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The 2024 Vision Zero Texas Summit is set for Friday in Houston, even as local safety advocates decry Mayor John Whitmire’s pause on mobility and road projects they say would curb traffic injuries and deaths across the city.
The summit ends a broader week of transportation safety events in Houston, including a Texas Transportation Institute pedestrian safety forum on Thursday and the release of LINK Houston’s Equity in Transit report on Wednesday. The summit kicks off at 10 a.m. at downtown’s Majestic Metro.
While Whitmire has insisted he is supportive of Vision Zero, a nationwide effort to reduce traffic deaths and injuries, his administration’s actions in the first four months of his mayoral term have left safety advocates dubious.
He has been dismissive of the efforts of former chief transportation planner and deputy public works director David Fields and Veronica Davis as “anti-car activists,” and has paused many street projects that are supposed to advance Vision Zero initiatives.
“It does feel a bit like this is going against what we know to be true of the principles of injury prevention,” said Tiffany Smith, a project manager for the nationwide Vision Zero Network. “I don’t view this as something that is anti-car at all. I mean, this is for the safety of everyone.”
According to the Whitmire administration, the goal is to get Houston back on track with Vision Zero.
“I would challenge whether or not (advocates) have been educated about the city actually applying Vision Zero to construction,” said Steven David, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff. “I would argue that the city has not been acting in the same way they have been talking about Vision Zero for the past five years.”
In an interview with the Abdelraoufsinno, David presented data showing a large majority of work completed in the city in recent years did not address the core of Houston’s traffic problem. That analysis was the result of a review of roadway projects and the city’s high injury network, a data-driven mapping of traffic incidents that occurred on Houston’s roadways. The analysis will be released to the public later this month, according to David.
According to the analysis, only a half mile of sidewalk, 36 miles of roadway, and 24 miles of bikeway built since July 2021 addressed the 595 miles of the high injury network. That represents a 10 percent overlap between the network and projects the city has completed, David said.
Additionally, only two miles of roadway and 1.6 miles of bikeway have been built along segments of the network labeled as priorities. No sidewalks had been constructed along the 37 miles of priority segments in that time.
“It was a surprise to us to learn that that is absolutely almost the opposite of what the city of Houston has been doing with regard to the high injury network and Vision Zero and road construction,” David said.
Road safety advocates push back
While the data surprised members of the administration, traffic safety advocates pointed out that projects take years to design, fund, and schedule. Peter Eccles, director of policy and planning for transit advocacy group LINK Houston, said those numbers do not include many projects currently in the pipeline.
“If the new administration wants to dedicate a larger percentage of projects toward the high injury network, that’s great news,” Eccles wrote in an email. “But insufficient progress is a perplexing reason to abandon the whole strategy.”
Mehdi Rais, co-director of nonprofit Walk and Roll Houston, pushed back on the idea that street projects around the city should only address the high injury network.
“It’s a fool’s errand,” Rais said. “This is a multi-dimensional puzzle we’re solving for.”
He pointed out that reconstruction projects, such as the one planned for Montrose Boulevard, mainly are focused on drainage, with half of the $54 million price tag dedicated to solving that issue.
“As we begin to build up to the surface, we ask the question ‘What does good look like?” he said. “It doesn’t look like what we’re doing today.”
Whitmire has done plenty to roll back street safety improvements in the eyes of advocates, including the removal of a median on Houston Avenue, revisiting changes on 11th Street, and pumping the brakes on phase two of the Shepherd and Durham reconstruction project. The mayor has expressed a desire to revisit planned projects that would remove lanes for automobile traffic, claiming that not enough input had been obtained from first responders and the community.
“We need to look at ways to encourage pedestrians and make sure that we have six-foot sidewalks so that people can walk and get places where they need to be,” Marlene Gafrick, the mayor’s senior advisor on planning, said this week. “To do something contrary that further restricts and tries to force people into behaviors, I think you’re going to have another effect, and that is people will not want to come.”
Rais disagreed, citing traffic studies that he said show there are too many lanes on some Houston roads.
“We need to more smartly think about this space so that it serves all people of all abilities in the area,” he said.
David pointed out that neither the Houston Avenue and 11th Street projects were part of the high injury network.
“Vision Zero, when it was described to the public, utilizing the high injury network at its inception, was a really amazing idea,” David said. “That is absolutely not what’s happened.”
Federal funding at risk?
The pause on Shepherd and Durham prompted advocates to again decry Whitmire’s choices in transportation, with an added emphasis on federal funds that were granted to help with the project. The administration wants to redesign the segment, but that could put those federal dollars at risk.
“It’s not really free money, right? People think of it as free, but there’s strings or conditions attached to that money,” said Gafrick. “You have to step back and say, ‘Are these conditions good for my community?’”
Rais, though, said the federal government is looking for more multi-modal mobility projects.
“If we don’t get in line with that vision that the federal government has, we are not going to be able to pull down those federal dollars, let alone reject federal dollars that are coming down already,” he said.
Eccles said the federal government is offering historic funding opportunities, and abandoning safer street designs would make it more difficult to take advantage of those opportunities.
Neighborhoods v Houston overall
Gafrick said the focus must be on Houston’s overall mobility, adding the city would be automobile-dependent for many years to come. Therefore, she said, the goal is to find ways to add sidewalks and connectivity without reducing the number of lanes or lane widths. She said the city was willing to find other funding partners to pursue a redesigned version of the Shepherd and Durham project.
“When you start talking about reducing lanes and you’re building a road for the next 40 to 50 years, with densification there’s going to be some concern that we aren’t going to have the capacity that we need to grow,” Gaffrick said. “We don’t want to choke ourselves out on congestion.”
That broader focus does not necessarily square with Vision Zero ideals, according to Smith.
“There’s this idea that more lanes leads to more throughput. But we’ve actually kind of seen that that’s not necessarily the case, more lanes actually leads to more traffic,” Smith said. “With road diets and increased transportation options, you’re actually making it easier for emergency and first responders to reach a destination more quickly because there’s less congestion.”
While first responder input has been a reason for putting projects on hold, Gafrick said their input generally was not sought on street projects due to existing road construction standards. Those standards involve wider lanes than those considered in Vision Zero-oriented projects.
“We need them involved when we start deviating or changing the standards,” she said.
David pointed out that in his research, a majority of firetrucks can be up to 12 feet wide, which would pose issues with lanes that are reduced to 10 or 11 feet.
When considering community input, Gaffrick said the administration views the community as more than just those that live near proposed projects. That includes commuters.
“You have to listen to everybody and then try to balance and figure out what is the best for Houston overall,” Gaffrick said. “You just can’t pick one over the other.”
While traffic injuries and deaths have trended downward in recent years, David cautioned against “spurious correlations” between that and Vision Zero.
“In a world where one injury, one death is too many, we still have to balance out,” David said. “If we’re killing business, then you’re sort of losing the desire to be in that place in the first place.”
The data-driven approach was encouraging to Eccles who urged the city to back up claims about “forcing behavior changes” or “killing business,” saying an analysis of sales tax collections on 11th Street showed an increase after the safety project was installed.
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