Shared from the 3/3/2019 Houston Chronicle eEdition

TRANSPORTATION

WHAT’S THE REAL COST OF NEW FREEWAYS IN HOUSTON?

Because TxDOT doesn’t answer to voters, its projects often ignore the reality on the ground

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Staff file photo

The Texas Department of Transportation is planning a $7 billion project to rebuild about 24 miles of highways in Houston.

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Staff file photo

Pedestrians entering Buffalo Bayou Park from Waugh and Allen Parkway have to navigate a “slip lane.”

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Speck

When drivers on Waugh approach the intersection with Allen Parkway, they can turn east toward downtown without having to stop or slow down. It’s called a “slip lane.”

Pedestrians crossing there into Buffalo Bayou Park, though, do have to stop and slow down. When I walk to the park to exercise, I crane over my shoulder and try to guess whether drivers will stay speeding north or turn east through the slip lane, and I wait for my chance at the crosswalk. There’s a yield sign, of course, and there’s also a Texas law that requires drivers to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. But there’s not much yielding going on. So I have to rush to the hunk of concrete in the intersection called a “refuge island,” hide behind the signal pole, say a prayer to the patron saint of vulnerable road users and then hurry across a few more lanes into the park. Who needs cardio after an exercise like that?

In his new book, Jeff Speck, one of America’s most influential city planners and urban designers, urges cities to remove their slip lanes. “They are highway-era erosions that do not belong in urban places,” he writes.

“Walkable City Rules” is a sequel to Speck’s popular “Walkable City,” published in 2012, which opened up what can be a specialized conversation about slip lanes and turn radii to general readers like me. His new book lays out 101 “steps” a city can take — once, of course, the city decides it should be more friendly to those who want to walk, bike, roll and take transit to move around — to become “better in a whole host of ways.”

Better how? Walkability, Speck has found, increases property values, appeals to a young and educated workforce, helps fight obesity and heart disease, reduces carbon emissions, eases the burden on those who are too elderly to operate a car or too poor to own one and helps us live much closer together — in many senses.

It’s not just about removing slip lanes. It’s about eliminating parking requirements, advocating for local schools and parks, redesigning crosswalks and planting trees. It’s about giving streets a “road diet” by removing unnecessary lanes and even tearing down highways.

“Walkable City Rules” is frustrating to read for aHoustonian — or at least for one who routinely scrambles across a slip lane that doesn’t need to be there. Ihave lived in this city long enough to anticipate the first question someone might ask when they finish: How much is all this going to cost?

That word — “cost” — is interesting to think about. In 2012, Houstonians were asked to vote on a $166 million proposition to pay for 150 miles of greenways along our bayous. In 2018, Harris County residents were asked to vote on a $2.5 billion proposition to pay for hundreds of projects that would help the entire region with flood control. This year, Metro says it will ask us to vote on a $3 billion proposition to pay for 20 miles of light rail extensions, 75 miles of bus rapid transit and other “systemwide improvements.”

The Texas Department of Transportation, too, is planning to spend $7 billion (and maybe more than that) to rebuild about 24 miles of freeways. The project will reshape roads between Midtown and Beltway 8, some of the most congested stretches in Texas, by merging Interstate 45 with Interstate 69 and rerouting them together northwest around downtown. Unlike with those greenways, flood projects or transit plans, TxDOT never had to ask permission from voters.

Because TxDOT doesn’t have to do that, its massive projects often ignore the reality of people on the ground — the thousands of Houstonians whose neighborhoods will be impacted both directly and indirectly as a result of the I-45 expansion.

“There has never been the same (political) pressure for specificity for highway projects,” Kyle Shelton, the transportation historian and the director of strategic partnerships at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, told me. Unlike transit, for example, freeways have historically been viewed and funded as a “public good.”

Last week, Speck was in Houston to talk about TxDOT’s plan. He is not convinced that it’s a public good. We know so much now that we didn’t know when the project was first proposed in the early 2000s. We have a new understanding about the way congestion works, flooding in urban areas, eminent domain and displacement from homes and businesses, environmental justice, air quality, tailpipe emissions and climate change and the devastation of the injuries and losses of lives that our car-dominated transportation system enables.

In other words: How much is this going to cost Houston?

“Highways,” Speck told a packed theater, outside of which protesters had gathered, holding signs decrying the pollution and the noise their neighborhood could face, “destroy quality of life.”

“The business community has come to recognize that jobs will go where the quality of life is,” he told me a week earlier.

When Mayor Sylvester Turner was elected in 2016, he stressed the need for a transportation “paradigm shift.” During his administration, we’ve learned that that shift will be slow. Many of us, as we wait at bus stops in the rain and stumble over buckled sidewalks, are still waiting for it even to begin. Because of the impending I-45 expansion, what Speck calls the “biggest planning decision in a generation,” Houston is now “facing two futures.” Maybe it can’t be as either/ or as driving or walking in a city as diverse as Houston. Maybe it can be both/and, though. Maybe someday. And what worries me is that TxDOT’s plan could make that future all the more faraway.

West is an editor and writer at the Chronicle.

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