Parking Design for Houston Central City industrial park
JACOB GONZALES
Problem
The city of Houston, Texas is arguably a unique city when it comes to city planning and development. With no land use ordinances, Houston could be a city of great potential or major disaster, and it is difficult to really understand the struggle of city planning and development within Houston, but I will be concentrating on the topic of parking and the possible impact it has on equity, inclusion and sustainability. I believe with better parking design the city can become more inclusive and create justice between all cultures. “The welfare of all and the welfare of minorities are both deserving of support” (Davidoff, 2011).
I reviewed and analyzed the Parking Study of the Downtown Main Street and Streetscape of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, but I must state that this study was used for parking occupancies during peak hours. I will be using this study for an alternative design solution for the city of Houston. Although, the comparison of population between Houston and Broken Arrow is dramatically different, with Houston population at 2.3 million and Broken Arrow population at 113, 540, the argument can be made that this study is scalable between the two cities. And by creating better parking “pocket” areas this will create presence and fairness within the city of Houston.
The area I concentrated on within the city of Houston is the Central City Industrial Park. The Central City Industrial Park is approximately 60 acres, making this site nearly 2.6 million square feet. This is 3 times the size of the Pearl in San Antonio. The Central City Industrial Park is currently going through schematic design for a master plan to be implemented. There needs to be transparency and input into the decisions that affect community, land, resources, sacred sites, cultural traditions, and sovereignty (Hausam, 2013). As I studied the site, I couldn’t help but think of Broadacre City, which was introduce by Frank Llyod Wright in 1932. And as Wright stated emphasis needs to be placed upon diversity in unity. (Wright p.348) This project intends to highlight environmental design and revitalize this industrial park. Again, I will concentrate on the parking application in this area.
As I analyzed the Houston’s parking requirements, I noticed that most of the requirements are not every useful and are not helpful when it comes to designing better parking area and parking structures. In Section 26.581 Construction standards for parking and loading facilities and Section 26.582 Design and maintenance standards for parking and loading facilities in the City of Houston Code of Ordinance. The code standards are extremely vague and not useful. I asked myself the question, is it possible to use the same approach as form base code to provide for a better parking design solution. As Talen examines this history using the criteria that FBC’s are enforceable, dictate private development to shape public space and create “time-tested forms of urbanism,” (p.146). As listed below the design criteria for Houston parking is ultimately of little use to provide the opportunities for change.
Alternative
The design of parking at large has an extreme impact on the environment and well-being of the community. Is it possible to address the problems with more regulation or less? Could the expression of environmental protection as a fundamental responsibility of democratic governance reflect the contemporary ideas relating to social equity, sustainable development and inclusion (p.301)? I began to consider some of the main topics for parking design. If these main topics are addressed this will allow for implementation to start and possibly scale.
• Total Parking Space Available: This can always become a problem. As the number of parking space available and the occupancies of the area will be a large factor of the design. Providing enough parking to accommodate all people at any give time is no easy task but there is a possibility to provide that is adaptive parking when its needed.
• Parking Accessibility: Accessible parking can often be a second or third thought when it comes to parking design but integrated accessible parking is now a liable option. This is where curbs are only located in designated areas rather than long all streets.
• Landscape and Shade: An extremely important part of a great designed parking area is the landscape. Creating well design shading and landscaping gives the user a sense of safety and welcomeness.
• Parking & Safety: Parking safety can be an issue regarding pedestrian safety and vehicle visibility. Parallel parking is generally considered to be safer; this is because vehicles entering parking spaces can be easily seen by concerning traffic, and drivers exiting parking spaces can clearly see (in their side mirror) oncoming traffic to determine when it is safe to pull out.
• Paid Parking & Parking Citations: Paid Parking areas are generally used and are often found in convenient areas. Although, these are often timed parking and can be difficult to estimate the time needed to park. Free parking can be scarce and is often found much further from the preferred destination, which than leads to exclusion and inequities. The result of paid parking may then lead to a parking citation again causing difficulties of providing accessible parking for those you may have trouble finding parking.
If changes are made soon, we may find ourselves in a desperate situation. The future has the potential to be a place of equality, inclusion and sustainable development is commonplace and the norm. Or we could find ourselves only continuing to development has we have been, and I can only imagine what the future would look like. I would like to lay out a couple of future scenarios were we make on changes the present regarding Houston Parking Codes.
1. Why does it always feel like there is never a parking close enough to my destination? Now, with parking literally found in every square inch of Downtown Houston I still struggle with parking. It seems has though once parking became such a high-priced item, back in the 2030’s, its evolved into an enterprise. Amazon alone purchased 600,000 square mile of parking lots, parking structures and parking facilities. It also doesn’t help that every single parking lot both public and private now charge some fee to park. It was in the late 2020’s when this began, and city politicians said it was to encourage walking within the city but failed to make the city anymore walkable.
2. Yet again another hurricane as hit the coastline of Houston. Hurricane Travis has thus far caused approximately 3.7 billion in damages. With 17 confirmed causalities due to the storm. Most people found settler in parking garages and parking structures during the storm.
What are we to do? Does infrastructure and land development play a major role to the cause of these devasting natural disasters. These are a few questions we have asked ourselves for the past century yet cannot seem to make the proper changes to avoid such disasters.
Could these problems or disasters been avoid had we investigated the theory of longtermism. Our future generation are just as important as our current one. To quote William MacAskill from his article The Case for Longtermism written in Aug. 5, 2022, he says,
"Our era is undergoing an unprecedented amount of change. Currently, the world economy doubles in size about every 19 years. But before the Industrial Revolution, it took hundreds of years for the world economy to double; and for hundreds of thousands of years before that, growth rates were close to zero. What’s more, the current rate of growth cannot continue forever; within just 10,000 years, there would be a trillion civilizations’ worth of economic output for every reachable atom." (MacAskill)
Implementation
My approach to this parking problem is to take the ideas by Ebenezer Howard, that “Town and Country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization” (E. Howard., 2011, p. 331). By taking a small-town approach to parking and implanting it into a dense urban environment maybe this will then bring a more inclusive, equitable and sustainable design to parking. This marriage idea Howard calls the Garden City, and he describes his vision of the garden city to be made up of concentric circles, with a garden at the center and public parks surrounding it. Although, the idea of the Garden City may seem out of scale to the idea of parking and landscaping, but this garden city model is scalable and can be reduce to a micro scale and applied to parking lots and landscape design.
The city of Houston needs to rethink the approach to parking and the impact it has on the equity, inclusion, and the environment. This is not to be done with stricter codes but rather a better develop look at the future and awareness in parking.
Reference
City of Houston (2022), ARTICLE VIII. - OFF-STREET PARKING AND LOADING https://library.municode.com/tx/houston/codes/code_of_ordinances? nodeId=COOR_CH26PA_ARTVIIIOREPALO_DIV6COMADE_S26-581COSTPALOFA
Eisenman, T. S. (2013). Frederick Law Olmsted, Green Infrastructure, and the Evolving City. Journal of Planning History, 12(4), 287–311. https://doi.org/10.1177/1538513212474227
Eshelman, H. Jon. (2012). Parking Study, Downtown Main Street Streetscape Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. https://coherent-commons.s3.amazonaws.com/artifacts/file/file/89cf59d7-465a-4f93-940e-7146ea989356.pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIA23B6R4NTCRHS5NZ3%2F20221103%2Fus-east-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20221103T152913Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=df6272b287f108a6193d73a1edea761e6db52eb675d67ae70a37ce0aacde5771
Hausam, S. (2013). Maybe, Maybe Not: Native American Participation in Regional Planning. In David C. Natcher, Ryan Christopher Walker, & Theodore S. Jojola (Eds.), Reclaiming Indigenous planning (pp. 166–190). McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Howard, E. (2011). Author’s Introduction and The Town-Country Magnet. In R. T. LeGates & F. Stout (Eds.), The City Reader (5th ed., pp. 328–335). Routledge.
MacAskill, W. (2022, August 5). The Case for Longtermism. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/opinion/the-case-for-longtermism.html
Talen, E. (2009). Design by the rules: The historical underpinnings of form-based codes. Journal of the American Planning Association, 75(2), 144–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944360802686662
Wright, F. L. (2020). Broadacre City: A New Community Plan. In R. T. LeGates & F. Stout (Eds.), The City Reader (7th ed., pp. 401–406). Routledge.
Credits:
Created with images by Kovcs - "Houston, Texas, USA Skyline" • f11photo - "Downtown Houston skyline" • Mike Mareen - "hurricane approaching the American continent visible above the Earth, a view from the satellite. Elements of this image furnished by NASA." • Robert Herhold - "Aerial view of a large parking lot with vehicles"