I think his main thrust is that at least we need to identify car-dependency as the problem. If we don’t, things can never get better. Once you recognize this as the problem, then you can start to adjust planning/spending priorities to make things better.
It’s not feasible just to rip it all up and start again, but continuing to build out new suburbs that do not and will not ever contribute to the prosperity of the city is just proving Einstein’s adage.
People get upset when they are trying to building light rail. I would be walking to work right now but Shepherd is a hazard to walk right now. The road work is done but the sidewalks are messed up.
I really want to walk to work, for a number of reasons.
I don’t think anyone will argue that Austin can be an unmitigated circus that can’t stay out of its own way. However, I don’t see how many of the recent changes the city is making (adding bike lanes, adding dedicated bus lanes downtown, removing slip lanes) are not objectively good things unless you are just anti-anything-but-cars.
I would love to take rail into downtown. They have a bus, but a) the bus doesn’t avoid traffic, and b) the hard part of taking the bus is driving to the bus stop, thus not avoiding the worst part of the commute. It’s really slow and kind of pointless.
Not only is Shepherd a disaster, but I don’t see that any of this work will make the road better.
I assumed it was done for drainage.
But it amazes me that there isn’t a commuter rail from Spring/Katy/Richmond/SugarLand/etc. into to the city. I’ve wanted that for years. I can’t imagine having a kid in the neighborhood I live in and getting them a bike. I’d have to load the kid and bike and drive somewhere so they could ride it.
I expect traffic in Houston, there are a lot of us living here, but I’d wish they would think of ways to get people where they need to go quickly (and not in a car).
BTW, I’ll take the bus to San Antonio. The only problem is the limited option on departure times. It takes just as long as driving there. If there was a train…
I’m wouldn’t characterize myself as “anything but cars,” but there hasn’t been a balance between facilitating auto traffic and bicycle traffic in a long fucking time. During that time, I have seen a ton of bike lanes added, a completely empty train that I wait on almost daily, and a ton of measures to slow traffic down. These urban planners are adding new tricks to slow my car down as we speak.
Meanwhile, I haven’t seen the percentage of bike use increase since my college days in the 80s where I went everywhere by bike. Imposing this “vision” has been a gigantic waste of public wealth.
This is spot on. When I worked in the office downtown I took the Park and Ride, which was great because I could read and listen to music, but the yuge downside is that it takes me probably as long to get to the P&R as the bus takes to get downtown some days.
I will say in our area of Katy (Cinco Ranch/Seven Lakes environs) there are lots of options for walking and biking. Mrs Sid rides her bike a lot for exercise and can ride for miles on local trails without having to cross very many streets. Sidewalks everywhere too pretty much, so whoever planned this area did a good job.
The park and ride is closer to downtown that it is to my house. One you get to the park and ride…one way, all freeway, into downtown. It’s getting to/from my house that is the long distance through aggravating, snarling traffic. The drive on the freeway is the relaxing bit.
The thing people most throw at rail projects is that “they lose money”. As if roads pay for themselves…
This is part of the problem created by how we mandate car-dependent suburbs, in that you need a car to get in/out. You can’t even walk through them as they’re designed without pedestrian/cyclist cut-throughs, so even on foot you have to snake around all the twists and turns. This also makes them impossible to run a bus through, even if the NextDoor app crowd would let that happen.
Most people see this as a feature, not a “problem”. I get that some out there want to live in a crowd of like-minded hipsters, but not everyone feels the same.
Transit and bike lines aren’t appealing to use in a car-oriented city unless they can reliably and safely get you 100% or the way to your destination. The only time I’ve regularly used either in Houston is when I worked downtown—the 82 ran close to my office and it was an easy walk home from the stop, but the thing that actually got me to use it was the frequency. It runs every 10 minutes, which makes it much more usable than a line that runs every 20-30 minutes. If I missed it, I knew there was another one coming before too long.
Nowadays I could take the Waugh bike lane 95% of the way to work but my wife and I usually drive in together now. I pass a few cyclists using it every day on my brief commute. Even if they were unused though, like a lot of bike lanes, they’re really part of a larger road-narrowing project to improve traffic safety (particularly important there as Waugh/Commonwealth are high-traffic streets running through a residential area). The 11th street bike lane up in the heights is the same deal. They’re narrowing the road to improve safety anyway—might as well use the space for a bike lane while they’re at it.
This is how getting in and out of a city like London, which is multiples larger than Houston, is achievable, because you don’t have to drive. Over 1 million people commute in and out of London on public transportation every day (this may be a pre-COVID number).
I lived 5 miles south of the City of London, and my overland train ride was 11 minutes. Yes, I walked from home to the station and, at the other end, from the station to my office. There were bus/tube options for both walks, but I was in my 20s and most of the time walking was fine. Car traffic was mostly at a standstill, but that doesn’t impact rail and busses/taxis had special lanes where they could zip past the traffic.
I’m totally fine with that. But if people want to live that way, they need to pay for the privilege. Right now, they are a giant money suck on city finances, not least of which because we keep building them bigger and more expensive roads so that they can live in cheaper sub-divisions and avoid taxes.
One can walk for miles in London and never break a sweat on most days. I don’t think I’d want to sit in an office in Houston with 100 other people who had just walked half a mile in August. For one thing, the constant chirp of defibrillators would be distracting.
I used to live in Montrose, and we would walk to things in the neighborhood all the time. We lived right next to an elementary school, and it was hilarious watching parents dropping off their kids by car getting frustrated because their God-given right to move at will was thwarted by parents walking their kids to school.
When we moved out and rented that house to a family, their two middle-school aged boys would walk themselves to school every day. There are at least 3 parks within easy walking distance to that house.
The only problem with walking in the neighborhood was that the ancient oak trees had turned a lot of the sidewalks into the mountain pass to Machu Picchu. Also, the street-lighting was patchy at best.
I could easily argue that if people wanted to live in a biker’s paradise they should pay for the privilege.
Again, most people don’t see living in a city like London as attractive. They WANT to live in a place where you can’t just bus people in and out. Residential suburbs didn’t spring up in a vacuum.
The main issue in London is the rain. On bad days, the office smelled like a kennel for wet dogs. On the 2 or 3 days a year when the temps get above 90℉, public transportation is pretty miserable. But this is compared to the other 362 days when driving would make one suicidal.
Also, on hot days, standing outside a pub with a cool beer watching the scantily-clad Essex girls tottering along to the station on their white FMPs was a fine way to pass time and allow the crush on the trains to die down.