Mobility In A Strong Town: Ugly Truths and Practical Solutions.

Houston’s infrastructure needs to change. Thanks to the Strong Towns Finance Decoder Tool, we know that Houston is financially insolvent because of decades of chasing short term growth at the expense of long term stability. Even worse, the city’s own infrastructure is killing Houstonians. In 2024, around 345 people died by car crashes. 119 of these deaths were people simply walking to where they needed to go. This is only getting worse: the Houston Chronicle shows that 2024’s numbers are part of an increasing trend of crashes and deaths on Houston’s stroads (more on that term below). Not only is Houston broke, it’s dangerous.

So how is Houston responding to this problem? Back in 2020, Houston adopted a much-needed Vision Zero initiative focused on redesigning streets in an effort to reduce pedestrian fatalities. But now, under Mayor John Whitmire, the city appears to be taking a different approach. Houston is implementing the Mayor’s “guiding mobility principles” on all street design projects. What are these principles? From what we can tell, the city is focused on maintaining the number and width of car lanes in any given street to facilitate traffic flow and reduce congestion. Additionally, the city is increasing police presence to enforce state and local traffic laws.

While well-intentioned, the guiding mobility principles fall short of making Houston a Strong Town. Mobility in a Strong Houston recognizes that safe and financially resilient—i.e., “Strong”—streets overcome some ugly truths with some practical solutions.

A Strong Towns approach to street design recognizes that our streets are platforms for building wealth and should be safe. A street is where people work, shop, play, eat, and form communities that want to incrementally invest in themselves. The Strong Towns approach prioritizes safety; we cannot have strong communities when people are in constant danger from speeding cars. A Strong Houston starts with safe streets.

Ugly Truth: We Don’t Know Our Streets From Our Roads.

Any mobility principle, whether it be Vision Zero or Mayor Whitmire’s guiding mobility principles, needs to know what to call that long stretch of pavement lining our city. It has many names, some of which you’ll see in this post. Thoroughfare is an easy term but it’s too academic at times. So what do we call it? That depends on its use.

A road is a high-speed connection between two places. I-10 should be road. It is a long stretch of pavement that can take us from Houston, the fourth largest city in the U.S., to San Antonio, the seventh in only 3 or 4 hours. Memorial Drive, or at least parts of it, should also be a road. You can get from downtown to the western edge of the 610 Loop, not too far from the Galleria, quickly. The purpose of these roads is to facilitate traffic and get cars from point A to point B in a short amount of time (in theory).

(I-10, Houston)

A street is a platform for building community wealth. Montrose Boulevard and Navigation Boulevard should be streets. People live, work, shop, and play along these streets, generating wealth in their local communities. People invest time, money, and energy into their streets because these investments will generate wealth in their backyards.

(Navigation Boulevard, Houston)

Note the use of “should.” Instead of the ideal versions of streets and roads, we’re stuck with stroads, an awful hybrid. Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn compares stroads to a futon: an uncomfortable couch that folds out into an uncomfortable bed, failing at both functions miserably. A stroad, likewise, is a strange street-road hybrid that is designed to facilitate traffic (a road) while also generating wealth for the local community (a street). It fails at both.

The Mayor’s guiding mobility principles do not address this distinction and encourage stroad development. As we’ve seen from recent news on the Montrose Boulevard and Telephone Road redesign projects, the city seems to be focusing on making it easier to pass through productive streets—a defining feature of an unproductive stroad. By prioritizing the number and width of vehicle lanes, the city prioritizes traffic flow over the quality of life in our communities. And our stroads are failing at both objectives. 

Practical Solution: Kill The Stroads.

The best solution is sometimes the easiest. Stroads have no place in Houston, and so the guiding mobility principles should focus on killing these nasty hybrids. To keep a street a street, it needs to be safe and productive (more on that below). To keep a road a road, it needs to reduce the number of entry and exit points, maintain high speeds, keep wide lanes, and facilitate traffic flow (for I-10, for example, think of shutting down a number of on and off ramps).

By confusing fast roads with productive streets, the city is doing itself a disservice. A fast road connects productive streets to one another, and a stroad does neither. There is no point in setting up shop along Montrose or Telephone if every car can whizz by going 60. And there is no point in taking I-10 to the grocery store (which is already a bad idea) if you’re stuck in the same traffic as everyone else.

True mobility principles in a Strong Houston know this difference and strive to keep our streets streets and roads roads.

Ugly Truth: Street Design Is At The Heart Of Every Crash.

There are many reasons car crashes happen, and people blame drivers. Texas police officers have about 79 codes for assessing what caused a crash, and more than three quarters of them focus on the driver.

Human error is always something to consider, but we cannot make our streets safer by hoping for perfect people. Instead, we need to understand the influence of street design on drivers.

Our environment shapes our behavior, especially in driving. Conventional traffic engineering standards call for increasing the number of wide traffic lanes to promote safety. This approach is based on the concept that wider lanes allow drivers more space to make corrections and avoid accidents.

However, this forgiving design contributes to the bad behaviors we pin on drivers. Wider lanes encourage speeding regardless of posted limits, while additional lanes provide greater opportunity for driver error.

Such street layouts play a significant role in Houston’s crash and death numbers; we are creating the drivers we blame for our crashes.

Speed kills, and our stroads are designed to facilitate speeding. So when the city calls for maintaining the number and width of traffic lanes in a given street, Houston is inviting more risky driving behavior at the expense of public safety.

Practical Solution: The Unforgiving Street Design.

A Strong Towns approach to street design focuses on safety by implementing design strategies that encourage reduced driving speeds and greater driver attentiveness. Measures such as decreasing the number and width of vehicle lanes, known as road diets, reduce both the risk and severity of traffic incidents on local streets.

Author and fellow urbanist Jeff Speck notes that streets generally should not have more than four lanes, and lane widths should be no greater than 10 feet. Streets exceeding these guidelines are candidates for a road diet. Typically, properly road-dieted streets experience minor vehicle accidents as opposed to deadly collisions.

And do not worry about traffic. Speck, citing a Nelson/Nygaard study, noted that in 23 cities across North America that implemented four-lane-to-three-lane road diets, vehicle capacity either stayed the same or increased. The unforgiving design sacrifices driver error, not vehicle capacity.

The new, unforgiving, street design also benefits the local community. With all the extra space saved with a road diet, cities can create wider sidewalks for people, install traffic calming devices like bollards, dedicate more space for parallel parking in commercial areas, plant more trees to increase shade coverage, or install bicycle lanes.

When the city of Orlando, Florida reduced a four lane stroad to a three lane street on Edgewater Drive: (1) collisions decreased by 40 percent; (2) injury rates decreased by 71 percent; and (3) property values increased due to increased economic productivity.

(Edgewater Drive Before & After, Courtesy of Project for Public Spaces)

With all this reclaimed space, businesses can flourish and people can walk to them without any worry of getting hit by a car. Empowering our communities with safer streets is at the heart of the Strong Towns approach.

Ugly Truth: You Will Never Fix Congestion.

Congestion is the bane of the modern driver and a never-ending puzzle for modern city leaders. Every local leader will undoubtedly have to face this question at a town hall: “What will you do about the traffic?” In response, city officials follow conventional traffic engineering advice—add more dangerous lanes.

But congestion will never go away so long as we have cars. Trying to eliminate it is a fool’s errand.

Creating more lanes only leads to increased traffic due to induced demand, making costly construction projects ineffective at reducing congestion. We need to stop prioritizing a false promise of convenience at the expense of safety.

We’ve been fooled before. Houston is the greatest example of this endless losing fight. In 2011, TxDOT invested nearly $3 billion in fighting congestion along the Katy Freeway, then a 6-lane highway.

When construction finished, the Katy Freeway became a 26-lane mega highway but the congestion never went away. In fact, by 2014, there was a reported 25-minute increase in morning commute times along the highway along with a 23-minute increase in the afternoon commute. Despite the massive increase in lane capacity, drivers wound up stuck in traffic yet again.

(Before And After Map of Katy Freeway, Courtesy of Justin Boey)

And we’ve been fooled again. TxDOT’s North Houston Highway Improvement Plan (the “NHHIP”) will add more lanes across major highways in Houston, destroying the city for the sake of a more convenient drive. Strong Towns Houston won’t belabor the point on the NHHIP (go follow Stop TxDOT I-45), but we will say this: adding more lanes is a “cure” worse than the disease.

So when the city of Houston calls for maintaining the existing number of traffic lanes to help with congestion, we need to recognize that no number of lanes will ever solve the problem. At least with a road diet, a reduction in lane number means people are safer.

Practical Solution: Emphasizing Humanity Over Convenience.

Strong Towns Houston does not advocate for bumper to bumper traffic. But we know that congestion will never go away, and that our current strategy to fight congestion creates dangerous stroads. So we must view congestion differently; what does congestion look like for the people frequenting these busy streets?

Instead of waiting behind an endless string of cars, some people choose other means of transit, like walking, biking, or taking the bus. And in the process, they may shop, eat, or just enjoy the trip.

In Walkable City and Walkable City Rules, Jeff Speck notes that there is a strong association between productive, healthy cities and congestion. American cities with the most traffic congestion, are the cities with the highest per-capita income, citizens with lower risk of heart disease and other health risks, and least amount of carbon emissions.

(Magnificent Mile at night, Chicago, Illinois)

We have to ask ourselves what we want from our local streets. Do we want to build wealth, foster communities, and build safe environments? Or do we want to try to have as many cars pass through as quickly as possible (emphasis on “try”). Houstonians should be advocating for the former—a crowded street is a living street, where people feel confident in spending their time at a place that won’t kill them.

Sacrificing safe and productive streets to chase the never-ending dream of eliminating congestion needs to stop. Human life and a city’s future are not worth shaving a few minutes off a commute. A Strong Houston is worth the wait.

Hope for A Strong Houston.

Strong Towns Houston believes that safer, more productive streets are key to our city’s success. These streets need to accommodate people first, reversing the decades long trend of auto-oriented development that left us insolvent and prone to death by automobile.

The Mayor’s guiding mobility principles, while well-intentioned, are at odds with a Strong Towns vision for Houston. Keeping the same number of car lanes at their width encourages unproductive, dangerous stroads. Our street design is killing us by allowing bad behaviors. Congestion cannot be fixed. These are ugly truths that we need to tackle head on if we want to overcome our past. Strong Towns Houston’s intent is not to fight with the city, but to remind it that this pattern of development hurts Houston. 

A Strong Houston should embrace road diets, safety and traffic calming measures, and designs that reinvigorate our productive streets. The National Association of City Traffic Officials (“NACTO”) has published multiple urban design guides that teach city officials how to build according to Strong Towns-esque principles. Houston is a NACTO member, and now it’s time to pick up those guides again if we want to see real mobility principles in Houston.

If you want to learn more about Strong Towns and how this movement can help Houston, join Strong Towns Houston and Strong Towns national. Let’s get started on making Houston a Strong Town.