Google optimizing traffic signals, idea for HTX office to residential conversions, Why Texas is Becoming America's Most Powerful State, NYT on Houston winning vs homelessness, and more
Just catching up on some backlogged smaller items this week...
"Google AI models that can autonomously optimize the traffic timing at that intersection, reducing idle times as well as the amount of braking and accelerating vehicles have to do there."
- And I'd be happy to help get METRO on a better path while they're at it?...
"Dallas officials were prickly when I toured their city and asked them pointedly why Houston was doing better...
The lesson I take from Houston and Dallas is that success doesn’t come from repeating bromides about how housing is a human right; homelessness is indifferent to earnestness but does respond to hard work and meticulous execution. Houston has succeeded because it has strong political leadership that gathers data, follows evidence and herds nonprofits in the same direction. It is relentless."
Finally I'll end with this really well-done video on the population, economic, and energy boom in Texas, which is on track to pass California by the 2040s: Why Texas is Becoming America's Most Powerful State
Labels: downtown, economy, home affordability, homelessness, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies, parking, rail
Road subsidies, challenging parking minimums, unsocial sidewalks, strong wage growth, Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock
A few smaller items to close out this week before some holiday travel. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you!
“All Texans should be able to start their own business without jumping through hoops that serve no purpose. This minimum parking ordinance isn’t just harmful to small business owners; it also violates the Texas Constitution.”
"There may be a few cases where sidewalks can increase the level with which one engages with local communal amenities. But at large, sidewalks hardly impact community connectedness, a drastic departure from common thinking, which has long seen sidewalks as critical public infrastructure connecting the private world directly with the public. These data are particularly noteworthy for they were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic when outdoor life has dramatically increased. Even though the pandemic has driven social life for many from dining, to strolling and making outdoor displays, and increased opportunities for chance encounters, the presence of sidewalks is not changing perceptions about community social capital whatsoever.
While no one is suggesting sidewalks be eliminated, urban theorists, scholars, and planners must acknowledge that sidewalk life may not be as powerful and vibrant as the various ethnographic stories make them out to be. There may be other factors --- like homeownership, tenure of residents, or the presence of families --- that may also play a role."
- Road subsidies: "According to the 2015 report, the average U.S. household spends around $1,100 a year to “subsidize” drivers’ road use — that’s on top of what individuals already pay in gas taxes and tolls." False. It's not a subsidy. Your property is plugged into a road network that gets you and your stuff (and emergency services) to and from your property whether or not you own a car, so it's perfectly reasonable for property taxes to pay for access to that network. It's not optional.
- Continuing on transportation subsidies, here are some interesting stats from the Reason Surface Transportation newsletter:
"In fact, a recent update of a U.S. DOT study estimating the actual federal subsidy by mode (federal spending minus the mode’s user taxes) found the following:
Amtrak $204/passenger-mile
Transit $142/passenger-mile
Air travel $3.62/passenger-mile
Highways -$0.79/passenger-mile"
"Her internal GPS, calibrated for the Low Countries, told her that they were driving from Amsterdam to Antwerp or Rotterdam, but of course nothing of the sort was happening - they were just moving around between different parts of Houston, a metro the size of Belgium."
Labels: economy, infrastructure, land-use regulation, parking, transit, walkability, zoning
Be Someone City Opportunity Urbanism event, relaxing min parking reqs, HTX #1 building homes, hurricane risk, and more
The lead item this week is a Houston event I'll be speaking at Wednesday evening June 16th: Building a 'Be Someone' City: Houston and the Rise of Opportunity Urbanism:
"Cities have historically been the gateway to America and our nation’s promise of opportunity and upward mobility. Today, however, many of our nation’s highest profile cities have become ‘luxury products’ affordable only for the highest income earners. Houston and other ‘opportunity cities’ have historically bucked this trend by embracing policies that lower the cost of living, create jobs, and enhance the quality of life for all. But a continuation of this success is under threat from an array of proposed ‘command and control’ policies that will erode our city’s dynamism. Houston’s success is no accident, and it’s future is worth fighting for.
Join the Liberty Leadership Council and the Urban Reform Institute for a vibrant discussion of Houston’s market-centered, ‘people-oriented’ approach to urban policy, planning, and development.
We’ll talk zoning, transportation, infrastructure, housing, and everything in between—all while enjoying views of downtown and toasting the Bayou City."
You can register here and I hope to see you there!
Moving on to this week's items:
- City Journal: End of the Road for Parking Requirements - They serve as a tax on housing. Houston should pass a plan to automatically reduce parking minimums citywide by 8%/year - enough for real impact over time w/o public blowback. Why keep building parking that autonomous taxis will make obsolete in the 2030s or even sooner?
- Excerpts from a Market Urbanist Scott Beyer Facebook post after his most recent trip to Texas:
"Texas is already known for high econ freedom and autonomy from the feds. The more I learn, the more unique it seems on this front. Counties without zoning. Toll roads galore. Limited land handed to the feds. Independent not unified school districts. Separate energy grid. Higher speed limits. And I could go on. The governance here is truly different.
A culture of exceptionalism: Texas wants to be the best, and has built an unapologetic brand around it - “everything’s bigger in Texas.” Coastal urban America used to have that bravado, but is now overcome with Nimbyism and guilt-mongering."
"More permits (48,208) were issued last year for new-home construction in the Houston area than anywhere else in the U.S. DFW ranked second (43,884), and Austin held the No. 5 spot (21,653)."
- Houston and NOx and SOx – Companion Pollutants
- Drive & Listen: Wow this is super cool and mesmerizing. You can set the speed of the vehicle, street noise, music - even change radio stations while driving in 50 different cities around the world, spending as much time as you like in any one of them. Someone needs to do this for Houston!
Finally, we'll end with a little dark humor meme that makes a great point:
Ever-growing layers of bureaucracy are how societies stagnate, and it's the direct cause of increasing unaffordability in cities across the country.
Labels: affordability, development, environment, home affordability, identity, land-use regulation, parking, planning, rankings, resilience, zoning
Astrodome as the world's largest climate-controlled festival park, smart traffic lights, HTX eating out vs other cities, relaxing parking minimums
The lead item this week is the Astrodome Conservancy's survey and public engagement on the future of the Astrodome. I've made a *lot* of posts over the years on the Astrodome - so many that I recently discovered the Astrodome tag on my blog only shows posts back to 2015 but not before. Before that I found them in 2014 (twice), 2013 (twice), 2012, and even as far back as 2005. After all of that debate, the best affordable solution I've settled on is the world’s largest climate-controlled park with a focus on weekend festivals. People love going to parks, but not during Houston’s extreme weather, especially summers. Having an activated park full of activities and festivals on weekends that is always protected from heat and rain would be a very popular spot for Houstonians, especially families desperate to find affordable activities every weekend (minus Texan home games or the Rodeo). And it could easily start very modestly and then expand over time with parking fees + philanthropy, like has been happening with the Zoo, MFAH, and HMNS. Imagine Levy Park + Discovery Green x10... or The Gathering Place in Tulsa (pictures)... pretty cool, right?! Be sure to let them know your own thoughts here.
Moving on to some smaller items this week:
- NYT: Smarter Traffic Lights, Calmer Commuters. Holy crap Houston needs this! I think Uptown and TMC would be really good test cases. The AI could learn optimal traffic light timings based on time-of-day as well as make dynamic adjustments for unexpected surges.
- Cities Spending the Most on Eating Out in 2020. We found that Houston, Texas ranks #11 for spending their annual income at restaurants. Houston residents spend an average of $357 each month on eating out and 5.7% of their annual income at restaurants. Houstonians spend about the same amount eating out vs. in. We eat out a lot, but at low prices. We eat out a lot more than Dallas residents, which surprised me a bit until you think about how hyper-competitive Houston's restaurant scene is from the lack of zoning. That hyper-competition applies to grocery stores as well, which shows up in how much less we're able to spend on food than most of the cities in their graph. Houstonians spend $300 less per year on groceries than the average American, but $1,000/year more on eating out due to the high incomes and great affordable restaurants here.
- City Journal: End of the Road for Parking Requirements - They serve as a tax on housing. Houston has been expanding its "market-driven parking" zone beyond downtown to Midtown and EaDo, and hopefully to additional areas in the future. Let developers decide how much parking they need, not arbitrary formulas. Hat tip to Jay.
- This makes me nauseous. Planners actually like tight zoning regulations like high minimum parking requirements so they can extort more out of the developer to relax them!
Labels: affordability, Astrodome, costs of congestion, dining, land-use regulation, mobility strategies, parking, planning, quality of place, rankings, transportation plan, zoning
