How to Fix American Urban Planning (metro, planner, transportation, zoning)

[Folks3000]

For all you urban planning and city nerds out there, these three writeups might be of use in your work:

Reforming American Transportation and Zoning

Reforming American Housing Policy

Reforming American Metropolitan Governance

Feel free to add on any ideas or discussions that were missed in these, and good luck doing the Lord's work out there!

[Avondalist]

Upzoning is a good start.

I think the biggest problem with American urban design, and it has really reached a crisis point, is the lack of affordable housing.

The Jane Jacobs type of arguments in favor of organic neighborhoods, etc. pale in comparison to the lack of affordable housing.

By all means we should try to build better communities, but the more pressing need is to just build more homes, cheaply. Unfortunately for some, that means sprawl.

[bus man]

I don't find anything inherently wrong with measuring Level of Service. But it shouldn't be the only tool that planners use to measure how well (or not well) the roadway network is functioning. Incidentally, LOS is also used in the transit industry to measure how effective a given route is in providing viable service to its riders. Only in the transit context, LOS is a measure of frequency, not speed.