There are almost 6,000 miles of street in Houston, according to the Memorial Examiner, and now about a half a mile of one in Midtown can call itself remarkable. The Greenroads Foundation, which confers on streets a kind of LEED-like designation, gave its first formal props to a project in Texas to Bagby St. between Tuam and St. Joseph Pkwy., for the $9 million in improvements built along the 0.62-mile span the past few months.
Included in those improvements are bike racks, street furniture, wayfinding signs, wider sidewalks, and narrower, less harrowing crosswalks. (You can see in the photo above that these improvements don’t include burying utilities.) But the designation isn’t meant just to make the lives of pedestrians more aesthetically pleasing: LED lights were installed; rain gardens were put in to help with drainage; “fly ash” concrete, which reduces carbon emissions, was used where possible; and Bagby itself, with its potholes, patches, and cracks, was repaved atop what the Midtown Redevelopment Authority calls “newly stabilized materials” that are supposed to require less maintenance over the long haul.
Here are a few more looks at the transformation:
 and Improved... "Pin It")
Concerns about how that new 
“The main reason 
Shade, Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Gray writes, is “cheap, efficient, and delicious.” Spurning the air-conditioned tunnels on a walk Downtown, Gray stops to cool off beneath “the deep sheltered walkway in front of the Post Rice Lofts,” she writes, and starts to heat up with questions: “
Yesterday, city council approved an ordinance requiring Houston drivers to play nicer with others. That means: No throwing things at them anymore, and no passing “vulnerable road users” without maintaining at least 3 ft. of space (or 6 ft., if you’re driving a commercial truck). And how are you supposed to know which road user is vulnerable? Maybe you can print out and keep in your car this list — not organized, presumably, by order of importance —Â from the city press release: “
An online petition aimed at Mayor Parker’s desk has just one demand: Block off a street, once a week, for pedestrian use: “Options abound,” the petition states: “McKinney downtown (between City Hall and Discovery Green), Rice Boulevard (between Main and Kirby), or Harrisburg. Westheimer between Shepherd and Bagby . . . . After seeing such a street in Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, one Houstonian wrote, ‘
