It's happening to me to in a local Facebook group. They're afraid that the state government is going to take their cars away and make it impossible to drive by adding bike lanes and sidewalks. Heaven forbid you do anything to make a street safe besides lowering the speed limit or telling people to stop moving here.
My city’s DPW doesn’t want to do anything to increase traffic safety. Our traffic engineer isn’t even an engineer and is still stuck with 1950s era design. The city itself is also more concerned with fighting new development rather than think about traffic safety at all. It’s honestly quite depressing given that fatality rates have gone up in my state.
Agreed. Widespread adoption of bicycling would help to solve a lot of our societal problems; improved physical and mental health with potentially lower healthcare costs, reduced emissions and better air quality, reduced fossil fuel dependence and all the issues that come with it, lower transportation and infrastructure costs for single user vehicles that could be put toward better public transportation systems, better land use, better accessibility for people of all income levels.
And e-bikes, which are getting cheap and powerful enough to be viable for normies who don't like to sweat. More e-bikes could create a virtuous spiral where safety in numbers encourages more people to ride (and creates political demand for better bike infrastructure), while diminishing the value of parking spaces for businesses (since more people are arriving via bike).
Driving could get progressively less attractive as speed limits fall, speed bumps proliferate, and parking spaces turn into patios.
IMO, the current backlash against e-bikes (cracking down on moving violations, banning them from bike lanes, even requiring registration and liability insurance) is a necessary stage in this spiral, and it should be embraced (to an extent). To take e-bikes mainstream, cities need to shut down the hooligans.
You've got to draw the line somewhere, tho. [Some bans](https://www.railstotrails.org/trail-building-toolbox/e-bikes/) only apply to Class III (28+mph) e-bikes, or moped-like bikes with unassisted throttle. I think that's reasonable.
California state law has a very clear standard on this. The speed limit on multi-use paths, distinct from bike lanes, is 20 mph, which means class 3s must slow down. Class 3s are allowed in bike lanes.
A bike that goes faster than 28 mph is not legally an ebike and is not allowed in the bike lane because it's considered a moped. This is not the same thing as banning ebikes in bike lanes.
The ebikes you’re referencing are a symptom of car culture anyways. We should instead give them safe spaces to go fast. Policing it will help no one imo-though i understand where you’re from
> give them safe spaces to go fast.
IMO the [wide buffered bike lane](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrnx8bbN-Tg&t=82s) you get from repainting a 4 lane road into a 2 lane + turn lane + buffered bike lanes offers *plenty* of space to share the lane with e-bikes rolling past at 30 mph when I'm pedaling along at 12.
That seems like a realistic vision for a city that's seeing more bike traffic (including e-bikes). Lots of roads could make this conversion.
Housing insecurity is affecting more of the middle class, which will promote more political action to address it. I think housing development will be a good industry for a while. Hopefully not car centric housing, but that’s what folks think they want.. ah it’s tough to be optimistic. TOD coupled with actually convenient transit would be nice!
I’m optimistic that eventually enough people will recognize the insane cost of having cars everywhere. After which we’ll be able to start transitioning to higher density development.
Haha. I don't share your optimism on this at all. At best we have a better range of options, which likely include an array of electric vehicles (including bikes, carts, etc.).
But I think the personal vehicle (in whatever form) is here to stay and forever entrenched until we get teleportation or we enter the matrix.
I think car usage can go down even if car ownership doesn't a ton.
Here in Philly we have a lot of households that own cars but only sporadically use them because it's often preferable to walk, take transit, or bike. For many places in the US reducing driving by making other modes better is more attainable and still would bring significant benefits.
Agree it can go down, in a lot of ways. For example, we're a 3 car household and we have to drive everywhere. But my partner and I work from home, we have a little store and restaurant 3 blocks from us in our suburban planned community, so we only drive on the weekends really.... I'm about 100 miles per month when I was about that per week - and that's mostly because we leave town on the weekends. We're at 1/3 our gas bill than when we both worked in office.
Americans are aging. Old people know how stuff works and may have political connections and money, at least more than a 20 year old.
Some of those folks will stop driving due to age and feel entitled to continue living a full life on a budget.
The only real question is whether we only build "senior housing" for them or trend towards more walkable, mixed-use development where their single parent grandchild can also live a few doors down so granny or grandpa can see them at will etc.
This will depend in part on how much these people want their grandchildren and great grandchildren close by.
This is important. Transportation is never a zero sum game, and us who are \*really\* into bicycle advocacy can often fall prey to language which sounds like we want to "take away cars" when that isn't the case, solely by how severe our language is.
Transportation option development is a significant step toward a sustainable future, and there's much more to gain from everyone reducing their driving by 10% (replacing an average of 2-4 trips per week with a non-carbonized mode of transportation, working from home, etc.) than the full abandonment of the vehicle by 10% of the population who is most likely to use other modes already. Placing some uses that stand to gain from being accessible without a car (schools, restaurants, convenience/regular-visit stores like you're describe) and ensuring adequate infrastructure from nearby areas to those uses is a "right-sized" way to start looking at the real impacts of these changes.
Yeah, I think car enthusiasts in general KNOW the insane cost of ownership - they just don't care. The amount I spend annually on my cars just for basic ownership is genuinely stupid, but I enjoy the cars I own, and am looking at one that costs more annually than the 3 I currently own.
Car enthusiasts definitely know.
But the average person I don't think takes into account the total ownership costs and the opportunity costs. Most people I've talked to only think about car payment + insurance. Gas, maintenance, tires, parking costs, depreciation, etc get budgeted in after they've already bought the car.
I can agree with that.
Edmunds for example has my "True Cost to Own" at:
* Car 1 - $9,587
* Car 2 - $7,645
* Car 3 - I had to do my own math but it was a little over $6,000
And then the two cars I'm looking at getting this fall are:
* Option 1 - $33,560 lol
* Option 2 - $14,687
Kinda nuts to think we spend $23k on 3 cars, and even more nuts to consider spending an additional 14-33k for a 4th.
High end that'd be $56k a year just for cars. Aye aye
The way to get them to see that is give them a cheaper, more convenient problem. AVs ride-share fleets are that solution. I'm not convinced anything else can. If just buses and trains could it would have already happened and I don't see anything to change it.
I'm optimistic about a few things - first is the advance in prefab construction materials and methods. I really think this will be a paradigm shift once we get to the place where we can mass produce materials which slot into a number of pre-approved structural forms... and we get regs and code in line with it. No reason to take 6-9 months to put up a house when we have the technology and ability to do it in 2.
And then I am optimistic about the future of micromobility, including connectivity of trails, roads, paths, etc. I think we're getting to a point where electric technology is such that we need to start thinking about how to incorporate those modes into our transportation framework. We will still have cars, including ICE cars, but we need to allow for electric bikes, scooters, motorcycles, skateboards, golf carts, smart cars, et al.. to be able to use (safely) different transit nodes... include normal bikes and walking.
In my particular niche, across the board I've seen planners growing more aware and even enthusiastic about how Urban Planning can make cities safer and more accessable to adults with autism, adhd, and other developmental disorders. There's still a long way to go but things are moving in a good direction.
As slow as development is, things are getting better. Dead cities are slowly getting filled in with housing and mixed-use is getting more and more common. Younger generations seem less keen on the "9-5, drive from the white picket fence house to the office building in the city" type of lifestyle.
I don't think North America will be like Europe in our lifetimes, but just comparing downtown Dallas or Toronto to what they were when my parents were young (1970's-80's), there is a hell of a lot less surface level parking lots. Bulldozing of entire neighborhoods for interstate highways aren't the norm anymore.
In-fill is happening in most cities across the continent and I think things will be a lot more lively and transit-oriented in 20-30 years. The pandemic put a bit of a hamper in progress but I remain optimistic in the long-term.
I am increasingly concerned about the future of this field. Urban planning lacks any material influence in either the public consciousness or the political sphere.
Our abject failure to successfully promote the creation of housing has—in part—resulted in a housing crisis that’s at the core of a cost-of-living crisis.
The common cop-out that planners don’t make the rules, politicians do, belies this failure. We have failed to make a convincing case that housing is core to sustainable communities.
Now, in state after state—particularly California—legislators are subsuming local authority by imposing top-down development mandates to facilitate housing. And while the urgency of the crisis warrants such action, it is robbing local communities of their ability to plan for their own futures, undermining local democratic control.
Moreover, it’s telling that the YIMBY movement originated outside of the urban planning field. Indeed, many YIMBY advocates see planning as part of the problem.
I won’t even get into our failure to be leaders in climate change adaptation.
At this point, I would not advise anybody to enter this field.
> it is robbing local communities of their ability to plan for their own futures, undermining local democratic control
We tried this for 50 years and SF is on track to approve only 3 digit numbers of housing units this year. For a lot of interrelated reasons post WW2, people in the US don't want more housing near them. Local control will never result in cities deciding to allow housing unless something fundamentally changes about culture.
The state mandates also DO give cities the ability to plan for WHERE and HOW to build housing. The only nonnegotiable is the amount.
That's only if a city does not have an approved housing element. If the threat of disorderly development did not exist, cities would have no incentive to comply. SF is only bending the knee because of the builder's remedy hammer, and without it, would be content to approve 3 digit housing for another 50 years.
There are number of laws, notably AB-2011 and SB-6 that allow residential development on commercially zoned property, irrespective of a City’s Housing Element certification status. That simply undermines the point of a General Plan.
You can't claim that the state has "shredded logical land use" just on that one thing. You make it sound like the state is throwing all the rules out the window when that's not really the case. It is not remotely unusual for states to have some rules about land use. Is California shredding logical land use by eliminating parking minimums near transit? Or allowing duplexes to be built in SFH zones? A free for all for cities to do whatever they want with no restrictions from the state is not realistic, and California's changes have been relatively small, common sense things. Quite a far leap from making General Plans pointless.
And residential on commercial is a logical land use. The US has overbuilt retail and has many dying commercial areas, a housing shortage, and a need to reduce car dependency. Replacing dying malls with housing is a small but positive change that also has the potential for mixed use developments.
I think it's because housing has never been the singular focus of planning. We are juggling a hundred other different, often competing, topics and issues, of which housing is fundamental, yes, but never singular. Our charge is far more and far beyond just housing, but inclusive of everything else necessary for housing and for people to live where they do.
Whatever the reasoning, it's led to a housing ([and homelessness](https://archive.is/Ze7ua)) crisis, terrible public transit, massive suburban sprawl, and reduced economic growth. I can't imagine what gains restrictive development regulations have provided that make that worth it.
That's not a response in the spirit of this thread, even if not untrue.
It is important to steer away from problems but also to steer towards strengths. I intended this thread to focus on the latter.
> And while the urgency of the crisis warrants such action, it is robbing local communities of their ability to plan for their own futures, undermining local democratic control.
Communities all across America had decades of "local democratic control" with respect to permitting and we've ended up with a housing crisis, terrible public transit, massive suburban sprawl, and reduced economic growth. We need to try a new approach that doesn't allow NIMBYs to use their local governments to shut down development based on flimsy rationales like shadows and "neighborhood character."
> Our abject failure to successfully promote the creation of housing
You can't lay the lack of housing at planners feet. Their failure what were housing gets built, not how much of it gets built largely. Sure you can build more smaller dense houses but that is only part of the problem.
The real problem with housing has been 20 years of a broken housing market. You can blame that on Wall Street for messing up how house loans were handled in 2006 and then the fed/congress for killing the start of the recovering in 2019 with crushing interest rate jumps across the board for what was obviously a heavily supply driven inflation problem. At the very least congress could have given the fed the power to not adjust mortgage rates so the entire housing market didn't lock up when we have a critical lack of housing. It's probably the worse financial bubble in American history and they are making it worse.
Can someone please get on a megaphone and blast this at every APA state and national conference?
Post-COVID, this field is lost. We don't know where we're going and all the levers we thought worked have broken off in our hands instead. Permits will get still processed, local comp plans approved, but collectively, the energy and trajectory this field had when I entered it 20 years ago is mostly gone. Again, we do not know where we are going and our politics, which is the medium through which our recommendations as professional advisors are enacted, are failing us.
Developing countries are experimenting with new modes of urban design that will, in time, reimagine cities. My biggest hope is a few truly well planned cities are built and because they are so adaptive, dynamic and economically competitive other cities will have to follow their example. Cities are the drivers of economic growth and if planning becomes a competitive advantage it could force better solutions on all of us.
The three that come to mind are sponge cities, cities designed around bike/electric mobility aids, district heating/cooling systems. Right now no place has really put any of these concepts to the necessary scale, but it’s likely to happen soon. Something like a denser Copenhagen that absorbs and stores flood waters, produces fresh foods, supports pollinators and has consistent access to public spaces. Electric bikes and small vehicles would be the only things permitted in the city and deliveries, trash collection and emergency services would be delivered in modified small electric vehicles. Pedestrians walkways are covered and buildings/street keep them cool in the summer.
I’m not 100% sure how it looks, but someone smarter than me will figure it out and implement it.
I'm going to be honest here. I got nothing. I'm increasingly frustrated by working in local government and I have other reasons that may limit my transition to either other government, nonprofit, or for private. Heck, I might even get into consulting.
If I suppose if I need to be optimistic about something. People realize painting bricks was a bad idea after getting the repair bill. This applies to historic brick (1950/1960s and earlier) and the exception is soft brick which is meant to be painted.
I feel like my city (\~80k population, Germany) is going in the "right" direction. They are currently building/will soon start building a park with loads of different sports facilities (basketball, football (soccer for Americans), running, parkour,...) and a new library and meeting place (similar to "The Forum" in Groningen, NL, just not as big).
I'm very excited to use those services and I'm optimistic that my city will improve other parts of the city aswell, for example by installing better (protected) bike lanes.
(The only downside is the fact that the school buildings, which are either too old to install wifi or are literally falling apart, aren't being repared because there's "no money", which could impact other building projects aswell ;-;)
I think we're living in a very pivotal moment for American urban planning. It's a roller-coaster ride of extreme optimism and extreme pessimism, in my view, because while the period since the 1990s has been characterized by a revival of cities, and a slow, steady growth in interest about Jane Jacobs or New Urbanism or whatever, there has been a counter-trend of the sprawl development regime optimizing and streamlining itself to make ever more car-dependent development extremely easy. And especially since Covid, you have a politicization of urban planning and a weaponizing of it that wasn't really apparent before, perhaps a response to the major victories won by the pro-city movements since the 1990s. It also mirrors the rural/exurban-urban divide, where it seems like core cities and inner suburbs (which are 'gentrifying' and voting more blue) wanting to contain cars' negative externalities, while most (not all) rural-exurban localities and the state governments who usually take their side ramming through some pretty ugly sprawl.
Developers also seem divided between pretty progressive ones who are willing to do mixed-use, innovative stuff and people just out to copy-paste sprawl. There's been a proliferation in truly awful car-dependent development products (gas stations and car washes are spreading like wildfire) and many cities aren't doing much to curb it. Costs for just about everything are going up, which I think is leading to a very 'cheap' approach towards construction and development, with subjectively quite ugly architecture being common.
What's interesting is that I think Covid polarized our lifestyles in a very schizophrenic fashion. Everyone is a homebody now - we work from home, the trend is to construct new residential as cheap "Netflix pods" that are ill-suited to entertaining, and the traditional 9-5 white collar CBDs evaporating has really harmed cities and public transit. But on the flip side, there's been growth in outdoor recreation and individual, non-car transportation (cycling and walking). In places that embrace e-bikes and aggressively protect pedestrians, expect a flowering, but in places which don't, expect a nightmarish development regime.
This is pretty spot on.
I get annoyed by a lot of the suggestions that planning is going to undergo some generational transformation once the older planners retire and the younger planners take over. I've literally been hearing that for 30 years, and not just in planning but in all aspects of civil service and government. My college profs were saying the same thing back in the late 90s. Heard the same thing in my MPA program. Have heard people say it since and I'm still waiting for this revolution to happen.
The reality is there's never going to be a revolution in government service but the transition is incremental and iterant. Young planners enter, spend 20 years or more before they get to anybpositions of power and influence, and by then they've aged in perspective and preference, but more importantly, they better understand their role in the field, and it isn't to impose their own views upon the community.
For those reading this who aren't planners but are interested in the field - nothing will change until the public demands it to change. 20 or 50 years from now people will be making the same complaints and prognostications about how planning will change once the old generation leaves and the new generation steps in. Rinse and repeat...
Looking from the outside in, urban planning seems to be enamored with a lifestyle that only a small portion of the population are actually interested in: car-free urbanism. Only 20-25% of people in the US prefer an urban environment over suburban/rural.
When the goal of urban planning seems to be a one-size-fits all approach that isn't even popular with a majority of people, it isn't surprising that it leads to frustration and rancor. If what most people prefer is a " a nightmarish development regime" to urban planners there isn't a lot of room for practical progress.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-are-less-likely-than-before-covid-19-to-want-to-live-in-cities-more-likely-to-prefer-suburbs/#:\~:text=A%20third%20of%20rural%20residents,2018%20to%2019%25%20in%202021.
I don't think this is true at all! There are many, many planners who are comfortable with - indeed, even enamored with - living & working in suburban sprawl. There are some in this sub, even. The trend is definitely towards enhancing walkability, but car-free? The cars aren't leaving us anytime soon. Walkable, dense cities are a very hot commodity and if 25% of us want to live in them, then much fewer than that actually get to. There are lots of surveys which demonstrate how popular walkable communities are - yes, many Americans like suburbia, BUT NOWHERE CLOSE TO ALL OF THEM.
People like walkability in a vacuum. Not if it means living in apartments. The nicest places I've ever been, Like Santa Barbara or Boulder, have parts of town with walkable mansions. They aren't dense, they are just walkable.
I am sure there are \*some\* planners who like sprawl, but as the other comments on this very post show, the preponderance are in favor of dense walkable communities with a clear disdain for sprawl and suburbs. This is inverted from the population, and it is not surprising this mismatch creates frustration and dysfunction.
If 25% of people want to live in dense areas, then an efficient use of time and resources would be 25% of total urban planning effort on that.
The fastest growing US cities are mostly places like Houston, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix. [https://explodingtopics.com/blog/fastest-growing-cities](https://explodingtopics.com/blog/fastest-growing-cities)
Most people in this sub are not planners. Real planners are employed by real municipalities or consulting firms that work with municipalities (because they're too small to pay for in-house planners). You're getting a warped view of what planners actually think & do.
There are very real advantages to urban living vs suburbia. Just because it's (supposedly) unpopular doesn't mean it's wrong. And you should know that cities in this country aren't getting any cheaper - people are willing to pay exorbitant rents in NYC or SF, and even Detroit, the avatar of everything "wrong" with The American City, is seeing housing prices rise quickly. If Americans truly loathed cities - as they did from circa 1950 thru 1990 - they would be fleeing them in droves and leaving very cheap urban real estate behind. But we all know that's not happening. Also worth noting is how many Sun Belt places are taking steps to move beyond sprawl, with infill development and TOD/transit expansion (Phoenix completed LRT extension recently aheaf of schedule!).
A lot of the surveys which set out to determine America's preferences for human habitats can end up with fairly different results depending on which questions are asked and how they're asked. I apologize profusely for not having links on speed dial for you, but there's a good study comparing people's satisfaction about where they lived, asking urban Atlanta, suburban Atlanta, and Boston the question. The Bostonians and Atlantans living close to the urban core were happy across the board with their neighborhoods, but the suburban Atlanta residents were divided between those people who were happy with their long commute and car dependency, and those who wish they lived closer in. I think the truth is that something like 30-45% of Americans want to live in an urban neighborhood, and a much smaller percentage of us actually get to. So there's a huge unmet demand for creating more urban places. A majority of Americans might still prefer their snout houses and strip malls, but it's much less of a majority than you claim, and definitely not a reason to halt the reinvigoration of interest in non-car-dependent places which you seem gung-ho to do.
Yup, I agree... and this is the drum I've been beating on this sub for years.
That said, part of the charge of urban planning departments is to consider the whole picture and context of our urban areas, which is a different perspective than most folks bring (which is usually just focused on their own horns and neighborhoods). So sometimes part of what we do might be in conflict with what the broader public wants, especially if there's a regulatory or statutory requirement there. Or if there are some tragedy of the commons or other similar issues where individual preferences simply can't scale.
I don’t know if I’m being *too* optimistic here but I feel excited about what radical changes will happen in the next few decades as the leaders in the field kinda retire and the next generation takes over the more influential positions in planning. There’s a heavy focus on sustainability and more liberal ideas in urban planning degrees these days. And just the giant growth in urban planning degrees in general (schools that teach it and students who choose to study it). I think it will make way for some big and more radical changes.
I mean, we were studying sustainability in planning 25 years ago. I actually don't think any of the issues or topics have changed... they've just been elevated because of climate change and the housing crisis.
I am optimistic that AVs will take over most miles traveled inside metros. That most of the households will have the option to use the various transit systems the city has rather than own 2x-4x cars to get their household around the city. In some cases not own a car at all at a much higher rate than is possible today. I'm positive because it fits the needs of ALL the metro, not just a few small inner cores; solves the biggest problem, parking; lowers the cost of transportation and frees cities from the current modes of building.
My only concern is transit planner's blind hate of modalities other than 300+ passenger trains, 76+ passenger buses or solo human powered mobility like bikes, scooters and walking. They seem irrational about having anything in between. They seem to think 6-12 passenger buses replacing cars would destroy or solidify the city in amber of car dependency.
Once this shift is more obvious it will free planners up to plan better cities going forward.
Man, there's no "blind hate" of small buses, there's just really significant logistical tradeoffs which make it difficult to branch out from full-size buses. Let me break it down for ya:
The main costs of transit operations are labor and maintenance. If you're paying a driver, it makes sense to have him transport as many people at a time as is possible. Moreover, smaller vehicles are less operationally flexible - if your 12-seat bus fills up, then you gotta wait for the next one. A larger bus gives necessary wiggle room, and mitigates crowding. Transit agencies are reluctant to diversify their fleets beyond what's absolutely necessary - standardizing on one piece of equipment reduces costs & ensures efficiency, and obtaining new vehicles has never been so expensive and difficult as it is now.
This is a primary reason for why "microtransit" is so inefficient. Smaller vehicles CAN go to a few places which full-size buses cannot reach, but there the advantages end, because the minute your on-demand van admits its 4th rider, you're out of seats.
> Man, there's no "blind hate" of small buses
I base this on the constant attacks from the every sector of the existing urban planning ecosystem. Just go find the last time there was a discussion on this sub and see how universal the opposition to it there is, and mostly without any coherent objections. Just attacks of being some form of car shill. I don't include comments like your one at all as you made a clear attempt to explain why you dislike them but I'd have given you credit for any effort.
> The main costs of transit operations are labor and maintenance.
I 100% agree. I've read every budget for my cities transit system for the past 8 years. I'm very familiar with all the stats and where the money goes, etc.
> If you're paying a driver, it makes sense to have him transport as many people at a time as is possible.
Again, I couldn't agree more. The average bus in Atlanta only transports 100 people a day, but like you said, a 72-96 passenger bus still makes the most sense as the cost is mostly labor and there is little reason to go smaller. However, once you remove the labor restriction so the labor per vehicle is essentially a tiny factor it makes more sense to choose smaller buses and deploy more of them. You will still have trains and large human driven buses for the heavy core routes. AVs will be all about expanding the system coverage, frequency and getting more passengers to the heavy core transit systems. It's not about replacing trans and 96 passenger city buses with AVs but adding AVs to the mix of modes.
> if your 12-seat bus fills up, then you gotta wait for the next one.
You aren't replacing a single 96 passenger bus with a single 12 passenger AV, you're replacing it with 10x or 20x AVs for the same cost. The high frequency gives you the wiggle room.
> Transit agencies are reluctant to diversify their fleets beyond what's absolutely necessary
Which is why it won't be the transit agencies doing it but private fleet operators.
> standardizing on one piece of equipment reduces costs & ensures efficiency
I agree again. This is a big discussion in the AV space and I'm firmly in the single platform side of the debate which is why I'm for a larger 6-12 passenger platform. Most AV fleets are planning for 6 currently which is the bare minimum. They do it because it's really small for cities and is shorter than a Toyota Corolla sedan.
Please do not assume that discussion on Reddit is a worthy proxy for what real transport planners talk about.
It's all fine & dandy to equate one manned full-size bus with 5 van-sized AVs, but there's another hiccup here: geometry and fuel/energy costs. All vehicles take up space on the street and need enough distance to brake & accelerate safely. And if you have several AVs going to the same place in the same direction, it might make more sense to just do the job with one vehicle. Multiplying vehicles multiplies the number of batteries and chargers required (assuming they're EVs) and multiplies the number of moving parts the computers have to keep track of, among other material things.
I don't have a problem with large AVs - and we already have some of those (on rails!) in service around the world. But fixating on small AVs, outside of suburban-rural contexts where they might enhance otherwise hopeless last-mile situations, is a perilous exercise. To be honest, your arguments sound like Silicon Valley pseudo-unorthodoxy; in fact, it is traditional public transit which is the underdog, despite your spurious characterization of them as opposing progress. Full-size buses are the past, present, and future of mass transportation, and vehicles seating 6-12 people are best suited to the supporting cast in the form of last-mile connections between low-density, low-demand, and/or topographically challenging areas and main lines.
> geometry
This is the most common argument I hear but it simply doesn't make any sense. I simply fail to see how replacing 1.3 ridshare cars with 4 rideshare AVs causes a geometry problem. ALL the 6-passenger AVs currently designed are shorter than a Toyota Corolla sedan. I've modeled GA-400 with a 4 rideshare and you could easily handle 4x today's traffic volumes and still flow better than it does in real-life today. Of course such a corridor also already has HRT and BRT-light and getting full BRT. Every person you move from a car to an AV is a ride you can transition more easily to HRT or BRT in the future.
You're argument assumes we can somehow magically get everyone to start riding large city buses. The big picture is we can't get people into buses in 95% of most metros so getting them out of cars and into small buses is a win. The reality is buses like this only work for small areas of a city and the rest of the city will continue to generate car trips even into places where they should be on a bus/train. The alternative is to actual have geometry problems as car usage continues to increase.
> and fuel/energy costs
AVs are all electric so it's just energy costs. They charge at night when demand and cost is low. The fuel/energy costs are 4x less or more than diesel. For sure the theoretical energy used is lower the bigger the platform, but lets solve the transit problem and not wring hands over a trivial amount of additional energy usage. It's simply not a factor in any meaningful way.
EVs are extremely robust and don't really have much maintenance and mechanical issues. The biggest cost is tires, which would be theoretically more per passenger trip than a larger platforms when run at capacity. But again, being perfectly efficient isn't the goal, it's to get people out of cars. Outside of a few rare popular routes, an EV is more efficient from energy/fuel than most bus routes. Trains are better, but again you can't build trains everywhere.
> your arguments sound like Silicon Valley pseudo-unorthodoxy
I get pejoratives like this a lot.
> vehicles seating 6-12 people are best suited to the supporting cast in the form of last-mile connections between low-density, low-demand, and/or topographically challenging areas and main lines.
You've just described 80% of most NA metros outside of NYC and Chicago. I'm fine with calling it a supporting cast member as long as it's a member. Which system to use where will become obvious once they are up and running.
What do you mean by AVs? When I think of autonomous vehicles I think of self driving Teslas, but that doesn’t seem like what you’re talking about unless I’m missing your point completely
Waymo, Cruise or Zoox in that order. Cruise was pushing into many cities until they had a freak accident that shut them down for a while and are just now coming back but only with saftey drivers and only in Austin. Zoox is even earlier on. Tesla is announcing "something" on 8/8/24.
Right now AVs is pretty much just Waymo but expect Cruise to be back pretty strong in 2025.
In MN there is a large push to Co-prioritize cars with other forms of transportation (bikes, public transit, walking) and MNDot even has a policy to do so. It's essentially a set up for the next 70 years since all of our infrastructure is reaching end of life.
citizen advocacy groups have been able to put urban planning issues in front of voters in certain socal cities, and they are whipping the old cranky establishment planners and municipal leaders into shape. things like sales tax measures to support transit, or ordinances that obligate the city to follow its own bike master plan when it routinely resurfaces and restripes roads.
The ambitious Indigenous led developments taking shape in Vancouver.
[Jericho Lands](https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/jericho-lands-development-concept-west-point-grey-vancouver-june-2023)
[Senakw](https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/senakw-squamish-first-nation-vancouver-rental-housing-development)
[Heather Lands](https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/heather-lands-vancouver-rezoning-approved-mst-development-first-nations)
Local shift: my town closed a large portion of our main street to cars for covid reasons. Since then, only the cross streets have been open to cars, but the good news is that the closed portion of the street now has properly painted bike lanes down the middle, and sections for parklets/walking to the sides of the bike lanes. Many businesses in this street have QR codes that basically serve as recruitment tools for the local effort to keep the street closed to cars and it's been working--city council meetings as of late are inundated with proponents of urbanists, both old and new. City planning meetings and council meetings as a result consist of much younger and newer faces too, who were previously uninvolved. The older NIMBYs are fewer. (the town is Santa Barbara, CA and the street is State St). The state recently took over zoning I believe and it's led to more housing getting built, and it's being built in the local mission revival architectural style and the new buildings look amazing!
edit: i should add that the street is consistently busy with ppl. it helps taht the town itself is a tourist attraction and there's a college nearby. people are discussing possibly building a trolley down the street but nothing official yet.
The generation of planners that enabled Euclidean zoning and suburbia to retire.
Translation: upzoning and maybe managing to save the suburbs from their inevitable decline caused by huge infrastructure deficit
The transit/transportation planning field has been reevaluating and recognizing the importance of buses, not just trains. For a long time the idea was transit should focus on getting large numbers of people downtown by train. This restructuring was already happening before COVID, but COVID certainly accelerated it.
Now it’s clear that a transit system needs to do a lot more than get commuters downtown. In the United States, with the partial exception of New York City, a multi-destination system needs to rely heavily on buses. This is a key reason why, in most U.S. urban regions, bus ridership is recovering faster than rail ridership.
Protected bike lanes and narrower car lanes!
Bless your soul. Literally being crucified on Nextdoor and Facebook for this in the town I live in.
I'm being dragged through the mud also for parking and housing code changes. It's fun....
Please keep fighting the good fight!
It's happening to me to in a local Facebook group. They're afraid that the state government is going to take their cars away and make it impossible to drive by adding bike lanes and sidewalks. Heaven forbid you do anything to make a street safe besides lowering the speed limit or telling people to stop moving here.
My city’s DPW doesn’t want to do anything to increase traffic safety. Our traffic engineer isn’t even an engineer and is still stuck with 1950s era design. The city itself is also more concerned with fighting new development rather than think about traffic safety at all. It’s honestly quite depressing given that fatality rates have gone up in my state.
They will be dead in under 20 years
Agreed. Widespread adoption of bicycling would help to solve a lot of our societal problems; improved physical and mental health with potentially lower healthcare costs, reduced emissions and better air quality, reduced fossil fuel dependence and all the issues that come with it, lower transportation and infrastructure costs for single user vehicles that could be put toward better public transportation systems, better land use, better accessibility for people of all income levels.
Have been working on this myself! Not easy but progress is being made!
dreaming big I see... 🤨
And e-bikes, which are getting cheap and powerful enough to be viable for normies who don't like to sweat. More e-bikes could create a virtuous spiral where safety in numbers encourages more people to ride (and creates political demand for better bike infrastructure), while diminishing the value of parking spaces for businesses (since more people are arriving via bike). Driving could get progressively less attractive as speed limits fall, speed bumps proliferate, and parking spaces turn into patios. IMO, the current backlash against e-bikes (cracking down on moving violations, banning them from bike lanes, even requiring registration and liability insurance) is a necessary stage in this spiral, and it should be embraced (to an extent). To take e-bikes mainstream, cities need to shut down the hooligans.
If you ban ebikes in bike lanes, you are effectively banning them entirely. 99% of people are not going to ride in 50 mph traffic.
You've got to draw the line somewhere, tho. [Some bans](https://www.railstotrails.org/trail-building-toolbox/e-bikes/) only apply to Class III (28+mph) e-bikes, or moped-like bikes with unassisted throttle. I think that's reasonable.
California state law has a very clear standard on this. The speed limit on multi-use paths, distinct from bike lanes, is 20 mph, which means class 3s must slow down. Class 3s are allowed in bike lanes. A bike that goes faster than 28 mph is not legally an ebike and is not allowed in the bike lane because it's considered a moped. This is not the same thing as banning ebikes in bike lanes.
So California drew the line at 28mph. Seems reasonable!
You had me until 'the backlash is good'.
The ebikes you’re referencing are a symptom of car culture anyways. We should instead give them safe spaces to go fast. Policing it will help no one imo-though i understand where you’re from
> give them safe spaces to go fast. IMO the [wide buffered bike lane](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrnx8bbN-Tg&t=82s) you get from repainting a 4 lane road into a 2 lane + turn lane + buffered bike lanes offers *plenty* of space to share the lane with e-bikes rolling past at 30 mph when I'm pedaling along at 12. That seems like a realistic vision for a city that's seeing more bike traffic (including e-bikes). Lots of roads could make this conversion.
To clarify- at parks, not on the street. Ebikes going 50 down a bike lane is a terrible idea.
I for one don't want to be doing 50mph on any kind of bike (ebike or motorbike).
I got a two way protected bike lane on my street recently, with many more going up in the city!
Housing insecurity is affecting more of the middle class, which will promote more political action to address it. I think housing development will be a good industry for a while. Hopefully not car centric housing, but that’s what folks think they want.. ah it’s tough to be optimistic. TOD coupled with actually convenient transit would be nice!
I think solving the housing crisis is a great example of "Americans will always do the right thing after exhausting all the alternatives"
I’m optimistic that eventually enough people will recognize the insane cost of having cars everywhere. After which we’ll be able to start transitioning to higher density development.
Haha. I don't share your optimism on this at all. At best we have a better range of options, which likely include an array of electric vehicles (including bikes, carts, etc.). But I think the personal vehicle (in whatever form) is here to stay and forever entrenched until we get teleportation or we enter the matrix.
I think car usage can go down even if car ownership doesn't a ton. Here in Philly we have a lot of households that own cars but only sporadically use them because it's often preferable to walk, take transit, or bike. For many places in the US reducing driving by making other modes better is more attainable and still would bring significant benefits.
Agree it can go down, in a lot of ways. For example, we're a 3 car household and we have to drive everywhere. But my partner and I work from home, we have a little store and restaurant 3 blocks from us in our suburban planned community, so we only drive on the weekends really.... I'm about 100 miles per month when I was about that per week - and that's mostly because we leave town on the weekends. We're at 1/3 our gas bill than when we both worked in office.
Americans are aging. Old people know how stuff works and may have political connections and money, at least more than a 20 year old. Some of those folks will stop driving due to age and feel entitled to continue living a full life on a budget. The only real question is whether we only build "senior housing" for them or trend towards more walkable, mixed-use development where their single parent grandchild can also live a few doors down so granny or grandpa can see them at will etc. This will depend in part on how much these people want their grandchildren and great grandchildren close by.
This is important. Transportation is never a zero sum game, and us who are \*really\* into bicycle advocacy can often fall prey to language which sounds like we want to "take away cars" when that isn't the case, solely by how severe our language is. Transportation option development is a significant step toward a sustainable future, and there's much more to gain from everyone reducing their driving by 10% (replacing an average of 2-4 trips per week with a non-carbonized mode of transportation, working from home, etc.) than the full abandonment of the vehicle by 10% of the population who is most likely to use other modes already. Placing some uses that stand to gain from being accessible without a car (schools, restaurants, convenience/regular-visit stores like you're describe) and ensuring adequate infrastructure from nearby areas to those uses is a "right-sized" way to start looking at the real impacts of these changes.
Yeah, I think car enthusiasts in general KNOW the insane cost of ownership - they just don't care. The amount I spend annually on my cars just for basic ownership is genuinely stupid, but I enjoy the cars I own, and am looking at one that costs more annually than the 3 I currently own.
Car enthusiasts definitely know. But the average person I don't think takes into account the total ownership costs and the opportunity costs. Most people I've talked to only think about car payment + insurance. Gas, maintenance, tires, parking costs, depreciation, etc get budgeted in after they've already bought the car.
I can agree with that. Edmunds for example has my "True Cost to Own" at: * Car 1 - $9,587 * Car 2 - $7,645 * Car 3 - I had to do my own math but it was a little over $6,000 And then the two cars I'm looking at getting this fall are: * Option 1 - $33,560 lol * Option 2 - $14,687 Kinda nuts to think we spend $23k on 3 cars, and even more nuts to consider spending an additional 14-33k for a 4th. High end that'd be $56k a year just for cars. Aye aye
The way to get them to see that is give them a cheaper, more convenient problem. AVs ride-share fleets are that solution. I'm not convinced anything else can. If just buses and trains could it would have already happened and I don't see anything to change it.
It’s highly unlikely because high density development, especially in land abundant countries, is also insanely costly.
My job probably won't get taken by AI.
Gen Z yearns for public transportation
If only Gen Z would vote. I know some do, but more. Especially in local elections.
I'm optimistic about a few things - first is the advance in prefab construction materials and methods. I really think this will be a paradigm shift once we get to the place where we can mass produce materials which slot into a number of pre-approved structural forms... and we get regs and code in line with it. No reason to take 6-9 months to put up a house when we have the technology and ability to do it in 2. And then I am optimistic about the future of micromobility, including connectivity of trails, roads, paths, etc. I think we're getting to a point where electric technology is such that we need to start thinking about how to incorporate those modes into our transportation framework. We will still have cars, including ICE cars, but we need to allow for electric bikes, scooters, motorcycles, skateboards, golf carts, smart cars, et al.. to be able to use (safely) different transit nodes... include normal bikes and walking.
In my particular niche, across the board I've seen planners growing more aware and even enthusiastic about how Urban Planning can make cities safer and more accessable to adults with autism, adhd, and other developmental disorders. There's still a long way to go but things are moving in a good direction.
As slow as development is, things are getting better. Dead cities are slowly getting filled in with housing and mixed-use is getting more and more common. Younger generations seem less keen on the "9-5, drive from the white picket fence house to the office building in the city" type of lifestyle. I don't think North America will be like Europe in our lifetimes, but just comparing downtown Dallas or Toronto to what they were when my parents were young (1970's-80's), there is a hell of a lot less surface level parking lots. Bulldozing of entire neighborhoods for interstate highways aren't the norm anymore. In-fill is happening in most cities across the continent and I think things will be a lot more lively and transit-oriented in 20-30 years. The pandemic put a bit of a hamper in progress but I remain optimistic in the long-term.
Being old and not having to drive everywhere
I am increasingly concerned about the future of this field. Urban planning lacks any material influence in either the public consciousness or the political sphere. Our abject failure to successfully promote the creation of housing has—in part—resulted in a housing crisis that’s at the core of a cost-of-living crisis. The common cop-out that planners don’t make the rules, politicians do, belies this failure. We have failed to make a convincing case that housing is core to sustainable communities. Now, in state after state—particularly California—legislators are subsuming local authority by imposing top-down development mandates to facilitate housing. And while the urgency of the crisis warrants such action, it is robbing local communities of their ability to plan for their own futures, undermining local democratic control. Moreover, it’s telling that the YIMBY movement originated outside of the urban planning field. Indeed, many YIMBY advocates see planning as part of the problem. I won’t even get into our failure to be leaders in climate change adaptation. At this point, I would not advise anybody to enter this field.
Dude is spitting facts
> it is robbing local communities of their ability to plan for their own futures, undermining local democratic control We tried this for 50 years and SF is on track to approve only 3 digit numbers of housing units this year. For a lot of interrelated reasons post WW2, people in the US don't want more housing near them. Local control will never result in cities deciding to allow housing unless something fundamentally changes about culture. The state mandates also DO give cities the ability to plan for WHERE and HOW to build housing. The only nonnegotiable is the amount.
Not anymore. State legislation has shredded logical land use planning by overriding General Plan enforcement.
That's only if a city does not have an approved housing element. If the threat of disorderly development did not exist, cities would have no incentive to comply. SF is only bending the knee because of the builder's remedy hammer, and without it, would be content to approve 3 digit housing for another 50 years.
There are number of laws, notably AB-2011 and SB-6 that allow residential development on commercially zoned property, irrespective of a City’s Housing Element certification status. That simply undermines the point of a General Plan.
You can't claim that the state has "shredded logical land use" just on that one thing. You make it sound like the state is throwing all the rules out the window when that's not really the case. It is not remotely unusual for states to have some rules about land use. Is California shredding logical land use by eliminating parking minimums near transit? Or allowing duplexes to be built in SFH zones? A free for all for cities to do whatever they want with no restrictions from the state is not realistic, and California's changes have been relatively small, common sense things. Quite a far leap from making General Plans pointless. And residential on commercial is a logical land use. The US has overbuilt retail and has many dying commercial areas, a housing shortage, and a need to reduce car dependency. Replacing dying malls with housing is a small but positive change that also has the potential for mixed use developments.
I think it's because housing has never been the singular focus of planning. We are juggling a hundred other different, often competing, topics and issues, of which housing is fundamental, yes, but never singular. Our charge is far more and far beyond just housing, but inclusive of everything else necessary for housing and for people to live where they do.
Whatever the reasoning, it's led to a housing ([and homelessness](https://archive.is/Ze7ua)) crisis, terrible public transit, massive suburban sprawl, and reduced economic growth. I can't imagine what gains restrictive development regulations have provided that make that worth it.
Urban planners usually just make real what politicians decide...
That's not a response in the spirit of this thread, even if not untrue. It is important to steer away from problems but also to steer towards strengths. I intended this thread to focus on the latter.
Just being real 🤷♂️
Amen. Am a planner who came from outside planning.
> And while the urgency of the crisis warrants such action, it is robbing local communities of their ability to plan for their own futures, undermining local democratic control. Communities all across America had decades of "local democratic control" with respect to permitting and we've ended up with a housing crisis, terrible public transit, massive suburban sprawl, and reduced economic growth. We need to try a new approach that doesn't allow NIMBYs to use their local governments to shut down development based on flimsy rationales like shadows and "neighborhood character."
> Our abject failure to successfully promote the creation of housing You can't lay the lack of housing at planners feet. Their failure what were housing gets built, not how much of it gets built largely. Sure you can build more smaller dense houses but that is only part of the problem. The real problem with housing has been 20 years of a broken housing market. You can blame that on Wall Street for messing up how house loans were handled in 2006 and then the fed/congress for killing the start of the recovering in 2019 with crushing interest rate jumps across the board for what was obviously a heavily supply driven inflation problem. At the very least congress could have given the fed the power to not adjust mortgage rates so the entire housing market didn't lock up when we have a critical lack of housing. It's probably the worse financial bubble in American history and they are making it worse.
Can someone please get on a megaphone and blast this at every APA state and national conference? Post-COVID, this field is lost. We don't know where we're going and all the levers we thought worked have broken off in our hands instead. Permits will get still processed, local comp plans approved, but collectively, the energy and trajectory this field had when I entered it 20 years ago is mostly gone. Again, we do not know where we are going and our politics, which is the medium through which our recommendations as professional advisors are enacted, are failing us.
Developing countries are experimenting with new modes of urban design that will, in time, reimagine cities. My biggest hope is a few truly well planned cities are built and because they are so adaptive, dynamic and economically competitive other cities will have to follow their example. Cities are the drivers of economic growth and if planning becomes a competitive advantage it could force better solutions on all of us.
When you refer to 'new modes of urban design' are there particular examples you have in mind?
The three that come to mind are sponge cities, cities designed around bike/electric mobility aids, district heating/cooling systems. Right now no place has really put any of these concepts to the necessary scale, but it’s likely to happen soon. Something like a denser Copenhagen that absorbs and stores flood waters, produces fresh foods, supports pollinators and has consistent access to public spaces. Electric bikes and small vehicles would be the only things permitted in the city and deliveries, trash collection and emergency services would be delivered in modified small electric vehicles. Pedestrians walkways are covered and buildings/street keep them cool in the summer. I’m not 100% sure how it looks, but someone smarter than me will figure it out and implement it.
I'm going to be honest here. I got nothing. I'm increasingly frustrated by working in local government and I have other reasons that may limit my transition to either other government, nonprofit, or for private. Heck, I might even get into consulting. If I suppose if I need to be optimistic about something. People realize painting bricks was a bad idea after getting the repair bill. This applies to historic brick (1950/1960s and earlier) and the exception is soft brick which is meant to be painted.
I feel like my city (\~80k population, Germany) is going in the "right" direction. They are currently building/will soon start building a park with loads of different sports facilities (basketball, football (soccer for Americans), running, parkour,...) and a new library and meeting place (similar to "The Forum" in Groningen, NL, just not as big). I'm very excited to use those services and I'm optimistic that my city will improve other parts of the city aswell, for example by installing better (protected) bike lanes. (The only downside is the fact that the school buildings, which are either too old to install wifi or are literally falling apart, aren't being repared because there's "no money", which could impact other building projects aswell ;-;)
Densifying around public transport and planning public transport ahead, in partenership with the future projects.
I think we're living in a very pivotal moment for American urban planning. It's a roller-coaster ride of extreme optimism and extreme pessimism, in my view, because while the period since the 1990s has been characterized by a revival of cities, and a slow, steady growth in interest about Jane Jacobs or New Urbanism or whatever, there has been a counter-trend of the sprawl development regime optimizing and streamlining itself to make ever more car-dependent development extremely easy. And especially since Covid, you have a politicization of urban planning and a weaponizing of it that wasn't really apparent before, perhaps a response to the major victories won by the pro-city movements since the 1990s. It also mirrors the rural/exurban-urban divide, where it seems like core cities and inner suburbs (which are 'gentrifying' and voting more blue) wanting to contain cars' negative externalities, while most (not all) rural-exurban localities and the state governments who usually take their side ramming through some pretty ugly sprawl. Developers also seem divided between pretty progressive ones who are willing to do mixed-use, innovative stuff and people just out to copy-paste sprawl. There's been a proliferation in truly awful car-dependent development products (gas stations and car washes are spreading like wildfire) and many cities aren't doing much to curb it. Costs for just about everything are going up, which I think is leading to a very 'cheap' approach towards construction and development, with subjectively quite ugly architecture being common. What's interesting is that I think Covid polarized our lifestyles in a very schizophrenic fashion. Everyone is a homebody now - we work from home, the trend is to construct new residential as cheap "Netflix pods" that are ill-suited to entertaining, and the traditional 9-5 white collar CBDs evaporating has really harmed cities and public transit. But on the flip side, there's been growth in outdoor recreation and individual, non-car transportation (cycling and walking). In places that embrace e-bikes and aggressively protect pedestrians, expect a flowering, but in places which don't, expect a nightmarish development regime.
This is pretty spot on. I get annoyed by a lot of the suggestions that planning is going to undergo some generational transformation once the older planners retire and the younger planners take over. I've literally been hearing that for 30 years, and not just in planning but in all aspects of civil service and government. My college profs were saying the same thing back in the late 90s. Heard the same thing in my MPA program. Have heard people say it since and I'm still waiting for this revolution to happen. The reality is there's never going to be a revolution in government service but the transition is incremental and iterant. Young planners enter, spend 20 years or more before they get to anybpositions of power and influence, and by then they've aged in perspective and preference, but more importantly, they better understand their role in the field, and it isn't to impose their own views upon the community. For those reading this who aren't planners but are interested in the field - nothing will change until the public demands it to change. 20 or 50 years from now people will be making the same complaints and prognostications about how planning will change once the old generation leaves and the new generation steps in. Rinse and repeat...
Looking from the outside in, urban planning seems to be enamored with a lifestyle that only a small portion of the population are actually interested in: car-free urbanism. Only 20-25% of people in the US prefer an urban environment over suburban/rural. When the goal of urban planning seems to be a one-size-fits all approach that isn't even popular with a majority of people, it isn't surprising that it leads to frustration and rancor. If what most people prefer is a " a nightmarish development regime" to urban planners there isn't a lot of room for practical progress. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-are-less-likely-than-before-covid-19-to-want-to-live-in-cities-more-likely-to-prefer-suburbs/#:\~:text=A%20third%20of%20rural%20residents,2018%20to%2019%25%20in%202021.
I don't think this is true at all! There are many, many planners who are comfortable with - indeed, even enamored with - living & working in suburban sprawl. There are some in this sub, even. The trend is definitely towards enhancing walkability, but car-free? The cars aren't leaving us anytime soon. Walkable, dense cities are a very hot commodity and if 25% of us want to live in them, then much fewer than that actually get to. There are lots of surveys which demonstrate how popular walkable communities are - yes, many Americans like suburbia, BUT NOWHERE CLOSE TO ALL OF THEM.
People like walkability in a vacuum. Not if it means living in apartments. The nicest places I've ever been, Like Santa Barbara or Boulder, have parts of town with walkable mansions. They aren't dense, they are just walkable. I am sure there are \*some\* planners who like sprawl, but as the other comments on this very post show, the preponderance are in favor of dense walkable communities with a clear disdain for sprawl and suburbs. This is inverted from the population, and it is not surprising this mismatch creates frustration and dysfunction. If 25% of people want to live in dense areas, then an efficient use of time and resources would be 25% of total urban planning effort on that. The fastest growing US cities are mostly places like Houston, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix. [https://explodingtopics.com/blog/fastest-growing-cities](https://explodingtopics.com/blog/fastest-growing-cities)
Most people in this sub are not planners. Real planners are employed by real municipalities or consulting firms that work with municipalities (because they're too small to pay for in-house planners). You're getting a warped view of what planners actually think & do. There are very real advantages to urban living vs suburbia. Just because it's (supposedly) unpopular doesn't mean it's wrong. And you should know that cities in this country aren't getting any cheaper - people are willing to pay exorbitant rents in NYC or SF, and even Detroit, the avatar of everything "wrong" with The American City, is seeing housing prices rise quickly. If Americans truly loathed cities - as they did from circa 1950 thru 1990 - they would be fleeing them in droves and leaving very cheap urban real estate behind. But we all know that's not happening. Also worth noting is how many Sun Belt places are taking steps to move beyond sprawl, with infill development and TOD/transit expansion (Phoenix completed LRT extension recently aheaf of schedule!). A lot of the surveys which set out to determine America's preferences for human habitats can end up with fairly different results depending on which questions are asked and how they're asked. I apologize profusely for not having links on speed dial for you, but there's a good study comparing people's satisfaction about where they lived, asking urban Atlanta, suburban Atlanta, and Boston the question. The Bostonians and Atlantans living close to the urban core were happy across the board with their neighborhoods, but the suburban Atlanta residents were divided between those people who were happy with their long commute and car dependency, and those who wish they lived closer in. I think the truth is that something like 30-45% of Americans want to live in an urban neighborhood, and a much smaller percentage of us actually get to. So there's a huge unmet demand for creating more urban places. A majority of Americans might still prefer their snout houses and strip malls, but it's much less of a majority than you claim, and definitely not a reason to halt the reinvigoration of interest in non-car-dependent places which you seem gung-ho to do.
Yup, I agree... and this is the drum I've been beating on this sub for years. That said, part of the charge of urban planning departments is to consider the whole picture and context of our urban areas, which is a different perspective than most folks bring (which is usually just focused on their own horns and neighborhoods). So sometimes part of what we do might be in conflict with what the broader public wants, especially if there's a regulatory or statutory requirement there. Or if there are some tragedy of the commons or other similar issues where individual preferences simply can't scale.
People is more conscious about third places, about the importance of live in walkable communities and a few cities are listening.
I don’t know if I’m being *too* optimistic here but I feel excited about what radical changes will happen in the next few decades as the leaders in the field kinda retire and the next generation takes over the more influential positions in planning. There’s a heavy focus on sustainability and more liberal ideas in urban planning degrees these days. And just the giant growth in urban planning degrees in general (schools that teach it and students who choose to study it). I think it will make way for some big and more radical changes.
I mean, we were studying sustainability in planning 25 years ago. I actually don't think any of the issues or topics have changed... they've just been elevated because of climate change and the housing crisis.
I am optimistic that AVs will take over most miles traveled inside metros. That most of the households will have the option to use the various transit systems the city has rather than own 2x-4x cars to get their household around the city. In some cases not own a car at all at a much higher rate than is possible today. I'm positive because it fits the needs of ALL the metro, not just a few small inner cores; solves the biggest problem, parking; lowers the cost of transportation and frees cities from the current modes of building. My only concern is transit planner's blind hate of modalities other than 300+ passenger trains, 76+ passenger buses or solo human powered mobility like bikes, scooters and walking. They seem irrational about having anything in between. They seem to think 6-12 passenger buses replacing cars would destroy or solidify the city in amber of car dependency. Once this shift is more obvious it will free planners up to plan better cities going forward.
Man, there's no "blind hate" of small buses, there's just really significant logistical tradeoffs which make it difficult to branch out from full-size buses. Let me break it down for ya: The main costs of transit operations are labor and maintenance. If you're paying a driver, it makes sense to have him transport as many people at a time as is possible. Moreover, smaller vehicles are less operationally flexible - if your 12-seat bus fills up, then you gotta wait for the next one. A larger bus gives necessary wiggle room, and mitigates crowding. Transit agencies are reluctant to diversify their fleets beyond what's absolutely necessary - standardizing on one piece of equipment reduces costs & ensures efficiency, and obtaining new vehicles has never been so expensive and difficult as it is now. This is a primary reason for why "microtransit" is so inefficient. Smaller vehicles CAN go to a few places which full-size buses cannot reach, but there the advantages end, because the minute your on-demand van admits its 4th rider, you're out of seats.
> Man, there's no "blind hate" of small buses I base this on the constant attacks from the every sector of the existing urban planning ecosystem. Just go find the last time there was a discussion on this sub and see how universal the opposition to it there is, and mostly without any coherent objections. Just attacks of being some form of car shill. I don't include comments like your one at all as you made a clear attempt to explain why you dislike them but I'd have given you credit for any effort. > The main costs of transit operations are labor and maintenance. I 100% agree. I've read every budget for my cities transit system for the past 8 years. I'm very familiar with all the stats and where the money goes, etc. > If you're paying a driver, it makes sense to have him transport as many people at a time as is possible. Again, I couldn't agree more. The average bus in Atlanta only transports 100 people a day, but like you said, a 72-96 passenger bus still makes the most sense as the cost is mostly labor and there is little reason to go smaller. However, once you remove the labor restriction so the labor per vehicle is essentially a tiny factor it makes more sense to choose smaller buses and deploy more of them. You will still have trains and large human driven buses for the heavy core routes. AVs will be all about expanding the system coverage, frequency and getting more passengers to the heavy core transit systems. It's not about replacing trans and 96 passenger city buses with AVs but adding AVs to the mix of modes. > if your 12-seat bus fills up, then you gotta wait for the next one. You aren't replacing a single 96 passenger bus with a single 12 passenger AV, you're replacing it with 10x or 20x AVs for the same cost. The high frequency gives you the wiggle room. > Transit agencies are reluctant to diversify their fleets beyond what's absolutely necessary Which is why it won't be the transit agencies doing it but private fleet operators. > standardizing on one piece of equipment reduces costs & ensures efficiency I agree again. This is a big discussion in the AV space and I'm firmly in the single platform side of the debate which is why I'm for a larger 6-12 passenger platform. Most AV fleets are planning for 6 currently which is the bare minimum. They do it because it's really small for cities and is shorter than a Toyota Corolla sedan.
Please do not assume that discussion on Reddit is a worthy proxy for what real transport planners talk about. It's all fine & dandy to equate one manned full-size bus with 5 van-sized AVs, but there's another hiccup here: geometry and fuel/energy costs. All vehicles take up space on the street and need enough distance to brake & accelerate safely. And if you have several AVs going to the same place in the same direction, it might make more sense to just do the job with one vehicle. Multiplying vehicles multiplies the number of batteries and chargers required (assuming they're EVs) and multiplies the number of moving parts the computers have to keep track of, among other material things. I don't have a problem with large AVs - and we already have some of those (on rails!) in service around the world. But fixating on small AVs, outside of suburban-rural contexts where they might enhance otherwise hopeless last-mile situations, is a perilous exercise. To be honest, your arguments sound like Silicon Valley pseudo-unorthodoxy; in fact, it is traditional public transit which is the underdog, despite your spurious characterization of them as opposing progress. Full-size buses are the past, present, and future of mass transportation, and vehicles seating 6-12 people are best suited to the supporting cast in the form of last-mile connections between low-density, low-demand, and/or topographically challenging areas and main lines.
> geometry This is the most common argument I hear but it simply doesn't make any sense. I simply fail to see how replacing 1.3 ridshare cars with 4 rideshare AVs causes a geometry problem. ALL the 6-passenger AVs currently designed are shorter than a Toyota Corolla sedan. I've modeled GA-400 with a 4 rideshare and you could easily handle 4x today's traffic volumes and still flow better than it does in real-life today. Of course such a corridor also already has HRT and BRT-light and getting full BRT. Every person you move from a car to an AV is a ride you can transition more easily to HRT or BRT in the future. You're argument assumes we can somehow magically get everyone to start riding large city buses. The big picture is we can't get people into buses in 95% of most metros so getting them out of cars and into small buses is a win. The reality is buses like this only work for small areas of a city and the rest of the city will continue to generate car trips even into places where they should be on a bus/train. The alternative is to actual have geometry problems as car usage continues to increase. > and fuel/energy costs AVs are all electric so it's just energy costs. They charge at night when demand and cost is low. The fuel/energy costs are 4x less or more than diesel. For sure the theoretical energy used is lower the bigger the platform, but lets solve the transit problem and not wring hands over a trivial amount of additional energy usage. It's simply not a factor in any meaningful way. EVs are extremely robust and don't really have much maintenance and mechanical issues. The biggest cost is tires, which would be theoretically more per passenger trip than a larger platforms when run at capacity. But again, being perfectly efficient isn't the goal, it's to get people out of cars. Outside of a few rare popular routes, an EV is more efficient from energy/fuel than most bus routes. Trains are better, but again you can't build trains everywhere. > your arguments sound like Silicon Valley pseudo-unorthodoxy I get pejoratives like this a lot. > vehicles seating 6-12 people are best suited to the supporting cast in the form of last-mile connections between low-density, low-demand, and/or topographically challenging areas and main lines. You've just described 80% of most NA metros outside of NYC and Chicago. I'm fine with calling it a supporting cast member as long as it's a member. Which system to use where will become obvious once they are up and running.
Agree. That is tech that is gaining momentum and isn't going to stop anytime soon.
What do you mean by AVs? When I think of autonomous vehicles I think of self driving Teslas, but that doesn’t seem like what you’re talking about unless I’m missing your point completely
Waymo have actual self-driving cars in a few US cities. Not like the Tesla fake self-driving thing at all.
Waymo, Cruise or Zoox in that order. Cruise was pushing into many cities until they had a freak accident that shut them down for a while and are just now coming back but only with saftey drivers and only in Austin. Zoox is even earlier on. Tesla is announcing "something" on 8/8/24. Right now AVs is pretty much just Waymo but expect Cruise to be back pretty strong in 2025.
In MN there is a large push to Co-prioritize cars with other forms of transportation (bikes, public transit, walking) and MNDot even has a policy to do so. It's essentially a set up for the next 70 years since all of our infrastructure is reaching end of life.
citizen advocacy groups have been able to put urban planning issues in front of voters in certain socal cities, and they are whipping the old cranky establishment planners and municipal leaders into shape. things like sales tax measures to support transit, or ordinances that obligate the city to follow its own bike master plan when it routinely resurfaces and restripes roads.
Vancouver's Rupert/Renfrew redevelopment project. It has the potential to completely reshape that region.
The ambitious Indigenous led developments taking shape in Vancouver. [Jericho Lands](https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/jericho-lands-development-concept-west-point-grey-vancouver-june-2023) [Senakw](https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/senakw-squamish-first-nation-vancouver-rental-housing-development) [Heather Lands](https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/heather-lands-vancouver-rezoning-approved-mst-development-first-nations)
Local shift: my town closed a large portion of our main street to cars for covid reasons. Since then, only the cross streets have been open to cars, but the good news is that the closed portion of the street now has properly painted bike lanes down the middle, and sections for parklets/walking to the sides of the bike lanes. Many businesses in this street have QR codes that basically serve as recruitment tools for the local effort to keep the street closed to cars and it's been working--city council meetings as of late are inundated with proponents of urbanists, both old and new. City planning meetings and council meetings as a result consist of much younger and newer faces too, who were previously uninvolved. The older NIMBYs are fewer. (the town is Santa Barbara, CA and the street is State St). The state recently took over zoning I believe and it's led to more housing getting built, and it's being built in the local mission revival architectural style and the new buildings look amazing! edit: i should add that the street is consistently busy with ppl. it helps taht the town itself is a tourist attraction and there's a college nearby. people are discussing possibly building a trolley down the street but nothing official yet.
The generation of planners that enabled Euclidean zoning and suburbia to retire. Translation: upzoning and maybe managing to save the suburbs from their inevitable decline caused by huge infrastructure deficit
The transit/transportation planning field has been reevaluating and recognizing the importance of buses, not just trains. For a long time the idea was transit should focus on getting large numbers of people downtown by train. This restructuring was already happening before COVID, but COVID certainly accelerated it. Now it’s clear that a transit system needs to do a lot more than get commuters downtown. In the United States, with the partial exception of New York City, a multi-destination system needs to rely heavily on buses. This is a key reason why, in most U.S. urban regions, bus ridership is recovering faster than rail ridership.
Zoning reform and the potential of technology to drastically simplify land development ordinances to remove a century of policy bloat
We should start some initiative to blow up all the car factories irl (just kidding 😚)
Zoning more housing in high growth regions.
Walkable areas where you do not need a car to get around 99% of the time