City design guide seen as threat to transit measure

[musicman]

Fallout from the long-dormant Ashby high-rise development emerged Wednesday as a potential obstacle to the city’s effort to promote walkable, urban-style development along Metro’s planned light-rail lines.

Neighborhood opposition to the Ashby project, a planned 23-story mixed-use tower whose developers continue to await a permit almost two years after they first applied, inspired changes to an obscure city document known as the Infrastructure Design Manual. The changes include a review process intended to prevent high-density developments from worsening traffic congestion on surrounding streets.

City Council members and speakers at a public hearing Wednesday said certain provisions in the design manual conflict with the goals of the proposed urban transit corridors ordinance. Councilwomen Toni Lawrence and Pam Holm threatened to withhold support from the ordinance, seen by many as a vital first step in creating walkable urbanism in Houston, unless the conflict was resolved.

While the goal of the transit corridors ordinance is to encourage higher density along rail lines, Breeding said, “the goal of Chapter 15 is to control, reduce or ultimately prohibit additional development density if it increases traffic.”

Icken said he will work with Marlene Gafrick, Houston’s planning and development director, to add language to the transit corridors ordinance clarifying that reduced automobile traffic is likely along corridors where people will be riding trains. That should reduce the need for any traffic mitigation, Icken said.

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Edited July 9, 2009 by musicman

[TheNiche]

Icken said he will work with Marlene Gafrick, Houston’s planning and development director, to add language to the transit corridors ordinance clarifying that reduced automobile traffic is likely along corridors where people will be riding trains. That should reduce the need for any traffic mitigation, Icken said.

Most trips do not feature an origination point and a destination point along the same corridor. Reductions in traffic (to the extent that light rail results in commuters switching from auto to light rail rather than from one form of mass transit to another) occur over a fairly wide area including many arterials. The only reasonable justification for a decline in traffic along one particular corridor (to the exclusion of other nearby corridors) after implementing light rail is that fewer and narrower lanes, combined with impediments to turning, resulted in auto traffic being displaced to parallel corridors.

[Houston19514]

Most trips do not feature an origination point and a destination point along the same corridor. Reductions in traffic (to the extent that light rail results in commuters switching from auto to light rail rather than from one form of mass transit to another) occur over a fairly wide area including many arterials. The only reasonable justification for a decline in traffic along one particular corridor (to the exclusion of other nearby corridors) after implementing light rail is that fewer and narrower lanes, combined with impediments to turning, resulted in auto traffic being displaced to parallel corridors.

That is one of your more nonsensical posts ever. To the extent that the rail replaces cars (and Metro's experience so far is that a large percentage of rail riders have switched from cars), it will indeed be entirely for trips that feature an origination point and a destination point along the same corridor (which of course is one of benefits that a car will always have over rail; the freedom to go anywhere). It is pure silliness to pretend that the use of the rail by people living, let's say in the Castle Court neighborhood, will not reduce traffic along the Richmond corridor. Yes it will reduce traffic elsewhere as well, but the most focused and therefore greatest reduction in traffic produced by the University Line will be on the Richmond corridor.