Quote:
Originally Posted by laniroj
Who thinks it makes the most sense here or there? Are the suburbs the right spot with good schools or is the center city the right spot with coffee shops? How about an existing office park with ample open space or 2,641 feet from a transit stop? The only true answer to this question is that EVERY SINGLE PLACE makes sense for someone. Planners have been dictating (with their best foot forward in most cases) where growth goes and it doesn't work. The market is efficient, people doing studies and making plans are not efficient.
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Personally, I would like to see planning departments spend a whole lot less time worrying about where growth goes, and a whole lot more time worrying about
how it gets built.
Rather than endlessly worrying about things like density, parking, or trying to decide if sidewalks should count toward or against minimum open area requirements (yes, this is a real discussion) - sometimes I wish planning would spend a whole lot more time scrutinizing the urban design fundamentals of minor subdivision plats. It may sound boring but it is
extremely important and is an area where I feel like modern urban planning is being entirely neglectful.
I have to give credit where credit is due - about 15 years ago, Boulder approved the
Transit Village Subarea Plan (TVAP - kind of ironic since the transit is still decades off). This plan included one of the only legally enforceable "connections plans" that I am aware of in Colorado. It basically gave the plan reviewers the legal backing to request public ROW in specific locations. After almost 2 decades in effect, the city has now exacted about 75% of the planned connections and the neighborhood is looking
fantastic. I'd provide streetview examples, but it is mostly all too new and the best parts of it still haven't been photographed - I'd encourage anyone in the area to go check it out. My favorite example is
this alley, where the city exacted ROW from two different landowners almost a decade apart. The Google streetview image is actually outdated and only shows half of the current alley - check out the aerial view for the current state of things. This kind of effort takes some serious long-term follow through, but this is the kind of subdivision approach (each half of the street comes from a different original landowner) that used to be common and gave us neighborhoods like the Highlands over 100 years ago. There is nothing wrong with a half-completed street or alley. But instead we end up with crap
like this (honestly - why did we need two over-wide private alleys separated by a fence?).
I reached out to a planner in Arvada once to ask why we couldn't plan for new connections east-west between Balsam and Allison. I received a response that "unfortunately, current and future land use patterns do not allow for new connections" (I'm paraphrasing a bit). And let that second part sink in for a second - we can't plan for "future land use patterns" -
really? They would prefer a "developer driven approach" that "encourages" new connections rather than mandating where they go. As if urban design outcomes
like this one are desirable.
These poor urban design outcomes are a part of why we have things like "DenverFugly" - it's not just the cheap stucco. What are planners actually "planning" if all they are doing is reviewing applications in a piecemeal fashion as they come in, wasting staff time on things that may not actually matter? Why not actually come up with a real
plan for how we are subdividing our land as we get denser? With a little advice from the real estate development community, we could probably easily determine which neighborhoods are about to "pop" and come up with a community-supported plan. If a neighborhood like Sloan's Lake had adopted a "connections plan" 15 years ago, the outcome today would be
very different.
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I guess I don't see what is so terrifying. I never said anything about this being done behind closed doors - a connections plan can be an open process that involves the community. By looking at an entire neighborhood as a single composition, it should be possible to come up with a design that is more efficient, wastes less space, and is more aesthetically attractive. Based on what I have seen, the double-alley example IS the norm and most cities' current approach tends to continue giving crappy results like 
Linear Mode
