Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Brown, a former city council member and director of the urbanism group Better Houston, is conducting an ongoing video critique of this Texas city’s pedestrian environment.

Watch the verbal tongue lashing Pete delivers to Houston’s public agencies when he encounters a utility pole in the sidewalk. Pete is our kind of guy!

You can follow Pete’s adventures in walking at his new, elegantly designed blog Pedestrian Pete. (It has a nice ring, doesn’t it?)

We’re looking forward to seeing what Houston’s pedestrians are up against.

Yesterday, we started our year-end 2011 round-up. We lamented transit cuts in places where transit is more important than ever, cheered the successful ballot initiatives that will fund transportation lifelines, took a moment to explore the nuances of some difficult issues, and called out Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin for some hare-brained ideas about the best way to spend money.

Now we continue with the second installment: What cities shone a little brighter and what cities lost their luster?

Let’s start with the good.

Cities That Led the Way: Bike-share caught on in 2011 like never before. New York City announced a system to dwarf all others, complete with 10,000 bikes. Boston had a great first season. DC and Arlington expanded Capital Bikeshare. Chicago got a TIGER grant to go full-tilt on its system. And bike-share is popping up in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect it – most recently, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. All those cities deserve credit for investing in active transportation options for their residents.

Minneapolis took the Greenway to a more sustainable future. Photo: Micah Taylor / Flickr

Meanwhile, in the DC area, suburban retrofits in White Flint and Tysons Corner started transforming these into urban, transit-rich communities with vibrant daytime and nighttime populations.

And Salt Lake City showed the country how to solve some of the most vexing geographic, political, cultural, and ecological challenges of urbanism. The city got behind a set of growth principles that champion walkability, density, transit options, and land conservation. The city’s new, sustainable developments are wildly popular and incredibly successful at encouraging active transportation.

But it was Minneapolis that stole our hearts this year. The city rocketed to the top of the Bike-Friendliness charts with its Nice Ride bike-share system and its beloved Midtown Greenway, which transformed an old industrial railroad trench into a major cyclist thoroughfare connecting key parts of the city. And that’s not all – Minneapolis has gone through the whole complete streets shopping list, from road diets to bike parking to improved crossings to bike boulevards.

Perhaps even more significantly, the Twin Cities aren’t just tacking some nice cycling amenities onto an otherwise roads-heavy transportation program. They’re actually divesting from road infrastructure, tabling 14 planned highway expansions and improving transit options instead. They’re maximizing existing highways by adding bus lanes and priced shoulder lanes, and they’re investing in transit-oriented development. As one city transportation planner said, “We couldn’t keep going on acting as if we were going to get money to build our way out of congestion.”

Cities That Lagged Behind: We at Streetsblog aren’t shy about calling out state leaders who make bad decisions in favor of sprawl and against smart transportation options. We talked about some of those yesterday (we’re looking at you, Scott Walker). But sometimes it’s not the state but the cities themselves that have a special knack for making bad decisions. And this was a big year for it.

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Last week Streetsblog looked into the suburban real estate moguls who used their public offices to advance the country’s largest sprawl project – Houston’s third outerbelt, also known as the Grand Parkway. But even with all the cronyism and self-deal propelling this project forward, just a few months ago it looked like the Grand Parkway had been stopped in its tracks. The money had run out. The public was balking [PDF].

Then a man named Ned Holmes came to the rescue. A real estate developer, Texas DOT commissioner and prominent businessman, Holmes “found” the $350 million in unbudgeted money needed to move the project forward another 15 miles in its relentless, multi-decade march into the Houston region’s last natural grasslands.

TxDOT Commissioner Ned Holmes presented Judge Ed Emmett with the "prestigious Road Hand award," in January honoring those "who have given their time, energy and vision to help improve transportation throughout the state." Both Holmes and Emmett have been instrumental in building the Grand Parkway, the city's third outerbelt. Photo: Edemmett.com

In many ways Ned Holmes fits the profile of the government officials that have pushed this project forward in the past: He’s a real estate developer occupying a public office that gives him enormous power to shape the built environment.

In his public life, Holmes is a well-known pillar of the Texas conservative establishment. According to the Texas Secretary of State, he is the director of the Houston Baptist University, Associated Republicans of Texas, the Greater Houston Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Houston Partnership and the Governor’s Business Council.

In his business activities, however, Holmes keeps a lower profile. He made a fortune in banking, but he identifies himself as a real estate developer, the head of Parkway Investments.

As for what Parkway Investments does exactly, it’s hard to know. The company has no website. There is no public record of properties developed. Holmes declined to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to email queries. But he did respond through a TxDOT employee, who said Holmes does not stand to profit in any of his business ventures from the completion of the $5.2 billion Grand Parkway.

But the company certainly has a record for actively supporting local politicians. In 2004 alone, Parkway Investments donated $174,000 to a variety of candidates, making Holmes one of the single biggest political donors in the state.

According to data maintained by Texans for Public Justice, Holmes has been a big supporter of Texas Governor Rick Perry. In fact, Holmes donated $192,000 to Rick Perry before the governor appointed him to TxDOT’s powerful Texas Transportation Commission in 2007. (Rick Perry has given 15 appointed positions to individuals who have donated more than $200,000 to his campaigns, according to TPJ.)

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If the U.S. had a national transportation policy, this story of corruption and waste never would have happened.

With help from real estate interests, Houston has built the country's fourth-largest city around the automobile. Photo: Michael Stravato/AP

But an enduring feature of the current policy predicament is that once federal funding is in the hands of state DOTs, they more or less have a blank check, and the merit of any given transportation project often matters less than who’s boosting it. In no state is this more apparent than Texas. And no Texas transportation project has been bought-and-paid-for so unabashedly as the Grand Parkway.

The Grand Parkway is Houston’s $5.2 billion, 180-mile third outerbelt. This September, Texas DOT broke ground on the newest segment of the highway, funded in part with money from the 2009 stimulus package. Constructed piecemeal over decades through largely undeveloped land outside one of the nation’s fastest growing cities, the Grand Parkway is a pointed demonstration of how a state can fritter away billions in federal transportation funds for the benefit of a small group of well-connected people.

In April, when Streetsblog interviewed Billy Burge, head of the pro-highway, non-profit Grand Parkway Association, he conceded that the outerbelt’s latest expansion — Segment E, through the Katy Prairie — wasn’t even intended to handle increased traffic. He was pretty clear that the project was about enabling the development of rural land into large-lot, detached single-family homes. “You can call it sprawl, or you can call it quality of life,” he said.

But Burge didn’t mention that before becoming head of the Grand Parkway Association, he had cashed in on that growth as a developer. Or that, thanks to a special Texas regulation, the Grand Parkway Association had been granted quasi-governmental powers. That’s just how it goes in Texas, where the businessmen fund the politicians, the politicians appoint the businessmen to public office, and the office holders funnel taxpayer funds to projects that enrich their business interests.

The Grand Parkway was first conceived as a futuristic, pie-in-the-sky, long-term vision in the 1960s, when magic highway delusions reached their apex in America. But the plan was largely forgotten by the time Billy Burge Jr. and Bob Lanier, both major landowners along the corridor, teamed up to resurrect it in 1984.

At the time, Lanier, who would go on to become Houston’s mayor, owned 1,700 acres along the proposed Parkway. He was also the head of the Texas State Highway Commission, the five-member decision making arm of Texas DOT.

Burge was serving as the head of Metro, Houston’s transit authority. He was also the developer of Cinco Ranch, a five-square-mile master-planned community that is now home to 11,000 people. The first segment of the Grand Parkway directly bisected Burge’s development.

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It’s generally difficult to determine exactly how and to what extent the shadowy hand of Big Oil is at work in our publicly funded infrastructure decisions.

ExxonMobil wants to move its headquarters 10 miles further from the city of Houston. And that's all the reason Texas needs to spend $5.2 billion on a highway. Photo: Bloomberg

Some of the more notable exceptions over the past few years have included the Koch Brothers-Scott Walker Wisconsin roads bonanza. Or the attempted assassination of the Cincinnati Streetcar by Ohio’s asphalt lobbiest-turned-DOT Director, Jerry Wray.

But Texas has just taken self-interested interference in public infrastructure projects by an oil company to a whole new level.

Nevermind that the state can’t afford it. Or that the region doesn’t have the congestion to justify it. The Houston region is renewing its push for a $5.2 billion third outerbelt at the behest of ExxonMobil.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the state is short about $315 billion — with a b — short of what is needed just to keep its existing highways in good repair and moving smoothly.

But Exxon has apparently pulled the well-worn trump card for private businesses seeking massive public subsidy in the form of roadways: it has threatened to leave the region. The multinational oil corporation has plans for a 385-acre campus, naturally, outside the reach of Houston’s two existing outerbelts, according to the Huffington Post.

The commission’s vote in support of the project was unanimous, and if all goes as planned, the segments of the road adjoining ExxonMobil will go online just as the company’s new campus, which sits about 10 miles up the road from its old campus, is completed in 2015.

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There’s a place just outside Houston where the vinyl siding and attached garages thin out and recede into grasslands.

The Katy Prairie, one of the country's last remaining natural grasslands and an important bird habitat, may be replaced with a highway and sprawl. Image: Houston Tomorrow

In this place — one of the country’s few remaining tall-grass prairies — something amazing happens each fall. First hundreds, then thousands, then millions of birds arrive here at Katy Prairie, an international wintering grounds for migratory birds, especially waterfowl.

Over the decades, this 1,000 square mile sanctuary has largely survived the encroachment of farmers and relentless development pressure from neighboring Houston, thanks in no small part to its dedicated supporters.

But the Katy Prairie has never faced a opponent like the Grand Parkway before. Piece by piece, the Houston area has been building a third — yes, third — bypass for the region. And much to the horror of local environmentalists, the next segment is planned to directly bisect this extraordinary habitat.

Development of this pristine land isn’t just collateral damage — it’s the point of the project. Project sponsors make no bones about it: The 15.2-mile Grand Parkway segment through Katy Prairie is a $462 million development project as much as it is a transportation project. Known as “Segment E,” it would be the third phase in a 180-mile “scenic bypass” for Houston. Each of the 11 segments is considered a separate and “independently justifiable project.”

Billy Burge of the Grand Parkway Association says right now there isn’t much need for Segment E, in terms of traffic. Burge and his colleagues don’t shy away from the fact that the project will generate more car trips and sprawl. In fact, they have what you might call a “build it and they will come” philosophy about road-building and traffic.

“There’s real demand in 15 to 17 years to have this,” said Burge, who chairs the association overseeing the project for the state and the region. “Once that link is completed, you’ll have a steady stream of traffic.”

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It looks like the Houston region still has a long way to go in balancing the needs of cyclists and pedestrians with those of drivers. The region’s Transportation Policy Council came down largely on the side of auto infrastructure Friday in deciding how to allocate tens of millions of dollars in federal funding. On the bright side, an all-out push from local cycling and pedestrian advocates successfully preserved a chunk of funding for biking and walking that had been under threat.

Houston planners justified their decision by saying more roads are needed and that pedestrian and cycling infrastructure benefits special interests. Photo: mrchriscornwell/Flickr

In a meeting packed with active transportation supporters, the TPC moved to dedicate 100 percent of its $80 million in federal discretionary funds to auto infrastructure over the next three years. Local advocates did keep the TPC from diverting an additional $12 million to roads that had already been dedicated to transit, walking, and biking.

“We did win something,” said Jay Crossley, of Houston Tomorrow, one of the groups that led the charge to secure increased funding for bike, pedestrian and transit projects. In addition to asking that the $12 million be preserved, they had also demanded that no more than 55 percent of the other $80 million be used for auto-oriented projects. Those funds come from two federal programs that often support non-automotive modes, including one dedicated to reducing congestion and air pollution.

“That’s $12.8 million that won’t be taken away from alternative modes, but we thought it could go farther,” said Crossley.

According to Crossley, 26 people spoke at the meeting in favor of increased bike and pedestrian funding. The four remaining speakers remarked on specific road projects, without entering the debate about how funding should be divided between different modes.

Ultimately, however, TPC members said expanding the region’s road network into sprawling and unincorporated areas was a bigger priority than “small-ticket things that are representative of individual communities’ values as opposed to regional values,” according to a report by The Houston Chronicle.

“We’re trying to provide the best mobility and alternative projects possible for the people of the entire region, not just some small part of this region,” said Harris County Judge Ed Emmett.

The TPC’s decision bowed to powerful real estate and development interests, despite popular outcry, Crossley said.

“There is no public uproar saying we need more roads,” he said. “They did not listen to the people.”

Crossley said the local advocacy community will turn their energy to new objectives in the coming year. They will be organizing to support a statewide Complete Streets bill and also working to support safe passing bills large cities.

“This movement can do a lot and change things,” Crossley said. “We can put Houston on the path for reasonable transportation choices this year.”

Nobody would accuse the Houston region of lacking auto infrastructure. Now local bicycling and pedestrian advocates are fighting to protect their tiny slice of the pie. They’re anxiously awaiting a final decision tomorrow about a pro-road money grab by the Houston-Galveston Area’s Transportation Policy Council.

Advocates in Houston are rallying to prevent the local metropolitan planning agency from spending 100 percent of its federal air quality funds on more of this. Photo: Houston Tomorrow

The Council has zeroed in on an $80 million chunk of funding that was to be distributed between bike and pedestrian projects, transit, livable communities, roads and freight. Regional transportation officials decided earlier this year to dedicate 100 percent of the money to road budgets.

Their efforts to divert funding from transit, bicycling, and walking didn’t stop there. Council members also elected to take an additional $12 million in funds already allocated toward “alternative modes” and redirect it toward infrastructure for automobiles.

Dozens of bike projects are in jeopardy, as well as new sidewalks needed to help ensure the safety of pedestrians near the city’s coming light rail system.

Advocates for active transportation in the region have battled back. A coalition led by the local organizations Houston Tomorrow, Bike Houston and the Citizens’ Transportation Coalition has produced a petition with more than 2,000 signatures opposing the Council’s actions.

At tomorrow’s Transportation Policy Council meeting, the advocates plan to confront regional policymakers with an alternative plan, under which 45 percent of the money would be spent on transit, cycling or sidewalks.

“The feeling among a lot of people is that the time is now,” said Jay Crossley, of Houston Tomorrow. “At the very least we’re going to have hundreds of people in the room.”

The Houston region has traditionally under-invested in sustainable transportation projects, according to Robin Holzer of the Citizen’s Transportation Coalition. But the Transportation Council’s most recent move is especially egregious.

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This is the fourth installment of Streetsblog Capitol Hill’s series on key governor’s races. Earlier we brought you stories about a candidate who likes bikes but isn’t sure about transit in Tennessee, the choice between light rail and bus rapid transit in Maryland, and how bike paranoia is cutting the GOP off at the knees in Colorado. Here we turn to Texas.

Let’s not sugar-coat this. Rick Perry, already the longest-serving governor in Texas history, is almost certainly going to win an unprecedented third term. And that’s bad news for people hoping for a shift away from autocentric transportation planning.

An artist's rendering of the planned Trans-Texas Corridor, with a separate right-of-way for every mode. FHWA

Perry is running against Democrat and former Houston Mayor Bill White. White has challenged some of Perry’s more ill-conceived road-building projects and has some nice things to say about high speed rail, but he’s no banner-waving reformer.

“Throughout his administration, it was apparent that he was fine with people wanting trains, but he himself does not see them as an important priority,” said Andrew Burleson, who writes the transportation and planning blog neoHOUSTON. “To him, the purpose of democracy is to let people vote for frivolities if they wish, but his job as mayor was to keep cars moving.”

For example, Burleson said, White talked a good game about promoting transit, but he effectively blocked a metrorail extension bill that would have added 40 new miles of light rail to the seven miles already in the system. White’s administration insisted on 12-foot-wide traffic lanes on every street. Aside from the huge additional expense, Burleson said, “You don’t want that on a pedestrian-heavy street. Cars will drive too fast.”

White told Grist that he’s in favor of “removing barriers” to people who want to walk to work, but that he wouldn’t push walkable urbanism from the state level. He wants to reform TxDOT by decentralizing power to give local jurisdictions more of a say in where the money goes. He criticizes Perry’s road-building binge, mostly because the state had to take on billions of dollars in debt to do it. Texas, under Perry, has built more roads in the last 10 years than any other state – a fact Perry touts every chance he gets.

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You may remember, back in August, economist Ed Glaeser's series on high-speed rail at the New York Times' Economix blog. Glaeser put together a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis of a hypothetical Houston-Dallas line, which purported to show that rail was a poor investment. You may also remember me responding in detail, and generally pointing out how woefully incomplete and misleading his analysis was.

To give an idea of the errors in his work, Glaeser made no allowance for population growth, and he assumed that the sole land use effect of high-speed rail would be to shift 100,000 suburbanites to the central city in both Dallas and Houston.

But these are absurd assumptions. The Census Bureau projects that America's population will grow by 130 million by mid-century, and the National Academies' Transportation Research Board estimates that America will add anywhere from 60 million to 100 million households in coming decades -- nearly doubling the current number of housing units.

This suggests that there is enormous potential ridership growth in growing metro areas and large opportunities for land use shifts. But Glaeser pretends that the world will be more or less static in coming decades.

For these reasons and others like them, I'm not very happy with this week's statement by Brookings' Jonathan Rothwell that "Glaeser’s core approach is sound," and that Rothwell's analysis of high-speed rail numbers "focus[es] on just those aspects of Glaeser’s analysis which merit criticism: the interest rate and the costs per passenger."

This is far too kind to what Glaeser himself said was back-of-the-envelope and which should not be interpreted to "represent ... a complete evaluation of any actual proposed route."

Still, even Rothwell's limited analysis of Glaeser's model (see below chart), using conservative but more appropriate data points for cost per passenger and interest rate, shows that high-speed rail systems are very likely to be worth the investment.

(Chart: The New Republic's Avenue)