What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
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Re: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
#2Seattle, by the way, is actually building a lot of rail, and it's going so well that people want more of it: http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/962706-129/bertha-who-seat....
Re: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
#3What happened to the great projects is that the governments responsible generally flubbed their ability to balance a budget so badly that people lost faith in their ability to deliver anything. The MTA Second System was a glorious and wonderful idea on paper, and any New Yorker would love having it, but look what actually became of those lofty ideals: one useful connection and the station named "Grand Street" (B/D) plus a bankruptcy.
Increased labor costs (thanks in part to pro-union prevailing-wage legislation) and environmental-planning holdups in years since haven't helped get things built for less money, either, and we've suffered a parade of boondoggle public-transportation projects, like the Acela service: crazy-money wasted on designing new trainsets instead of importing existing ones, and then the trains are run at normal-train speeds for most of their trip. Next up: California high-speed rail. Not that this is specific to public transit, mind you: the Big Dig should disabuse anyone of that notion. And even when the government supposedly tries to be efficient, we end up with scandals like with the new Bay Bridge.
Bonus points, too, when the laughable micro-projects with insane price tags that are approved find themselves over-budget and end up dropping some of the promises that they did make. (In the Bay Area I know there are people who still complain about how VTA promised to run light rail up West San Carlos Ave, from downtown to the Valley Fair mall, and the old BART/VTA institutional/political rivalry is still running after all these decades.)
How can we restore our faith, asks our intrepid columnist? You'll need to get the governments involved to get their acts together, and then it will be pretty automatic as they demonstrate competence. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.
Re: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
#4An awful lot of the really big ones (on the scale of towns and cities) were bloody awful. Aesthetically pleasing on paper, but unliveable. Logical minds planning carefully separated zones and routes and so on in ways that looked nice on paper and created soulless cities with broken public spaces.
An excellent read on this is "Seeing Like a State", by James Scott. The chapters on forestry and collectivised agriculture are similarly interesting.
Re: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
#5I find it amusing that the photo that heads the article of the Millau Viaduct which, while truly a good example of the sort of project they are advocating, could hardly be called "urban".
Re: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
#6The problem is cars. Older cities were designed too, they were just designed for people instead of cars. A lot of what looks like spontaneous generation was just designed so well you can't see the design.
Re: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
#7What happened to the great projects is that the governments responsible generally flubbed their ability to balance a budget so badly that people lost faith in their ability to deliver anything. The MTA Second System was a glorious and wonderful idea on paper, and any New Yorker would love having it, but look what actually became of those lofty ideals: one useful connection and the station named "Grand Street" (B/D) p…
The government and especially municipal bodies are staffed by people from the community. If you want the government to change, there is a way to do so: generate more interest in what it does, how it functions. Get more people involved/interested, including yourself :) .
Re: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
#8The problem is cars. Older cities were designed too, they were just designed for people instead of cars. A lot of what looks like spontaneous generation was just designed so well you can't see the design.
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Re: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
#9The problem is cars. Older cities were designed too, they were just designed for people instead of cars. A lot of what looks like spontaneous generation was just designed so well you can't see the design.
Its not that simple. Sure, it was much more complicated back then since you had to think of trams and public transportation whereas now you just build highways. But, the amount of corruption in public projects has increased tremendously, spending on infrastructure has reduced etc.
Re: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?
#10What happened to the great projects is that the governments responsible generally flubbed their ability to balance a budget so badly that people lost faith in their ability to deliver anything. The MTA Second System was a glorious and wonderful idea on paper, and any New Yorker would love having it, but look what actually became of those lofty ideals: one useful connection and the station named "Grand Street" (B/D) p…
The government and especially municipal bodies are staffed by people from the community. If you want the government to change, there is a way to do so: generate more interest in what it does, how it functions. Get more people involved/interested, including yourself :) .
This is merely a restatement of the ideal of government, and doesn't address the fundamental complaint of the GP.
Government isn't incompetent because it's made up of incompetent individuals -- it's incompetent because it's been deeply captured by special interest groups, including, but not limited to, public sector unions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
(TL;DR: When studying government from an economics perspective, the sum of rational self-interest actions across all actors isn't very well aligned with the overall public interest.)