Posts about Development
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El Camino Bonito
I walked across El Camino Real - once. This road, once the main thoroughfare through Silicon Valley, is now a 50 mile long strip mall of motels, gas stations, mattress stores, car rental places, fast food, and one major university. Every business or shopping center along its length has a parking lot. In the utopia of sprawl, El Camino Real would be Main Street. Keep reading…
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What free market?
Houston is the poster child for bad urban planning - or should I say the complete lack of any planning. Developers build subdivisions across the Texas plains, and the government builds freeways to them, in an endless cycle of sprawl. This Houston Chronicle article talks about the many negative effects this is having on the region, from decaying inner-ring suburbs to… Keep reading…
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Harvard’s Allston plan: wow
The architects hired by Harvard University to study locating facilities in Allston have created an interim report, and it’s really nice. If Harvard really implements most of it, rather than getting cheap and cutting the more expensive pieces which improve quality of life, it sounds as though a really nice new campus might result. I’m pleasantly surprised,… Keep reading…
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Stop the space elevator, or, it’s the Battery Bridge all over again
This is wonderful. And a very clever satire on an important issue. Keep reading…
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The sprawl lovers
There’s something aesthetically appealing about big, soaring highway ramps conveying a feeling of speed and mobility. And I can understand why, in Robert Moses’ day, people could have thought building highways was a grand endeavor. But we now know they just don’t work. Or do we? Alex Marshall, author of one of the best books on sprawl,… Keep reading…
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Don’t play SimCity (Classic)
Like many people my age, I grew up playing SimCity, the 80s classic video game of city planning. The player lays out transportation infrastructure, parks, and residential, commercial, or industrial zones into which the Sims build their own buildings. All the zones are square and exactly the same size. (There have since been two sequels, SimCity 2000 and… Keep reading…
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Let’s solve traffic jams by creating more!
Congress is close to approving a huge transportation bill, which in its original form allocated $300 billion to roads but only $75 billion to transit. According to the article, “House Transportation Committee spokeman Steve Hansen… cited the $70 billion that is ‘wasted each year due solely to traffic congestion and the waste of more than 5.7 billion gallons… Keep reading…
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Reaper Mall
Actually, it turns out there’s quite a lot to say about How Cities Work and Reaper Man. In Reaper Man, a mysterious set of snow globes appears in Ankh-Morpork, followed by metal shopping carts. A character realizes that if cities are like life forms - large, slow moving life forms - then there would evolve parasites to prey upon them, just as other long-lived life… Keep reading…
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Marshall and Pratchett
I started reading How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall on the plane. (I also started reading Reaper Man, but there’s not much to say about that other than that Terry Pratchett is hilarious and you should read his books). Keep reading…