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Brings me to the broader question: why are Californians so bad at urban planning? LA is a disaster, SF has endless issues and pitfalls, the Bay Area is a sprawl

Brings me to the broader question: why are Californians so bad at urban planning? LA is a disaster, SF has endless issues and pitfalls, the Bay Area is a sprawling mess. For a people who seem to pride themselves on being progressive, "enlightened" etc they sure are bad at livability, almost as bad as Texas.

tempestn 12y ago
99% Invisible had an episode recently that explained some of LA's sprawl: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-red-car-conspiracy/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-r...
geebee 12y ago
My impression is that poor urban planning correlates more with era than geography. One thing I noticed while traveling in Europe is that while the old urban centers are pretty great, the outskirts, built during the automotive era, are no better than anywhere else. There's just less of it. That said, in SF (according to the article), some pre-automotive buildings were actually retrofitted to reflect the new car culture and add garages.
dredmorbius 12y ago
Contrasting with where exactly? Los Angeles is not particularly better or worse than any post-WWII automobile-centric metropolis, except that it's bigger than all others in the U.S. Compare it to Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, or Atlanta (focusing on downtown and suburbs more than the inner city core), and its primary problem is simply scale, not quality. As in -- it doesn't have a markedly worse quality than any of the other examples, it's simply just larger. San Francisco is actually pretty well planned, but it's got exceptionally high demand, very limited land (courtesy of geography), and sits in the middle of what's essentially a post-WWII urban sprawl. Not quite so bad as L.A., but at ~1/3 the size, only slightly less so. Washington, D.C., is far worse in many respects. For livable experiences in the U.S., you've generally got to either look to older cities (New York or Boston, say, not that either's wonderful), or smaller towns: Portland, Oregon, Boise, Idaho, Santa Fe, NM, old-town Wilmington in North Carolina, Knoxville, TN, to name a few examples. Some are older, some simply have managed to retain a smaller-town feel. And the places which are just plain hellholes ... Industrial pop-up towns and burbclaves across the country. Hardly at all restricted to California.

tempestn 12y ago

99% Invisible had an episode recently that explained some of LA's sprawl: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-red-car-conspiracy/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-r...

geebee 12y ago

My impression is that poor urban planning correlates more with era than geography. One thing I noticed while traveling in Europe is that while the old urban centers are pretty great, the outskirts, built during the automotive era, are no better than anywhere else. There's just less of it. That said, in SF (according to the article), some pre-automotive buildings were actually retrofitted to reflect the new car culture and add garages.

dredmorbius 12y ago

Contrasting with where exactly? Los Angeles is not particularly better or worse than any post-WWII automobile-centric metropolis, except that it's bigger than all others in the U.S. Compare it to Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, or Atlanta (focusing on downtown and suburbs more than the inner city core), and its primary problem is simply scale, not quality. As in -- it doesn't have a markedly worse quality than any of the other examples, it's simply just larger. San Francisco is actually pretty well planned, but it's got exceptionally high demand, very limited land (courtesy of geography), and sits in the middle of what's essentially a post-WWII urban sprawl. Not quite so bad as L.A., but at ~1/3 the size, only slightly less so. Washington, D.C., is far worse in many respects. For livable experiences in the U.S., you've generally got to either look to older cities (New York or Boston, say, not that either's wonderful), or smaller towns: Portland, Oregon, Boise, Idaho, Santa Fe, NM, old-town Wilmington in North Carolina, Knoxville, TN, to name a few examples. Some are older, some simply have managed to retain a smaller-town feel. And the places which are just plain hellholes ... Industrial pop-up towns and burbclaves across the country. Hardly at all restricted to California.