A mid-size city with no parking lots

[Myra]

well, you don't really have to put shops on the ground floor. The idea would be to collect some parking fees for the use of the facility.

[ablarc]

well, you don't really have to put shops on the ground floor.

Then you'll have to look at parked cars as you walk by.

In a dark cave.

[jresta]

That's right, it's the built environment. If we build a place that's walkable, people will walk. We don't need to be always pussyfooting around the issue looking for deep, first-principle red herrings like climate or culture or geography. It's just a question of built form.

A lot of people don't realize the devastation visited upon southern cities during the civil war. Richmond and Atlanta in 1860 looked much like a Pittsburgh or a Cleveland in 1960. Atlanta was 90% destroyed after Sherman set fire to the town. A lot of these cities got new plans during reconstruction but even then the money wasn't there to completely rebuild them and just when it looked steady the great depression hit and by the time it was over everyone was driving.

It gets hot in Rio de Janeiro and it gets really hot in Baghdad but they're still urban places. Architecture plays a roll in keeping people cool and when it doesn't people plan their days around the midday heat - just like in the old days when southern families used to meet back at home for "dinner" for a few hours at midday because it was just too damn hot to keep the shop open.

[BKM]

Then you'll have to look at parked cars as you walk by.

In a dark cave.

...with lurking trolls ready to waylay the unwary traveller.

[ablarc]

...with lurking trolls ready to waylay the unwary traveller.

Or maybe muggers.

Oh...this is the 21st Century; no more muggers.

[BKM]

Or maybe muggers.

.

What do you think "trolls" really were?

[illinoisplanner]

That city is perfect. It's as close to reality as I can get to the dream fictional city I've drawn up plans for.

[MitchBaby]

yeah, but if its Perth, watch out for the salt water alligators.

(the river would be the Swan estuary, I think)

No Alligators in Perth, or in Australia for that matter. The Salt Water Crocodiles are way more evil than American Alligators, but they are only in the top end. Not in Perth.

[The One]

Land banking is probably the single most pernicious term in planners' dismal lexicon.

Reminds me of the "pacification" of Vietnam.

If I remember correctly, the old City of Denver TDR program required sending sites be left open or used for parking to allow the receiving sites to max out on height in the Downtown. I think most places have moved beyond this ability to suck 100% of the development rights off a property, thus making it useless for anything but parking lots.

Anyone out there experienced a TDR program (for height or otherwise) that may support urban parking lots?

[ablarc]

If I remember correctly, the old City of Denver TDR program required sending sites be left open or used for parking to allow the receiving sites to max out on height in the Downtown. I think most places have moved beyond this ability to suck 100% of the development rights off a property, thus making it useless for anything but parking lots.

Did you ever see development rights transferred from one lot to another? Is it done with a crane?

This is so self-referential, it's like learned discussions of the emperor's clothes. Nothing is real; the only thing being discussed is a condition that wouldn't have existed except for someone making up dopey rules (to compensate for dopey rules made up by someone else, such as height limitations). This all exists in a parallel universe of rules and other phantom realities. To think that grown people actually muck about with this kind of stuff every day!

To illustrate the unreality and meaninglessness of it all: in the year 3000, how would an archaeologist without access to zoning documents explain what he found by uncovering the foundations? What interpretation would he put on the disparities of development from lot to lot?

Hm... must have religious significance.

[BKM]

Did you ever see development rights transferred from one lot to another? Is it done with a crane?
.

LOL. In Planning School, TDR was all the rage. In 16 years, I've never seen them effectively used.

[cnyOntario]

And for the record, when I lived uptown, all of my neighbors in First Ward were Southerners. No one from Syracuse in the lot (although I called the shores of Lake Onandaga home in the 1980s). Besides, all of my friends in Syracuse love their yards...they only see them three months in a year.

You can't generalize. Cities or people. They'll prove you wrong every time.

Did someone say the shores of Onondaga Lake

[ablarc]

Upstate New York's such an unsung beauty spot.