Update on Transit Corridors

Alright, I’m back from vacation in Alaska, and I have an update to add to my previous post on the proposed Transit Corridor Streets ordinance.

First, if you haven’t read it, Christof wrote a very detailed explanation of what the ordinance does and doesn’t do. If you want to understand the nuts and bolts of this thing, read what he has to say.

Second, I recieved an email from Steve Spillete (who has been involved in the creation of the Transit Corridor Street Ordinance) clarifying one important detail.

The new setback of 15 feet would be measured from the edge of the street, not the property line. According to Spillette, in many places the edge of the street is 7 or 8 feet from the current right-of-way line, so in some cases the ordinance could result in a gain in usable property compared to the previous 0-5 foot standard for commercial, and would always result in a gain for non-commercial uses.

Still, my objection remains the same. The standards are good. These rules should prevent bad imitations of urban development (such as the Calais at Courtlandt Square – a pretend urban building on top of two levels of open parking), and that’s something to be grateful for.

However, these standards represent an awful lot of extra work for a developer, and offer very little incentive to convince someone to build urban instead of suburban.

Houston’s taxpayers are investing billions in new mass-transit. The least we could expect is that our city government would protect our investment by requiring urban scale, transit-supportive development in the vicinity of the new light rail stations. If we don’t have the balls to mandate that kind of thing, we should at LEAST offer a compelling incentive that we can count on to produce significant compliance.

Still, at the end of the day our biggest problem remains a total lack of public ownership of sidewalks. The city needs to man up and take ownership of its pedestrian space. It should be included in the public ROW and held to the same strict design requirements as the automobile travel lanes are. As Christof pointed out in his post, the City itself is one of the worst offenders when it comes to messing up the sidewalk.

Interface matters. These standards are a recipe for good interface, and I’m glad we’ve got them on the books. However, until we start IMPLEMENTING these we’re going to be stuck in the same rut we’ve always been in: plenty of good ideas, no execution.