway redesign following the release of the project’s draft environmental report. Disenfranchised communities fear rebuilding the freeway and its connector ramps will further cut them off from economic gains so that other people can shave a minute or two from their daily commutes.
Their message is clear: Houston has one chance in five decades to remake the spine of the region’s north-south traffic movements. Good isn’t good enough. It has to address everything to the best of everyone’s abilities.
“The only thing that will improve the project is dialogue,” said Michael Skelly, an energy executive, parks board member and co-organizer of the coalition formed to focus concerns about I-45 to the state. “I think we have put together a sufficiently broad group of organizations that (TxDOT) should have a good sense of the issues and informed, articulate, concerned stakeholders that they can work with.”
Transportation officials insist they are working toward the same goal — a good project for everyone — but can’t wait much longer to start a project that will take more than a decade to complete.
“We are trying to make this project fit the community as much as we can,” said Quincy Allen, district engineer for TxDOT in Houston, adding that plans call for improved trail access and burying portions of the freeway to reduce noise.
“Those are not going to be easy things to do, but we are committed to doing them,” Allen said.
In dramatic terms, this project will determine not only how Houstonians will travel along I-45 and around it but how TxDOT builds the next generation of highway systems with considerations for local traffic, bicycling and pedestrians.
“Were TxDOT to ignore all of these suggestions about how to improve the project … I think a lot of people would raise legitimate questions about the process,” Skelly said. “I don’t think that is going to happen, but I think people would be concerned if it did.”
Moving forward
Coalition members have asked TxDOT to revise the draft environmental report released last year and do a supplemental draft — thus delaying some approvals for months and potentially more than a year. The supplement is needed so communities and advocates can see, in writing, exactly what commitments TxDOT can make, based on more study.
TxDOT officials are moving ahead, in hope of having the federally required record of decision needed to start the project in a matter of months.
“We have reviewed the information and their concerns,” spokeswoman Raquelle Lewis said. “There is not anything based on where we are in the process to a get a record of decision that requires us to get a supplemental.”
Officials plan to start work on the widening in late 2020 or in 2021. The entire widening northward to the Sam Houston Tollway is likely to take more than a decade, and it could be seven years or more before any of the segments open.
Work on the project started in 2004 as a comprehensive study of travel needs along the I-45 corridor.
After years of additional study, design and public comment, TxDOT settled on a plan to add two managed lanes in each direction to the center of the freeway and to redesign nearly every freeway interchange along the way. The managed lanes, which officials have described as HOV lanes or MaX lanes aimed at improving transit and carpooling, would end in the central business district.
‘Trying to stay the course’
None of the current plans is based on tolling as a way to pay for or control use of the lanes. Officials have not definitively ruled out opening the lanes to toll-paying solo drivers, however.
To reach this point, officials canvassed communities and held years of planning meetings, including during and after the environmental analysis was unveiled last year.
“We have not dodged one meeting, one person, one group,” Allen said. “Currently, we are trying to stay the course of the process, and that’s let’s go through the comments from the comment period.”
The most radical changes come downtown, where relocating I-45 to the central business district’s east side also means remaking every freeway it touches — Interstate 10, Interstate 69 and Texas 288. The downtown portion, which alone is expected to cost at least $3 billion, includes burying I-45 and I-69 as they run parallel east of the George R. Brown Convention Center.
The sunken freeways also could be capped, allowing for a space along the convention center rivaling Discovery Green to the west, and further connecting EaDo and the business district.
Neighborhoods, meanwhile, face their own unique challenges, which TxDOT has compiled via a historic level of community meetings and public hearings. Observers have said the amount of input this project has received makes it the mostdiscussed freeway project in Houston history and one facing a new level of scrutiny following torrential floods in 2015, 2016 and the remnants of Hurricane Harvey last August.
The widening also is coming at a time of upheaval — and promise — for many of the neighborhoods. Downtown, Midtown and EaDo officials have said burying the freeway and removing the elevated portion of I-45 along Pierce has huge potential for economic development.
‘A place for everyone’
But some neighborhoods to the north see their communities spiraling further. Tanya Debose, executive director of the Independent Heights Redevelopment Council, worries the expanded I-45 will finish erasing the past of one of Houston’s original black settlements.
Independence Heights, once its own city before founders reluctantly agreed to annexation by Houston, long was ignored by wealthy city leaders. Then it was sliced apart for Interstate 45 and again for Loop 610 in the early 1960s. The new widening project could claim hundreds of apartments and some businesses along the southbound frontage road.
There might be some benefit to sprucing up some of the sites along the frontage road, Dubose said, but the removals also would mean losing hundreds of residents — some with long ties to Independence Heights.
“One of our missions is make sure there is a place for everyone,” Debose said on a tour of the neighborhood.
Many folks in the neighborhoods along White Oak Bayou also want to ensure the project protects both sides of the freeway. Long cut off from the gains in the Historic Heights, businesses and residents in the Northside are imploring TxDOT to consider how some of the changes will fit into the community.
A planned detention basin along I-45 near Patton is one example. Currently home to a truck stop, the site is sought by TxDOT for a huge stormwater drainage basin near Little White Oak Bayou. Allen said after three successive years of record flooding in Houston, he directed engineers to reconsider all drainage standards along the project.
Typically, TxDOT designs based on state and federal estimates for 100-year flood events.
“We’re going above that,” Allen said. “Now you’re thinking ‘Are you going to 500-year Quincy?’ No, we’re just going beyond the norm. … It is not practical and feasible to design to a 500-year standard.”
The reconsidered stormwater plans will capture runoff not only from the freeways but from surrounding communities, some plagued with flooding woes, said Varuna Singh, director of special projects for TxDOT’s Houston office.
In losing the truck stop, however, the community is losing an asset and wants one in return even if it pulls double-duty for drainage.
“The concern there is we don’t just have a hole in the ground — that it can be an amenity,” said Rebecca Reyna, executive director of the Greater Northside Management District.
In many of the neighborhoods, frontage roads pose perhaps the greatest challenge. Lined with shops that neighbors frequent, they are ripe for economic potential, but the freeway and frontage roads also become barriers. Reyna said softening that divide with better bike lanes and crosswalks and green spaces could help the freeway blend into the community, as opposed to scarring it.
“Bring it together, and the economic development could grow on both sides,” Reyna said.
As the Houston area has grown, its thinking on transportation projects has evolved, forcing transportation officials to consider how freeways align with the local streets in various communities.
Skelly said in many places, that’s a simple fix the coalition and others need TxDOT to address. Safer bicycle and pedestrian crossings of frontage roads, for example, can be obtained by widening sidewalks or avoiding wide turn lanes that push crossings back from the view of turning drivers.
“These are issues that have grown in importance over the last decade,” Skelly said. “I think there is a higher level of sophistication of how all these pieces of the city fit together.”
Tough choices
Other challenges, such as how to preserve that pristine segment of White Oak Bayou, could wind up forcing observers and highway officials to make a choice of what they value most.
The vantage from the 3,200 feet of trail and bayou yields skyscrapers and overpasses no matter where you turn. Along the bayou, though, there’s just grass, wildflowers in the spring and birds looking for a quick meal along a running and biking path popular with pedalers headed to downtown jobs.
Parks board and coalition officials haven’t given up hope of finding a feasible way to widen three freeways and either protect or mitigate Houston’s natural spaces.
Coalition members said without someone telling the state highway builders what is wrong, they cannot make it right. Skelly said the group just wants it to be the best possible plan — and become a playbook for all the plans to come.
“Assuming that we work and this dialogue produces a better project, I think TxDOT will become institutionally better at developing projects,” Skelly said. “I think they already have shown some of that. We just want them to show it more.”