Can one street solve Silicon Valley’s housing and transportation woes? | Peter Calthorpe

Lets all say it together: Car dependency and bad city planning. This is literally the majority of the problem. If you have a walkable town, you don't need a car for your basic you need to live. You just walk to the store. Also, because going to a store is not a car trip, you can do it every day, or every other day. You don't need a insanely large fridge and freezers that Americans seem to have. You can also take advantage of temporary price reductions. Towns built around walkability, bikes and public transport are just superior in every way that we can measure, from health to water use and so on. The US needs to fundamentally change its approach to cities and towns. You can't have poor people working in cities to provide services and then force them to live in some Cul-de-Sac cheap house 1-2h drive outside of the city. I highly suggest people listen to Peter Calthorpe, who coined the turn Transit Oriented Development. Here some great videos that are worth checking out, one general, one about California: - General/China: link - Cali: ▶ this video This article is missing the forest while talking about trees.

This is exactly true. In all honesty the US should never again build a new road or highway. There is already more then enough of both. Its not even close, in fact a huge amount of road needs to be removed, just reclaimed by nature. To give an example, the city of Indianapolis is 'commited' to maintain a road that could go from Indianapolis to Alaska. Like seriously, even if 100% of government revenue was focused on just road maintenance, this wouldn't be possible. Lots of cities have the same situation, way to much infrastructure. Within existing limits of the bay area cities you could easily build like 2 million new houses. Without a single new road, water pipe or anything. This talk by Peter Calthorpe (the guy who invented Transit Oriented Development) about California and the Bay Area: ▶ this video This video about his work in China is also amazing: ▶ this video

Yes, and you have to go even further and more general. The solution is actually urbanism. You can't just build trains and hope everything is gone be fine. Living in low or high density urban environments is far more efficient in pretty much every single way that we can measure. CO2, energy, land use, water use and so on, and not just by a little but by a huge margin. Transport can be electrified trains, trams, trolly buses, metros. This uses very few battery materials and essentially no new technology. All technology read to deploy in large numbers. This would also 'solve' the housing crisis as increasing density around transportation with mixed use is what leads to much cheaper living cost (housing and transportation need to be seen together). This talk by famous City Planner Peter Calthorpe is really good and goes into detail. He and his teams were charged with making a few projection plans for California and have really good numbers on all of these things (except the nuclear I mentioned): ▶ this video He has other great talks about his work in China as well, this is a bit more academic: link

Lol, who is moving the goal posts now. You simply lost the argument. Nothing completely solves the poor people problem and I have not claimed on doing so. Specially when we talk about thing we do in first world nations, as most people live in places like India and Indonesia and the problems there are actually pretty different. They lack infrastructure when in the US the problem is actually that there is, to much and it not used effectively. This articles is about: > The cost of being poor: Why it costs so much to be poor in America And I am point out things that are almost universally accepted by urban planning community know-days. It address this specific point, why cost of living are so high in the US for poor people. Addressing these points would not solve poverty, but it would reduce a huge cost burden from a huge part of the population and would improve living quality substantially. This was modeled by a famous urban planner for California: ▶ this video

Having to buy a larger house, a larger refrigerate, a larger transport vehicle to get the option to potentially buy in bulk. When in effect what they actually do, and data shows this, they buy to much perishables and then throw them away. So I can buy that yes, there some potential places where this theory could potentially apply. However, if you derive a social theory from these effects, I would like to see some evidence of this effect being really large. Compare that with the land use situation I keep bringing up, we have prove and had it for a long time that density and walkability does massively reduce the living cost of poor. This was modled in detail for California for example: This video shows the results of some modeling done for California by a famous urban planner: ▶ this video

You know what would be 10x better for society? Not have a society where half of every city is compromised of parking lots. The car and parking lots problem is a huge part issue in the US in particular. Not only is the whole concept incredibly bad environmentally, in terms of CO2 of course, but also emissions and other problems like cities being hotter and causing water management issues. These parking lots are also a huge economic problem a symptom of the reason why so many towns are functionally broke. Encouraging cheap building for box stores or fast food restaurants with huge parking lots represents and incredibly uneconomic proposition and is losing cities money. Lots of infrastructure cost for very little in terms of property tax. Not to mention that such a development pattern makes city centers less attractive, and that is exactly the place where cities could be making actual money. Often is actually the poorer denser areas of the city that financially support the sprawl of the richer part of the city. So instead of plastering solar panels all over parking-lots ever effort should be made to eliminate the parking lots themselves. Infill development has to be done, and the city needs to support it with by relaxing their often borderline sociopathic zoning orders (along with a host of other harmful regulation). Changing the development pattern would save far more energy then plastering parking lots with solar panels will ever do. And not only will it help for the environment, things like the housing crisis in the Bay Area (and other places could be solved or at least massively impacted). Talking all the under utilized commercial zone property in the Bay Area and zoning it for mixed-use could potentially add 1000000s of housing units in the 'missing middle' segment. See this talk on the Bay Area by City designer Peter Calthorpe: ▶ this video The organization 'Strong Towns' has made this one of its central issues: link For some more details on the economics Joe Minicozzi: The Cash Flow of Urbanism:link So what I end up with is that inside of cities you shouldn't have parking lots hardly at all, and outside of the urban environment you might as well just put them onto some empty space. Putting solar panels on parking lots will just make those parking lots an even more persistent and harder to remove in the future. So remove the parking lot, don't buy the solar panels, invest that money in a trolley bus instead. It will be better for the environment and the city.

California and the Bay Area specifically need to seriously look in the mirror and apply some basic logic to the situation. Public transport being bad and crime filled, is not the fault of public transport. Its a symptom of systematic failure to do even the most basic city planning, in fact maybe the historically worst example of city planning I can imagine. The solution is to continue to invest into walking, biking and public transport infrastructure. Continue to make it better while at the same time attempt to build real urban environments in the area. You need to build housing for literally millions of people inside of the current boundaries of the cities around the bay. The good news is that there is gigantic amount of commercial zoned land that could be turned into mixed use urban environments. Even better if you can defeat the NIMBY and rezone all the single family housing zones to low density mix use urban. Given the state of emergency, the city could even build these project and have 15% be public housing. City planners have been arguing for these basic things for 30+ years. Here is a modern take on some basic things that can be improved: ▶ this video