I live in San Diego and just waited 30 minutes in bumper to bumper traffic to drive 7 miles. Until better traffic infrastructure is installed, more people sounds like a nightmare.
...that only works if there are viable alternatives (see "public transit" portion of proposal"
> make it so bad that people move closer to work.
Do you really believe it's that easy to move? and then never switch your job?
The proposal is trying to fix the problems you are complaining about, I'm not sure what value your alternatives would bring.
One advantage of both cars and proper mass transit systems is that you don't have to move if your work does, or if you switch jobs, or if a partner moves in...
Now you have two people (a+b) in a career. They start off living 10 miles from their office (A + B), and meet each other at a mutual friend (f) that's 10 miles in the opposite direction
A -- a -- f -- b -- B
They then move in equidistant, 20 miles
A -- -- afb -- -- B
Then office A moves 10 miles the wrong way
A -- -- -- afb -- -- B
How do ab move closer to work?
Also, Moving such that one person can take transit or walk would also be a huge huge improvement in traffic.
- schools
- hospitals
- malls/retail
All of those things need to be close to residents who don't necessarily live downtown or on major transit lines. And they're also all expensive to move. How many of them are well connected to transit today?
We don't need to get everybody to get rid of all cars. We need to make sure that everybody has a reasonable opportunity to not use the car.
Frankly, San Diego has terrible civic planning and I suspect it comes from a combination of apathetic/uninformed citizenry and corruption w/r/t the real estate industry. But the problem is certainly not "too many people." There are many cities much larger than San Diego that have figured this problem out much better.
I grew up in San Diego and lived in New York as well as Ft. Worth and I think you don't know what you are talking about.
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.
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.
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.
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-wo...
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.
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.
Right now San Diego feels like an overgrown suburbia. If we transform into a real urban city I welcome it. The increased housing density will also presumably decrease housing prices, further making a more equitable city.
In any event, classic Nimbyism. Memory still pisses me off. Glad to see at least the University has come around, even if I imagine most La Jolla residents haven't.
For reference, if I'm not mistaken, it was a La Jolla resident who invented that cheap clicker device that you can click to instantly report plane noise complaint to FTA. Cool little project but, well, yeah.
There was a spike in UTC area visible homelessness last summer, making the area Starbuckses uninhabitable, and the transit line will certainly make quality of life even worse.
Close. Chris McCann lives in Point Loma, directly under the SAN flight path. :)
Edit: Oh, nope. You're right, he is in La Jolla.
Given that's pretty close to the driving commute times anyway, it's not that bad.
But I welcome it. We need more livable cities in warm/moderate climates.
Sure, there are some walkable neighborhoods, but most people don't live in one of them. And even if you do, almost everyone needs to commute out of it or leave regularly for activities or socialization. And if you need to do that, 95% of the time the trolley is not anywhere near it, and a bus could take an extra hour and a half and is occupied almost exclusively by poor people and children in most areas.
It's like this because everything is sprawled out over a very large area. San Diego is like a 500 square mile area and stuff can happen all over it. And there are freeways everywhere rather than trains (which could not cover the area) because the whole thing is designed for cars.
I actually lived in San Diego without a car for years. But I was one of very very few people who go without a vehicle and are not homeless. And the only reason I could do that was because I only took 100% remote jobs and literally had zero social life.
I mean it is great that they are taking some kind of action on housing. It's still going to cost $1400 for an apartment in the ghetto though. Which is why I moved to TJ and live on the beach for half of that.
Certainly there's no guarantees but it's not as if there is a lack of good examples of success of mixed-use zoning. NYC is a common example in the US but there's similar ones all over the world.
> More people will invariably mean more cars.
If you worked ~ten blocks away from where you lived, would you get in a car to get there (knowing that it would take about the same overall duration or longer via car)? Seems especially nice that you could count on favorable weather most of the time.
I agree you can live in some places in SD and survive without a car, however you cannot really get to more than half of the places you want to get to. Most of the tech companies are up north, so working in tech you really need a car unless you are at one of the few shops downtown / Mission Valley.
All of the downvotes to the parent are justified.
However, the fact of the matter is that often times, you need the increased tax revenue from higher density developments in order to be able to justify and afford expansions and improvements to the transportation networks. This includes not just roads and highways, but also _gasp_ public transport.
The only thing low density zoning codes due is force sprawl.
With more housing in high-density areas, people don't have to drive as much and traffic can actually go down.
I'm speaking from experience. The developers in Denver are chomping at the bits to buy up another grocery store property in Capitol Hill (a centrally-located walkable dense neighborhood) and tear it down for multi-unit housing, and this has already happened in other neighborhoods (we used to have a walking-distance market before it was torn down for high-rises). I have the joy of living near a multi-unit box that is zoned as "mixed use" and has a total of 0 businesses and 0 parking spots, and they tore down a local medical office to build that. In another location, four blocks down, they're tearing down other small offices to build hundreds of apartments -- again, zoned for "mixed use" and yet, again, the ground floor in their blueprints only has more condos and lobby space. Zero local businesses.
My point is it just takes a while along with quite a bit of pissed-off political willpower until folks can comfortably ditch cars in car-centric communities, and density isn't a magic pill. What would likely happen is several years of increased traffic and parking utilization before everything falls into place. We're talking about bike lanes, public transportation, and walkability.
Where I live in San Diego (UTC) there was significant improvement due to mixed use (they are building high rises within walking distance of Westfield UTC mall, some of the new residential buildings also have office space inside them (looking at plans for Lux, yes, the name is cringy)).
Where I work in San Diego (Carmel Valley) there is a large new development project (One Paseo) that is located next to a mall (Del Mar Highland Center) which is being significantly renovated, and One Paseo itself includes dense residential, office buildings, and restaurants/shops (in fact, the restaurants/shops are already opened while housing will take a few more years to be ready).
Both of these developments involve building multistory parking garages to accommodate parking needs.
Even if the "mixed-use" buildings we create today are all residential, that doesn't mean they will stay that way. They can be remodeled if a grocery store wants in. Or the building that goes up next door in a few years can have a bit of commercial. Right now there is more commercial space than we need, while residential space is lacking, so it is no surprise that what you see today it mostly residential. However we now have the legal means to change that over time which is big.
SD's public transportation issue is that SD is just so spread out and public transportation is typically slower than cars due to stops, waiting, etc. Oceanside to downtown (~38 miles) takes ~75 minutes, or just over 30 mph. The only places where public trans works well is when people don't have to travel that far.
This simply is not true. A lot of people in SD think this is true, but it is not. There is nothing structurally unique about SD that makes it a nightmare for transportation. It's just that SD as a city lacks the will and the leadership to make the necessary changes happen. Civic planning is on autopilot from the 1960s: build condos everywhere, and widen roads whenever possible. This is a recipe for continued nightmares.