What planning fads of today will be looked at as possible mistakes in the future

[Jonboy1983]

Well, I will be honest, I just do not like BRT. However, in some parts of a few cities it does prove more viable/feasible than some rail options. I do have a problem seeing BRT proposed in areas where the density should warrant a more dense mode of transport, such as LRT, subway, or commuter rail...

Of course, if cost is a serious issue (and it usually is), then I can see why BRT is a popular option. ROW to secure, materials to construct and of course overall maintenance are all very low when compared to LRT, subway, etc...

[M II A II R II K]

And a trolleyed BRT can't hurt either.

[miketoronto]

Originally Posted by mhays

Good lord Mike. He said nothing about asking questions. The point was that you turn your anecdotal experiences into broad statements about the rest of the world.

A college grad shouldn't do what you do. Nor should a college grad completely miss the points that people keep drilling into you.

This is a forum where people are supposed to talk.
Everyone takes their experiences. And for a forum, I am not going to conduct a study every time I want to talk about something.

The problem here is everyone takes this way too seriously, when it is supposed to be a fun place to talk and discuss ideas.

It is funny how I can sit in a coffee shop and throw out a question like the one I posed here, and have a very interesting conservation with people about their experiences, what they think, what they have read, etc.

Here, people get upset.

Also on the LRT thing, I never meant it to sound like I hate LRT. I like LRT where it makes sense. My whole comment about LRT is the overarching view right now that LRT is the savior of transit and cities.
Many cities are spending a ton of money on LRT even where it makes little sense, just because they want an LRT system like everyone else.

So LRT is not bad. Many are a success like in Calgary and Edmonton. But at the same time, there is this fad with LRT at the moment.

[mhays]

How does that explain misreading posts, like your response before this one?

As for your point about throwing out ideas, it's all in how you frame it. You tend to frame things as generalizations.

[eemy]

Getting back to Mike's original post which I think is actually quite interesting.

New Urbanism: I think history is going to show that New Urbanism is simply gussied up suburbanism. For the most part, I suspect we will find that the movement will have a minimal effect on transportation modal shares and that integrated commercial developments will struggle and stagnate. Though the street networks are more grid-like than other styles of suburban development, they are still usually designed to prevent traffic from moving through the neighbourhoods and thus retain the disadvantages of the grid (lower density, greater hard surfaces) without any of the benefits such as efficiency and adaptability.

Live/Work: I don't think this is a mistake, but I think that planners are going to realize that this goal is largely unattainable due to both spouses working and a shift to choose a residence based on lifestyle instead of needs. Hence you see large reverse-commutes developing in conjunction with the resurgence in downtown living. I do think a somewhat unanticipated consequence of moving toward a mixture of uses will be far more efficient use of transportation infrastructure.

I'm going to have to strongly disagree with Mike with regard to the role that public consultation is going to play in the future. I only see the role of the public growing stronger as more effective forms of consultation and collaboration take place. The role of a planner as some sort of urban scientist passed ages ago.

Most planning ideas have been failures in moving toward their goals as originally planned; the only difference is that some have proven more disastrous to the functioning of a city than others (some have even proven beneficial!). In hindsight, most of the mistakes are apparent, but only hubris would leave you to believe that we somehow can avoid making the same mistakes this time around with whatever flavour of the decade we are currently fixated on.

[mhays]

Live/work, definitely.

In my city, far too many streets require new projects to have retail -- far more than the local buying power actually merits. The code now allows more live/work units (basically townhouses) in some cases in lieu of retail. But that doesn't work either. A lot of streets that aren't good for retail also aren't good for townhouses, maybe due to high traffic, noise, street people, or people's general aversion to having an unsecured door in the most urban areas. So the developer chooses between building retail that won't rent well, or live/work units that won't sell or rent well. At least with live/work they'll eventually get rid of them, at maybe (guessing) 90% of the expected income. With retail, they might get 50%, when a nail salon or insurance salesman finally takes the space after it's been sitting for a couple years.

[Cirrus]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

I would rather be critical and question things, than just accept everything as truth because it came out of a textbook.

Originally Posted by miketoronto in a different thread yesterday

(My opinion) comes from actually having studied this kind of stuff in school.

[zilfondel]

New Urbanism!
New Urbanism!
New Urbanism!
New Urbanism!
New Urbanism!

Yes, you heard me correctly. NU is such a joke.

[Cirrus]

I think it's a fad to give new urbanism a name and to label developments as specifically "new urbanist" ones, but I don't think the principles of new urbanism are ever going away. They're not new, after all.

[bgwah]

I haven't read the entire thread, but I would say building LRT where completely grade-separated rail should have gone will be seen as a mistake.

[ltsmotorsport]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

I think it's a fad to give new urbanism a name and to label developments as specifically "new urbanist" ones, but I don't think the principles of new urbanism are ever going away. They're not new, after all.

It's really how these principles are applied, which as someone stated earlier, can end up looking very suburban. It's almost as if many of the suburban planners or tract home developers have just taken on some of these principles in select developments and heralded a new paradigm.

But as you said, these ideas aren't now, and hopefully we'll see more and more true urban developments in the coming years.

[ardecila]

Definitely everything associated with the current stadium paradigm will die off. A stadium cannot drive a successful urban neighborhood. Cite Fenway and Wrigley all you want, but Kenmore Square and Wrigleyville are bustling neighborhoods because tons of people live there and patronize the bars and restaurants even when it's not game day. Any attempt to manufacture some kind of entertainment district around a stadium to make it "more urban" will fail.

This is not even getting into the whole public financing issue, or the money-grubbing way in which professional teams betray their respective cities by threatening to move unless they get Subsidy X or Preferential Treatment Y.

I prefer the European model for stadiums: stick it in a big park and provide really good transit and pedestrian connections with limited parking nearby. Don't worry about "integrating into the city". Soldier Field is relatively good in this respect; so are most Division I football stadiums.

Originally Posted by 10023

An attempt at some real examples:

- Adaptation of old infrastructure for open space (e.g., the High Line, the elevated rail line in Chicago, or efforts to cover rail lines or roadways with parkland). I love it, as I'm sure we all do, but you do have to wonder what happens when these things get old and fall into disuse. It's a lot harder to maintain something like the High Line than any old patch of grass.

... more to come...

Definitely this is a huge fad, although again, repurposing the infrastructure of an earlier generation has been going on for centuries - see Rome. For an idea of what the High Line will eventually look like, check out the Promenade Plantee in Paris (the first viaduct park, opened in 1993). It's still a busy park, but there are weedy areas, broken fountains, missing/damaged benches, etc.

The Chicago and Philly projects will probably be more resilient than the first two, benefiting from more durable viaducts and far more sustainable, simple landscaping. Since both the Bloomingdale and Reading viaducts are solid-fill, it's actually not substantially harder to maintain the elevated landscape than a typical urban park.

[miketoronto]

The only saving grace for parks like the High Line, are that they have a parks conservancy operating them. So they may not fall into disrepair like regular city parks did.

[Crawford]

The High Line is mostly being paid for by billionaires, and its upkeep is paid for by a special assessment on surrounding real estate.

It's probably the least likely public park on earth to potentially fall into disrepair.

And it's only about half completed, BTW. Phase 3 is easily the largest phase.

[Wizened Variations]

IMO, the United States is the epicenter of where future lifestyle change will occurr in the old Eurocentric world.

A) We, of all the world's large national populations, are the most rubber tire centric.

I Light Rail

A.-Most of the 'poor planning' for the 'new realities' reflects our having torn up steel rail interconnections in our urban centers even into the 21st Century (Denver for example) and built very localized buildout on spaces which should have been used as fast transfer points.

B.-Our 'light rail' built from the late 1970s until today tends to be very localized in scope (in terms of speed, frequency, ROW, etc), and when built over larger metro areas, average speeds are exquisitely slow. Most reflect the desire for real estate development by Downtown factions, at the expense of well coordinated regional development. This is the result of the concentration of governmental agencies in downtowns, and the collective political power of these agencies have in metropolitan areas.

C-Light rail tends only to be convenient to go to downtown, and woefully slow when ridden through it due to transfers required, and modal changes to other forms of public transit. Average velocity is the key and this includes traveling through downtown. 40 kmh, IMO, is about minimum and should include transfer time, regardless of the 'hamstrings' of definition

II Freeway expansion

A- Freeways represent the product of most powerful State agency that contracts out contruction. State 'Departments of Transportaion' have been around since at least the 1950s, and are extremely well connected to city, county, and state politicians. These agencies have long histories of using emminent domain and are 'first choice' in government transportation spending.

Many tend to be experts at getting public transportation agencies to foot more than their fair share of intrastructural costs on projects where freeways and light rail run parallel. In addition, the freeway portion almost ALWAYS gets the least grade, the gentlest curves etc (check out the Southeast Line in Denver, and the West line west of Simms/Union.)


III Retail- Big Box stores

A. Big box stores reflect the apogee of retailing in the autombile and truck age, as further morphed by the US loosing the bulk of it's local and regional supplying manufacturing. The combination of "convenient" shopping with private railroad intermodal (where containers from the West Coast* are transferred to regional truck carriers and moved to huge warehouses) technology and subsidized energy makes operations like WalMart profitable.**

This, IMO, will become far less profitable (many big box stores are dying even now) in the future due to rising energy costs in constant dollars combined with decreasing incomes for the bottom 90-95%. Yet, developments such as open malls, big box store row, etc., continue to be made.

III Retail- internet

A. The huge providers of physical and virtual internet infrastructure, to this point in time, have the political muscle to 'buy' pass most taxation authorities. Contrary to most popular beliefs, this is not necessarily progress, as these authorities represent humans that need social services (fire, sewer, water, police, medicaid, etc )and the erosion of city and county sales tax bases result in diminished social services.

There will be readjustments in this area soon, either in a per/bit taxation paid by the user through the ISP or some kind of transactional taxation

IV Housing

B. US private housing is still locked into the pre-collapse suburb view, where social class is defined in terms of square footage and housing where no structural walls are shared with neighbors. In the 30%-90% national income bracket this is being corrected by the excruciating pain of mark to market changes in home values. The upper middle and upper classes will live where they want in almost any economic environment, in large square footage houses. The changes are occurring in the expectations of the average house dweller


*With the completion of the expansion of the Panama Canal container ships with a container capacity of 10,000 or more will be seeking Gulf and West Coast ports. This will change the private railroad part of the equation.

**Walmart also grew through the relentless pursuit of lower cost labor, and, lower cost suppliers. IMO, Walmart should take partial credit for the rise of China- which we are now paying for in the collapse of the non-governmental middle class. I am not a fan.

[ozone]

Wizened Variations i think your assessment is right on. He/she is right - the Big Box retail model is already beginning to show signs it's reached it's limit with Best Buy's declaration that it's moving away from that model.

Online sales will continue to expand and in-store retail shrink. Since this has not dramatically affected the strongest regional retail centers that much -yet- most cities and property owners haven't been forced -yet- to realize a plan to reprurpose the space and regain lost revenue. As WV pointed out there's going to be a day of reckoning. But I don't think it will but the kibosh on the growth of Internet sales. So the mistake being made is to continue the fads of past 50 years and not recognize the real changes and adapting planning to deal with them.

Instead of trying to revitize the down-at-heal working-class suburbs and their dying malls we need to be planning for functioning, self-sustaining, densely populated, working-poor "slumurbs".

We need to stop imagining and planning our downtowns on pre-WWII models. Instead we need to plan for 'creative-class ghettos', free-trade zones where local producers sell direct to the consumers without the brick & motar overhead.

If Asia is becoming more Westernized then the Western cities will become more Easternized.

[montréaliste]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

those non-core cookie cutter residential/retail lifestyle malls - although that craze seems to have died down.

frit or mesh facades. very oughts/tweens era and wont date well.

anything gehry. ^same.

one trend that i hope that grows much more widespread is tod of any kind!

Bullseyes on all counts!

[novaCJ]

I don't discriminate against any specific architectural styles, as long as the building in question looks good(not tacky). Some(perhaps many) may disagree, but Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, etc. look fine to me because the buildings actually serve a legitimate purpose as actual businesses and homes, not as an amusement park, though some still treat it that way, and they look nice and are consistent without being too monotonous. Let's not make this an architecture-dominated discussion, though.

The 'power centers' and 'lifestyle centers' surrounded by seas of parking lots. Big Box will go away, it was simply a fad.

Massive, master-planned communities will ultimately be a failure. They are never dense enough and tend to be built in the middle of nowhere.

We need to pay attention to preserving out mid-century modern architecture, I fear it is going the way of the Victorians it replaced, and when done right can actually be very beautiful.

Getting the government too involved in private development is ultimately not good, the live-work mandatory zoning mentioned previously is a good example. On the other hand, NIMBYs are currently too controlling, as I have experienced in my own community.

Light Rail is fine, headways can always be changed if the need exists.

Having a corporate-operated everything(retail spaces, residential, etc) on a large scale throughout an area, as I see quite often in new developments may prove to be unsustainable in the long run.

[Xelebes]

Originally Posted by novaCJ

Massive, master-planned communities will ultimately be a failure. They are never dense enough and tend to be built in the middle of nowhere.

Christopher Wren begs to differ.

[ssiguy]

When I saw this thread I only had one thing come to mind.............streetcar and LRT.
While both can be useful in certain circumstances, the US seems to have taken it ffrom a transportation option to the only option.
These huge LRT lines may look nice on paper when planned but building BRT or automated systems like monorails would have been a better choice. Many of these huge systems costs huge amounts of money and when they open the frequency levels are terrible and ridership low.
Downtown streetcars are also fads with many cities building them for no other reason than "everyone else has one". Attractive BRt can get the same ridership levels and promote TOD at a much cheaper cost aka Cleveland Healthline. Sometime streetcars make sense in urban areas but most of the construction in the US right now has nothing to do with improving transit and everything to do with local politicians looking forward to a nice warm and fuzzy ribbon cutting ceremony right before an election.