Amongst my many readings right now, I am currently slugging my way through Suburban Nation, The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. I have not completed reading the book yet. It clocks in at 270 pages and I am currently about half way through it. A book review is forthcoming. I keep promising myself I will write more book reviews, but never seem to get around to writing them.
Before going any further, I should state something. I do not object to all of the things that the "Smart Growth" crowd aims for. Indeed there were some things I found myself agreeing with while going through the book. My main objection to the Smart Growth agenda is that I would personally like for government to be agonstic about development, but that is not what most people in the Smart Growth movement are after. For example, I would not care one way or another if development occurred where shops were built in a multi-story building with apartments and condos being located upstairs. But from what I am reading from some Smart Growth texts, some in the movement want all development to be this way.
But I digress. One of among many complaints that the Smart Growth crowd has is that modern day urban development is at the automobile scale and not at the human scale. They want walkable places where people can get to places under the power of their own two feet.
What I would say is this. I am not in favor of rewriting the entire Houston development and planning codes just for the sake of attempting to socially engineer an environment where the hoped for walking will take place. In otherwords, one of the mantras of the Smart Growth handbook seems to be that ordainances have to be rewritten such that buildings along thoroughfares are to be brought up close to the street and not set back with parking lots in front. Wide sidewalks are then to be constructed which are pedestrian friendly. I live along Westheimer, the true Main Street of Houston, and the greatest street in the city. I can only imagine how well this idea would go down with the thousands of businesses which line the street.
I just came back from London and Paris where I spent 4 weeks. I have visited places like New York where I walked perhaps 50 miles over a period of about 10 days.
What I seem to notice about walking in cities is that walking tends to get deterred when the street is more than 4 lanes wide, or with 2 lanes going in each direction. Walking also gets deterred when the roads or thoroughfares are privy to traffic that is travelling more than 35 or so miles per hour.
So what to do about this sad state of affairs? If you are a hard core Smart Growther, then you simply ban the construction of roads more than 4 lanes wide. The fewer lanes the better. You also employ so called "traffic calming" measures to slow automobile traffic to a crawl.
But what about Houston? I would suggest the following ideas:
1) Install electronic counting devices at major intersections which time the lights at those intersections. In other words, say you are at the corner of Hilcroft and Westheimer, an intersection which probably sees 100,000 vehicles go through it everyday and is probably the busiest intersection in Houston. At the intersection, install some counters which stipulate that northbound / southbound traffic will have a green light for 45 seconds. Then when the lights turn red, then the counters will stipulate that the red light will last for 45 seconds. At the same time, the eastbound / westbound traffic will have 45 seconds of green lights and red lights.
What this would do is tell would be pedestrians and bike riders that they have X amount of time to walk across the street. They would not find themselves wondering whether they need to put on their track shoes in order to make it across the intersection. The main issue with this idea is that it might interfere with normal auto traffic flow and that those lights might cost many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece to install.
2) Install those pedestrian street overpasses over busy streets just like those from which I took those photos of Bangkok traffic. This would particularly hold for busy streets. Notice how wide the streets are over which I was standing when I took those photos. One could place a buttressing column to help hold up the walkway in the medians along wide streets like Westheimer. The walkways would need to be high enough to allow for 18 wheelers to cross under them. In otherwords, they would probably need to be at least 20 feet tall. They would also need to have stairwells constructed along the sidewalks which would lead up to them. I have no idea how much it would cost to construct such walkways, but it would seem that such walkways could be built for a few hundred thousand dollars apiece.
Conceivably, places like the Galleria mall and its counterpart shopping center across Westheimer could be linked by such an overpass, but one problem there is that trees have already been planted along the street in accordance with an edict passed in 1996 which stipulates that all new development has to have trees planted in front of them which fronts up against thoroughfares. One idea would be that the two property interests could be talked into helping to pay for an overpass if they would deem it to be in their shared interest to do so. Shoppers could then walk across the street to both properties. Not all such walkways would have to be necessarily be paid for out of the public kitty.
Two other issues involving pedestrian overpasses are that some might consider it prudent to make sure that pedestrians are sheltered from any electrical lines which might happen to be nearby (although I am not sure how much of a problem this would be), and that stairwells leading to the overpasses would have to be at least 3 feet wide. Some sidewalks themselves are not three feet wide and this might pose a problem for pedestrians that might need to get around the proposed stairwell.
3) As for walking along streets like Westheimer, I am fully sympathetic to the idea that many do not feel comfortable walking along them even though it is pretty safe to do so. I walk along them all the time, though you do run into problems such as the idea that walkways are not always continuous (like along San Felipe in River Oaks inside the Loop). When I used to live at Kirby and West Main, I used to walk all through the neighborhood including to Bookstop, the post office at Greenbriar, and even to the Randalls at Westheimer and Shepherd (that was about a 15 minute walk).
One low cost idea I have to encourage walking would be to install barriers at the edge of pedestrian sidewalks. Duany and company suggest taking up entire lanes with cars as barriers between moving traffic and pedestrians. I can't claim to be an expert, but this seems to be excessive and is probably just another ploy to use up another lane of traffic so that it isn't used by moving cars. There are plenty of places in the world I have walked (like Oxford Street in London) where people walk in droves along busy streets and are right up against moving traffic.
Instead, why not try punching 3 foot tall metal polls or railings into the concrete along sidewalks? They could serve as a barrier between pedestrians, bikers, and street traffic. Another idea would be to pour perhaps 2-3 foot tall concrete domes or a concrete barrier at the edge of the sidewalk which would serve as a barrier between pedestrian traffic and moving vehicles? One issue with this is that rainwater need to be able to flow from sidewalks and into the street drains where it could be carried away.
As it is, something tells me inside that the traffic engineers and car insurance companies would go berserk at the idea that we should put up barriers along sidewalks to protect pedestrians from autos. They might complain that such barriers might lead to more car accidents, but I rarely see people drive their cars into sidewalks.
4) The City of Houston lost a court case in November 2006 where it was found not to be in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I heard in commentary (which I cannot confirm) that U.S. District Judge in fact expanded his original ruling so that the entire city was covered under his ruling instead of just the 34 ramps in the Montrose area. My idea would be to have sidewalks extended in areas where they are now not fully connected (such as in the aforementioned San Felipe area).
5) This is perhaps the most important item. Several months ago, the City of Houston hosted a Citizens Congress which I attended. When the group of people whom I was put in with addressed the issue of pedestrianism, nobody addressed the most important issue which was how do you get from your front door to major street intersections! It was basically assumed that handicapped people, those in wheelchairs, etc, would get to their light rail line from their front doors with no problem. Unfortunately, not all neighborhoods in Houston have sidewalks. I know because I grew up in a neighborhood that didn't have them. We just walked along the street. I don't know how much it would cost to mandate installing sidewalks in and along neighborhoods which do not have them, but until you do, those people are not going to behave in a matter that would be satisfactory to the social engineers. Unfortunately, many at my table were too busy thinking that forcing developers to go through the vast expense of redoing their properties so that they were right up against the street was more important than ensuring that people could get from their front doors to the streets where the shops, businesses, and bus routes were.
Now would this all end up turning Houstonians into a bunch of happy contented pedestrians? The answer is I don't know. It is widely acknowledged by both the Smart Growth planners and their opponents that places of interest have to be within a 5+ minute walking distance or else many people will not care to walk. I for one can get to my HEB supermarket in about 8 minutes while I can get to my dentist in 4-5.
Enough for now. I have written plenty today. The biggest issue for me is that these are relatively low cost, property rights friendly, non-invasive ways of making Houston - dare I say it - a more pedestrian friendly place.
Wizard.
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at February 19, 2007 02:06 AM