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I mean yeah don't drive on Westheimer

I rarely see cars on [insert basically any residential street here]. Keeping it open to cars is clearly a waste.

Glad to see Chron hit the right note in the opening graf, at least. The situation right now certainly feels dire to me, and we need the media to amplify the noise that multimodal Houstonians have been making the last couple of weeks.

My understanding is that Westheimer is off-limits because it is a Farm-to-Market, so TXDoT controls the ROW. Would love to be wrong about that. Still, there should be a tram on Westheimer and protected-lane rapid lines on Richmond and Dallas/Shepherd/San Felipe.

Especially when the medians are not just concrete slabs, but deep tree-capacious esplanades. Tearing those out and carving up the roadway is going to make traffic a lot worse for a while, and then when they finish it'll just go back to being dangerous, and all for a pretty hefty pricetag.

There's one of these next to the former Whole Foods location in Midtown. A giant touchscreen kiosk next to a four-lane highway onramp masquerading as a city street. "Smart city" stuff.

Nah, I was on my good ol' acoustic bike

Since we probably all need a break from the Whitmire doomscrolling, some thoughts on East River: Yeah, none of it is open. Yeah, every merchant there will be too expensive for most of the closest current residents (or my own midtown self) to frequent. But here's the thing - I have never, in my entire life, seen an unfinished construction project as open to the public as this (of course, I've never been to the Sagrada Familia). I saw at least ten other people there during my tenish minutes there this afternoon. And yeah, it's a nice day, but a lot of trails are still a little iffy after this afternoon's rain, so it's not like it was just oodles of bayou path cyclists. It was just people - regular people (not even HAIF nerds!) just sort of existing there. In an unfinished construction site with zero open businesses and no current immediate trail connection. Why does this matter? Because it reveals, once again, that people like places. There is so much latent demand for places to comfortably exist in, and I think ER will be such a success story that I genuinely believe that many more mixed-use developments will follow their lead when it comes to permeability and perambulability. And I hope more developments recognize the advertising potential of having an explorable site (to the extent that it's legally possible) before opening. Anyway, there's my positivity post for the day. I'm sure I'm not the only one who needed it.

This is such a beautiful mural, but as far as I can tell, it's impossible to see the whole thing from street level.

Ugh.

Glad to see the turnaround since this morning. Whitmire reversed course on Tour de Houston after an outcry - maybe he'll do the same here? There's still a chance that he really just doesn't realize that a lot of people actually really care about and want these things. I can imagine "slower traffic = bad politics" sticking around as an unquestioned axiom. Maybe public outcry will lead to a(nother) course reversal. But I'm not holding my breath.

Shocked, I tell ya!

The last bit sounds like Orwell. I think he is intelligent when it comes to things he cares about. I don't think he cares about pedestrian-oriented urbanism.

Both sides of Richmond for me, from Shepherd to Spur 527, feel as close as Houston gets to Chicago, with the enclosedish residential streets coming off the main drag. (Still a looong way off, but a boy can dream...)

If I understand the situation correctly, the majority of the parking lots are all owned by holding companies (rather than developers), so there is minimal incentive to be the first to sell. I feel like a land value tax would address this, but as has been discussed here before, that brings along other complexities. I have a vaguely formed notion of a probably-unpassable federal Livable Downtowns law that would allow (/encourage? require?) state and federal HUDs to eminent-domain lots in downtown districts that sit vacant or as parking lots for a certain number of years and construct/contract the construction of multifamily housing. But that would also create its own set of downstream effects, of which I can only imagine some.

I don't want to draw this out too much, but my point is this: the statement and approach reflect a priority structure that is quite different from mine. I don't expect to see a Houston mayor in my lifetime prioritize the pedestrian realm as much as I do, but my impression from the quote is that he doesn't consider high-quality pedestrian realms to be a very high priority, and that impression remains. Ultimately everybody will have their own calculus on issues like this, and his is probably more representative of the average Houstonian than mine is. But sidewalks - quality, maintanence, and coverage - are at or very near the top of my local political priorities. So the "well, we can have this or that" attitude - when to me, it seems that both "this" and "that" are bare necessities - makes me uneasy. I would love for Whitmire's administration to make me look like a paranoid pearl-clutcher about all of this. It just feels like he's a moderate step back from Turner's already moderate approach to what feels to me like a dire situation.

Right. It's the notion of a bare minimum - 8ft for an urbanized area - as "going back for seconds." It's the pitting of two neighborhoods' basic needs against each other. "Deer Park needs sidewalks" is not a valid reason for not investing in Washington Ave sidewalks.

Imagine defending that left turn.

Saw a tweet about that. That's awesome. I hope they have a little more protection on the other stretches of West Alabama than the Wesleyan-Buffalo Speedway segment they finished a couple of months ago, but even if it's the same, that's a big upgrade.

Yes, that's the one. It made me uncomfortable. The phrase "perfectly good three-foot sidewalk" doesn't belong in the English language, let alone anywhere near a conversation about Washington Ave. It feels like he's pitting two underserved needs against each other, but with car streets it's "we need whole new slabs," not "why does San Jacinto need four lanes?"

I remember reading an interview with him somewhere in which he described 8-foot sidewalks on Washington as "wasteful". I've had an uneasy feeling about him since then. Turner was no Anne Hidalgo, but it did feel like the safe streets movement was finally starting to gain momentum under him. I do also remember reading something about Whitmire supporting a better bike connection to Memorial Park, but there really wasn't anything at all in his campaign about alternatives to cars. I don't feel like he takes transit, pedestrian, and bicyclist needs seriously. But again, this is just a general uneasiness - I can't currently point to any specific policies or actions to legitimize that sense. Hoping Triton's wrong, though.

Here it is around 4pm yesterday (sorry, had about 0.75 seconds to snap the photo before my phone died).

For a painting of La Virgen de Guadalupe, I've always thought that mural was a bit...well, anyway...

I agree, but at least it's full. Better than the "Built for Black Friday" lots near my work:

I think a more precise argument would be that removing parking requirements will not automatically - and certainly not quickly - reduce the present demand for parking, so parking will continue to be built, which will do a pretty good job of preserving that demand, ergo the amount of parking. But the mandate skips the market middleman and preserves the parking excess all on its own.