Walkable Houston?

An article in the Chronicle today announced that Houston was ranked 21st on a list of the most walkable cities in the nation. Sounds great, right? But they only ranked the top 30 metropolitan areas, and much of Houston’s “walkability” was actually found in Sugar Land, a large suburb well southwest of the city. Also:

Leinberger attaches one major caveat to his report: The survey did not take into account the size of each walkable place. For example, midtown Manhattan is given the same weight as Reston Town Center, a lifestyle center outside Washington, even though the latter has only a tiny fraction of the office and retail space, residential units, and hotel rooms of midtown.

This seems like a pretty worthless survey to me. It only took into account “walkable areas per capita” and didn’t appear to factor in other issues like the availability of public transportation, the safety of various cities, etc. Some of the top 10 are pretty accurate — I have visited DC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and New York and have walked around or taken public transportation in each one. Any of those cities is orders of magnitude more walkable than Houston. It’s laughable to me that Houston is even included on this list.

To me, a single good measurement of walkability would be to ask a resident: “Could you live here without car, or would not having a vehicle be a major obstacle?” In Houston, I can safely say not having a car would be a major problem. You would be limited in access to the few square miles around your home, so hopefully you could find a home near your job. If you lived downtown, you might have a little more access to other parts of the city via bus and metro, but that access would be limited. Many major roads have no sidewalk. There are few bike lanes.

Part of the “walkability” issue in Houston relates to the climate, and the fact that not many people look forward to walking around town in the middle of August when it’s 90 degrees with 95% humidity. Another major issue is the size of the city; Houston covers far more physical area than many of the other cities on the list and thus presents more of a logistical problem. Yet the city has done little over the years to encourage residents to lose any small part of our dependence on cars. I live in Clear Lake, which is surrounded by suburbs yet is still part of Houston. The city line runs down NASA Road 1, and yet in this area there is no public transportation. You can catch the commuter bus that goes into downtown, but you can’t catch a bus to get to, say, the grocery store.

In contrast, my sister and brother-in-law live south of Seattle and own a single car despite the fact that their job locations are tens of miles apart. Katie can walk from her house to the train station, take a half hour train ride into downtown Seattle, and get off within a half mile of her building (actually, more like 300 yards!). You can ride the bus in the immediate downtown area for free. You can take a bus across Lake Washington to the suburbs.

When I was at Stanford, I could bike from my on-campus apartment to the train station and ride the train into downtown San Francisco, where I then had access to buses that went all over the city. When Jose and I visited Boston in July, the T took us anywhere we wanted to go, and we never had to walk more than a half mile to get from the T stop to our final destination. Thousands if not millions of people live in New York without owning a car and never have a problem getting anywhere.

Walkable? Houston? Not really.