City Life

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All topics urbanism and city related, from urban planning to public transit to municipal interest stuff. Both automobile and FuckCars inclusive.

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From an urban planning perspective, what's the worst designed aspect of your city? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by bermuda@beehaw.org to c/citylife@beehaw.org

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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.

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[–] Pseu@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] shanghaibebop@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.