Icy roads leave most Houstonians in a familiar place — right at home
Typically on a day he did not need to go into the office but was up early, Jason Clark would drive more than a mile from his condo sandwiched between Upper Kirby and Montrose to his favorite coffee shop for a latte.
Tuesday morning, he walked two blocks to the gas station — very carefully — for a black coffee along a street iced in white.
“That’s as far as I‘m going today,” Clark, 36, said after he settled back in to his thankfully-heated home. “My next trip outside will be to the mailbox.”
Huddled at home was where many Houston area residents stayed Tuesday, a familiar place given the ongoing pandemic, dropping traffic levels to practically nothing.
Heavy trucks and the occasional automobile sputtered cautiously along the freeways and frontage roads open by midday Tuesday. Most major streets saw a fraction of their typical commuting traffic. The few who ventured further than walking distance descended on gas stations and markets, or made their way from their powerless homes to someplace safe with heat.
Traffic monitoring, housed at Houston TranStar, could give only a spotty sense of traffic demand. The same power outages plunging residents into cold darkness scuttled the region’s road sensors. As of Tuesday morning, 60
percent of TranStar’s field equipment was down, spokesman Joshua Shideler said.
“It has changed some things for sure, but we’ve got road crews going out and reporting back,” he said.
Based on observation and the limited data coming in, travel volumes in the region for Monday were among the lowest in modern history, comparing not with the earliest days of the COVID pandemic when Easter Sunday traffic was 63 percent below a typical weekend day, but the first 48 hours of Tropical Storm Harvey striking when only emergency vehicles were on the move.
“Traffic is still much lighter than usual, which is good,” Shideler said.
Decreased traffic allowed police and fire to respond to emergencies, lessen the risk of wrecks and allowed road crews ample time to do whatever they could to clear major streets. In Rosenberg, the city declared all its roads passable by 11 a.m. but encouraged drivers to use extreme caution.
Metropolitan Transit Authority, which parked its buses and trains and closed HOT lanes along freeways in advance of the arctic blast, will continue its suspension of service through Wednesday, but provide will medically necessary paratransit trips.
Along freeways, Texas Department of Transportation workers were out in force, with the tools they had.
“They’re coming up with a lot of creative ways to treat roadways like using loaders to scrape snow and ice off the roads since we do not have snow plows,” TxDOT spokeswoman Emily Black said of the crews.
Black said that with additional rain likely in northern parts of the region, officials were preparing for conditions to improve and then worsen as the temperature remains below freezing and the sun sets.
“Currently we have about 115,000 gallons of brine solution mixed and in tanks ready to roll,” Black said. “All area offices have additional bags of salt to mix brine, as well, along with aggregate mixtures like sand and a meltdown mixture.”
The supply should be enough to maintain roads through Friday if needed, before replenishments arrive.
Most in Houston, meanwhile, will wait. Following more than 11 months of COVID concerns and isolation, topped by advice to dress in layers to keep warm, many Houstonians on Tuesday found themselves right where they seemingly have always been: At home with no plans to venture out.
“This is our life now,” said Chloe Boyer, 40, a First Ward resident who from her lower Washington Avenue apartment can practically see her company’s offices in Allen Center that she has not set foot in since August. “You stay home. You talk to everyone to make sure they are safe, but you do it by phone.”