18-lane highway going up in Houston

[diablo234]

Some blog I found on the Houston Chronicle regarding freeways and sprawl.

July 16, 2010
How freeway investments actually reduce sprawl
Torry Gatis
http://blogs.chron.com/opportunityur...ty+Urbanist%29
These posts originally ran on the Houston Strategies blog in June 2005, and have been reposted here as part of an occasional “best of” retrospective series on Fridays, with a particular focus on generating discussion and action around significant ideas.

The Chronicle has an article this morning on Houston and sprawl which unfortunately repeats the same dangerous myth about sprawl that has hobbled so many other cities. The claim is that we should be "planning the transportation investments that influence where development occurs", but that's really a code phrase for the belief "if we don't build any new roads, everybody will move into nice high density developments in the city core and sprawl will stop."

The Washington DC metro area is exhibit A#1 for how this approach completely fails. They hobbled road building and built heavy rail to the core. What did they get? One of the most hyper-sprawling metro areas in the country. As soon as commuting into the city became unbearable, the employers scattered to the four winds over huge swaths Maryland and Virginia so they could be near new, affordable housing their core middle-class family employees wanted to live in. The cruel irony is that, once my employer has moved 30 miles out of the city, I can now move 30 miles beyond that, live on my own country estate, and still have a reasonable commute. DC metro now has commuters that live in West Virginia! That's 90 miles from the DC core. To put that in a local context, you could live in a beach house halfway down Galveston Island and still be closer to downtown Houston than that.

The paradox that people find hard to grasp is that large transportation investments - and especially freeways - actually reduce sprawl. By providing access to new, affordable housing and making the commute bearable into the city, employers stay here. When employers stay here, that puts a real limit on how far out you can live and keep a reasonable commute - realistically 20-30 miles.

Employers really would like to stay in the core. They have employees scattered over all points of the compass, from Clear Lake to Sugar Land to Katy to The Woodlands to Kingwood - and moving out to any one suburb is going to be seriously disruptive to a good chunk of their employees. But once they bite the bullet and make the move, there's just about nothing that can bring them back. Silicon Valley employers aren't going to San Francisco, Orange County employers aren't going to LA, and the hundreds of auto industry companies in southeast Michigan have no intention of going back into the city of Detroit.

Fortunately, Mayor White seems to have a handle on the real solutions:

Mayor Bill White, meanwhile, said he is launching initiatives to help the city — particularly areas of northeast and southeast Houston that have been "leapfrogged" by new development — capture a greater share of the single-family housing market.
"I don't want, nor do most people in this community want, to tell people where they can and can't live or how long their commute should or shouldn't be," White said. "One person's sprawl is another person's dream house." ...
White agreed that transportation "is a critical issue in defining where and how the city grows." His strategy for directing more growth into the city, however, doesn't involve withholding transportation projects from remote areas.
Instead, White said, he wants to make the city more attractive for development through initiatives such as Project Houston Hope, a redevelopment plan for six neighborhoods just outside Loop 610. The plan calls for making tax-delinquent property available for affordable housing, working with school districts to improve educational quality and building streets and utilities to replace crumbling infrastructure.
With reasonably priced houses available in improved neighborhoods, White said, young families might be attracted by urban amenities such as libraries and entertainment venues that "are difficult sometimes to create in a new community." He said people who live outside the city often tell him they wish they were served by Houston police and firefighters.
White said he wants to more than double the number of single-family housing starts inside the city within two years. He said his staff is researching the current figure for the city; builders typically release new home-construction figures on a regional basis.
--------------------------------

As a followup to my earlier post on sprawl, I came across this interesting report that shows Houston had one of the highest density increases among cities in the 1990s (chart p.3) - the highest among what they called "unconstrained" cities - meaning we had no natural geographic or regulatory constraints to sprawl. Our density actually increased at the same rate as Portland or San Francisco: 8% (to 3,856 people/sq.mile in our case). Much more density increase than my earlier example city, DC (2%), which did not build many roads and invested heavily in transit. And if you're thinking it's all about immigration: San Antonio proportionally gets as much or more immigration as Houston, yet actually lost density.

Again, I would argue that because we invested heavily in freeways, jobs stayed in the core, which made the core more attractive and led to more dense development. If you look at the bottom of their list, a lot of those cities have lost most of their jobs to their surburban and exurban periphery, so there's no incentive for development in the core, leading to density loses in those cities - even big transit-investing cities like Boston, Chicago, and Philly.

[diablo234]

Double Post

[mhays]

Yeah, and the result is...Houston. Even with the infill of recent years it's a great example of misguided policy.

[Trae]

Originally Posted by mhays

Yeah, and the result is...Houston. Even with the infill of recent years it's a great example of misguided policy.

Care to expand on that? And like I said earlier, we can't stop the people from moving here and not all want to live in an area like the Inner Loop.

[hannah_banana]

I wish I never opened this thread.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Trae

Care to expand on that? And like I said earlier, we can't stop the people from moving here and not all want to live in an area like the Inner Loop.

Surely you jest. Insane sprawl, extremely low transit use, extremely low amount of walking (even for a sauna)...

[Nic]

Originally Posted by mhays

Surely you jest. Insane sprawl, extremely low transit use, extremely low amount of walking (even for a sauna)...

Any city that's growing quickly is sprawling a lot.

From what I hear, Houston's light-rail line is performing extraordinarily well. Per mile, it's amongst the best in the U.S. for ridership. Even with over twice as many miles, Seattle's light rail carries substantially less riders than Houston's system.

And I realize Houston is a larger city, but more people take transit overall there as well.

So in summary, being from Seattle, it doesn't seem you should be criticizing Houston.

[mhays]

Seattle's ridership anihilates Houston's in transit overall. Do you REALLY want to go there? (That light rail line, which is somewhere around 5% of our overall transit ridership, has grown by about 55% in ridership since last year, despite having neither park-n-rides except one, nor much density.)

Let's review 2008 ACS data for metro commute modes:
Houston: 2.6% transit, 1.5% walk.
Seattle: 7.8% transit, 3.4% walk.

Central cities:
Houston: 5.0% transit, 2.2% walk.
Seattle: 18.1% transit, 8.6% walk.

Now THAT is anihiliation. If Seattle's numbers are only "ok", and even then only by US standards, Houston has some catching up to do.

Sprawl doesn't have to happen. You can manage growth. It's not easy and not everyone likes it, but many cities have good or great success.

[diablo234]

To be fair if Seattle were to annex it's surrounding suburbs it probably would post similar percentages. Im sure if you were to just include people who live inside the Loop it would be much higher.

Plus don't forget we are currently expanding our light rail system with the construction of the East End Line, Southeast Line, and North Line underway along with the University Line and Uptown Line once those pesky NIMBY's get out of the way.

[Nic]

Seattle light rail - 17.3 miles with 23,400 daily riders
Houston light rail - 7.5 miles with 39,500 daily riders

King County Metro - 400,457 daily riders
Harris County Metro - 600,500 daily riders

[mhays]

Notice my numbers included metro area figures.

Further, Seattle has $20 billion in rail and other transit upgrades that are voter-approved and happening in phases, in addition to what's already here.

I'm not sure why you're bothering. Houston might be improving at a good rate, but the current numbers aren't good.

[mhays]

I spent 60 seconds to find a good stat to clarify things. The APTA is the main authority on transit stats.

Urbanized areas, unlinked passenger trips in 2008:

Seattle UA (pop 2,712,205): 195,507,000 trips.
Houston UA (pop 3,822,509): 100,403,000 trips.

Seattle had 71 trips per capita while Houston had 26.

See page 9: http://apta.com/resources/statistics..._Fact_Book.pdf

Your "600,000 daily" figure is clearly incorrect, or not using the same methods as APTA.

[dleung]

The paradox that people find hard to grasp is that large transportation investments - and especially freeways - actually reduce sprawl. By providing access to new, affordable housing and making the commute bearable into the city, employers stay here. When employers stay here, that puts a real limit on how far out you can live and keep a reasonable commute - realistically 20-30 miles.

30 miles is reasonable?! Good grief. I live in a lush single-family neighbourhood and my commute to downtown is 5 miles. This article is clearly a brain fart from the automotive lobby...

[mhays]

PS, the Seattle light rail mileage stat (not ridership stat) appears to include the Tacoma streetcar in addition to Central Link light rail line.

[Trae]

Originally Posted by mhays

Notice my numbers included metro area figures.

Further, Seattle has $20 billion in rail and other transit upgrades that are voter-approved and happening in phases, in addition to what's already here.

I'm not sure why you're bothering. Houston might be improving at a good rate, but the current numbers aren't good.

But Houston's light rail is expanding as we speak. And people have a problem with thinking rail is the only form of transit. Anyway, you add the transit (bus, rail, and HOV) improvements to Houston, along with the freeway expansions/new freeway construction, AND the fact that the metro area is laid out in a grid pattern, and there should be no question why congestion has been dropping (in one of the fastest growing regions in the US).

[mhays]

I'm impressed that Houston is improving its transit. I'm only disputing the current numbers.

[Sonrise]

Originally Posted by nerdly_dood

I think the best option is not to build bigger highways, but more of them, like maybe a bypass or something. Different options are different colors: The red line would put a bypass far from the city so that I-10 could be less crowded with traffic that's just passing through, and it uses the routes of existing roads. The dark blue line would put a highway far from the city center, but still going through the northern burbs. The light blue line puts a bypass closer to the city center, but would put additional traffic on the northern side of the loop. The green line is essentially widening I-10 and putting half the lanes a few miles north. The purple line is the best I can think of for a south-side bypass.

Hi,
Would you mind telling me how you were able to put in freeways; is that some type of software? I'd like to do that for where I live, but I'm not very computer savvy. Thanks

[Sonrise]

Originally Posted by mhays

Seattle's ridership anihilates Houston's in transit overall. Do you REALLY want to go there? (That light rail line, which is somewhere around 5% of our overall transit ridership, has grown by about 55% in ridership since last year, despite having neither park-n-rides except one, nor much density.)

Let's review 2008 ACS data for metro commute modes:
Houston: 2.6% transit, 1.5% walk.
Seattle: 7.8% transit, 3.4% walk.

Central cities:
Houston: 5.0% transit, 2.2% walk.
Seattle: 18.1% transit, 8.6% walk.

Now THAT is anihiliation. If Seattle's numbers are only "ok", and even then only by US standards, Houston has some catching up to do.

Sprawl doesn't have to happen. You can manage growth. It's not easy and not everyone likes it, but many cities have good or great success.

Seattles taxes and leftist bureaucracy also annihilate Houstons. Not everyone wants what you want.

[Xusein]

How so? Washington State, like Texas, does not have an income tax.

[bnk]

18 is nothing to be proud of. When you get to 30 lanes than we will talk. But by then the price of gas will be so high squatters will be living in at least 10 of those 30 lanes that seemed worthwhile in a few years in the future.

Really you could at 2X the amount of lanes and you only get 2X's the problems. Enjoy it while it lasts.


I saw the History Channel on the Big Flyover in Houston. Now that is a large waste of livable space that I have heard is even scary to drive on the top tier. And just think that I wanted at one time in my life to be a Civil Engineer to create these urban monstrosities.

I am thankful I chose a path of a career that really helps people and not destroy lives in the process.

First do no harm.