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Infrastructure Can Pave the Way to a Greener, Fairer Houston
Veronica Davis
Originally published October 1, 2021 in Houston Chronicle
When I moved to Houston this year to manage the city’s transportation and drainage network, I was aware of some of the challenges facing the city—rapid growth, extreme congestion, frequent hurricanes. What I didn’t expect was to be tested in my second month by one of the worst natural disasters in Texas history as a severe winter storm crippled infrastructure across the state, including our transportation network.
The city of Houston—and America—finds itself at a critical point. We face multiple, interconnected challenges. Climate change brings increased flooding and more severe storms, in many cases putting our transportation networks literally under ice or under water.
We’re living today with historic underinvestment in communities of color, paired with transportation systems designed to divide those same communities. And these issues interconnect with unfortunate results: the Houston region is ranked as one of the nation’s most unsafe for pedestrians neighborhoods’ access to resources.
For decades, federal transportation policy has added to these challenges by disproportionately encouraging and subsidizing the growth of one type of transportation infrastructure: highways, which receive 80 percent of federal transportation funding in the U.S.
But there is good news: we can fix many of these problems. By offering many ways to get around, we can help reconnect divided neighborhoods, provide more access to opportunity for all Houstonians, lessen racial inequities, and, with less concrete, have our neighborhoods flood less often.
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While highways are—and always will be—critical infrastructure here in Houston, we’re increasingly focusing on the rest of our transportation system. We’re making many of these investments ourselves: building high-comfort bicycle lanes, designing safer intersections and speeding up bus trips. With the Resilient Houston plan, we are investing in drainage and green infrastructure to manage stormwater from major and minor storms. And under Mayor Turner’s Complete Communities initiative, we are investing in Houston’s under-resourced neighborhoods—right-sizing roads to make them safer for people walking and biking, and working to reduce flooding.
But our efforts won’t be enough without outside help. The federal infrastructure bill would dedicate some funding to climate resilience, safety and equity. Much less noticed is a small, inspired proposal from the House of Representatives, tucked into the separate reconciliation package. That proposal takes a fundamentally new approach, which will help our city—and country—create a sustainable, inclusive transportation system.
The House’s reconciliation proposal includes $10 billion in funding for buses in low-income neighborhoods that have been underserved by their local transit systems. It would mark the first time in decades, outside of pandemic relief, that the federal government has dedicated funds specifically to support this essential service in metropolitan areas.
The House proposal also includes $4 billion to repair the historic damage to Black and low-income neighborhoods caused by highways that intentionally destroyed thriving places and widened segregation.
And it includes $4 billion for cities to reimagine transportation projects to address the global climate crisis. Those funds could help Houston creatively build new sidewalk networks in neighborhoods with open ditches. It also could provide additional investment to ensure that the infrastructure we build continues to do the double-duty of moving people and increasing our flood protections.
The House’s proposed transportation measures comprise just over 1 percent of the reconciliation package’s full cost. But these targeted measures could be transformative, tying funding directly to goals, and giving local governments a greater say in what will most benefit their neighborhoods. For us to move forward on climate, on equity, on safety, and on providing
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access to jobs and uplifting all the residents in our communities—we must focus on transportation. We must take new approaches.
The House’s proposed measures could have the greatest impact per dollar of any federal transportation policy in decades.
Congress must keep them in the final reconciliation bill. The future of Houston—and America—depends on it.
