Houston Past & Present: Walkable Urbanism

houston past & present

CHARLIER & ASSOCIATES

By David Crossley

Houston 3.0

Walkable Urbanism is on the way Houston is going through some radical changes right now. By far the biggest is a focused return to its roots, to an old concept called Walkable Urbanism.

DOWNTOWN HOUSTON © VANHART, FOTOLIA.COM

Sixty five is a lot of origins and destinations for a young transit system. Very quickly, the Houston light rail ridership per day could be as great as any other light rail system in the US and almost certainly will be number two.1 Essentially, we will have gone from the bottom to the top in 10 years.

David Crossley is president of Houston Tomorrow, an institute for research, education, and discussion, whose mission is to improve the quality of life in the Houston region.

Houston Tomorrow’s online newsmagazine is published daily at houstontomorrow.org.

In about four years, we’re going to have light rail transit service in 65 of our neighborhoods. Nearly 200,000 riders will be moving in and out of those neighborhoods by train every day. That’s going to be different.

An urban network of dispersed centers of various sizes and cultures will evolve. There will be constant civic pressure to expand the transit network to other centers, always going to centers, where the people are. In fact, that pressure is palpable everywhere in the region today. No other U.S. city is so committed to an urban light rail strategy. And, perhaps ironically, no other U.S. region is so well constructed for such a strategy.

David Crossley

1

Boston’s Green Line is tops and will stay there, with over 220,000 riders right now. However, this line has been in operation since 1897 and is integrated with a heavy rail system.

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CITIZENS' TRANSPORTATION COALITION/CHRISTOF SPIELER

Houston 3.0: Walkable Urbanism is on the Way That’s because the neighborhoods, which emanated out from the transit stations, were originally designed to be walkable. After all, everybody back then was a pedestrian, and amenities and services had to be close by.

Many of those neighborhoods still have centers, “urban” places where people come together, often on foot or bicycle, and then fan back out to the centers surrounding sub-urban residential areas.

By 1940, all the streetcar lines were gone. Houston 2.0 began in the post-World War II era of the Interstate Highway System that created a robust sub-urban economy on a vast geographic scale. That era was based on driving cars and trucks using the cheap energy we found and sold to the world.

METRO SOLUTIONS PHASE II LIGHT RAIL EXPANSION MAP

We may be surprised, as we ride the trains around the city, to find that we already have some interesting neighborhoods many of us didn’t know about. We will certainly “find” a burst of hot new restaurants; some of them will indeed be new, but many have been there all along.

We’ll see the emergence of places that are both origins and destinations, real neighborhoods of various sizes providing amenities and services to people who choose to live, work, learn, and play in a growing walkable urban network.

I call this Houston 3.0.

Houston 1.0 and 2.0 We’ve had two big phases. Houston 1.0 was the growth from the Allen Brothers’ vision of a great city that led to efficient walkable urbanism with transit as the basis for development and regional mobility.

For nearly 100 years, Downtown, the Heights, Montrose, Bellaire, and other areas, grew around Houston’s enormous streetcar system.

Houston was transit-oriented and walkable for many decades.

Even today, it retains its original “bones,” the street grid that one Boulder planner called the best in North America, after Portland.

The people who live in those neighborhoods today drive significantly less than people who live in other areas of the region, even though the transit is long gone.

MAJOR ACTIVITY CENTERS WILL BE CONNECTED, CREATING WALKABLE URBANISM

“Sprawl” and “Suburban” are not the same Sprawl is disconnected, single-purpose residential developments that require inhabitants to drive everywhere for everything. It can happen anywhere and a lot of it did in the Houston region.

Sub-urban, though, means something different. Montrose, the Heights, Bellaire, and the others are sub-urbs of the Central Business District, and each of those neighborhoods has centers that have residential sub-urbs.

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CITY OF HOUSTON URBAN CORRIDORS

STREET CAR SYSTEMS OPERATING IN HOUSTON, CIRCA 1927

In The Woodlands there is an urban area and a sub-urban area. First Colony is becoming a sub-urb of the increasingly urban and walkable City of Sugar Land. Slowly, those places look less like sprawl.

In the nation, the market is rapidly moving away from sprawl, because it really doesn’t fit into the traditional continuum of natural, rural, sub-urban, and urban forms, especially given all the change drivers, such as climate change, increasing fuel and transportation costs, and rapidly changing national demographics.

Everywhere in the country, and here in Houston, the big thing is Town Centers, Livable Centers. These are examples of Walkable Urbanism. The City of Waller, with 2,000 people, is designing a town center at its old town center.

It may be that the creation of so many high-intensity activity centers in the Houston region leaves us positioned as perhaps the most polycentric region in the United States -- at a time when world planners are focused on this abstract vision as the basis of sustainability:

Regions with multiple centers, organized into collaborative economic clusters that form sustainable networks of access, mobility, and green infrastructure What opportunities are there, in connecting our centers, to create a new transit-based urban world within the existing sub-urban one in a way that provides many more choices and job opportunities for people?

We are on the cusp of Houston 3.0. Really, we’re already in it.

Main Street — The Kickoff The City of Houston began to capitalize on its basic historic urban structure by putting the tracks for the Main Street light rail line back in the heart of the region, in the middle of the large urban street grid and block pattern left over from Houston 1.0. Because the little 7.5-mile rail line connected the largest activity intensity center in the region -- downtown -- with the closest other large activity center -the Medical Center -- it reached its 2040 goal of 40,000 boardings a day in 2007, 33 years early.

The coming phase of light rail service will reach out through the old urban streetcar grid and beyond, entering the post-1940s era’s first big Houston edge city, the Uptown/Galleria. Along the way it will go through Greenway Plaza, thus linking the top four activity centers in the region.

When the new service begins, 20 percent of all the jobs in the region will be in a high-capacity transit network.

The size of our regional population means we’ve reached a point that all big, growing regions in all the world reach, when the market moves to more self-sufficient centers of many sizes, and connects them with high-capacity transit. The second transit era has begun.

That era could be the beginning of a move toward a higher quality of life, as we unravel some of the bottlenecks, take some stress out of our networks, recover greenspace, and let the market begin to fill in some blanks and offer enough of a range of lifestyle choices to lower the level of frustration that now pervades civic life.

Beyond the Houston region, in the vast Texas Triangle of Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin, we can see the outlines of a rail web of small centers connected to bigger centers and then cities connected to other cities by high-speed rail.

Houston 3.0 is on a journey toward sustainable prosperity.

There are imaginative discussions and plans for hundreds of miles of new high-capacity transit. That kind of talk is possible because the region, during 2.0, threw out a huge network of roads to establish seven great “cities”; dozens of smaller, growing cities; nearly 150 towns; at least 70 master-planned communities; and thousands of neighborhoods.

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