Something new Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said recently that “we must push ourselves into unfamiliar territory” when we talk about transportation. “We need to be thinking not just about moving cars, but about connecting people to economic opportunity, creating great walkable places that people enjoy, attracting the next innovative workforce, and even reducing flood risks in our city.” The Mayor talks about supporting well-connected transit-oriented development in the multiple urban centers in our region and proposes that we improve them all. He calls those centers Complete...

We in the City of Houston are having a difficult time coalescing  around a general set of principles for the growth, development, and mobility of our community. The greatest concern is always mobility (followed by poverty). When more and more people live, work, and play in the same geographic area, the place becomes denser by definition. A city the size and age of Houston has long-established public rights of way for travel from place to place. Over time, these do not substantially change, because people have built thousands of living, working, playing facilities along those rights of way. As...

...the standard of health, comfort, and happiness experienced by an individual or group; the things that are needed for a good quality of life. Wikipedia says: Quality of life is the general well-being of individuals and societies. Quality of life should not be confused with standard of living, which is based primarily on income and acquisition of stuff. Improving the quality of life is the top priority in hundreds of towns and cities around the world, but especially in the United States, where quality of life determines the quality of the work and thinkforce at all levels. Houston...

By Kaid Benfield We know from exhaustive research that walkable neighborhoods and cities reduce driving, associated emissions, and living costs. Three important academic studies published earlier this year demonstrate that they are good for our health, too. In particular, the research, which examines different aspects of compact, walkable, and mixed-use communities and compares those aspects to published government health data, finds that such neighborhoods and cities are strongly associated with reduced rates of obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes. The reason...

“Affordable Housing” has a legal definition in Federal policy and that concept typically has broad support at the municipal level. People seeking a walkable urban lifestyle with easy transit connections among various walkable centers, have found the concept of “affordable housing” is largely used to build low-cost subsidized single-family houses on their own lots on cheap land. That policy requires the owners to use a car to get to nearly all amenities, including jobs. But a car costs nearly $10,000 every year, a big bite out of the affordability budget. Jettisoning that expense...

TAKE SURVEY The 2014 – 2018 Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy in the Gulf Coast Economic Development District sets vision, goals, and strategies for the regional economy. The plan takes direction from the Regional Plan for Sustainable Development created by the Houston-Galveston Area Council with significant community input. Perhaps the most powerful of the plan’s eight goals is this one: Our region’s residents live in safe, healthy communities with transportation options and have access to services and amenities that support a high quality of life. Or it could be this...

The infrastructure that is readily available and already owned by the public is the road and highway system. This system connects all the major origin and destination nodes in the Houston region. It is why those nodes were created. The circles on the map above show the top 25 job centers in the Houston region. Nearly all of those job centers are in the City of Houston. Eighty-eight percent of the region's people live around those job centers. Transit service is possible everywhere in this infrastructure and in fact already operates widely there. Walkable centers with a variety...

The map above shows the stations for three commuter rail lines as proposed by the Gulf Rail District. The beige area is the City of Houston. Of 20 stations, only 5 or 6 are in the City, mostly as destinations. The great majority serve the citizens of other political entities, people who choose not to live in the City. The number of City of Houston residents who would be served by this system is very small. None of the lines serves the largest job center in the City and region, the Central Business District, although the plan for the Hempstead line recognizes the issue. The only...

Health is a product of genes, environment, and inputs, particularly air, food, and liquids. Genetics are beyond the scope of City governance, so the place where the greatest leverage is available is the health of the human environment. In the natural environment, humans have created a built environment in which they live, work, and play. The quality of that environment determines to a great degree whether people get ordinary exercise throughout every day, and whether clean air, healthy food, and abundant clean water are readily available. The vast network of cars and trucks in the City...

Very large numbers of houston's jobs are clustered around freeway intersections. Commuters - people going to and from work - need convenient, frequent service among those centers without needing their own cars, and not just morning and afternoon but all day. The infrastructure to deliver such transit service already exists and already belongs to the public. In the map above, 23 of the top 25 job centers in the Houston region are shown linked by transit ways in freeways or tollways. The section colored green - I-10 west - is a model for the network. The process to convert center...