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Combed Thunderclap posted:While some people, i.e., anyone who’s ever watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit, love the idea that this was a grand conspiracy by General Motors, it was almost certainly a combination of factors that the infrastructure in question was never actually financially sound, the Great Depression happened, and all these great new roads made it super easy for white people to buy up cheap houses in suburbs that were suddenly within commuting distance, making it even easier to leave racial minorities behind in the inner city choking on whites’ economic dust. thanks for leading off with this. the streetcar conspiracy drives me nuts Combed Thunderclap posted:- Atlanta: Fun facts: Seattle turned down a boatload of federal funds back in the day to build a subway so that way undesirables wouldn’t be able to move around the area. All those earmarked funds have to go somewhere, though, so they went to Atlanta, where the MARTA system now struggles to wrassle the counties surrounding Atlanta into providing the system with funding. MARTA sucks but it's not their fault - they're one of the most cost effective transit systems just from their perpetual shoestring budget two interesting things are going on in atlanta -the atlanta streetcar, which is really just a sponge to soak up TIGER grants as well as try to bootstrap the chicken-egg problem that is contemporary streetcars -the beltline, which is a system of greenspace/walking trail/hiking trail/maybe mass transit eventually that is nevertheless pouring massive fuel on the fire that is the gentrification of atlanta's downtown eastside in terms of marta, clayton county (heavily black, middle class, commuter) keeps going back and forth on it but they may join the MARTA coalition which would be nice. us locals in the know think that gwinnett county (most populous, lots of money but wide disparities, increasingly nonwhite) is prone to join up in the next ten years or so, fingers crossed
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Apr 1, 2016 07:32
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as well as another that would expand MARTA service. Fulton County is also having a sales tax referendum, but it currently intends to put the $568 million towards everything but MARTA. 
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1337JiveTurkey posted:Don't forget the goddamned HOV lanes into Cobb County rather than making some sort of rail solution up this way. you'll have a 'rail solution' as soon as your hick loving neighbors vote to join marta Combed Thunderclap posted:Also I guess they're better than nothing but the amount of funding that gets poured into building HOV lanes really gets me riled up. Argh marta is a local, county initiative, under the purview of GRTA and the ARC. the highways though are a state-federal partnership e: i grew up in gwinnett, and i loving hate cobb county boner confessor fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 08:17
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CommieGIR posted:We're desperate in Atlanta to expand MARTA, especially towards Gwinnett County where traffic inflow onto i-85N/S is intense, but Georgia has decided on Lexus style Toll lanes that are an absolute rip off (up to $12 dollars one way on a 15 mile stretch) and they are expanding these toll lanes to i-75N/S on both sides of Atlanta. the suburban counties won't get poo poo until they pay for the splost. suburban voters are terrified of "criminals" from atlanta riding the trains up to rob their houses, which is why they consistently vote down attempts to join marta and instead implement their own halfassed horrible county transit systems
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Apr 1, 2016 15:49
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Warcabbit posted:Automated driverless cars are coming, but it won't be critical till they reach five nines of penetration or so. As long as one in a thousand cars is human piloted, you need to keep the traffic laws human-centric, and it's the poorest people who will be keeping their junkers the longest. So thirty years after they reach the 'Tesla 3' stage. (Maybe 20) and not just poor people driving junkers, but car enthusiasts who will resist driverless cars as long as possible driverless cars is a bit of a red herring, the land use/transportation mix is already oriented towards mass automobile ownership so nothing much is going to change there, at best we see incremental efficiencies in terms of traffic flow and a sharp reduction in traffic fatalities, which is nice, but there's not going to be some kind of transformative utopia the way a lot of people imagine
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Apr 1, 2016 16:35
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blowfish posted:I'm just going to be a pampered European here and point out that only the second even approaches something that would be considered adequate for a major city. it's not just a city, more an entire region. the gray rough vaguely circular line is interstate 285, which is superimposed here over greater london for scale (the larger blue line, the smaller blue line is a system of trails being constructed which more or less encircles the core of Atlanta)  MARTA is the little system that could, everyone recognizes that it sucks but it's only about 40 years old and it's one of the very few metro systems in the us - and the largest system by far - which recieves zero state funding, and a shoestring of sales tax money from two (!) counties and the city of atlanta, with some assistance from the feds. the state of georgia actively hampers MARTA as much as possible to cater to suburbanites just outside of I285 who stay awake at night fearing crimes being whisked to their subdivisions on high speed trains http://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/marta-tsplost-transportation/ CommieGIR posted:Yes, its embarressing. And now our state is moving towards a Lexus style toll system for those who can afford it to avoid rush hour traffic. They are literally loving the poor transit wise. this is all GDOT's bag though, and GDOT doesn't like MARTA because 1) they're competitors 2) it's hard to slush and kickback rail contracts so, more roads! roads everywhere! boner confessor fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 21:57
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AA is for Quitters posted:Disney/scoot/celebration is an awesome look into what happens of urban plannners had their own sim city. That was real. I'm not a crazy Disney fangirl, but Disney world is just such a fascinatingly built place, I love to go not for the characters, I go to nerd out on the construction. celebration is a bit much, and creepy. seaside, fl is the same thing but not a company town
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Apr 7, 2016 18:05
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-Troika- posted:
bob moses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses long story short bob moses was a political mastermind who, despite never being elected, held a huge amount of power in new york city and basically wanted to build expressways and automobile infrastructure loving everywhere, all the time. luckily he was stopped from some of his more insane plans but he still completely hated mass transit and purposely built overpasses too low for buses to traverse bob moses represents the mid century planning tendency that all problems can be fixed by building more roads, more or less, and jane jacobs (author of death and life of great american cities which rebooted pedestrianism and eventually turned into new urbanism) completely hated every part of him boner confessor fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 19:37
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Do you have a link for that last one? That's hosed up even by labor union standards.
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Curvature of Earth posted:(White) Baby Boomers are the wealthiest, most politically engaged cohort in America right now. If they retire in-place in suburbia, or move to other suburbia, you can kiss all dreams of a more urbanist American fabric goodbye for another couple decades, at least. If we can't sell them on anything slightly denser than their preferred suburban form, all our urbanist, pro-transit dreams are hosed and we literally have to wait for them to die. in my opinion we're already pretty screwed. street networks and land ownership/use, in the absence of cataclysmic events like land-erasing disasters or complete political revolution, tend to be locked in over long periods of time. a ton of virgin land was developed around american cities in the early 20th century for primarily automotive access. it would take sustained political and economic investment over many years to convert this fabric, one piece at a time, to something more pedestrian friendly, and given how we can't even commit to paying the necessary costs for automotive infrastructure... for now i see the most feasible path forward as a bunch of scattered, wildcat projects to turn just one local area into something more urban. every once in a while you'll hear about some suburban town either revitalizing or building an entirely new downtown core area but without regional support it's just a little ped island in a sea of cars
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Apr 13, 2016 20:47
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Cicero posted:It'll take a long time, but it's not unfixable. The Netherlands was very car dominant after WW2, they didn't start turning things around until the 70s. I think things in the US are slowly shifting towards being friendlier towards 'alternative' transportation. the netherlands, like most of europe, has a predominant land use/transportation framework that was laid down long before 1940. even if we assume a village is completely destroyed by war and scraped clean, any contemporaneous rebuilding will be somewhat founded on previous lot allocations and land ownership, traditional rights of way, etc. in many places in the united states, areas which are subdivisions now were literal primeval forests in 1940, or large allocations of agricultural land with no fixed lu-tran layout and yeah i'm not saying it's impossible. i just don't see american political will swinging that way when we can't even commit to making our car-focused infrastructure up to date
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Apr 13, 2016 21:22
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just to be clear what i refer to as the land use-transportation framework is largely conceptual and about relationships between land and structure uses and how people navigate between them. this is in part determined by the built environment (what structures actually exist right now at this place and time) but also in part on things like land ownership and rights of way, which tend to be relatively permanent. look at london for example, which burned to the ground ~350 years ago but retained a largely medival-ish road network and building/street relationships when rebuilt because that was the path of least resistance. it takes a napoleon to enable a hausmann, even bob moses tried to tamper with the lu-tran of nyc and he was eventually turned out by neighborhood activists
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Apr 13, 2016 21:35
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Curvature of Earth posted:I'm a wee bit more optimistic. Or in this case, apocalyptic. Because as I posted earlier, that cataclysmic event is coming. Suburbia will die regardless of whether you or I do anything, and regardless of how hard suburbanites fight to preserve it. It's simply not financially sustainable. The 1950s/60s-era suburban infrastructure is already reaching its end-of-life, and there isn't the money to replace all of it. This will compound with each decade, until the steep costs of maintaining sewers, roads, and water lines past their intended lifespan forces cities to pick which subdivisions they allow to crumble and which they desperately try to save. This is America, so states will bail out the wealthier, whiter towns as long as they can, and local governments will abandon the brownest and poorest neighborhoods first, but min-maxing a failing system does nothing to change the fact that it's a failing system. the whole of suburbia won't die. the suburbs are still gaining population. we're just going to let the suburbs die in the places where, coincidentally, we stick all the poor urbanites being displaced by gentrification
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Apr 13, 2016 22:23
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Curvature of Earth posted:Irrelevant. That's like arguing that rising sea levels won't affect Miami because its population is growing. What people want doesn't matter if the fundamentals can't support it, anymore than the popularity of home ownership couldn't stop the housing bubble from collapsing. kind of an odd metaphor given that after the housing bubble collapse owner occupied detached single family homes are still the most common form of housing Curvature of Earth posted:That's not how it works. In my home state of Oregon, the Portland Metro area comprises about 47% of the state's population. The Salem metro area contains another 10% or so, and the Eugene metro area another 9%. Realistically, only Portland has the resiliency and tax base needed to prop up suburbs undergoing financial collapse, while Salem is the state's capital so it won't be allowed to die. So we're looking at about 40% of the population that lack the political and economic power to support themselves in the face of the oncoming financial cataclysm. This isn't small potatoes. This isn't a problem that can be dismissed with handwaving about minor population shuffles. oregon's a weird example though given that it's the only state in the us with strong regional planning directives, meaning the state has squarely placed the burden of managing city-suburb relationships on the metro governmental authority. really every state is weird since they're all different, here in georgia the state underwrites a ton of the cost for roadways and the state does everything it can to undercut regional planning power and preventing atlanta from annexing or spreading transit
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Apr 14, 2016 01:01
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Neon Belly posted:Just read a neat piece on the structuring of suburban office parks and company's continued resilience to change: it's just cheaper to construct and operate. basically nobody builds their own corporate towers anymore in the us, tower construction has slowed down a lot and when they are constructed they're built by real estate firms who are looking to rent to various tenants. so if you want to be your own landlord a campus is really the only way to go there's plenty of companies which take the opposite route, and even google bought a massive tower for its NYC office. but if you want to do the ultimite prestige project and build some hyper avant garde architectural thing in america in the 21st century you're probably not building a tower
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Apr 15, 2016 23:56
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Trevor Hale posted:The article also hints at how hosed up cities are because hotshots with money work in the suburbs. If you're driving to work, you never interact with your city. Why should someone who lives in City A and drives to Campus B give a poo poo about the public transit of City A? this makes sense if you assume people just, like, hibernate in a coffin from the time they come home from work until the time they leave for work. people who make the choice to live downtown and commute to a suburban office probably chose to pay more money to live in a city because they like living in cities
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Apr 16, 2016 00:02
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Curvature of Earth posted:Tech company headquarters are built in suburbia because their founders/executives are born-and-bred suburbanites. For them, suburbia is the default. It has nothing do with cost and everything to do with uncritically embracing the system they're most familiar with. ah, can i dual class suburbanite/hipster or do i get a racial penalty
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Apr 19, 2016 20:48
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HorseLord posted:Amsterdam in the 70s vs now: this was true of all cities when mass automobile ownership first became a thing. cities built on a human scale fare poorly when people start driving cars into and through them. most european cities, being old and well worn as human-scaled places, found it easier to ban and restrict cars. american cities, being younger and larger (really the only american city which is comparable to a european city in design terms is boston, and thats a stretch) found it easier to just ditch the whole human scale and build cities for cars instead of people. thus,  all of those blocks used to be buildings, but it turned out the better economic use at the time was to use them for car storage. lame part of it is a sociological reaction to the deeply ingrained racism in american culture. but as america careens towards a legitimately multiethnic democracy, actual for real urbanism is becoming more popular (see: hipsters, gentrification, exploding rents in american cities) and bit by bit we're converting american downtowns into livable good places again
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Apr 24, 2016 06:20
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of course that is if we don't just boot all the urban minorities into suburban ghettos as is the european style and leave the city cores for a wealthy and middle class cultural elite 
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Apr 24, 2016 06:25
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computer parts posted:No, the issue with towns in the South is that they didn't really have any development until after WW2. Those blocks were never buildings, they started out as parking spaces. yeah i doubt they just laid out perfectly orthogonal parking areas conforming to the block gridiron. no, this was the ugly face of urban renewal, when it made economic sense to tear down low rise brick and wood structures so you could build parking lots. notice the random blocks with like a single one story structure tucked off in a corner? those are the survivors you're right about the post-ww2 boom (an ugly secret is that federal military spending really jumpstarted the southern urban economy, sort of like reconstruction but 80 years later) but that was largely related to sunbelt growth pressure which coincided with the largest wave of white flight and suburbanization, creating a huge incentive for all that automotive travel necessitating wide swathes of parking to begin with computer parts posted:The difference is that Houston covers an area of over 600 square miles, while Boston covers about 90 square miles. kind of a red herring - we're not interested in the size of the jurisdiction, we're interested in the specific economic pressures on that patch of land called downtown boner confessor fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Apr 24, 2016 |
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Apr 24, 2016 06:45
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computer parts posted:Orthogonal areas don't really correlate with buildings, they correlate with newer construction the road network, orthogonal or not, is much tougher to rebuild than just knocking down a set of buildings and consolidating lots. i'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here - are you saying that most of downtown houston was virgin land that was first developed as postwar parking lots? or are you saying that the civic government took an aggressive stance in imposing an orthogonal grid of purpose build parking over previous development, because that's a stretch for houston, city of no zoning ordinance. what are you trying to argue here, because midcentury urban renewal's tendency to destroy pedestrian oriented urban framework for a wasteland of cars is pretty well established as a trend in american urban planning and i'd like to hear more detail about your alternate theory
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Apr 24, 2016 07:11
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computer parts posted:I'm saying Houston was very small Pre-WW2 (which it was, it wasn't even 400,000 people back then) and was very spread out (because land is/was cheap), so when development did occur it was due to post-WW2 ideas of structuring society. this doesn't address at all what i was talking about, which is that prewar (which is just a proxy for pre mass automobile) development was knocked down for the sake of parking, to demonstrate some of the alternative responses to mass auto travel than the european tendency to push for pedestrianism first
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Apr 24, 2016 18:33
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computer parts posted:Yeah, and your proof that it was knocked down is that "the city has orthogonal grids". In fact, that's usually evidence of development that's post-WW2. you misread. i questioned why parking lots, if built freely, would conform to an orthogonal grid, because you claimed that large areas of downtown houston were not developed until the midcentury as individual block-sized parking lots. you're effectively saying that this map is a fabrication  so either you have a grossly deficient understanding of american urban development in the 20th century or you're trying to bait me with an absurd troll. orthogonal grids were used in american planning since the colonial era. the ancient greeks and romans often built on a grid when they could, and the grid came back into style as 'more rational' during the rennaisance boner confessor fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Apr 24, 2016 |
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Apr 24, 2016 18:57
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Bip Roberts posted:You can mark out streets without developing buildings. Look at a map of California City. i highly doubt the town engineer of houston circa 1880 marked off blocks and prevented anyone from developing them so that, fifty years later, they could be used as parking spaces
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Apr 24, 2016 19:04
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computer parts posted:Does that mean Houston tore down a bunch of buildings because they love cars so much? No. urban renewal and 'slum clearance' was a well known process in the mid 20th century. lots of older development was torn down for public works or sometimes just the 'public interest' which in the case of a city as light on regulation as houston could easily be left to rot for parking. here's a couple more examples from pittsburgh and st louis   sorry man, i hate to be rude but you clearly have no idea what you're talking about so i'm going to ignore you for now
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Apr 24, 2016 19:11
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computer parts posted:e: Here's the same area from the 1930s: so uh did you not notice that this image directly contradicts your earlier claim that " Those blocks were never buildings, they started out as parking spaces." at least try to keep a consistent bad argument
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Apr 24, 2016 19:13
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Curvature of Earth posted:Massive swathes of downtown parking were not built because of economics, any more than the federal government spent $500 billion dollars to build the national highway system because of economics. President Eisenhower did not run the numbers on highways versus rail when he proposed building a national highway system. Robert Moses did not calculate the loss of tax revenue to cities when he planned to level whole neighborhoods for highways and determine that highways grew the economy enough to outweigh the loss. These were ideologically-driven choices, and specific policies were put in place to implement them. Government and business does not exist in a vacuum, with executives and legislators robotically crunching the numbers behind every decision. All choices have an ideological bent. Governments went all-in on car-centric infrastructure. So did businesses. none of this impacts individual landowners or businesses who decide what land use will generate the highest rents
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Apr 25, 2016 03:19
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Curvature of Earth posted:Popular Thug Drink has exactly the opinions on urbanism you'd expect a white guy from Atlanta who picked the name "Popular Thug Drink" to have. i'm sorry that you're upset that i made fun of your stupid posts but i actually hold a post grad degree in this topic whereas you seem to think being a suburbanite is an inherited cultural trait do you also have some issue with the factual basis of mid 20th century urban renewal or what are you salty about this time? you seem to be calling me some kind of racist without understanding the context of my post at all or why i put 'slum clearance' in scare quotes
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Apr 26, 2016 22:30
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so are you just going to ignore that you implied i was racist because you didn't understand the historical context of my post Kalman posted:Right. Cities with a good number of walkable suburbs that have good transit to the city core (NY, Chicago) have affordable suburbs. there's really no way to generalize the comparative cost of suburbs across america given the massive amounts of suburban land surrounding each major metro and cost disparity within each metro let alone across metros
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May 2, 2016 04:08
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ok thanks really the biggest reason american cities are seeing spiking prices is hedonic. young people with money are increasingly clustered in cities and rejecting suburban living - not as an iron rule, but as a general trend. this is a good problem to have even if it leads to political fights between nimbyists and hipster gentrifiers. im more worried about all of the urban poor who are getting pushed out to the least desirable suburbs
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May 2, 2016 04:49
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Harik posted:How is it only 3x as expensive to build a multi-story parking garage as it is to tamp down some dirt and pour asphalt on it? I honestly would have pegged it at 10x as expensive if you'd asked me to guess. Is it land cost? That varies so wildly that it's hard to make a generalization about it. parking structures are pretty simple to build. no complex plumbing, bare minimum electrical, no fancy decorations. just throw up a skeleton and pour concrete
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May 10, 2016 19:39
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i know a guy who lived in western virginia but his team, and their office, were in denver. they'd fly him out and pay for his hotel whenever they needed him on site. dude was a wizard of coding tho so yeah if you're important enough you can demand these kind of perks
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May 26, 2016 16:18
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Neon Belly posted:Does that streetcar not have a dedicated lane? most systems in the united states dont, the cost of distinct lane separation is prohibitive for brand new systems but it's pretty easy to dedicate the lane later at least. or share the lane with buses
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Jun 3, 2016 00:17
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probably also that WMATA is in a jurisdictionally weird position where they do not have dedicated funding nor a single stable state government supporting it but rather have to petition for funding from two states, an independent district that lacks many state powers, and the us congress
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Oct 12, 2016 22:47
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blowfish posted:Yuuuuuge gains that Trump hopefully won't destroy bigly? these are all state/local level referendums, the federal government can't do anything about it. this is why it's so slow to implement good mass transit in the US, the feds have traditionally been extremely averse to funding any kind of local mass transit because it's firmly in conflict with the 10th amendment - unless transportation has something to do with interstate or international commerce, it's none of the fed's business. so in the absence of consistent federal funding, most mass transit is left up to the locality, with widely divergent effects. portland, oregon enjoys broad state level support for both urban planning and transportation authority, and so has a very muscular transit system for its size. atlanta, georgia is traditionally poo poo upon by the state government and so faces a number of disadvantages, long headways and high fares, but they manage to keep the system running in decent repair despite a hostile state government and NO state funding the department of transportation can provide grants to individual projects (expect those to disappear) but if the city of atlanta wants to vote for extra taxes to fund transit, there's nothing the feds can do to stop them
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Nov 10, 2016 18:51
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Badger of Basra posted:USDOT does fund some transit through grants or low interest loans. If they pull a bunch of that money it won't derail (haha) these projects but it could make them a lot smaller. yeah i said that in my post Quorum posted:DoT grants to help urbanism, sustainability, walkability, all that fun stuff are completely dead for the time being. It's unfortunate, because I know my city's weak-rear end new BRT line is relying on some federal grants; I sincerely hope that stuff is all allocated and can't be revoked by the new administration. New projects will have to rely on state and local funding at best. not a whole lot has changed though - while dot transit grants will certainly dry up it's not like there was a deep pool of them to begin with what with the federal government dysfunction and aversion to funding useful things
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Nov 11, 2016 07:44
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