But reducing it with roads probably isn't the most popular option. Last year, a poll of Harris County residents conducted by Klineberg found that only 27 percent of them preferred roads as the best long-term solution to traffic. A full 70 percent supported building public transit or living in communities closer to work.
Eckels's strategy to reduce congestion aligns more tightly with the work done by many of his campaign contributors. Since 2000, he has accepted $93,250 in campaign contributions from road builders and suburban developers. Major contributors include people such as Michael Stevens, who led the fight against the METRORail project; roadway contractor Charles Beyer; and Bob Perry, owner of Perry Homes, which has built only nine of its 48 projects inside the Loop.
Daniel Kramer
Once lined with houses and lawns, Bunningham Lane
is being razed to make way for the expanded Katy
Freeway.
Daniel Kramer
Once lined with houses and lawns, Bunningham Lane
is being razed to make way for the expanded Katy
Freeway.
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Eckels denies the donations have influenced him. He says many contractors would also eagerly build rail projects, and many developers would be happy to see them whistle through their communities.
Klineberg disagrees. "To build a different kind of Houston requires a different set of talent and experience," he says. "And it can be developed, but people who have the personnel already trained to build roads are going to be very much inclined to want to keep doing that."
In the end, the transportation plan is a political give-and-take between people such as Eckels, who represent suburban interests, and representatives from the city of Houston, who should be opposing projects that sap vitality from the city core. And one of the biggest outrages of the entire process, activists say, is that Houston's members of the planning committee have done almost nothing to advocate for the city's interests. In fact, they haven't even gone to most of the meetings. At more than half of the 26 meetings leading up to the vote on the plan, only one of Houston's three delegates was present. City Councilmember Carol Alvarado and her alternate attended only six meetings, and City Councilmember Gabriel Vasquez made it to just four. Both were replaced on the board in April, three meetings before the plan passed.
So how do Houston residents influence Eckels?
"I appreciate the comments of those folks," he says, "and I may or may not agree with them. But when it's over, we have our vote, and if they want to change it three years down the line, elect a new county judge. Because that's where the ultimate accountability is in this."
Before Lillian Jones was forced to leave her house on Bunningham to make way for the Katy Freeway, she sold her homegrown flowers. "They went like hotcakes," she says. Some people even bought the ones in the ground. She couldn't take them with her because she was too old to replant her life all over again. Instead, she moved to a retirement community, a place with a big parking lot and a small courtyard where not much is in bloom this time of year.
But on a recent Saturday afternoon when her son was visiting, Jones was making do. The flowers were on her bright blue and pink dress, sharing the fabric with butterflies. She sat in an armchair and, around her, oil paintings and a medieval tapestry hung close together on apartment walls.
Despite her best efforts, starting a new life has been tough. "It's really hard to adjust when you don't have space," she says. "Even the kitty has problems."
George the cat got lost one day in the complex, where one place looks just like another. A resident found him and sent him to the pound. Jones had to pay to get him back, and she knows how he must have felt.
"Sometimes I think it's pretty soon time to go home," she says. "Then I realize, 'Home, I don't have a home.' "
Her new apartment sits a few miles north of the Katy Freeway, but it's not immune to the influence of Eckels's transportation plan. A block away runs Gessner -- potentially, a future Smart Street.
Asked to weigh in on her city's transportation future, Jones, who was born when most people still walked to get around, tries not to let nostalgia get the best of her. "I don't have enough information about what is best," she says. "I just know this is a big mess."
