Let me detail some reasons behind my list, since people are so up in arms about it.
Downtown residential
-Cities are putting way too much energy into downtown residential with the idea that it is going to be the saviour of downtown, and turn a dead downtown into a 24 hour hopping place.
This could not be farther from the truth, and while a piece in a successful downtown, residential alone is not going to save downtown.
Downtown needs destinations and a critical mass of people attracted from across a city and region.
Downtown residents alone are not going to save downtown and downtown residential if overdone could even have the opposite effect and actually deaden vibrant areas of downtowns (see Toronto's entertainment district, which is being killed off by residential).
Again downtown residential has a place. But I think planners and city governments are going to see they put way too much eggs into one basket.
Just like stadiums, downtown malls, pedestrian malls, and mega developments, downtown residential alone is not going to fix anything by itself. Yet it is the mega project fix of the 2000's.
Light Rail Transit
-There is an ideology out there right now that LRT is going to fix everything. Put an LRT track down and all of a sudden a street is going to turn into a hip, thriving destination.
This ideology has led cities to promote LRT networks even in places where another option would be better, either subway or bus.
Many cities are spending a ton of money on LRT networks, just because other cities have one, and they want one. All while their bus networks fall apart, etc.
Other cities which need better transit are also building LRT, because it is the in thing to do. And these cities may well face a situation where LRT just can't provide the transportation needed, and they will have to build all over again with higher capacity and grade separated systems.
Or LRT will fail to attract the ridership that another transit system type may, and our cities will be left with lower transit use as a result.
Go to any public meeting and the prevailing comment always made is "well every other city has LRT, so we need one".
Planned (forced) government sanctioned decentralization of a metropolitan area
-Promoting decentralized nodal cities has been a planning fad for a while now. However the results have been very mixed and in fact most plans have not lived up to their expectations.
Promoting decentralization could actually be leading to increased sprawl and car use, because people are able to just live that little further out, if their jobs are moved out of the city to a suburban location.
In addition, despite the idea that people will ride transit to decentralized employment zones. The results have not bore out that way, and decentralized areas face low transit use. In fact the closer one lives to work, the more likely they are too drive, completely going against the idea that moving jobs out of the city to the suburbs will all of sudden make people ride transit or bike to work.
Some decentralization is going to happen naturally. But fully promoting it in a plan may not be the best idea in building a compact, transit friendly metropolitan region.
Living and working in the same neighbourhood idea
-There is this idea now that we have to force people to live and work in the same neighbourhood they live in. I am not against living and working in the same area. But I do think things like purposly slowing down transit to force people to live near work is stupid. And will just lead to more car trips.
At the end of the day with many dual income families, and big companies. The idea of having this utopia where the majority of people walk and bike to work is not turning out that way. Families can't move every time their job changes, and dual income families have to have someone commute in most cases.
While it is good to promote people living close to work if they can. We can't ignore the fact that many people don't want to live next to work or can't. So ideas like not investing in transit to make it hard for people to commute to work, etc is not a good idea.
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Miketoronto
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