If Only Houston Could Have No-Car Zones in These Areas...
Image: Houstonia Composite
The pandemic—for all the upheaval and grief—did prove the value of being outside (and the value of the QR code, too). We remembered we needed to share space. Houston BCycle saw 21 percent more trips. Parks had never been so packed, so precious. The city was building bike lanes; planning a future of fast, frequent buses; developing a plan to stop ruining the planet.
Five years and one mayor later, we still have the parks. But downtown Houston must have seen the light, as the More Space: Main Street project pilot will become permanent by the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Eleven blocks of Main Street on both sides of the Metro Red Line, from Dallas Street to Allen’s Landing, will be closed to cars, the street and sidewalk joined in a uniform plane to make room for more people and trees. The hope is that iconic bars like Little Dipper will take the lead building the pandemic-era dining sheds that are now being removed from cities like New York and create what Downtown Houston CEO Kris Larson called a “vibrant, happening retail environment” in an interview with the Houston Chronicle.
Maybe it will! And maybe that’s not the whole point. Because the experiment implies the idea that there are parts of a city that could be better off without cars.
Especially in Houston, after all, cars demand a lot of space. Larson’s predecessor, Bob Eury, estimated that 30 blocks of the Central Business District were only parking. (Yes, parking is a business, too, as it’s been figured we use our cars only about 5 percent of the time.) Cars waste a lot of space, and they also get in the way of the rest of our lives. In 2024, more people died in car crashes in Houston than in homicides, and the region has been for years one of the most dangerous places in the country to get around, whether you’re driving, walking, or biking. Transportation is our region’s single-largest source of the pollution, destabilizing the climate and making recent hurricanes that much more destructive. Millions of fossil fuel–powered vehicles contribute to the air pollution that harms children’s brains and academic development and the noise pollution that has been linked to Alzheimer’s.
What if we decided cars didn’t always belong in every single part of our city? Larson told the Houston Chronicle that the Main Street Promenade will be “unlike anything else we have in downtown.” It’ll be unlike anything else we have anywhere, actually. So where else might be better off if we get rid of cars—and what might we get back?
Image: Courtesy Downtown Houston+
1. The rest of Main Street to Wheeler Transit Center
Some of us have been calling for dedicating the two remaining lanes of downtown’s Main Street to Wheeler Transit Center in Midtown to pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and others for years—especially when drivers have their choice of any lane nearby on Louisiana, Milam, Travis, Fannin, and San Jacinto.
You won’t miss them.
2. Memorial Drive from Houston Avenue to Shepherd Drive
Looking back on Hurricane Harvey—and Tropical Storm Imelda and the Tax Day Floods and the Fourth of July Flood that washed out the fireworks and Allison and the flood in 1937, why not—it’s clear that poor old Buffalo Bayou and the earthen Barker and Addicks dams upstream were engineered for a city and climate that no longer exist.
SWA Group’s 2015 redesign of Buffalo Bayou Park is “designed to flood,” but 500-year storms are turning into annual events. Restoring the acreage beneath the redundant concrete of Memorial Drive could extend the park for miles, adding trees, native grasses, trails, and better topography, all there for us to enjoy when it’s dry and protect our property when it’s not. Willow Waterhole in southeast Houston near Brays Bayou, a rolling series of six “lakes” excavated out of a flat, former agricultural landscape, can retain 600 million gallons of stormwater—and the rest of the time it’s there for birding, fishing, even cross-country meets.
3. If you don’t like that, fine, then Allen Parkway from Sabine to Shepherd.
You can have one east-west artery in and out of downtown, but you don’t need two. NIMBY’s choice!
4. Rice Village is a no-brainer, right?
It’s taken almost 20 years and how many lawsuits to get half a high-rise to start going up near Rice University. The density of Rice Village and its mix of incomes, apartments, and retail spaces make it an ideal candidate to be transformed into something as walkable as an actual village. But by the time a judge decides to allow Kelvin Street to be closed to cars for two hours every seventh Sunday, Houston will be too hot for anyone to tolerate walking even from West Elm to Pretty Kitty.
5. OK, if you don’t like any of this, fine—let’s try something else.
There are few places in the region where a planning director or TIRZ president can wiggle their nose and create the dynamic environment Larson and others hope to see. If the Main Street Promenade doesn’t transform downtown into Day for Night, it’ll be evidence for some that Houston will never be as dense, as lively, as social as New York City. The pandemic, for all the empathy, also proved people don’t love giving things up.
So maybe we don’t take Memorial Drive or Allen Parkway away. Instead, maybe we add an elevated bridge above Buffalo Bayou that links to Memorial Park, so users can zip along a story or two above the cars, separated, safe, up between the high-rises to be built. Maybe we install a playful landscape in place of the wasteful dozen parking spots inside Heights Mercantile, so parents aren’t spiking with cortisol from checking over their shoulders that no one’s gunning to run their children over.
Maybe it’s a hundred of these little moves, added here and there to a city that forgot about our health, that slowly increase safety, reduce pollution, and replace the penetrating motor noise with the birdsong it would be good for us to be able to hear again.
