It’s an inevitable part of life in Houston: every once in a while, the rain bands pile one on top of another, the rain keeps coming, the bayous rise, the streets flood. The morning commute is a shambles; people get to work late or not at all, and the lucky ones stay home marveling at the pictures on TV and listening to a long list of closures.

Does it have to be like that? Show me any flooded intersection or frontage road or rail line and I can tell you how to fix it, given enough money and cooperative neighbors.

But that gets to the big question: do we build for the two days a year it’s flooding badly, or do we build for all the other days? That’s no small difference. Building elevated instead of at grade rail, for example, doubles the cost. Is that worth it for several hours more service a year? And do those hours do any good if all the streets around the stations are flooded? Ultimately, we lose more productivity to football parties and Solitaire than to flooding.

Property damage, of course, is another matter. There are things we can do to keep neighborhoods from flooding. As it turn out, letting streets and freeways flood is one of them; water in your street is water that’s not in your living room. And of course safety is another matter entirely.

When it comes to transportation, there’s hardware and there’s software. Hardware is concrete and asphalt and rails. Software is signs and operating procedures and public information. Hardware is a flooded underpass. Software is a flood gage in that underpass triggering a warning sign and a loud reminder on TV that it really isn’t a good idea to drive through flooding. For that matter, software is contraflow lanes and phased evacuation and staging buses. In transportation, unlike with Microsoft, software is cheaper than hardware.

Part of living in Houston is figuring out how to deal with a flat and rainy place. But that doesn’t means we make everything floodproof. Sometimes the solution is just to stay home.

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