Transportation Issues in Houston

In the new services-based economy, local growth politics is starting to take a new shape. Growth machine politics are now more likely to promote a “good business climate,” an abstract concept constituted by a number of factors that make a city attractive to outside  investment. With an increasingly diversified economy, the climate for business is increasingly more defined by quality of life factors. A piece of city publicity media we watched in class advertises Houston “diverse, progressive, economically thriving, affordable, and the next great world-city,” calling these and other features the “Texaplex advantage.”

This new focus and direction for Houston’s image creation can also be seen in efforts to revitalize downtown, expansion of the light rail and the Urban Corridors development plan, new  attractions such as the eco-friendly Discovery Green park downtown, new bike trails, and emergence of organizations such as Keep Houston Beautiful and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership that are trying to make Houston more aesthetically appealing and a more pleasant place to live.

A first impression of Houston viewed from its highways, the ugly featureless sprawl of parking lots, big box stores, and chain restaurants, would suggest that there is not much here worth caring about. An unofficial resident-led campaign for Houston has emerged as a parody of Houston’s self-marketing strategies that leave out the city’s major drawbacks, such as its heat, humidity, traffic, sprawl, and pollution. But the campaign’s main purpose it to show the sides of Houston that Houstonians genuinely love by providing a platform for their voices to talk about the many things the city has to offer from an insider’s perspective.  The campaign is called “Houston: It’s Worth It”

Houston is a treasure trove of diverse, well-hidden attractions that can only be discovered little by little by living here.I personally appreciate Houston’s wide range of ethnic cuisine, the live music scene, the world-class theater and museum districts, the charming historic houses, the beautiful Rothko chapel, the vibrant venues for salsa and country dancing, independent coffee shops, the underground tunnels downtown, the art scene in the Warehouse district, farmers markets, Rice University’s campus, and so much more.

Stephen Fox, a historian of architecture at Rice characterized Houston as “insular,” in its total abandonment of public landscape for any use other than automobile traffic, lack of aesthetic consideration in its development, and the visual and spatial disconnect between its places. However, there are many signs that Houston is coming to a self-conscious realization that in order to continue its economic prosperity it is going to have to become a world-class city that the new workforce of the information age will choose to live in. It will have to capitalize on the positive features it already possesses but also turn its eyes toward improving quality-of-life factors.

One of the biggest challenges Houston will face is improving mobility for Houstonians. Houston is hopefully nearing the end of its highway building and suburban expansion age. Now it needs to focus on improving what it already has. Houstonians don’t need more highways and parking, they need better ways to get to the store, interesting places to walk around and enjoy Houston’s cultural offerings, and beautiful public spaces for their children to play.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jjsala/3159037956/

Houston: Epitome of Laissez-Faire Capitalism?

The dominant rhetoric in Houston tends to attribute the city’s economic growth to a decidedly hands-off government that has allowed entrepreneurs and business leaders to freely and organically pursue their interests. Governance in Houston: Growth Theories and Urban Pressures by Igor Vojnovic argues that Houston’s history, heralded as a success story of laissez-faire capitalism, is not what it is proclaimed to be. Rather, closer observation shows a close marriage of business and politics, with a handful of local elites  using public intervention as a tool to pursue their personal interests.

Models of Local Government

Vojnovic evaluates Tiebout and Peterson’s public choice models, which emphasize the motivation of inter-municipal competition in cities’ pursuit of growth. The models assert that cities are in competition to create the most appealing tax-service ratio in the region to attract a rich tax base. This implies that cities will generally pursue growth to improve its standing as a city as a whole, but it does not explain the role of  conflicts among intra-municipal interest groups in shaping local policy.

Vojnovic argues that Houston’s history fits more closely with Molotch’s Growth Machine framework, which says that yes, cities tend to pursue growth, but not necessarily because it constitutes the rational fiscal decision for the aggregate best interest. Growth may occur as the outcome of politicking by local land-based elites (e.g. large landowners, developers, and bankers) with a general consensus formed around growth and their manipulation of local markets through public intervention.

The close marriage of business and politics in Houston’s history cannot be understated, especially in terms of the influence of a handful of place-based elites (although power has become more decentralized as the city’s business community has grown and diversified). Houston is not about an absent local government but an actively pro-business government.

Historical Houston Transportation Infrastructure Projects

Every major leap in Houston’s transportation infrastructure development has been directly connected to Houston’s industry and private profit. For a long time growth was associated in the public conscience with a sense of city pride. In the mid 1850s Houston leaders subsidized and directed railroad routes out of private interest in land rents. The railroad was framed by city boosters as a necessary measure for Houston’s prosperity as a whole, and indeed it was a major factor in the city’s rise to a major distributional center, although place-based elites gained more than anyone.

This profit-minded growth continued with the dredging of the Houston Ship Channel. A coalition of business leaders sent a delegation to Washington to lobby for funding, and succeeded in getting federal support, even when the project ended up being far more expensive than they had originally said. The ship channel allowed Houston to surpass hurricane-prone Galveston as the biggest port in the region. A visit to the Houston Ship Channel today affirms the single-mindedness in its conception.  I have heard the comment that the unattractive, industry-dominated Ship Channel might be one of the worst demonstrations of human connection (or lack thereof) with a waterway. There seems to be so much lost potential there for mixed-usage, recreation, and tourism. This is true for Houston’s bayous too, which have mostly been viewed as natural storm sewers and dumping grounds.

Houston’s transition from streetcars to bus lines was guided by land speculation and  development patterns. Houston real estate agents, property developers, bankers, and other land-based elites manipulated the streetcar lines and even tried to build their own streetcar companies to facilitate movement to the suburbs. The beginning stages of the bus system allowed for development that continued building Houston outward and consuming more raw land.

Now, car ownership is so common that new development does not have to be tied to the bus system. However, freeways are the modern infrastructural prize within Houston’s growth machine politics that allow city building to continue. The undeterred construction of the Grand Parkway into the uninhabited hinterlands of Houston is proof that land-based growth is still a major political priority of the city. While there has been controversy over where some segments of the parkway will lie, there has not been widespread discussion over whether it should even be built. One thing I personally don’t understand, probably due to my unfamiliarity with the workings of real estate development, is why growth tends to be so outward-bound when there is still so much space for infill development in Houston. Why are new subdivisions more enticing to developers than building inside the city? Maybe a topic for further study.

Before:

After:

Making a Human-Scale Environment for Light Rail passengers

In June 2006 the City of Houston passed the Urban Corridors Ordinance, a major initiative that will encourage denser urban development surrounding the light rail lines to accommodate pedestrianism and transit use. Houston now has many requirements in place that make pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented development nearly impossible (such as a regulation that requires buildings to be set far back from the street). This planning ordinance will create a new set of regulations, standards, and incentives for development on streets along light rail stations, as well as streets that intersect them within 1/4 mile of the station, such as:

• wider sidewalks, clear of obstructions (poles, signs, etc.)
• vegetative buffers between the sidewalk and parking areas
• placing building entrances adjacent to the pedestrian realm
• more parks and plazas accessible to the public
• designing building facades to be at least 30% transparent on the first-floor

This will create dense, transit-supportive development to nurture the success of the light rail, thereby protecting taxpayers’ investment.

Criticism

Some transit-oriented development advocates say that this ordinance does not go far enough. They say that some of the optional provisions should be made mandatory and that the scope should extend further than 1/4 mile. Also, larger developments that face the transit corridor or a connecting street on at least one side should be entirely covered.

One of the biggest omissions of the ordinance is that it fails to relax Houston’s off-street parking requirement that applies to the whole city (except for a few areas, like the CBD and Med Center) which requires a certain number of parking spaces for every new or remodeled building, based on square footage.

Christof Spieler, the author of Intermodality Blog for the Citizens Transportation Coalition explains the absurdity of this policy:

Parking comes at a very real cost to the building owner: aside from the cost of paving, there’s the cost of the land: Midtown property goes for $50 a square foot, so that’s almost $20,000 a parking spot. Parking comes at a cost to the city, too. Every parking spot is a bit of land that can’t be occupied by a store or a restaurant. It’s land we build streets and utlities for but don’t get any sales tax revenue from. More importantly, it deadens the city. In Midtown, the city rules amount to requiring half of all lots to be occupied with parking (assuming one story buildings and no garages). That’s in addition to the 40% of the land that’s taken up by the streets, leaving only 30% of the land for uses that are actually worth going to. As a pedestrian, you have a certain distance you’ll walk. The more parking, the less you can do within that range.

(http://www.ctchouston.org/intermodality/2006/09/12/72/)

Peek Road, designated to become part of Segment E of the Grand Parkway

SH 99, Houston Grand Parkway

For decades yet another superhighway project has been in the works that was proposed by the Texas Department of Transportation and promoted by the Grand Parkway Association. The Grand Parkway will be an outer-outer-concentric loop around the Greater Houston region, running 180 miles through seven counties. The first segment was constructed in 1994.

Construction of Segment E, which will connect I-10 and US-290, began in 2009 by Harris County. The county was under the impression that TxDOT did not have sufficient funding for the project and also believed that they could get the toll collections to cover the county’s Parkway-related infrastructure costs, such as drainage and connector roads.

However, in February the Transportation Commission notified Harris County Judge Ed Emmet that they actually have $425 million to devote to the project. Discussions are still underway, although it looks likely that by April or May the project will be handed back to the state, and Harris County will be reimbursed for the part of the project it has completed. The  County Judge  has expressed interest in reallocating the funds to Hempstead Tollway, a proposed  road to ease congestion on US 290.

The Grand Parkway project has been a point of heated controversy. This represents a crucial juncture in Houston’s transportation policy that will effectively shape where and how future development occurs in the city.

Arguments Against It

Neighborhood organizations, environmental advocacy organizations, and transportation interest groups have risen up in protest to the highway. Their main argument: The Grand Parkway is not where the people are. The Gulf Coast Institute analyzed GIS population density data from the area and found that only 80,000 people live within 3 miles of Segment E, and 66,000 of them live within 3 miles of 290 or I-10. It is an undeveloped, rural area. Putting a highway way out in Houston’s hinterlands is not about improving the quality of life for current taxpayers but about opening up land on the fringes, effectively subsidizing new outward development by extending publicly-funded infrastructure to it.

“Segment E of the Grand Parkway is entirely about subsidizing access for a handful of suburban home builders,”

– Coalition Chairwoman Robin Holzer of the Citizens Transportation Coalition, a local transportation advocacy group.

This is concerning, as Houston’s population is projected to grow by another 1 million people over the next 25 years. Guiding residential and commercial development  to the most far flung corners of the Houston region serves to extend Houston’s current development patterns of never-ending low-density sprawl and exacerbate car-dependent culture.

Another hot-button issue is the particular environmental sensitivity of the area. The Katy Prairie region is habitat to thousands of species of birds and attracts many eco-tourists every year. An intrusive highway and subsequent suburban development will directly endanger the prairie ecosystem. The area is also valuable as fertile farmland. With rising fuel costs and population growth, local food sources will grow evermore important. There are also many water quality concerns posed by continued infrastructure extension and outward development.

Construction Charges Onward

It looks likely that the construction of Segment E will continue onward, no matter whether the county or state builds it. What has brought the construction and promotion of it a new sense of urgency is Exxon’s decision to locate their North American headquarters out there. TxDOT has indicated strong ties between the Grand Parkway project and Exxon:

“Exxon representatives have stated very clearly to me that TxDOT moving forward on the Grand Parkway is essential and that if that did not happen they would not select this site.”

-Transportation Commissioner Ned Holmes

The Grand Parkway Association executive director told the Houston Chronicle that the Exxon move is a consolidation of some 11,000 employees they have in the Houston region now and some 4,000 employees that would move here primarily from Virginia. The Houston-area employees will be moving from an office in the Greenspoint area.

Parkway boosters cite economic growth in their arguments, saying that the area will attract many new jobs.  But it seems that the Exxon move is primarily going to relocate employees that are already here more than it will attract new jobs, while the costly extension of infrastructure to undeveloped land takes away from funds that could be spent on interior improvements and infill development.

As discussed in my previous post about models of urban policy, local business elites as well as land speculators are the ones who often shape Houston’s economy and urban form by calling on government to subsidize their growth goals. Even though the Grand Parkway will be an enormously expensive project with many valid arguments against it,  business leaders and developers tend to be close to the policy-makers and more effective at lobbying for their interests.

In Houston, the transportation policy initiatives that get funded are not about efficient human mobility or sustainable land use but about the local economy. Houston is already infamous for being a sprawling metropolis, but with the approval of projects like this, it appears that the hunger for growth still has not reached its outer limits. At what point will low-density development be considered more costly to build than it is worth?

Sources:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/falkenberg/7427399.html

http://www.houstontomorrow.org/livability/story/burge-exxon-needs-grand-parkway-and-soon/

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7370488.html

http://www.ctchouston.org/whatnot/2008/06/03/harris-cty-gpky-sege/

http://www.grandpky.com/home/

Photo from: http://offcite.org/2009/12/01/can-houston-feed-itself

When I proposed the question the previous post, I didn’t expect it to be so difficult to answer. After much searching for quality information about Houston’s streetcars, I finally found a book in the Woodson Research Center at Rice’s Fondren library  by a writer named Steven M. Baron, who had noticed this gap in the popular conception of the Houston’s history also. So this jaunt through a period of Houston’s forgotten past will mostly draw from what I learned from Houston Electric: The Street Railways of Houston, Texas.

Streetcar vs. Jitneys

As Streetcars had operated on the same 1890s fare for decades, Houston Electric (the streetcar company) eventually ran into financial trouble. Additionally,  they were burdened by the city’s requirement that they bear the costs for paving streets where they extended their railways. This would essentially usher in their eventual downfall by subsidizing greater ease of mobility for private automobiles.

In 1914, the first formidable challenge to the streetcar system arose in the form of jitneys, private cars that entrepreneurial drivers used as shared taxis for hire, charging a rate that undercut the streetcar fare. People would pack into the jitneys, even hanging off the sides of the car. Streetcar ridership went down noticeably, but  still remained the uncontested backbone of Houston’s transit system.

The streets became congested with jitneys, and collisions with streetcars became perilously frequent. The city eventually accommodated a plea from Houston Electric (the streetcar company) to begin regulating the jitney services, enforcing a registration and licensing system for jitney drivers.

Enter: The Bus

In 1924 when the city denied Houston Electric (HE) a fare increase to account for inflation, the company resorted to a federal lawsuit. In a city referendum that year, HE agreed to drop the lawsuit in exchange for the city’s abolition of jitney service. HE also agreed to build 8 city-specified extensions of the streetcar system as well as 3 new bus lines, thus turning itself into a hybrid bus and streetcar service.

Over the next fifteen years. a number of factors led HE to gradually phase out their streetcar lines in favor of bus routes. As Houston got more and more spread out, it began to make less economic sense to extend the railways when a new bus line could be established for a much lower initial cost. New suburban developments would make deals with HE to establish express bus routes to them, agreeing to subsidize the cost to compensate for low ridership. Streetcars remained the city’s transit backbone, but it was no longer considered essential to further development

The streetcar may still have worked for the more densely settled inner city, but the cost of track maintenance and reconstruction were rising. As the tracks and streets aged, HE deemed it more cost-effective to substitute with buses than to rebuild the tracks. This also “relieved HE of the burden of having to pay a portion of the paving cost as required by the city. As a result, the city’s paving program appears tohave been the greatest single factor in determining the order in which the streetcar lines were abandoned” (Baron).

While Houston’s population was increasing, streetcar ridership remained stagnant, as more and more people embraced the car. When businesses and other non-residential development began popping up in the suburbs it was clear that people were using the car for more than just their commutes. Houston was already well on its way to becoming the car-dependent city it is today.

The official abandonment of the streetcar system occurred in 1940 in a deal between the city and HE. The mayor of Houston had an interest in gaining ownership of the interurban route, most of which was operated by HE. His main motive was a project he had been championing, a proposed multi-lane highway to Galveston (which would eventually become the Gulf Freeway). In exchange for the right-of-way on the Houston-Galveston interurban corridor and $50,000 the city would take on the expensive task of dismantling all of the street rails, making HE’s transition to buses complete. “The death of Houston’s streetcar system was thus, in a very real sense, tied with the birth of Houston’s super-highway system” (Baron).

It is interesting to not that while the bus was touted by Houston Electric as being a more ‘flexible’ means of transportation, most of the routes continued to follow the old street line rails.

So it was not simply preference for the car but the convergence of a complex set of factors, such as real estate interests pushing outward development beyond the feasible reach of streetcars, financial trouble, economic considerations that made buses a more appealing option, unfavorable policies and political decisions (denial of fare increase, the paving requirement, etc.) and city boosterism in favor of superhighways that led to the demise of Houston’s streetcar system.

Houston has made connection to the outside world for business purposes a major priority in its history. In the railroad boom of the mid-1800s Houston boosters raced to make the city a railroad hub, opening it up to new markets for its agricultural goods. Houston also accomplished the feat of gaining access to sea trade on Gulf of Mexico with the dredging of the Houston Ship Channel in 1908, giving it the enormous economic advantage of a sheltered inland port. Houston became even more internationally connected in recent decades by its two airports, William P. Hobby and George Bush Intercontinental.

All of these landmark transportation decisions in Houston’s history were made with the single-minded goal of economic growth. While they did help Houston to prosper financially, they make it clear that transportation has mostly been viewed as a tool for moving goods around. Human mobility within the city has not been an object of  thoughtful consideration and planning, but rather something that was merely used as a tool to facilitate city growth.

Seemingly unlimited political will to privilege highway funding above other modes of transit in conjunction with real estate developers’ and banks’ interest in furthering suburban development has facilitated Houston’s boundless outward sprawl. The result is that Houstonians have no other choice than to depend on private transportation. Even if a Houstonian would prefer not to drive a car, the dearth of infrastructure for alternative transit options means that there is no way to express that preference.

In light of its car-dependence today, most Houstonians would be surprised to discover that Houston was originally built up around  a passenger streetcar system, made up of over 100 miles of railways. While cars serve to explain Houston’s outward growth post WWII, the city’s original ascendency from a muddy commercial center in the mid 1800s to a city of skyscrapers by the 1920s was facilitated not by the automobile, but by the electric streetcar. In his 1997 book, Houston Electric: The Street Railways of Houston, Texas, Steven M. Baron writes,

“”For half a century, life in Houston was unimaginable without streetcars. Merchants, clerks and factory workers went to work on them. Shoppers boarded them with the day’s purchases or the groceries. Young people rode them to school and on dates. Accounts of life in Houston during the decades surrounding the turn of the century are full of references to streetcar travel, for it was the dominant mode of transportation for all but the richest citizens… even after the automobile began replacing the horse, most Houstonians still relied on public transit for everyday commuting. Only in the 1920s did this pattern begin to change significantly…”

The Beginning of Transportation in Houston

“Until the 1920s virtually every significant land development was located on or near an existing or proposed streetcar line.” (Baron)

In 1868 Houston had reached a population of 10,000 people, all living and working within one square mile of land. The city was a bustling commercial center, a major exporter of cotton, pine lumber, and petroleum, made possible by all the railroads that passed through it. That year marked the first appearance of public transportation in Houston, a mule-drawn passenger streetcar that initially operated on abandoned freight railways. With advancing technology, the mule-drawn streetcar eventually gave way to the electric streetcar and an expanding network of railways.

Streetcar Suburbs

There was always a close relationship between the streetcars and property development. The coming of the streetcar ushered the city into its first period of significant suburban development.  Real estate developers, who saw opportunity for profit in Houston’s outlying land made many maneuvers to extend streetcar service to their new suburban communities, or in some cases tried to establish their own streetcar company. Houston Heights, Montrose, Magnolia Park, Houston Harbor, and Woodland Heights all originated as streetcar suburbs.

Perhaps as evidence of the long-standing anti-urban sentiment in the United States (Judd & Swanstrom) people took this first opportunity to relocate outside of the dirty, bustling central city. Dense residential areas grew up alongside the streetcar rails, creating Houston’s first instance of relatively distinct land uses, as people relied on the central city to conduct their business activity and errands but opted to live on the outskirts. However, unlike the sprawling land-use patterns of today, streetcar suburbs were necessarily concentrated around the railways, making for dense residential areas where property values were directly proportional to proximity to the trolley lines. The streetcar suburbs were not self-sufficient. They depended on the central city for their existence.

What happened to Houston’s streetcar system?

Houston’s streetcar system disappeared before WWII, and for sixty four years  of its history  the city had no internal passenger railways. From 1990 until 2004 (when MetroRAIL was built), Houston was the largest city in the nation without a rail system.

In the next post I will explore the factors that led to the streetcar’s demise. This story is a strong demonstration of Houston’s distinctive character, illuminating the particular interests and cultural values that have been favored by the city’s politics throughout its history.

Sources:

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/43630527@N05/4054179893/

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5851165.html

Houston Electric: The Street Railways of Houston, Texas, Steven M. Baron

San Francisco, September 1992. A group of bicycle commuters, discussing their mutual frustration with marginalization and endangerment in the city’s streets, spearheaded a monthly urban bike ride they called Commute Clot. As the event quickly grew in popularity to hundreds of riders per month, they changed the name to Critical Mass, inspired by a documentary that showed how Chinese cyclists negotiate major intersections with no traffic signals by using the influence of their collective numbers to forge ahead together. Critical Mass drew in a wide variety of people who wanted the opportunity to promote sharing of the streets and to elevate the profile of bicycles as a viable mode of transportation. Critical Mass has since become a global phenomenon, catching on in hundreds of cities in the US and around the world.

Critical Mass isn’t just about anti-car and pro-bike activism, but a general sense of malaise with the confining features of modern life and how this is reflected in the car-centric urban form. In an essay from Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration by Chris Carlsson, a Critical Mass participant makes an effort to describe the values and purpose of this rather amorphous social movement:

Critical Mass is an unparalleled, practical experiment in public, collective self-expression, reclaiming out diminishing connectedness, interdependency and mutual responsibility. CM provides encouragement and reinforcement for desertion from the rat wheel of car ownership and its attendant investments. But even more subversively, it does it by gaining active participation in an event of unmediated human creation, outside of economic logic, and offering an exhilarating taste of a life practically forgotten – free, convivial, cooperative, connected, collective … Critical Mass since its beginning has identified itself as a celebration more than a protest, and is for many of its participants a prefigurative experience, both calling attention to and actually creating a taste of a different way of life … It is a public demonstration of a better way of moving through cities.

Last year I began participating in Critical Mass Houston every last Friday of the month. The Houston ride is casual and low-speed, originating at Tranquility Park downtown and usually lasting around 3 hours. Following the CritMass conventions, Houston’s ride is an “organized coincidence,” with no formal leadership and no planned route. Each week someone different steps up to get the ride started and forge the way. Sometimes there are stops along the way at various venues to give riders a chance to catch up and socialize.

One of the more controversial practices of this movement is that the ride uses safety in numbers to flout traffic laws. A common tactic of Critical Mass rides is for a few riders, called “corkers,” to block each intersection so that the rest of the riders can go by, even through red lights. As one would imagine, this occasionally generates hostility from Houston drivers, who are particularly unused to accommodating pedestrians and cyclists. I have seen some instances of drivers who were stopped at the intersection becoming belligerent, sitting on their horns, getting out to yell, or inching their car up toward the corker. But fortunately, for the number of intersections the ride goes through, these occurrences are relatively rare. Bystanders and drivers tend to be mostly amused and/or supportive.

While it has met some opposition to its methods by other bicycle advocacy groups, Critical Mass rides are definitely succeeding in grabbing attention. Even in the two years that I have attended the Houston rides on and off I have seen a noticeable increase in participation. At my first Critical Mass, there were maybe 75-150 riders. In last month’s ride there were easily 400.

I find this popular uprising against Houston’s systemic exclusion of cyclists on the roads to be a fascinating recent development. Critical Mass does not claim to be a protest or political demonstration, but rather a spontaneous gathering of cyclists who want a chance to reclaim the roads. In some cities the rides have taken on more explicit political stances, forming activist groups that communicate the complaints and desires of cyclists to local government.

While I am a bit skeptical that an event by primarily young, countercultural types in Houston’s downtown will be an agent of wide-sweeping change across a sprawling metropolis ruled by business interests, I do see it as an indicator of changing preferences and a visible presence of young progressives in Houston that have the potential to influence the city’s character. By creating a demand for more bike-friendly policies and development (a critical mass, if you will), there will be a greater business interest to appeal to people who want that kind of lifestyle.

Houston has never been known as a destination for vibrant street life, but there is definitely a growing demand here for more walkable and bikeable urbanism. There are pockets of hope, such as pedestrian-oriented developments in the Midtown and Montrose area, as well as the new mixed-use town centers sprouting up in Sugarland, Memorial, and other suburbs, which have proven to be wildly popular.

I highly recommend reading the wikipedia article. It goes through the history of Critical Mass as a social movement, criticisms and responses, and other similar rides around the world. You can also visit the Houston Critical Mass blog.

Arguably the biggest factor in defining a city is the way that people get around in it. With this blog I intend to explore transportation in Houston- its history, current policy issues, controversies, and future development possibilities. Through this I will try to identify the stakeholders and their economic and political interests that are shaping the story of transportation in Houston. My posts will be informed by a mixture of class readings, online news articles, academic sources, and my personal experience of living in Houston all my life.

I thought I would begin this blog by sharing my personal inspiration for choosing to write about transportation in Houston. I have always lived in Houston, so I grew up accustomed to getting in the family car for every little errand. Criss-crossing highways, big box stores, and seas of parking lots constituted the taken-for-granted milieu of my childhood. Now that I am at Rice, my classes and experiences have awoken me to the inherent unsustainability of this urban form and its corresponding way of life, not to mention its negative impacts that it has on health and well-being.

You only realize the force of the current when you try to go against it. I went through a period where I would feel increasingly guilty and frustrated every time I had to drive off of Rice campus during rush hour and participate in the madness. When I  decided to start riding my bike  for short off-campus errands, it became even more clear how all-consuming and self-perpetuating car culture can be. I never fully realize the complete dearth of infrastructure  for alternative transportation options (such as adequate bike paths, bike lanes and consistent, well-maintained sidewalks) until I was out trying to navigate the urban terrain without the protection of a car. In some areas of the city, cycling and pedestrianism are so out of place that they seem like deviant behavior… or a death wish, as Houston drivers are not accustomed to accommodating pedestrians and cyclists. However, the more I learn about the social, economic, and political forces and attitudes that shaped Houston, the more I realized that it’s going to take a lot more than mere individual resistance to forge a path for other forms of transportation in Houston.

Photo source: http://blogs.edf.org/texascleanairmatters/page/3/