The Life and Death of the Great American City: Sacramento Edition

Here’s How the US Can Stop Wasting Billions of Dollars on Each Transit Project is a very nice summary of the kind of haphazard planning that goes on in U.S. civic design. One takeaway from the article: people who plan these projects have to give a shit. They currently don't.

 Says Jane Jacobs (author of The Life and Death of the Great American City): "Modern planning is positively neurotic in its willingness to embrace what doesn't work and ignore what does...It's a form of advanced superstition, like 19th century medicine, when doctors believed bleeding patients would cure them." (Ok, that's pretty close to a quote, but probably not exact.)

...and if you want to make a resource shortage worse, how about making its over-consumption a part of daily life. I'm referring to sprawl here. Every single trip must be in an auto. It's a regressive tax and a health hazard rolled into one! Health hazard? Not just accidents! Having every single important trip in an auto builds exercise out of our cities. The U.S. currently experiences epidemics not just of coronavirus, but of obesity, heart disease, strokes and diabetes....the diseases of chronic inactivity. (and the obese are more likely to die from COVID!)

As for transit...forget it! Streets as currently designed are hazardous to pedestrians. The regional planning body recently estimated it would need $50 million just to connect all the disconnected sidewalks. So you often can't walk to the transit stops!

And bonus! One needs a minimum of 11 dwelling units per acre to have enough potential transit customers to make transit economically viable. Such neighborhoods are rare in the city of sprawl, and transit comes (if ever) only once every three hours. In other words it's useless (unless, of course, you are an auto dealer or asphalt manufacturer...then everything's jake!)

The techno-fix--a phone app that will make the bus come to you--has been tried in northeast Sacramento County (the South County is where the poor people live, and would use transit, but no one gives a shit). Was it a success? Who knows? Everyone's too busy commuting by car.