Friday before the stormFollow

/shrug. I happen to live in one of the larger metropolitan areas of the US which hasn't (yet) succumbed to the assumption that cities must be modeled on ever increasingly dense populations connected by increasingly necessary mass transit systems. And I believe that it's much much better to not adopt that model if you can. To be fair, cities like New York and Chicago had grown probably to the point (or near) of requiring mass transit before cars became commonly affordable, but it's still a point to make in terms of future city growth and planning.


I see the designs of those older large cities as examples of what *not* to do.

Yeah, it's not. Crack open a history book.

Mainly I commented on how ugly and devoid of interest it is and how it looks like the cookie-cutter models from an old computer game.

Edited, Sep 6th 2011 7:07pm by Jophiel

Thank God I don't live in LA then! How's this for a better skyline?

Edited, Sep 6th 2011 6:14pm by gbaji

I'll be going from this:



to this:



(if Google can be believed.)

You work at an observatory or something? That seems pretty bizarre really.

Hospital.

Someone from a railroad company bought land 'near downtown' sight unseen, thinking it'd be a good place for a depot. Years later they discovered the land was on top of a hill, and the grade made it impractical for rail. The land was donated to the state, and the biggest hospital in the city is now located on top of a hill and is nearly inaccessible to ambulances during the winter storms.



Edited, Sep 6th 2011 6:35pm by someproteinguy

Is that the suburb of some real city?

Nope.

Are you retarded? Seriously WTF?

Brilliant retort. I'd think you'd be used to being wrong all the time by now.

Now you're just being silly. It's not my fault that I live in such a vastly superior city to where most of you have to live. Not sure if it's about being smarter or luckier or what, but I'll take it!


San Diego is the 8th largest city and the 6th largest county by population in the US. We're like the 48th largest metropolitan area though. Want to know why? Because we are more spread out. As a result, we don't have the same kind of traffic issues that other large counties have. We don't have the same ridiculous commute times, and we don't have to build a huge expensive public transit system. Sadly, some idiot liberals keep trying to foist a larger transit system on us, but aside from some stupid and counterproductive success with the Trolley system, we've largely kept them at bay.


And we're much much much better off for it.

Shades of the NYC mosque argument and Gbaji trying to lecture me on zoning and the building/construction permitting process

IIRC, you said that the train station closest to your house wasn't working, and you'd have to drive to another one farther away, but that this station didn't have enough parking, so you left 2 hours early to ensure that you could park at that station in order to ride the train in to work.



I understand the financial argument. But my point is that the difference in cost is so great *because* the system was built deliberately to make it that way. You talk about living further out from the city, but what if the city wasn't where all the jobs were focused in? What if 90% of the businesses on Manhattan island were spread out in various business parks throughout the surrounding area? Wouldn't it then be more likely that you could have found employment that was just as good as where you are working now, but that wasn't "in the city" and to which you could commute quickly and easily by car?




You might just know much more about how cities plan within already existing assumptions. I'm talking about changing the assumptions themselves. You live and work in a city where that mass transit decision was made several generations ago. It's probably hard for you to comprehend how things might have been built differently.

I'm living in a city where we have avoided the mass transit issue, but some are trying to force it on us. In my lifetime I've seen some of our city planners talk people into building a trolley system, then when it didn't make enough money, use the needs of the trolley system as a lever to change city planning. The literally chose to expand or create certain downtown sites specifically to make use of the mass transit system which wasn't paying for itself. Right now, there is talk of moving the stadium from the nearly perfect location it is at, to the increasingly congested downtown area. Why? There are plenty of better places. But that way they can put it somewhere where there's no sufficient parking and no way to get there, so people will have to take the trolley to get there.

Heck. They've already done this to a degree. Even at the existing site, they jacked up the price of parking (by about 400%) to help offset the cost of building a spur line out to the stadium. Why? Well, because it's "better" to get people to ride the mass transit system of course! So now a bunch of people ride the trolley to get to games, not because there isn't plenty of parking, and aren't plenty of routes in and out, but because they artificially increased the cost of parking to force people to pay for a trolley ticket instead.


So excuse me if I don't buy that line. In my experience watching this conflict first hand (which I'll bet you never have) what I've seen is that mass transit systems end out forcing changes to city planning that are not beneficial to the public but serve to justify the costs of the mass transit system itself. As I said earlier, it's a self created problem. Don't build it in the first place, and your city doesn't concentrate beyond that which your road system can handle, and you don't need the mass transit system.

The total amount of business in an area is exactly the same whether you concentrate it all in one downtown area or not. The theory that concentrating shops and business somehow amplifies money flow is flawed economics at best, and flat out wrong at worst. Why on earth would I take a train into a busy and crowded city center if I could access the same shops and restaurants and venues distributed across the whole county? And because they are spread out, there isn't heavy traffic getting to any one location.


Open your mind. There are newer and better ways of designing cities. Some of us realize this. Others stick dogmatically to what they were taught in some classroom somewhere.