For anyone interested, I’ll be giving a webcast tomorrow in conjunction with Strong Towns on the subject of Urban Design and Property Values. This is a new-and-improved version of a talk that I’ve presented at CNU-18, CNU-Central Texas, Texas Tech University, the Texas APA Convention, the Texas Trails Convention, CNU-Next Gen, CNU 20, and Houston Tomorrow. I think it’s pretty good, evidenced by how many times I’ve been asked to present it.

The webcast is from 2:00 – 3:30 PM. Register for free online and you’ll get an email with instructions on how to join the webcast. You’ll be able to tweet questions during the event, I’ll respond to many of them at the end of the webcast, and will do the best I can to answer all the rest via twitter / email etc. when its over. I hope you’ll check it out.

After arriving at a decision two weeks ago in perhaps the most open, transparent public process in Houston history, a totally different deal was arrived at in Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack’s office early this week.

Reportedly under threats from Harris County, Houston Mayor Parker and Metro chair Gilbert Garcia have agreed to ask the board to almost completely change its earlier decision, which would have allocated the General Mobility Program funds to cities and unincorporated Harris County fairly according to how much of the sales taxes were collected in each of the jurisdictions.

Under the existing program, 14 cities and unincorporated Harris County get back far more than 25% of taxes collected in their jurisdictions and the City of Houston gets far less. The board decided last week that the ballot concept should correct those inequities and set up a formula for fair allocation.

Immediately after that vote, Commission Radack told the Chronicle that allocating money fairly was “disgusting” and began to apply pressure to the City and Metro. Now those entities have agreed to change the ballot to the following (and perhaps more):
- Leave the allocations as they are, limiting the City’s participation
- Cap the amounts at 2014 levels, with all increments above those levels split 50/50 between Metro and the other entities
- Prohibit Metro from spending any of its increment on rail expansion
- Remove the requirement for a new referendum no later than 2021

The Metro board will vote tomorrow (Friday) on final language for the ballot. Houston Tomorrow believes the board should stick with the result of the public process and reject this new backroom deal.

WE ASK OUR READERS TO SEND A QUICK NOTE TO THE BOARD RIGHT NOWtelling them you don’t support this Harris County attempt to circumvent the process, remove fairness from the ballot issue, and end rail expansion in the Metro area.

I sent an email. If you’re sick of the rural interests pushing the city around, and of corrupt power brokers attempting to subvert the democratic process, I encourage you to speak up as well.

Apparently, the [Bagby St. pedestrian improvements] project (already 100 days into construction) with city-approved plans that have been vetted by members of the community, is coming to a halt in a couple days. Yes, construction (and all work on Bagby) is about to stop (and remain in its current state). Why? Because the city’s Public Works Department wants three lanes of traffic on Bagby… even though Midtown had traffic studies conducted that said only two lanes are needed, and that the community wants Bagby to be more pedestrian friendly…

Apparently, “Public Works wants Bagby to be a pass-through street where cars can fly through Midtown,” and they’re willing to flush all the existing public money that has been spent on this project down the drain to go back AFTER approving the project and deny it. Sadly, I’m not surprised. Houston has 4 blocks of decent urban form in a city of ~6 Million people… and according to Public Works that’s four blocks too many.

Now, according to InnerLooped this is the report from adjacent property owners, but it hasn’t been “officially” announced to the public. Still this kind of crap from the city is absolutely unacceptable, and if you’re as upset about it as I am you need to let them know.

Email the following:

mayor@houstontx.gov

districtc@houstontx.gov

atlarge1@houstontx.gov

atlarge2@houstontx.gov

atlarge3@houstontx.gov

atlarge4@houstontx.gov

atlarge5@houstontx.gov

Plus add your own district councilmember (unless you live in Dist. C). Tell them you want to hear from them that this crap isn’t true and that they won’t stand for this kind of disgraceful waste of public money, violation of public process, disregard for public will, and backwards public policy.

A crude paraphrase of the philosophy that emerged would sound like this:

Engineer: You know, we’ll build these highways, and they’ll function like pipes. The cars will be like water molecules, flowing uniformly through these pipes. So we can design the roads for a smooth-flow condition, and it will just work perfectly. Once we’ve gotten rid of the intersections there will never be another traffic delay again.

Skeptic: Ok, but what about the drivers? How can you be sure they’ll use the freeways correctly?

Engineer: Oh, that’s easy: we make them get a license in order to drive, and we require *driver’s education* to get a license. So then we just put up a sign telling people what speed to go, and we teach them how to leave the correct distance between cars etc., and it’ll be great! Everyone will behave, because it’s in their own best interest to behave.

Of course, we know that isn’t what happened. Humans suck at driving. We get mad and honk and swerve and cut people off and rubberneck and don’t pay attention and nearly miss our exit and swing across 3 lanes of traffic nearly killing ourselves to save the five minutes it would have taken to just take the next exit and u-turn. Humans are nothing like water molecules. We have minds, and we have emotions, and somehow Engineers seem to have great difficulty understanding and correcting for that.

Now, today a friend emailed me a link to this video, which is basically an information campaign going in in Mexico to raise awareness of the social costs of auto subsidies. It’s interesting, not exactly the same situation we have in the US but certainly there are similar issues.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv0Fjk9D968

Here’s what really struck me from the video, though: in it they point out that traffic behaves like a gas. That is, it spreads out and fills all the available space. So it doesn’t really matter how much room there is in the system, traffic will spread evenly throughout and use any room that’s available.

I’m sure others have heard this before but for whatever reason I hadn’t, and it hadn’t occurred to me until I saw the video. From here on out though, I’ll remember that. And the next time someone asks me how my drive was, I’ll tell them: “It was a gas.”

As Minister Robert Muhammad said in a 2009 blog post, “The public transportation system of Harris County has been looted for the past 21 years by the City and county to the tune of $2.5 billion. Let me be explicit, 25% of public transit revenue from the one cent public transit sales tax has gone for street, drainage, and landscaping projects. This is NOT what voters established Metro to do when it was created in 1978.”

Muhammad also pointed out that the $2.5 billion could have been used to leverage another $2.5 billion in federal money over the years, so more than $5 billion has been lost that could have already produced the expansion of transit system we need.

This kind of stuff is just ridiculous, and it’s got to stop.

Two thoughts:

1. I am an ardent, hard-core believer in Rail transit as a critical part of our urban and inter-urban infrastructure. But, 3 hours to Austin isn’t good enough. Not many people are going to take inter-city rail to auto-dependent cities where you have to have a car to get around unless the rail is notably faster or cheaper than driving. Despite their progressive reputation, Austin is much harder to get around car-free than Houston. Neither city has decent transit service to the majority of places people live and work, although Houston’s existing transit is vastly better than Austin’s, and it’s current transit expansion will only widen that gap.

2. The folks who planned the Capital Metro Rail project should have zero input on this proposed inter-city line.

It’s both a financial and political waste when you spend $105 million on a 32+ mile regional rail system that takes over an hour to drop you off in the outskirts of a downtown where you almost certainly have to take a very slow bus to actually get anywhere you want to go. Austin should have learned from Houston, which spent $325M on it’s 7.5 mile system. At first it sounds like Houston got a raw deal, but because it’s an urban circulator in the densest part of Houston it carries about 38,000 people per day, where Austin’s system caries 1,600.

Thus, Houston spent about $8500 per passenger/day, whereas Austin spent about $65,000 per passenger/day. Houston’s Metro carries almost 14 million people per year, Austin’s is on track to carry less than 600 thousand. If you look at a standard 30-year amortization of capital costs, Houston capital investment was about $0.78 per passenger, whereas Austin’s was austin’s was about $5.99.

So who got a better deal?

Inter-city rail is a critical part of our infrastructure future, but only when:

1. It’s faster than driving.
2. It costs less than driving (about half, so the train is at least competitive with a two-person carpool).
3. It delivers you to dense, walkable places that have transit access to a large percentage of their surrounding area.

Items 1 and 2 require serious commitment from the state and federal government to invest in rail as seriously as they invest in highways — OR a total desubsidization of car travel so that private sector rail can actually compete.

Item 3 requires the same things on a local level, but also a significant cultural change to embrace urban density on a much larger scale than any place in America (perhaps outside of the urban northeast) has ever done before. This is not to say that urban density must be forced on people, but that it must be made legal again. Right now the suburban, low-density, auto-dependent development pattern is required by law in every city in the US (including Houston). Until that changes no rail (or other non-automobile) system will perform very well.

A footnote: to compare the cost of investments and “seriousness of commitment” it’s helpful to sometimes look at the difference in transit and rail spending. While this is definitely not an apples-to-apples comparison, it does give you a sense of the order-of-magnitude difference in the commitment to each mode.

The Katy Freeway carries something like 220,000 cars per day, and the most recent expansion, widening cost about $2.8 billion. That’s about $12,700 per car/day in capital investment, or about $1.20 per car trip if you spread it over 30 years.

So the order of magnitude of capital investment in Houston is about 10x higher for freeway projects than rail projects, and the capital cost per trip is 33% higher. Oh, and the highway creates massive noise and emissions pollution, takes up an enormous amount of physical space, increases downstream congestion, and is incompatible with any other transportation mode. All that, and yet mega freeway projects are embraced in this region with little more than token questions as to their cost / benefit, while rail projects are lambasted from all angles and continuously derided as a waste of money.

This is what I mean about the need for a culture-shift if we’re ever going to have transportation freedom-of-choice.

At the moment I’m looking for an intern who could work with me in my office on Washington Ave. for about 5-10 hours a week. The ideal candidate would probably be an architecture / urban design / graphic design student, but anyone who is passionate about place-making might be a fit.

If you’re interested, or you know anyone else who might be interested, check out the job post online. I’d also be grateful to anyone who shares the job post, the more I can get the word out about this, the better.

Thanks!

Read more from the .

If you haven’t been paying attention to this issue, it’s time to tune in.

A thoughtful response to this issue was released last week, and I agree with that response.

Today I want to take a moment just to consider the larger picture of what’s going on in the City politically, and point out a different way of looking at the problem at hand.

The City’s current rulebook is built on the assumption that every property in the city is exactly like every other property. Famously, we do not have zoning that distinguishes what owners can do based on the surrounding context.

The obvious reality, however, is that every property in the City of Houston is not the same. In the past the city was pressured to allow higher-density development inside the loop, which led to the creation of Houston’s two zones: the ‘urban zone’ and ‘suburban zone’. Issues like Ashby High-Rise and Heights Walmart have pushed the city to put token restrictions on towers in residential areas, while also creating a third zoning category, the ‘Major Activity Center’, where said restrictions do not apply. Major Activity Centers are supposed to be an opportunity for places that have a lot of development to get major rule changes that they’ve been clamoring for without changing things around the rest of the city.

So the rulebook now stands on the following premise: “Everything outside the loop is the same, and everything inside the loop is the same, except for the places that are completely different.”*

Any observant person can see where this is going: because every property is, in fact, not the same as every other, the city is under political pressure to create more and more zones on the map that have different rules from each other. If you think that sounds a lot like zoning, you’re right.

There are two political ideas that have historically kept zoning out of Houston:

1. Developers like it better when there are fewer rules to learn, so having a single set of rules for the whole city is good for business.
2. The City does not know what the best use of a piece of land is, the market does, so the City should not be in the business of regulating land use.

These two ideas are basically correct. Simpler and more consistent rules generally are better for business, and land-use based regulation offers very few benefits at a great cost of economic and bureaucratic inefficiency.

However, the assumption that every piece of property in the city is and should be treated exactly the same is both wrong *and* unpopular. So that’s slowly but surely going away. The problem is, the City’s attempts to adhere to Principle #1 while trying to adapt the ordinances to reality and to political pressure mean we’re headed toward an increasingly balkanized set of “exception” zones that have totally separate and unrelated rules.

The reason the City is taking this approach is that the City believes that the only alternative to the balkanized exceptions approach is land-use zoning, which violates Principle #2. This is the great fallacy of Houston.

A far better and more effective approach to development regulation is form-based code. In a form-based code the scale of a building and the way it relates to its surroundings is regulated, and land-use is not regulated. Incidentally, this is how the City’s rulebook already works: Chapter 42 prescribes that all development in the City of Houston must be built in the conventional suburban form, with large setbacks between buildings and streets, and buildings oriented toward surface parking.

The great opportunity for Houston would be to take a more rational and orderly approach to the political pressure and physical reality that not every property is the same. We could do this while continuing to adhere to Principles 1 and 2.

What if we simply tied development standards and street standards together? If your property fronts on a small street, you need to build a smaller scale building. If your property fronts on a larger-scale street you can build a larger-scale building.

Consider the following food-for-thought example. What if the High Density Ordinance looked like this:

* Note that “Directional Lane” means either one-way or each way. Ie: most of downtown has 4-5 lane one-way streets, which would qualify for unlimited height.

If you apply the logic above you’ll find that it already fits 98% of the development in Houston. Only a handful of high-rises around town fall outside of these parameters, and arguably those are the very high-rises the surrounding community believes are detrimental.

The best part of this formula is that it leaves the developer totally in control of density for any new greenfield project, but requires that they build streets that will offer appropriate capacity to the scale of proposed construction.

These rules are simple, they don’t require any special exception zones, they don’t allow high-rises in single-family neighborhoods, and they could be applied city-wide without an issue.

In fact, with a few minor additions (like sidewalk, utility, and platting standards) a simple set of rules like this could easily replace the City’s existing Chapter 42 and result in better development outcomes. That would be a win-win for everyone, and that is the kind of outcome we should be looking for. Instead we continue to see token efforts that slowly but surely make our development rules more complex and unpredictable without actually achieving the outcomes that the neighborhoods mobilized about in the first place.

* As an aside, they’re also about to change the definition of “urban” from “inside the loop” to “inside the Beltway”.