Parking Lots, Parking Minimums, and All That In 2019, Houston city council passed a ground-breaking ordinance that removed parking minimums for parts of Midtown and EaDo. The city’s climate action plan, which was adopted in 2020, calls for an end to all minimum parking requirements by 2030.
I thought it would be interesting to look at parking in The Heights, so I put together this little study. Originally I wanted to do the entire city, but I could not find a source of data on parking lots covering the whole city, so that was out.
The city of Houston makes a file available on the web every week containing a summary of the past week’s building permits. I found this file a bit difficult to digest - it needed a map, it needed search and filtering. So I wrote some code to automatically read the file in each week, merge it with the previous weeks files, and then upload that to the web where I have an application to display it.
We like to walk. When the weather cooperates, we can easily get in 5 or more miles in a day just walking around the neighborhood. We walk to the bank, to the grocery store, the hardware store, or just around the ’hood. There are two huge irritants on our walks. The terrible drivers who refuse to yield right-of-way to a pedestrian, and the abysmal quality of the sidewalks. This report will look at the sidewalks.