...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.
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?
- 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?
Also, Moving such that one person can take transit or walk would also be a huge huge improvement in traffic.
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...
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.
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.
Close. Chris McCann lives in Point Loma, directly under the SAN flight path. :)
Edit: Oh, nope. You're right, he is in La Jolla.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.