The draft Regional Transportation Plan issued on Friday neatly sorts projects into modes: a highway project here, a pedestrian project over here, and transit project there.

No wonder we have such a hard time building good streets.

In Houston, most planners are still working under the idea that a street is a pathway for cars. A good street, though, is a pathway for cars, a transit corridor, a bike path, a pedestrian walkway, a shopping mall, a parking lot, a gathering space, and a public park. We knew how to build good streets once, and we have a few in Houston: Texas Avenue, Main Street at the Mecom Fountain, Rice Boulevard in the Village. But then came road planners, and land use planners, and transportation planners, and federal funding streams and in the process we forgot how all this stuff works together. For 50 years now, city transportation departments have been building streets for cars, and letting other agencies figure out the rest somehow. (For a case in point, see Dan Lundeen’s crosswalk post in our forums.)

Then I saw Washington D.C.’s Great Streets Initiative and I thought, that’s more like it. They’ve brought together the transportation department, the planning department, and the parks department, and they’re working with the transit agency as well. They’ve chosen six streets and they’re doing a master plan for each one. They’re looking at traffic lanes, turn lanes, traffic signals, parking, sidewalks, lighting, crosswalks, bus stops, bike lanes, street trees, and more. They’re looking at land use, because there’s no way to design a good street without knowing how it will be used, and they’re talking to the neighborhoods and businesses along the streets, because they know the streets best.

It all sounds obvious, actually. But it’s stunning. They’re looking (pdf) at an intersection and considering traffic flow, pedestrian flows, and transit , and they’re modeling all of this to minimize backup at the light, minimize walking distances between major pedestrian destinations, and locate bus stops so that riders can transfer easily and won’t be tempted to jaywalk. Different city departments are interacting an a way that’s as complicated as the world they’re actually building.

And it looks like we have the start of the same thinking in Houston. The city’s Urban Corridor Planning process,
which wraps up a phase of public workshops with a presentation Wednesday night at the George R. Brown 6:00-9:00, is looking at all of these issues. I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen so far. The city has hired some top-notch consultants, the Planning Partnership from Toronto. They’ve done some of the best work I’ve seen in trying to understand what our city is actually like and how it works. And they’ve done a great job of letting the public into that process.

But the real question for us is how much support the city — its elected leaders and its departments — will give to this process. I can already hear the predictable anti-zoning chorus. But the fact is we’re already regulating this stuff. The city already designs traffic lanes and turn lanes and signals and signage and sidewalks and bike lanes. METRO already designs bus stops and rail lines. The city regulates how far buildings have to be set back from the sidewalk, how much landscaping they need to have, how many curb cuts they can build, and how many parking spots they need to have. We’re already planning streets. But we’re planning haphazardly. We have to do better if we want to have better streets.

To create a good street, the public sector has to be in sync with what the private sector does. We don’t need the city to decide whether a street will be commercial or residential, dense or less dense. Neighborhoods, developers, homebuyers, and businesses are deciding that already. But it’s the city’s job, the county’s job, and METRO’s job to make sure those streets are suited to those uses. And that requires us to think of the whole street, not just the traffic lanes or the transit or the sidewalk alone.

We have our own public space in the forums. And you won’t get run over on your way there.