Rethinking Houston

The week before the Super Bowl, the new, pedestrian-friendly version of Avenida de las Americas in front of the George R. Brown Convention Center was packed with people. Some were there for Super Bowl festivities, while others lined the newly redesigned pedestrian space to protest the Trump Administration's executive orders on immigration.

It's significant that today, both those events could happen in the middle of a street in front of one of Houston's economic engines.

Converted from what was formerly a six-lane road, the new pedestrian zone includes wider sidewalks and a pedestrian plaza, a smaller right-of-way that encourages bikes, pedestrians, and cars to use the same space at slower speeds, public art and new street-level restaurants.

The remaking of the Avenida de las Americas into a more pedestrian friendly plaza is a statement of what is possible here, despite Houston's car-centric design. Historically, Houston's approach has given us a built environment where, at best, pedestrians and bicyclists are slightly less-than-uncomfortable as they cross the city, and, at worst, they fear for their lives. But the Avenida de las Americas experience shows us we can pursue a different approach.

While building safer streets should be our foundational goal, there are other advantages to this approach. Higher foot traffic in a business or commercial district is good for the economy and promotes higher sales. We can build them because they make our neighborhoods more interesting and encourage us to lead more active, healthy lives.

Best of all, there isn't just one way to pursue this. The city has a number of examples of great streets that encourage pedestrian, bicycle and transit use while not removing cars. We can prioritize people without prohibiting cars.

In Houston's East End, a formerly empty median was remade into the Navigation Esplanade, a pedestrian plaza has helped to revive activity along a central commercial corridor in the neighborhood. By marginally shrinking the right-of-way of the two lanes of traffic, the project created a wide central median that was re-done by the East End Management district into an engaging public space. Today a weekly farmer's market and a variety of street festivals use the median. Pedestrians have easier, stop-light controlled access to the median and cars tend to travel more slowly in the stretch next to the populated median.

In neighborhoods, this approach might be as simple as designing streets that require drivers to travel at lower speeds. A bill in the state Legislature would lower the prima facie speed limit from 30 to 25 mph on city streets to improve safety. But beyond regulatory changes we can physically remake neighborhood streets to calm traffic and encourage mixed-mode usage where bikes, pedestrians, and cars share space safely. The Energy Corridor has already introduced the city's first woonerf, a design feature from The Netherlands that forces cars to slow and encourages pedestrians and bikes to share the road space. Other neighborhoods could follow suit or pursue their own strategies - building bulb-out curbs to narrow streets or pushing for the creation of wider pedestrian realms in future projects.

Some of our biggest commercial districts are a small step away from remaking themselves. Places like City Centre and Sugar Land Town Center could pursue parking and street-level interventions that remove cars from key commercial sections and open up foot traffic. Rice Village and the Museum District might look for ways to close or reduce traffic on small, underutilized sections of streets to encourage safer mode mixing. Rice Village's anchor tenant Trademark Property announced the creation of a pedestrian plaza along Morningside Drive. Such strategies could even be pursued initially on a temporary basis. Experiments can extend to our streets and we don't have to be afraid to close something to traffic for a test run.

And finally, many of our major corridors could be rethought and re-engineered in bold ways to help create a different kind of Houston. Wide, car-centric boulevards like Bellaire Boulevard or Richmond Avenue are too wide in many places, especially along major commercial activity nodes with concentrated traffic of vehicles and pedestrians. Options - including shrinking road widths, remaking the pedestrian realm, and reconsidering setback requirements on businesses that put front doors instead of parking lots adjacent to sidewalks - could remake these spaces. Even simply adding additional traffic lights could create safer crossings for pedestrians.

Such projects would require that we imagine a city that isn't only experienced through a car. This shift, to work on a grand scale, would require real money - not nearly as much as a single lane of highway costs - but real money nonetheless. It would also require cooperation among the Texas Department of Transportation, the city of Houston's Public Works and Planning departments, the Harris County Engineering Department, and citizens through the city.

Most important, these efforts don't have to happen in isolation. If we pursue a collection of such projects, the spaces could be tied together by the Bayou Greenways initiative or the in-progress bike plan to transform the way Houstonians think about and move through the city. The city recently inaugurated a walkable place committee to explore how we might pursue such an agenda.

Our streets are meant to be places of interaction, commerce and activity. Those things don't have to only happen in a car. They shouldn't only happen in a car. We only have to have the willingness to imagine ourselves experiencing that kind of street realm and then act to make that kind of street possible.

Shelton is director of Strategic Partnerships at Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research.