A Transportation Model from the 70s and a Choice

I’ve been working through an idea as I work on a podcast episode about Kingwood, the neighborhood outside of Houston (since annexed by the city) where I grew up. The idea is that during the 1970s we could have chosen another direction on transportation as the Netherlands did. We had a prototype but didn’t act on it. When I was younger I didn’t realize that Kingwood was a different place outside of the norm of transportation, where you could get around easily without a car via a series of trails called greenbelts.

The greenbelts weren’t necessarily a new idea, but in the context of an ever increasing auto oriented environment and at that moment in time, they were a visionary rethinking of suburban circulation. In the 1960s, new towns were taking off in Reston Virginia and Columbia Maryland, while Walt Disney was cribbing off the ideas of Victor Gruen for what became Disney World in Florida. At the same time, oil companies and their beneficiaries were amassing huge amounts of land outside of cities from timber companies.

In Texas, Humble Oil company (now Exxon) in particular was accumulating land to Houston’s northeast and southeast along the newly dredged ship channel. They decided real estate development in addition to oil extraction would benefit them the most. A new federally funded agency named NASA needed a headquarters, and Houston’s power brokers knew just the spot for it.

With the success of the NASA headquarters and surrounding industrial and residential development that became Clear Lake City, Humble Oil and its subsidiary Friendswood Development Corp thought development would be a the best way to increase the value of land holdings. Unlike Europe’s new towns, these new versions were fueled by interstate highway money and federal mortgage programs.

In 1973 an oil crisis hit and prices spiked. This to many people is a line of demarcation. Some countries such as the Netherlands, made deliberate choices towards less energy intensive modes around that time as the United States inched towards auto dependence.

But it didn’t have to be that way. In the late 1970s John Walsh of Friendswood Development Corp was put in charge of developing Kingwood, the place I grew up, from more Humble Oil owned land. Inspired by Reston and Columbia he and a group of landscape architects and forward thinking civil engineers did something different. They built a suburb that focused on saving the trees and connecting people not just by streets, but by bike paths that wandered between the homes in the forest.  Now there are more than 75 miles of pathways which pass under arterial roads in tunnels for a neighborhood of over 80,000 people.

The landscape architects responsible for designing the trail, including Charles Tapley, were also the catalysts for undoing the concrete channelization of Buffalo Bayou in downtown Houston as well as suggesting to oil man George Mitchell that his development called The Woodlands, also on former timber company land, would benefit from a now famous landscape architect named Ian McHarg. They had a vision for sustainable development on land the oil companies and oil men had acquired. These first iterations weren’t perfect, but they were a start.

But in 1979 with more oil embargoes and the election of Ronald Reagan, auto dependence and urban sprawl were set in stone for another generation. I was born into a rare Texas bubble. A place where you could bike everywhere if you wished.  And my beliefs reflect that place from every ride to the baseball card shop and training run I completed.

It didn’t have to be that way. But we do have a suburban blueprint to start with and make better. We know others created a different path and have seen it work. We could get there too if we choose.

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