> It's funny, seems like people had me pegged as some Suburb Guy, when that couldn't be further from the truth.
I didn't, I read your comment. I think you are just haven't done the necessary level of research or you just have a doomer outlook.
> Yes, the poor always lose out versus Hypothetical Utopia.
But they are not comparing to Utopia, but rather the comparable situation where changes have been made. Or to the same city before and after some change.
Unless you are making the argument that no objective knowledge can exist, the research is pretty clear.
> I'm referring to reality as it exists in the current and near future where many many poor & middle-class people need cars.
Nobody is questioning that. Literally nobody. That why its called 'car centric design'. Who are you arguing against?
> You can't just take them away because of a dumb student-type notion that "cars are only for rich people".
Again, literally nobody is arguing that! You have constructed a complete straw man of urbanist.
The argument is to encourage policy that will make people want to live without cars in the future.
Unless you think, restricting parts of the city center or closing some urban highways is 'taking cars away', you are literally arguing against nobody.
> Yes, I would love to tell Silicon Valley how to zone, but even the popular governor is having trouble doing that.
Yes, all of my suggesting involve politics. And of course not all of them can be implemented practically depending on location. This is always true with literally any suggestion about anything political.
But your claim wasn't 'its politically difficult' rather your claim was 'nobody knows how'.
> We have that, but it doesn't actually help because it's mostly about building rail out to new suburbs where people can get into city center office jobs (and the rail agency can get tax money). In the meanwhile, we built an urban subway with 3! stations.
If be 'we' you mean California, yes there is one. And that is already a lot better then what many other places have. You might not think its enough, but it better then nothing. And the claim that it is bad because its only 'new suburbs' is also factually wrong as part of the rail plan you just had Caltrain electrification, and future improvement to existing rail Caltrain. I'm not an expert on California rail, but the claim that it serves 100% new subburbs is certainty false.
> Like I said, it's a trillion dollar problem, and there's no easy button. Just incremental improvements.
I have no idea why you are claiming its a 'trillion $' problem. That can be said about not doing anything at all too. When we are talking about the infrastructure of 300 million people (assuming we are talking US) then of course, any decision you make its a trillion $. But in that context 1 trillion $ also isn't that much.
And if you actually look at the research you will see that actually many of the suggestion I have SAVE MONEY. The idea that all of this cost unbelievable amounts of money is simply not true.
Lets go threw examples:
- Saver roads pay for themselves because accidents have a really high cost. And the new safer roads will decease avg speed, leaing to easier to maintain roads. In the US today there is a massive amount of overbuilding of incrastructure that simply isn't needed if you were builing roads according to modern scientific principles, rather then some book some engineer wrote in 1960s that just so happens to have been adopted as 'the standard'. And the principles aren't that hard or expensive to implement. This is a clear money safer. Think about all the idiotic lights the US uses at every intersection, each set of lights is expensive, sound road planning would eliminate many of these.
- Closing down urban freeways increases property taxes. Gives the city new land to redevelop and sell, or keep as parks. Also reduces maintenance burden on state level.
- Rezoning pays for itself many, many, many times over, its not even close.
- Increase parking price can raise money for the city. If you don't want to remove them. Removing them is very easy and cheap.
- Putting down protected bike lanes with simple concrete protection is very very cheap and tons of research shows that it is very beneficial. More people on bikes means less car, means less time wasted in traffic. It has also been repeatedly shown that it improves retail on those roads and it also improves property prices.
- Setting up pedestrian zones is also incredibly cheap. Literally a few concert blocks or at most a few bulliards that you can fold down for emergency access. Incredibly cheap, increases property prices and retail.
- Increasing prices on suberbia to reflect actual cost, raises money, rather then losing it.
- Redeveloping stroads is a bit more expensive, but I'm not proposing building anything new, but rather changing the way access and priority works. Cost money but not that much and in the long term it saves a lot of money.
- City buying and developing land does cost money, but since the new mixed use areas will be popular they can actually make a lot of money. Money for this can be raised by cities.
- Setting up a bus network is also really not that expensive. That is some amount of running cost, but if your buses have good priority lanes and are frequent you can cover a lot of the operation. This certainty not a 'trillion $' and each city can handle this themselves, like the do in most of the world. And again, this is increasing tax revenue along bus routes as has repeatedly been shown.
- All the revenue increases are doubly relevant if you switch from property tax to land tax.
The only thing that is at all expensive that I proposed is a long term rail plan. But in terms of your long term transportation plan, you have a lot of cost anyway. And rail is a better long term investment.
I formulate all of my points specifically so they were something cheap that can be done. I didn't propose building huge new parks, or huge metro systems. Or high speed rail. Or anything like that.
You can literally do 95% of what is needed by with paint, concrete blocks, a bunch of buses and bus drivers and a few legal chances. The city will actually increase its revenue a huge amount over time.
The current model of trying to support ever increasingly distant suburbs is what is actually bankrupting cities.
I suggest you look at the detailed research from Urban3. They clearly show how cities that have done many of the chances I propose, are good for the cities finances. In fact, some cities have implemented some of these changes specifically because they are out of money.
So please do not spread the idea that American cities can't change because its to expensive. That is the sort of thing far-right wing people spread, the whole 'we can't afford bike-lanes' nonsense.