From an urban planning perspective, what's the worst designed aspect of your city?
From an urban planning perspective, what's the worst designed aspect of your city?
Personally it's crossing the freeway where I live. My city has about 100,000 people but only six roads cross the freeway, with three more wayyy on the outskirts that are basically detours. There are also only a few pedestrian bridges that cross it, and zero pedestrian tunnels. The way our freeway works is it goes around downtown with the ocean to the south and west, so people live on the outside of the freeway and then commute inwards. This means insane bottlenecks with miles of cars in both directions trying to get to the other side. It doesn't help that our four freeway entrances are also at some of these tunnels / bridges, which means people who need to get on or off the freeway are also present. In general it's a shitshow and I'd really like to see a few more bypasses to prevent this congestion in the future.
There's glass everywhere. In a few places, there's street sweeping, but mostly not. So unless you want to go vacuum/sweep up every bike lane you use (which I've seriously considered), bike tires really don't last very long.
3Armadillo tires were the best investment I ever made in my bike. I also live in a place that, where there even are bike lanes, they're often full of debris. Spending a bit more on tires ends up saving you so much in innertubes.
I've also seen wire mesh type tires for road bikes that look really promising, though I've never tried them.
2
Single family zoning as far as the eye can see. San Francisco simply cannot grow due to the stupidly restrictive zoning. Combine that with prop 13 limits on property tax based on purchase price rather than market price of the property, you got a bunch of land horders who are not pressured to better utilize the limited space that we have as a city.
In turn, this makes rent stupid expensive, and the housing stock really bad for renters.
2Permanently Deleted
1Until you realize overwhelming majority, (70+percent) of the tax deduction is on commercial property (hence California strip malls because you’ll never get updated tax when you never upgrade your commercial facility) and luxury residential property over 2mm and that’s why we have to have income tax in California.
2
I live in an old market town (UK), so the worst aspect of my town's planning is the complete lack of any planning. 😀
In all seriousness, I'd say it's the lack of any major roads into the town. There's effectively only three roads that go into a town of 35,000 people, all with only a single lane in each direction. This is despite the fact that the town's major industries are mining and tourism, both of which need decent road infrastructure. One of the roads enters the town with a very sharp 90 degree turn, which lorries nevertheless need to navigate in order to deliver goods to shops, because all the shops are next to that road.
The people that founded the town in the 10th century really didn't give any thought to what might happen in the following 1000 years!
2While I do find it lovely to stumble around twisting alleyways in old cities, I remember being lost in a section of Florence asking "Who in the hell thought this was a good idea?"
1
They built the interstate on the west side of town, so all the pollution blows into town. They built a pork processing plant on the west side of the interstate, so all of the smell blows over the interstate and into town. The main road through town is a state highway with 2 east and two west lanes plus a split turn lane. It goes directly past the high school and near some other schools. Most of the pork trucks come from the east and have to travel all the way through town. There's also two roads that travel north/south that are 2/2 with turn lane, the intersections with the state highway have a lot of accidents. Old downtown is several blocks away from any main road, so nobody goes to any business near them. They have started to focus all development near the interstate, and are trying to get developers to build near the highway, by the pork plant. It's 18 levels of pure stupidity.
2The tramway was dismantled in 1955. It was supposed to be the march of progress, to make way for cars.
According to the mayor, unchanged for 20+ years, this policy is still valid.
1NYC does a lot of things right, but its subway is very clearly designed to shuffle people in and out of Manhattan. There are many trips one might take within or between Brooklyn and Queens where the fastest path is taking the train into Manhattan and back out again. There's been a long plan to build a line connecting deeper parts of Brooklyn and Queens - the Interborough Express - but as is usually the case for any infrastructure projects in NYC, it's moving very slowly and will be ludicrously expensive.
To really put that into perspective, extending the Q line about two miles and building four stations cost roughly the same amount of money as it took London to build the Elizabeth line, covering 73 miles and 41 stops. And of course, this is London, which has a lot of the same issues of being a very old, dense, and developed city.
1Huh. Do you know why it's so much more expensive than London?
1We should be using the Army Corp of Engineers as a full time federal team of infrastructure builders and dramatically increase it in size, but alas.
1
I'm going to give a narrower scope and mention something that bothers me in my neighborhood. I can bike to a park and ride for a bike-friendly train that goes directly to downtown with a decent frequency, which is fantastic! Unfortunately it's really only accessible by car, and I have to take quite a significant detour to get to it without needing to ride ~a mile on a very fast very busy main road without sidewalks :(. We're so close!
1I currently live in Denver which has been ranked one of the worst cities for public transit design in the USA. Moving soon to Barcelona and looking forward to not owning a car.
1You can get anywhere in the city on a bus! ...in about 2 hours, with a half-hour transition from the east-west bus to the north-south bus in the middle.
3I believe you but the thought that Denver is worse in this department than where I am (Nashville) is baffling. It’s also horrible here, my area doesn’t even have sidewalks. :(
1
Hmm. I'm in a pretty small town. I think the most annoying thing is that we have two very nice river trails, they're obviously supposed to connect, but they don't. Both of them just stop before the highway. There was a planned underpass, but it was put on hold during COVID and our new city council seems uninterested in restarting construction.
As such, around 1/4 of our population can't bike or walk into downtown, they must drive. And I can't bike into work, as turning left on the highway is not gonna happen on a bike.
With how many people use our paths, we need much more investment into them. They're great for residents and they're a tourist attraction: we need to make them as easy to use as possible.
1