New Houston mayor reverses course on bike, pedestrian improvements

Bike lanes and pedestrian improvements might be popping up in cities across the country, but in Houston, they could be on their way out.

Pedestrian and cyclist advocates in the country’s fourth-largest city are worried that Houston’s new mayor, 74-year-old John Whitmire, is set to reverse course from his predecessor on transportation policy.

Since taking office in January, Whitmire ordered the removal of medians that served as pedestrian islands along one major thoroughfare. He halted construction and planning on other bike- and pedestrian-friendly improvements throughout the city. He saw two top city transportation officials leave, and called cyclist and pedestrian advocates “anti-car activists.”

“What we’ve seen from the administration so far is that the mayor is really not interested in pedestrian safety,” said Gabe Cazares, executive director of LINK Houston, a group that advocates for residents to have multiple transportation options. “He would like to go back to the Houston that moves vehicles at all costs.”

Houston has roughly the same number of pedestrian deaths a year as New York City, even though the Texas city’s population is a third of the size. The dangerous streets prompted former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and other local leaders to install more protected bike lanes and seek funding for sidewalks in neighborhoods that long lacked them. The street-level improvements are often linked with trails that run through the Bayou Greenways, parks along the region’s waterways that voters created in 2012.

Local governments in the area have secured $100 million in federal grants for projects that include bike and pedestrian improvements. “They all implemented elements of street safety and pedestrian safety. In fact, that’s why those projects were awarded,” Cazares said. “Now all of those projects are on pause.”

Whitmire transportation advisor Marlen Gafrick said the mayor “is seeking to carefully balance current and future mobility needs for all Houstonians by providing a range of mobility options without affecting our existing mobility options.”

Mary Benton, a Whitmire spokesperson, detailed some of the mayor’s concerns with Houston’s ABC 13 Eyewitness News earlier in the week.

“A review of mobility projects constructed in the last administration revealed newly constructed bike lanes removed residential and business street parking, failed to accommodate residential solid waste trash cans, negatively impacted emergency responders, and impacted our general mobility with reduced lanes,” she wrote.

Gafrick said the projects that are on hold are “ones that reduce the number of general-purpose mobility lanes or lane widths. In addition, projects are being evaluated to ensure that city service delivery for emergency responders and solid waste collection are maintained or enhanced.”

The mayor has called on police to step up enforcement of traffic laws in response to people getting killed by drivers while walking. He also suggested cyclists didn’t belong on city roads. “Bikers need to be protected from the traffic,” he said last month, “and they need to do that on bike paths that are recreational and not try to compete with people going to work and school.”

Whitmire has been a fixture in local politics for half a century. He was the longest-serving member of the Texas Senate before he cruised to election in a mayoral runoff last year. He made a name for himself in Austin on criminal justice matters, and his mayoral campaign also emphasized public safety, even though crime had been decreasing in the city.

During the campaign, his remarks about traffic safety were vague, said Cazares, whose organization hosted a September mayoral race forum on transportation. Whitmire expressed frustration about how long it took to get a crosswalk and a traffic signal installed in his neighborhood, but his answers at the forum were “noncommittal.” “I learned more from what he didn’t say than what he did say,” Cazares said.

But Gafrick said the mayor made clear what his transportation priorities were during the campaign. “The changes should not be a surprise,” she said. 

Since taking office, it appears that Whitmire is listening more to public safety officials about transportation problems than his own transportation staff, added Joe Cutrufo, the executive director of BikeHouston.

His decision to remove the medians along Houston Avenue, for example, appear to have been the result of a conversation that Whitmire had while riding along the road with Police Chief Troy Finner. The mayor is also considering whether to remove bike lanes installed on 11th Street in 2022, in part because of concerns that they make it harder for fire engines to turn there.

“When Mayor Turner had questions about transportation, he would turn to the very experienced transportation planners and engineers on his staff,” Cutrufo said. But some of the most prominent transportation experts left the city after Whitmire took office. “Mayor Whitmire apparently listens to the chief of police, who is not a planner or an engineer.”

The mayor recently told the Houston Chronicle that part of his plan was to rethink how transportation money was spent. “Some neighborhoods have no sidewalks,” he said. “Then you have neighborhoods like the Heights who have three-foot sidewalks that they’re tearing up to put in 10-foot sidewalks. So there needs to be some equality in prioritizing our resources. […] We need to slow down the 10-foot sidewalks until some people get a three-foot sidewalk.”

The city is currently inventorying the sidewalks throughout its 650 square miles of territory to identify which special districts can help pay for improvements and where gaps remain, Gafrick said.

“We have communities that have never had sidewalks. The pedestrians in these communities are using the vehicular travel lanes for access to bus stops, schools, stores and other daily necessities. In contrast, we have communities that are replacing perfectly good sidewalks with wider sidewalks. We will be focusing our efforts and resources on building sidewalks in areas that need them, providing safe sidewalk crossings and repairing broken sidewalks,” she said. 

Cutrufo acknowledged that many neighborhoods in the city needed sidewalks. But, he added, that shouldn’t be used as “cover” for stopping projects that are in the works or, even worse, tearing up improvements that have already been made. “It’s not a great use of taxpayer dollars to try and start from scratch when there’s already been so much invested in projects that have been funded and designed,” he said.

Some of those projects have been in the works for years, Cutrufo noted. A project to install better drainage and prevent chronic flooding on Montrose Boulevard also includes a 10-foot wide path for cyclists and pedestrians. Similar improvements are slated along Shepherd and Durham Drives. The four-lane one-way streets would both be converted to three-lane roads with new wide sidewalks and bikeways, along with new landscaping. U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Republican, helped secure $25 million in federal money for the project.

Lawmakers from both parties supported the effort, which is now on hold, Cutrufo said. “They realized that Shepherd and Durham is emblematic of the direction that Houston has been heading in. And you can already see developers making serious investments on that corridor because they understand that people want to be on a street that is three lanes with big, wide, beautiful sidewalks and bike paths as opposed to a four-lane highway with barely any sidewalks,” he said.

Gafrick said the city is currently reviewing projects that received federal funding, including a $43 million grant to improve sidewalks in the Gulfton and Kashmere Gardens neighborhoods. “Our preliminary review of the Gulfton and Kashmere Gardens grant is that the grant allows some flexibility and does not conflict with his transportation policy. Not all grants are right for every city. Each city needs to determine if the grant criteria meet their vision. Houston will review future grant applications to determine if they are right for our city,” she said.

Cutrufo, the bike advocate, said he is worried the mayor will not only stop projects that are currently under construction, but also that he could order the removal of existing bike lanes and other infrastructure installed to improve safety.

Houston has about 300 traffic deaths a year, and a third of those are of pedestrians. “That’s a lot of people dying while walking in a city where the trope is ‘nobody walks,’” he said. “For a mayor who is so hyper focused on public safety, you would think that traffic safety would be a pillar of any public safety plan. It’s been anything but since he took office.”