Planning: general 🌇 Random Planning Thoughts (and Photos) Deserving No Thread Of Their Own

[jumbach]

Fernley, NV | Business View Magazine

Business View Magazine sat down with Fernley Mayor Neal E. McIntyre and City Manager Benjamin Marchant to discuss how their Nevada community is transforming from agricultural outpost to industrial powerhouse, due to its strategic location and federal Tech Hub designation to attract major...

businessviewmagazine.com

 

[DVD]

Walkable cities are fatphobic.

 

[Wannaplan?]

Walkable cities are fatphobic.

I can walk to the burger joint, and afterwards, walk up to the ice cream booth, then meet my friends at the tavern to chug some beers.

 

[JNA]

A proposal by an American city planner for the inner city of Amsterdam in the 1960s

 

[Planit]

^^^Glad that thing sat on a shelf & collected dust.

 

[Dan]

As posted on FB by Terrible Maps
What a masterpiece. Absolute chaos - couldn't have designed it better mysefl. If you’re English, you know.

View attachment 65367

Oh, I can top Spaghetti Junction.

Fun bit of trivia: in the Buffalo, New York metro area, there's only two four-legged expressway intersections. The 90 (New York Thruway) and 33 (Kensington Expressway), and the 190 (Niagara Thruway) and the LaSalle Expressway. (Technically, the LaSalle Expressway turns into the truck-free Robert Moses Parkway west of the 190, so even that might not be a full four-legged expressway-crosses-expressway intersection according to road geeks.) Otherwise, everything else is a semi-directional T, with one oddball trumpet (90 to the 400) and a two-level roundabout (Hamburg Turnpike to the 179/Milestrip Expressway/unfinished Belt Expressway).

(And I got ghosted from the GBNRTC. Bet nobody there knows it's called a two-level roundabout. )

 

[Dan]

Sad to see small town America shriveling up and turning to dust.

Indeed. However, so many of these small towns have been shriveling up since the Dust Bowl. Are they sustainable now?

Fertility rates are decreasing throughout the western world. Many western nations continue to grow only through immigration. As more countries join the middle class of nations, women enter higher paying fields, and internal income inequality drops, some expect the planet's population to peak before the end of the century. From there, it's all downhill. Ghost towns everywhere, not Soylent Green. Meanwhile, the planet's population continues to urbanize, and despit what some Sierra Club members might believe, it's "greener" to have a billion people living in cities than sprawled throughout the countryside.

I think we can only go so far to save very small rural communities. It's sad to think that they used to be prosperous and vibrant, but their prosperity was usually just short-lived. I think it's time we start thinking about the cost of maintaining those places that we know, statistically and in our hearts, are going to end up at ghost towns. What's the long-term cost of keeping Dirtsuck, Oklahoma, population 85 (1976 two-man high school football state champions), on life support, as opposed to relocating residents who want to leave to the nearby town of Residue, population 1,354? What are the benefts?

 

[Wannaplan?]

…relocating residents who want to leave to the nearby town of Residue…

I feel like you are copy-and-pasting AI output regarding a generalized urban planning idea and then posting it here to see if we can turn our AI-dar (see: gaydar) up to eleven (see: This Is Spinal Tap) to see what we can detect. There’s some tells in this output, but I just want to point out the bolded text in what I quote from you, specifically: Ain’t no way a human being talks that way when saying they’ve been thinking about moving to the town next door!

 

[JNA]

No that is not me

 

[Wannaplan?]

I think we can only go so far to save very small rural communities.

And also:

If that text is AI-generated, the AI has a seeming disdain, so spiteful, for rural communities, as well as a lack of understanding of how rural communities actually plan and engage with economic development. Whatever kind of database that LLM was trained on, it certainly didn't have access to relevant and meaningful case studies.

 

[mendelman]

State conference time in downtown Chicago.

Chilling on the patio waiting for the first session