Why City Design is Important (and Why I Hate Houston)

This was posted before.
Houston is headed for traffic hell (as if it isn't already).

 

Grew up in and around Houston - am happy to be out of it.

DD

 

Yeah Houston has horrible urban planning. It's an ugly city. Never seen so many strip malls.

 

Narrator is a Canadian hipster that is comparing a hot humid city in South Texas to Scandanavian cities. He knows nothing of both areas' culture, year-round climate, flora and fauna (pollen and skeeters), history, economic standing, etc. I would like him to show me people walking around those beautiful sidewalks when it's -10 degrees in Trondheim.

 

It's been ~50 degrees the last two mornings, with highs in the 80's.

Fall weather in the Hill Country, can't beat it.

FINALLY.

 

Even the most loyal Houstonian would admit that the city was not really well thought out when it came to planning/transportation/etc.

I'd also say that October- April is fairly good weather (minus the random really cold days) to walk around, spend time outdoors, not melt away. That's half the year.

 

I simulated Houston under global warming and freezing scenario up to 2078. The Dome remains. Traffic good.

 

Yeah, beautiful Fall weather and it's still September, ordinarily summer around here. In the 50's this morning at our house. Love it!

Good lord, @tinman! Looks like I-35 at 4 o'clock!
;-)

I wonder if anyone still skinny dips at the coves of Paleface? We drove up from Houston for years and had big parties there. Sometimes a boat would slowly cruise by, the men passing the binoculars around, looking at our girlfriends sun bathing. They smiled and waved. We had a winter campout every year in late January or February, with a big fire. Drinking beer, imbibing the latest herbs, dipping into sandwich bags of mushrooms someone brought (sometimes it was me). Addick's was a great place to find them in the pastures. Addick's couldn't be any more different today.

 

So mountains form sometime between now and 2078?

 

According to the dictator in China around 2067, "That's no mountain."

 

Yeah - the narrator was walking on 1960, right in front of Willowbrook Mall and said it was "unacceptable". If he'd have been downtown, walking in the tunnels he would have been singing its praises. I guess he judged the entire 671 square miles of Houston based on one street. It's also crappy that he compares Houston to Amsterdam, which is one-third the size of Houston and has a completely different climate.

I'm not gonna say Houston is perfect. We desperately need a suburban rail system, there are many streets that should have sidewalks and bike paths, and we are very spread out. But there are reasons for this. Cities like New York have geographical constraints (like rivers) that force the city to grow more vertically. As Houston's population increases, higher land prices and rent in he inner city pushes people out further and further. And the climate at Houston gets pretty damn hot and humid and isn't conducive to walking outdoors.

But I've also seen a LOT worse than Houston. The three loops with crisscrossing freeways is actually excellent and facilitates alternate routes pretty well. Missed your exit? No problem - just take the next exit and U-turn (there are soooo many cities that don't have this simple solution). And when you're walking you don't have as many options of where to shop as when you're driving.

TL/DR.... The video is oversimplifying and shortsighted.

 

This guy's problem is that he speaks metric. Speak 'Murican, candanadian.

 

Singapore is a modern city in humid weather - definitely more walkable and pedestrian friendly than Houston. And for all of their very different faults (weather, poverty, housing, population), Saigon, Hanoi, Bombay, Philadelphia, Boston are all walkable and you see life lived on the streets.

Houston's development was borne after Eisenhower's superhighway system + post-war boom + car culture + suburbia - the city was designed for cars and commuters, not pedestrians and town squares. and it shows.

I grew up in Houston in the 80s and 90s around Mission Bend, then Alief. We used to pick blackberries in fields near that old Safeway past Highway 6. Used to ride my bike around fields near Petrosky. t's all strip malls and big box stores now and toll roads and more and more lane highways that go to McMansion where people live in houses with garages that would be obscene to the rest of the world because they're larger than most people's apartments. So friends who grew up in Alief moved to Mission Bend, then Sugarland, then First Colony, the New Territory, and outwards and outwards.

There were pockets of resistance when I worked downtown in the early aughts: Buffalo Bayou Park, Montrose.. but not nearly enough. Cheap land and lack of regulations = getting more and more people their shortcuts to the American Dream of big house, big cars - except the American reality is sitting in 2 hours commutes and a mortgage for a cookie cutter home with never enough stuff to fill it up with.

Everytime I come back to visit the folks, it's like an alien landscape and I always think: man the people are great, the food is amazing, but it f** sucks to sit in a car 30 minutes just to see anyone. Can't go grab a drink downtown without worrying about how many and how to drive back home. At nighttime when it's cooler - I'd love to walk to digest a meal after a restaurant, maybe hit up a few places for drinks or music, but that means planning where to drive.

I think maybe a rapid transit system / hubs/spokes (more buses, dedicated freeway and street lanes) - something like what Bogota has - may work for Houston... but yeah, it's prob too late.

Anyways, love the city I grew up in but it's a failure in terms of urban planning.

-- speaking as a bleeding heart San Francsisco liberal

Here's how urban planning for cars changed Detroit:



Here's how removing a freeway changed SF

 

name some

 

@Xerobull moving to Amsterdam confirmed

 

If you ever drive around in the Northeast (like New Jersey) you'll realize that frequently, if you miss your exit, you've got to go a long way before you can get off the freeway. And when you're eventually able to exit, it's not just a simple U-turn to get back on track. You'll quickly appreciate Houston's organized freeway exits and abundant U-turns.

Also, this comes to mind..

 

so noted

USA's NE, and Paris, have sidewalks and bike lanes, no>

 

After moving to Canada I hear a lot of the snootiness about urban design. In reality, Canada followed all of the same urban design principles as the US. The eastern part of Canada was settled at the same time as the US so basic urban design mimics the northeast but they ran highways through the middle of the cities as well and built the same suburbs with dead end streets and cul-de-sacs.

With the exception of Vancouver, Canadian urban design is largely the same as the US (Vancouver is the one exception as they prohibited highways from the start so the city has a very modern consistent design). And in places like Montreal, sprinkle in some systemic corruption involving construction and you get both bad design and crumbling roads.

 

Everywhere? No.
More than Houston? I dunno. Maybe, maybe not.
They do have better rail.
OP's video is still crap.

 

One thing I appreciate about Houston is the grid-Iike road system. It's easy to navigate where you go. Living in Austin, there's so many odd angles and curves that are nearly impossible to navigate if you're lost and have no map.

Houston roads are designed better for a driver. Except for last night when I drove into Houston. Who the **** thought it'd be a good idea to condense I-10 to one lane?