3 ms·

San Diego is much more like Ft. Worth than NYC, I'll grant you that. But the reason why San Diego is the way it is, is due to 40-50 years of uncontrolled and un

by sd_dev 7y ago

San Diego is much more like Ft. Worth than NYC, I'll grant you that. But the reason why San Diego is the way it is, is due to 40-50 years of uncontrolled and unplanned housing construction combined with uncontrolled and unplanned road building. The city (let alone the county) has nearly _doubled_ in population in this time, and while civil planners around the world have known for decades that road building increases rather than solves congestion, San Diego's response to congestion has consistently been to build new roads and widen existing ones. Why? Because that's what greases palms in San Diego. It's a toxic mix of developers, contractors, and their bought politicians running the show. The situation will continue to grow more intolerable until that changes. People in SD are beginning to wake up to this, and to understand that civic pride requires civic participation, but it's an uphill battle with attitudes such as yours.

davidw 7y ago
"Unplanned" is actually - to some degree - closer to what got us older, denser cities on the east coast and Europe. Places like San Diego absolutely had "plans": build a shitload of big, wide roads, zone mostly for single family units, and separate uses so that it's virtually impossible to live without a car.
- sd_dev 7y ago
  The plan you're describing is "make a ton of money building shit and make sure all the right people get their piece of the action." I mean, yes, it's a plan. But it's not really a plan for a city. I think you're dramatically understating the extent to which pre-automobile city building was a negotiation between local and regional plans, rules, and regulations, just as it is today. And large civil plans and projects were enacted well before the automobile, too. New Haven, Connecticut was one of the first planned cities in the US, and predates the car by centuries. It has a modern grid system. Boston's largest neighborhood, the Back Bay, was created out of a massive land-filling project decades before the invention of the automobile. Much of Paris, France, was built in the 19th century according to modern civil planning principles. The whole "the roads used to be cowpaths" thing with old cities is really only true when you're talking about really old cities that still have medieval quarters and things like that. Indeed, some of the oldest cities in the world have been built and rebuilt on top of themselves a number of times over the course of their histories, often according to very complicated plans. That's because the oldest cities in the world today are more often than not several orders of magnitude larger than they have ever been at any point in their history.
  - davidw 7y ago
    I guess there's planning and there's modern planning. Even the Romans did grids, which is a pretty good system. And it makes sense to keep really noxious things like tanneries or smelly factories or whatever away from, say, schools and places people live, where possible. But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities. And developers? They build what they're allowed to build. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/upshot/developer-dirty-word-housing-shortage.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/upshot/developer-dirty-wo...
    - wahern 7y ago
      > But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities. That may be true, but as was pointed out by commenters to a recent Strong Towns article, planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs--which through various public comment and challenge procedures effectively gives them veto power--which are far and away the greatest impediment to healthy, incremental growth. The days of Robert Moses are long gone. Almost all professional planners subscribe to the religion of Jane Jacobs[1], sometimes to a fault. We don't need to get into the philosophical weeds about top-down vs bottom-up evolution. Our most substantial problems lie along a different axis. [1] The tenets of the religion vary among the adherents, like any mature religion.
      - davidw 7y ago
        > planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs Sure, I agree with that. But a lot of that zoning and NIMBYism seems to use the idea that cities can be 'planned' as a crutch. "We have traffic because it's not 'well-planned'" - as opposed to realizing that you have traffic because the modern portion of your city is predicated on automobile ownership for pretty much every facet of your life.

by sd_dev 7y ago

davidw 7y ago

"Unplanned" is actually - to some degree - closer to what got us older, denser cities on the east coast and Europe. Places like San Diego absolutely had "plans": build a shitload of big, wide roads, zone mostly for single family units, and separate uses so that it's virtually impossible to live without a car.

sd_dev 7y ago
The plan you're describing is "make a ton of money building shit and make sure all the right people get their piece of the action." I mean, yes, it's a plan. But it's not really a plan for a city. I think you're dramatically understating the extent to which pre-automobile city building was a negotiation between local and regional plans, rules, and regulations, just as it is today. And large civil plans and projects were enacted well before the automobile, too. New Haven, Connecticut was one of the first planned cities in the US, and predates the car by centuries. It has a modern grid system. Boston's largest neighborhood, the Back Bay, was created out of a massive land-filling project decades before the invention of the automobile. Much of Paris, France, was built in the 19th century according to modern civil planning principles. The whole "the roads used to be cowpaths" thing with old cities is really only true when you're talking about really old cities that still have medieval quarters and things like that. Indeed, some of the oldest cities in the world have been built and rebuilt on top of themselves a number of times over the course of their histories, often according to very complicated plans. That's because the oldest cities in the world today are more often than not several orders of magnitude larger than they have ever been at any point in their history.
- davidw 7y ago
  I guess there's planning and there's modern planning. Even the Romans did grids, which is a pretty good system. And it makes sense to keep really noxious things like tanneries or smelly factories or whatever away from, say, schools and places people live, where possible. But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities. And developers? They build what they're allowed to build. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/upshot/developer-dirty-word-housing-shortage.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/upshot/developer-dirty-wo...
  - wahern 7y ago
    > But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities. That may be true, but as was pointed out by commenters to a recent Strong Towns article, planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs--which through various public comment and challenge procedures effectively gives them veto power--which are far and away the greatest impediment to healthy, incremental growth. The days of Robert Moses are long gone. Almost all professional planners subscribe to the religion of Jane Jacobs[1], sometimes to a fault. We don't need to get into the philosophical weeds about top-down vs bottom-up evolution. Our most substantial problems lie along a different axis. [1] The tenets of the religion vary among the adherents, like any mature religion.
    - davidw 7y ago
      > planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs Sure, I agree with that. But a lot of that zoning and NIMBYism seems to use the idea that cities can be 'planned' as a crutch. "We have traffic because it's not 'well-planned'" - as opposed to realizing that you have traffic because the modern portion of your city is predicated on automobile ownership for pretty much every facet of your life.