Dallas-Austin-Houston

There's about 400 flights a week between these three cities. The cities are about 200-300 miles away from each other. The environment there is largely flat and seldomly sees freezing temperatures. Creating real competition with the airlines would be beneficial to all as it would force airlines to make it a better experience or a better price.

That's before considering car traffic. Even with enormous amounts of land dedicated to some of the widest highways in the country, they still have horrible traffic issues. Trains could help alleviate that.

Besides the automobile and airplane lobbies, what am I missing here that makes it an impossibility?

I'm a Coloradan, and next year, our state is offering FAIR Plan insurance policies. For those not versed in insurance, a FAIR Plan (FAIR Access to Insurance Requirements) is a state-managed insurance market that provides limited coverage to otherwise-uninsurable properties such as those in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) or those at risk of other perils. Typically these high risk properties get dropped by traditional insurance providers as insuring them is not likely to be profitable.

Putting on your zoning hats, do we think that states offering this kind of last resort option could create a bad incentive to continue developing in high risk areas?

I love checking out linear pedestrian infrastructure offered by cities, particularly for running or biking. In my own city of Boston, and most US cities for that matter, I've noticed that these paths are almost always either radial and/or waterfront.

I visited Atlanta and was fascinated by the Beltline. I also recently discovered Tucson's Loop, and Oklahoma City's vision for restoring the Grand Boulevard as a trail. Are there any other major US cities that have such a ring trail system?

Since the mid 1980s LA County has embraced an aggressive rail expansion operation. Based on my very rough, inflation adjusted math, the transit agency has spent to date roughly $40 billion. For this, the entire rail network gets an embarrassing daily ridership of just 200k.

For comparison, the last major road construction operation in the county was the Century Freeway. This handles roughly 200k vehicles per day in each direction. And it cost less than $5 billion in current dollars.

I'm struggling to see how Metro can justify the exorbitant spending on rail projects. They haven't worked for 40 years.

I'm looking for:

1. Pedestrianized main streets

2. In the US

3. Originally pedestrianized in the 20th Century

4. That are still going strong today with mostly successful retail

All four.

Off the top of my head there's:

• Boulder

• Burlington

• Santa Monica

• Charlottesville

• Winchester

• Denver (buses present)

• Minneapolis (buses present)

What am I missing?

,

I am looking for a website where I can easily sketch road plans, intersections, etc. Im looking to be able to 'play around' with roads in my city and modify them (just for fun). Thanks!

p.s It is for a small project/hobby.

This monthly recurring post will help concentrate common questions around career and education advice.

Goal:

To reduce the number of posts asking somewhat similar questions about Education or Career advice and to make the previous discussions more readily accessible.

It seems that in discussions of increasing housing density in California, policymakers and policy proposals generally focus just on upzoning and increasing density while not touching the single-use aspects of most land use policies today. Taking San Diego as an example most policies seem focused on just increasing housing density rather than allowing more mixed use along the increased density.

To me while I support allowing denser housing, it leads to unwalkable density since single-use land use patterns still often de facto require people to drive to daily necessities like schools and groceries. As someone who supports housing land use reform, I'm conjecturing that if upzoning proposals akin to California's SB 9 and 10 came with more opportunities for people to operate businesses out of their homes, people would support more density in their neighborhoods. Is there any direct evidence for this or am I wrong in thinking this way?

I'm an architecture student redesigning a struggling neighborhood in Washington, DC. I'm working with three blocks along a diagonal street. The northern block is the largest, and the city already has an unprotected bike lane on that street, but there's no bike infrastructure around the site.

My issue is that we can't modify streets outside our site, so any bike lanes I add will only connect to the existing one, creating a small loop instead of a broader system. Most bike lane research concerns city-wide systems; I'm having trouble scaling the principles since I'm working in a smaller, residential-focused area. Any advice on designing bike lanes for this scenario would be helpful. I'll leave the coordinates for the site below for reference if anyone is interested in going that far, which I would appreciate tbh. My site is bounded by 3rd St, I St, Delaware Ave, M St, and the pedestrian-only K St and L St, which have emergency lanes with bollards that can only be lowered by the Fire Department and EMS.

I would also appreciate some quick tips on designing protected bike lanes in general. I know what the norm is, at least in DC, regarding plastic bollards or small curbs, but anything besides that would be helpful. I would like a physical barrier; the marked separation space that's popular in many places doesn't seem like enough actual protection from DC drivers.

Cords (for center block): 38°52'40.7"N 77°00'51.8"W

TLDR: my city (Athens, GA) was awarded a $25 million dollar Fed RAISE grant in 2022. The original application was to take a five lane stroad and make it safe for all users.

This section of stroad cuts through a historically black part of town but is now littered with liquor stores and gas stations.

Staff proposed reducing the number of total number of lanes from 5 to 4 (reducing one gravel lane). One of the city commissioners that represents that area (who also has two DUI’s) hates the idea of losing a lane so her and another commissioner proposed doing basically nothing, which risks us from losing the $25 million grant.

Both fear monger that this project will gentrify ( already gentrified) their historically AA neighborhoods.

I would appreciate any recommendations for books that offer an overarching planning history of a specific North American city.

It seems to be a big focus of economic development efforts to market shovel-ready industrial sites, where they have the land graded, utilities at the ready, and tout direct highway and rail access. In Virginia where I live, they just announced that an EV battery manufacturer is locating near Danville, VA on one such site.

The amount of jobs and investment that is occurring here is undeniable. According to the above article, it will bring 2,000 jobs with an average salary of 60k (it's low COL here). This is a big development for the area, as Danville used to be a textile manufacturing hub, but since that and other industries went out of business/left the country and thousands lost their jobs, Danville along with the rest of Southside VA has seen decades of decline.

This plant is going on the Berry Hill Mega Site, which is a 20 minute drive (15 miles) from downtown Danville. The 2,000 jobs here could potentially be only a small fraction of what is there if the whole site is built out, as it only comprises 212 of the total 3,500 acres.

Is there anyone talking about the implications of mega site development? To me it is a major upending of the way that things would naturally develop. For example (this is a massive oversimplification, I don't know the city that well), the same story that happened all over the country happened in Danville. Downtown was where all industry was, so dense/traditional housing development naturally occurred around it. Then the industry slowly moved out of the country, buildings were torn down for road widenings and parking lots to accommodate outlying sprawl, zoning regulations barred the kind of development that was allowed previously, and the city declined. It still has good bones, so they are successfully starting to revitalize the downtown by converting some of the old industrial buildings into mixed use, which was presumably allowed by loosening zoning restrictions.

Now instead of the market driving where jobs are, it's government subsidy, to the tune of $200m being invested in this plot of land in the middle of nowhere, with speculative roads being built to access it, and in this case to house an industry that is presumably also, at least in part, being propped up by government subsidy (will this last in the next administration?). Instead of people having the option to live near where they work, they will have to commute to this massive development. Will this be the opposite of suburban sprawl, where people live in the dense housing downtown, then commute out of town to the mega site? I suppose there could be a transit option, but I don't think that is in the plans.

A lesson that could be learned from Danville's decline and ongoing rebirth is the merit of not putting your eggs all into one basket, as the city lived and died with the textile industry. What happens if these 2,000 people move here to work at this plant, and then the plant goes out of business or moves overseas when the political winds shift to that being the most profitable? A more resilient option would seem to be to encourage a diverse economic base, rather than be dependent on a small group of huge employers that are brought in by outside forces. Unfortunately, the governor doesn't get to come to a ribbon cutting for that kind of thing!

These jobs will be great for the people who get them. I just question the long term wisdom of the focus on mega site development, and wonder if anyone is researching this. It seems to be quite at odds with most of the dominant thinking about planning, and yet it is often a huge focus of regional and local economic development goals.

It seems like a cycle of building lowering prices temporarily, more people trying to move in, prices going back up and having to build more again. Kind of like how if you build more lanes to accomadate peak traffic hours, more people will drive and traffic goes back to normal

https://abc7news.com/post/daylighting-law-san-francisco-eliminating-14000-parking-spaces-cas-new-rule-takes-effect-heres-what-means/15538700/

EDIT: This is a statewide law. This article specifically points out the number of parking spaces affected in SF.

Hi, all. I don't know if this is the correct sub to post this, but it's something I've been obsessed with for a while.

I'm living in South America, and while walkability isn't usually a problem (even in the capitals), centralization in the capital cities leads to huge density and terrible traffic. Now, one thing that these countries have is LAND, but very few small-to-medium cities.

I know America has many small cities and towns but I'm not sure I understand how they sustain themselves without the commerce and taxation that a capital city takes for granted. A lot of towns here are just slums or primitive settlements next to natural resources like mines or logging camps, and that's something I'd like to see solved within my lifetime.

My question is, how would one go about building a city from scratch? What professions would be necessary, and how many people. What natural resources and geography should one look for? What things am I ignoring or completely naive about?

Thanks in advance.

I am a young Brazilian traditional Catholic with a fairly conservative outlook on issues like abortion, for example. I see the modern urban model—based on zoning and car dependency—as incompatible with my values. This type of urban planning, in my view, distances people from tradition, promotes materialism, individualism, and hedonism, weakens community bonds, contributes to rising obesity and social isolation, among other issues I see as negative.

However, I am surprised to notice that in the United States, the defense of walkable cities and more sustainable urbanism is generally associated with the left, while many conservatives reject these ideas. Could this resistance to sustainable urbanism among conservatives in the U.S. have roots in specific cultural or historical aspects of American society? Considering that conservatism values traditions, such as the historical urban structure of traditional cities across various cultures, why doesn’t this appreciation seem to translate into support for sustainable urbanism? Additionally, could the differences between Brazilian and American conservatism also influence how these topics are viewed? After all, the vision of community and tradition varies across cultures.

Finally, could this issue of sustainable urbanism be tied to a broader political conflict in the U.S., where, due to ideological associations, the concept is rejected more as opposition to the left than due to actual disagreement with the topic itself? How can this be explained?

A lot of things are going to change soon and I am worried about the state of urban planning. Issues like LGBT and reproductive rights have a lot of people who are both aware and committed to protecting them. But urban planning has also been specifically targeted by Project 2025 and similar agendas. The difference is urban planning was struggling to get people on board before this, despite decades of data. It was difficult but slowly we were having results. Now there is going to be an effort to reverse those gains. How is the profession going to prepare for a hostile government on the federal and many state levels?

The results are pretty recent, but I sincerely hope a conversation is somewhere. If so, where?

I've always considered myself to be somewhat involved in local politics when it comes to transit planning, but with the results of the election coming out the way that it did. I've decided to get a more cohesive understanding of municipal politics and institutions, especially since I want my region to change so drastically by forming a Metropolitan Government. So, a few days ago, I took it upon myself to go to the first zoning board meeting of the month. Here's what went down (doing this from pure memory so I may forget a few details):

• Overall vibe: When the planners here on the sub emphasize that there's nothing really "sexy" or flashy about the day to day of the urban planning process, they weren't lying at all, I damn near fell asleep at the board meeting at multiple different instances.

• The first project dealt with an expansion of a mulch producer who wanted to take over some abandoned road ROW to link up an acquired property to it's base of operations. This was within an already established industrial area. I can't remember exactly how the zoning board felt about this project

• The second project involved the approval of a set of connected single family homes on a dead-end street (that is not a cul-de-sac) the plot of land was located near some woodland, all of which were zoned for residential use. The zoning board's main contention was that, in case of a fire, the city's fire engines would have a tough time maneuvering in and out of the street.

• The third project was regarding the approval of a security gate for a foreign country's embassy in light of security concerns on the property (the representatives from the embassy disclosed that someone attempted to start a fire inside of their building after hours). There was unanimous agreement on the zoning board that there should be a security gate put in place, however, there was contention about how exactly the gates would open onto a major arterial road since swinging gates would cause traffic back ups.

• Public comment: Besides the applicants going over their desired variances, me and some other guy were the only residents who decided to take the time out of out nights to come to the zoning board meeting. The other guy let me go first and since we were the only people left in the room, we spoke freely with no regard for time restrictions. I chose to use my time to discuss the need for a revised master plan for the city so that the city could absorb as many people as possible in the near future because of climate refugees. I was alerted by the zoning board to the fact that the city did in actually have a recently revised master plan in place (which, I'll make a post about when I read it) and wanted me to know that ecological concerns were some of the main areas of focus that the master plan took into consideration. I left before I got the chance to hear what the other guy's comments to the board were about.

#What I would change under a Metropolitan Government:

Okay, I just wanna say first that I think the zoning board handled itself pretty well and I agree with all of the considerations that were put forward towards all the projects. The zoning board basically made it a point of saying that every project would get approved at some point in the future, which, I don't disagree with. Here's my thoughts about

• The only project that I would really force any changes to would be the second project since it sits within an area that has woodland. We recently had a ballot measure that passed which would cull the deer population (I voted against it), I'd have changed the lot size to allow a larger development on a smaller lot size and restricted the development from creating and back yards so the wildlife in the area wouldn't be restricted in their movement.

• All projects zoned in already existing districts would be developed by right

• If you have to dedicated time out of your day to come plead your case to the local government, if they're in support of your project, one meeting should be the end of it. It doesn't sense to me why you'd have to do more than one meeting.

• The only other thing that I'd change about the approvals process is the fact that, in my perfect Metropolitan Government, I'd has an appointed member of council who had powers to approve project by right just by looking at applications, any points of contention would go before the metropolitan zoning board, which, would be made a bit larger.