Good Evening Fighters - 

ARTS had 3 representatives today at Open Council. We requested an audit of all data based on the discordance of data being presented to the public and project justification vs the actual data we received from public records.  Our focus was to first to thank Mayor Turner on halting the project to review all facts and data but also to discuss the flaws in the Cities Data that they use to justify to project.

He stated he will be making his decision next week! 

Our ask of each of you is to send an email supporting the audit based on the flawed data.  You can use the following factual letter as a resource to devise your email with FACTS:

Mayor Turner

Thank you for your visit to 11th Street yesterday to hear directly from businesses and residents of their concerns with the 11th Street project. 

I am requesting an audit of work done by the Transportation Planning Department (TPD) on the 11th Street Project because of the reasons given below. I have raised some of the issues detailed below in emails but have not had responses to some of them. I believe a face to face audit is the only way to resolve our differences with the project.  I believe some of the work done has ignored some key traffic data that has been gathered by the City in coming to their conclusions that 11th street should be reduced from 4 lanes to 2 lanes. We believe if all the data would have been considered in the study that it would be clear that the proposal of reducing the number of lanes on 11th street is not justified.  In addition, the impact on residents near 11th Street and businesses on 11th Street have not been adequately addressed.  

I have analyzed the data associated with the project and I have spoken to the City Council, the Houston Heights Association and the Greater Heights Super Neighborhood Council on my findings and conclusions.  I have always been concerned with the mischaracterization regarding the safety and other aspects of the 11th street project by the TPD as I have noted in my many talks and emails.  Of course, the media picks up on these key talking points and sadly misrepresents the 11th street project to the general public.  

From a project management perspective, the first principal should be to develop an accurate database of key metrics - fatalities, serious injuries, crashes and their causes, traffic count representative of the current situation, speeding surveys and analyze the data. In my view, there is very little data on the project to analyze and the most recent data was taken nearly 3 years ago.  In addition, I believe that some data that was received from the City through a separate request has not been reported by TPD and has been ignored as discussed below. 

1. Fatalities and serious injuries - TPD has said in public meetings that there have not been any fatalities or serious injuries on 11th Street for the 2010-2019 time period. I am assuming there have been none since 2019 since, if there were, TPD would have made a point of that.  11th Street meets Vision Zero Guidelines and was not on the 2020 Vision Zero Action Plan.

2. Crashes on 11th Street - crash data along 11th St. from Durham to Michaux was shown during the Feb 7, 2022 HHA Land Use Committee meeting.  

- TPD says crashes show safety is a corridor issue.  Yet when this data is analyzed, most of the crashes are concentrated at the intersections of Durham, Shepherd, Yale, Heights Boulevard and Studewood.  My conclusion is 11th Street improvement should focus on enhancing the safety at these intersections and not changing the entire corridor. 

- TPD says 11th Street crashes between Shepherd and Heights Boulevard per 100 million vehicle miles is 10% above the Texas average for 4+ lanes.   I do not have access to the database that would validate this conclusion. What is the metric for Shepherd to Michaux - why is the data only presented up to Heights Blvd?  In addition, I do not know what crashes along the corridor are included.  For example, are crashes at Shepherd and Heights Blvd included? It's not clear because of the statement "between Shepherd and Heights".  So, I'm challenging this statement and how the entire Shephard-Michaux safety metric compares to the Texas average.

3.  Speeding - TPD infers that 11th Street speeding and erratic maneuvering is the base cause of the safety issues on 11th Street.  I have asked for traffic count data starting in 2010 for 11th Street from the City.  When I analyzed the data, I noticed there were only 2 speed surveys taken anywhere on 11th Street since 2015. The first survey taken on Jan 8, 2019, showed the average speed east of Nicholson and 11th was 34 mph with the 85%-tile at 38.5 mph. The second survey on the same day east of Heights Boulevard shows the mean speed was 24 mph with the 85%-tile at 30 mph.  Yet TPD at the February 7, 2022 presentation shows the "typical speed of 11th Street is 38.5 mph" without any mention of the 2nd survey or mention of the average speed. I have discussed these surveys with another professional engineer and he was surprised that the survey would have been taken right after a major holiday as it might not have been representative of traffic speeds on 11th Street.  [Note: For example, I am using average speed and mean speed as the same as these numbers are within 1mph in this data set.]

And now the Houston Chronicle of May 26 claims that “city officials say...average speeds on the street nearly reach 45 mph.”  This is clearly incorrect as noted above.  The same article describes 11th street as a sewer – a statement not fit for civil public discourse.  

To validate the conclusion regarding speeding, I believe additional surveys should be taken to draw any kind of meaningful conclusion as part of further studies on 11th Street.

4. Traffic count - again there are limited traffic count surveys in the 2015-2022 time period - only 2 full 24 hour periods before Covid.  TPD shows data taken east of Nicholson taken on 1/8/2019 as the basis of their conclusion that 11th street has adequate capacity except for a 1-hour period using 800 vehicles per direction per hour as its metric.  The FHWA uses 750 vphvd for road diets as the "probably feasible" maximum for road diets and their metric includes a turn lane as all their illustrations for road diets have turn lanes.  A 13-hour survey taken at Nicholson on 9/6/2019 shows 3 hours over the 800 vphpd metric used by TPD. No mention was made of that survey and its implication that congestion is likely over a 3-hour period - eastbound between 4 pm and 7 pm. TPD have said in more than one presentation that the traffic count exceeded the metric for less than a 1 hour period and therefore only 1 lane each way is needed.  If all the available data were used, this conclusion would have been that 2 lanes each way are needed.  TPD has not used all the data in this regard in their proposal for 11th Street.

 5. Projected Traffic Increases have been underestimated.  TPD uses 1% traffic growth per year, yet the population growth for the Heights is expected to be 3.5%.  When this point was raised in an email, TPD said that traffic increase and population growth did not correlate.  Yet a Brookings Institute study concluded that the most obvious reason for traffic increase is due to population growth and that it is a 1:1 correlation.  (I have raised this point before in an email to City Council and TPD and have not had any response.) The impact of traffic increase is that the ADT (Average Daily Traffic) for 11th street will exceed the City's Major Throughway and Freeway Plan (MTFP) guideline of 16,000 by 2023 for a 2 lane Major Thoroughfare. This clearly shows that 11th Street should remain 4 lanes.

UPDATE: Houston Heights 1 yr (2020 - 2021) growth 6.0% - Published in Houstonia Summer 2022.  

6. Traffic overflows to side streets - FOR THIS SECTION - SHOW PHOTOS! WE DID AT COUNCIL AND IT WAS EFFECTIVE - SHOW CONGESTION ON 11TH! no studies have been presented that reassure residents on residential streets that this issue will not occur.  In fact, the opposite is evident in other presentations made by TPD (e.g. Slow Streets).  The plan for 11th street does have provision for overflow at Dorothy and Lawrence but nothing presented for side streets east of there.  Again, with the traffic capacity data mentioned above, we believe this will become a serious issue for residents on side streets and in our view it is totally unnecessary to proceed with the project that puts those residents at risk.

7. Impact on Businesses - we have raised this issue several times during City Council meetings and we do not feel this issue has been adequately addressed.  Potential reduction in traffic due to lane reductions means fewer customers, a reduction in business revenues and less future investments.  The issue of deliveries to businesses along 11th Street should be seriously considered when making a decision on the project.

Please send your version of the email to the following:

Mayor - mayor@houstontx.gov

District C - Abbie Kamin - 832-393-3004 - districtc@houstontx.gov

District H - Karla Cisneros - 832.393.3003 - districth@houstontx.gov

At-Large Position 1 - Mike Knox - 832.393.3014 - atlarge1@houstontx.gov

At-Large Position 2 - David Robinson - 832.393.3013 - atlarge2@houstontx.gov

At-Large Position 3 - Michael Kubosh 832.393.3005   atlarge3@houstontx.gov

At-Large Position 4 - Letitia Plummer - 832.393.3012   atlarge4@houstontx.gov

At-Large Position 5 - Sallie Alcorn - 832.393.3017 - atlarge5@houstontx.gov

David Fields Chief Transportation Planner DPW - 832-393-6600 - David.Fields@houstontx.gov