Can Bayou City do a U-turn on its Unsustainable Transportation System?
An all too common truism I would hear growing up is that we Americans love our cars. It seemed self-evident when one considers how high car ownership and usage is in this country, and especially with how many cities appear to have been entirely built around using the automobile. Nowhere is the omnipresence of car culture felt more acutely than in my hometown of Houston, Texas. The fourth largest city in the nation is probably the poster-child for urban sprawl, with generation after generation of politicians and business leaders boasting that it is the largest city with no proper zoning laws.
But do we Houstonians truly love our cars, or is it more likely that we don’t have any choice but to love them? As I have gotten older and reached the fraught millennial milestone of “adulting,” I have come to realize that many of the things in society we are taught to take for granted were very much the result of certain public policy decisions. In this capitol of oil and gas, transportation options aside from the car are scant and woefully inadequate, especially out in the vast network of suburbs that surround the outer rims of the metropolitan area. Indeed, in many parts of the Greater Houston area, it is essentially impossible to get around without a car. And even if you can, the experience is fraught with danger as pedestrian deaths have recently reached a thirty-year high nationwide.
As University of Iowa law professor, Gregory Shill, notes in the Atlantic, “over the course of several generations lawmakers rewrote the rules of American life to conform to the interests of Big Oil, the auto barons, and the car-loving 1 percenters of the Roaring Twenties.” The result has been a century of domination by the automobile and its proponents, like the Koch brothers, who have also notably gone out of their way to kill initiatives to bolster public transportation wherever they pop up. The irony in the supposed proponents of the free market seeing fit to kill choice for consumers when it could harm their bottom line is palpable, but not altogether surprising.
Most significantly, transportation, specifically via car, is the biggest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the United States, and has long been a primary factor for the intensification of climate change. We Houstonians should know that better than anyone else, or at least our noses should whenever allergy season occurs. Furthermore, Hurricane Harvey, for all the destruction it wrought, is just a harbinger of worse storms and disasters to come in the coming decades.
Unfortunately, our society is slow to change, as the recent debacle over the I-45 North expansion illustrates. This highway expansion will approach the complex issue of traffic congestion with all the nuance our state is famous for: what if we made the roads bigger? Even with the failure of the I-10 expansion about a decade ago very recent in public memory, the Texas Department of Transportation and many political and business actors in Greater Houston are too beholden to automobile hegemony to aspire for anything that could benefit people outside of the affluent suburbs. And increasingly, whether even wealthier suburbanites will benefit from this boondoggle of a project is in doubt.
All this to say, I am not advocating for pessimism, but rather, a need to take a hard look at ourselves as a society and begin to finally get our affairs in order. As we have heard about time and again this past year, humanity has but a measly decade to act to avert an impending climate catastrophe. This action cannot just be at the international and federal scale, but it absolutely must be undertaken by municipalities like Houston as well. We may not necessarily be able to prevent another Harvey from striking, but we can certainly be better prepared for it next time.
This November, Houstonians will actually have a chance to vote in a bond referendum on whether to fund a whole host of public transportation initiatives through the next two decades. It is my sincere hope that we as a city will make the right decision. By 2040, it is expected that the Greater Houston area will have over ten million residents, and for the sake of those successive generations who will call our great city home, it is imperative that this city alter the laissez-faire paradigm it has relied on for so long. And while this may be just the most basic of first steps, it’s high time that, rather than driving as we’re so accustomed to do, we can instead start walking towards a more sustainable future.