Hidalgo Street

Following up on some of the comments received in my earlier post about Multiways in Houston, I took a trip over to Hidalgo street yesterday to see what it was like. Keep Houston Houston tipped me off that this street already had some of the design features I was talking about, and it turns out he was right.

(Side note, he also had a great post about streetcars that I just found, I wish I had seen it a couple days ago when it was posted. Oh, and one last thing, KHH: do you have a name??).

Here’s what Hidalgo looks like:

What you see here is three mainlanes (one-way) and a slip lane that consolidates all the driveways together. Here’s the slip lane:

As you can imagine, this is a pretty effective separation of local access needs with through-movement needs, and it looks nice too.

The drawback, of course, is the one-way configuration without a nearby pair street. Alamaba runs the other direction, but it’s far enough away to not be an ideal coupling.

Another downside is the preponderance of garage doors on this street. It would look and feel nicer if these were taller row-houses with alley loaded garages and the front was for visitor parking. This is the tricky thing about multiways, they almost need a minimum density level to ‘look right’, but that’s purely an aesthetic preference, this functions fine.

Lastly, the whole arrangement would be a bit smarter if either:

A. The slip lane were level (no curb), and maybe even paved with brick or stamped concrete, so that it was clearly a shared auto/pedestrian zone by design. As is, it functions this way by default because there’s no other place to walk, but it feel safe to be walking down a concrete curb and gutter street.

-or-

B. The side medians were wide enough to have a sidewalk.

So, it’s not perfect, but of course nothing ever is.

It is, however, a pretty smart way to combine market demand for compact residential with the need to have a major collector through the middle of it. If you’ve never been over there, it’s probably worth a look.