Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Which city has the ugliest asphalt expanse? The deadest downtown? The most awful place to sit and eat lunch? Those are the questions you must ask yourself as we approach the finale of Parking Madness, our hunt for the worst parking crater in the U.S.

We’re wrapping up Final Four competition today with Tulsa and Houston vying for the chance to take on Milwaukee in the championship game.

Here we have Tulsa, where the south half of downtown has pretty much been replaced with thousands of 9 foot-by-20 foot stalls:

Our friend Steve Lassiter in Tulsa sent along these shots to give us some historical context. Here are views of downtown Tulsa, facing north from the same point, in 1978 and 2005:

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NCAA basketball has nothing on the drama, the intrigue, the heartbreak of a competitive parking crater tournament. We’re now into the “Elite Eight” round of Parking Madness, and today’s winner will join Dallas in the Final Four. It’s going to be a fierce competition between Louisville and Houston.

Louisville’s downtown, you’ll recall, looks like this:

This entry was submitted by Patrick Smith (@cityresearch on Twitter). Note that the grey boxes are buildings that haven’t been uploaded yet to Google Earth. Local urbanists conservatively estimate that at least one-third of downtown Louisville’s land area is occupied by parking.

Now southward to this anonymously-submitted Houston parking crater:

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With Milwaukee, Tulsa, Dallas, Louisville, Cleveland, and Atlanta advancing to the second round of Parking Madness, there are only two spaces left in the Elite Eight of parking disasters. In this installment, we’re looking at two very different cities, each of which is extremely car-centric in its own way. It’s San Bernardino versus Houston.

Let’s start with San Bernardino. Here’s an old postcard of 3rd and F Street in downtown:

And on this site right now are a mall and its assorted parking lots, which obliterated the street grid:

Reader Kevin Dumler writes:

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This video, made by congestion pricing wunderkind Lewis Lehe, could help explain how TxDOT could get its finances in order and reduce congestion on Houston streets at the same time. The answer is a smart policy in place in Singapore, a smaller place with a bigger population and much freer flowing streets.

We’ve featured Lehe’s videos before, which present a compelling economic argument for congestion pricing.

Last night delivered some good results — and some disappointment — for transit-related ballot initiatives around the country.

The biggest disappointments came from Los Angeles, Memphis, and Houston.

A measure to continue the half-cent sales tax for transit in Los Angeles County until 2069 was narrowly defeated, falling less than two percent short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage, Damien Newton reports at Streetsblog Los Angeles.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had championed Measure J, which would have raised revenues to accelerate the pace of construction projects like the West Side Subway. But a coalition of bus riders and other interests who don’t fit the “anti-transit” label opposed the 30-year measure, saying the projects favored new construction over existing riders. Still, the referendum got a “yea” from 65 percent of voters — a clear majority, but not quite the two-thirds vote required in California.

Meanwhile, residents of the city of Memphis rejected, in a 60-40 vote, an innovative measure to impose a one-cent gas tax hike to fund transit improvements. The measure would have generated between $3 and $6 million annually to shore up the city’s bare-bones transit system, the local ABC affiliate reports. Memphis is unusual in having the authority to impose its own gas tax, separate from state and federal gas taxes, but it appears that resident declined to use that authority this time around.

Transit suffered a loss in Houston as well. The region’s voters upheld Metro’s policy of diverting one-quarter of the revenues collected for transit to road projects. The measure was opposed by transit advocates like Houston Tomorrow‘s David Crossley, who argued that this transfer has cost the Houston region $2.7 billion in transit improvements over the past 35 years.

On to the good news: There was cause for jubilation in Virginia Beach and in Orange County, North Carolina.

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Transit and bike activists are creative folks. More and more young, car-eschewing millennials are making their case in amateur music videos. The result is funnier and more imaginative than anything you’ll find on basic cable.

Check out this one from the University of Michigan. Production value, casting, script — this video is almost too good. Extra points for creative use of puppets and originality in drawing on the tradition of the Broadway musical:

More than Broadway, however, the active transportation advocacy music video genre tends to draw its inspiration from hip hop. Who could forget this Legoman rap video promoting center-running light rail for Detroit? This was also produced by some wildly talented folks at the University of Michigan.

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Meet Pedestrian Pete, otherwise known as Houston notable Peter Brown.

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.

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.

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.

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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