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

businessviewmagazine.com

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...
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A proposal by an American city planner for the inner city of Amsterdam in the 1960s
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JNA said:
As posted on FB by Terrible Maps
What a masterpiece. Absolute chaos - couldn't have designed it better mysefl. If youā€™re English, you know.

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Oh, I can top Spaghetti Junction.


Canadian Celebration GIF by Pi-Slices


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. :( )
 
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SlaveToTheGrind said:
Sad to see small town America shriveling up and turning to dust.
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Indeed. However, so many of these small towns have been shriveling up since the Dust Bowl. Are they sustainable now?

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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?

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Dan said:
ā€¦relocating residents who want to leave to the nearby town of Residueā€¦
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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. Thereā€™s some tells in this output, but I just want to point out the bolded text in what I quote from you, specifically: Ainā€™t no way a human being talks that way when saying theyā€™ve been thinking about moving to the town next door!
 
Dan said:
I think we can only go so far to save very small rural communities.
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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.
 
^^I've had clothes hung out to dry ... it wasn't all that great, honestly. I'll stick with my dryer, thank you very much.
 
I am beginning to cringe at the way planners use the term community in their everyday. I wish there was a word or phrase that better communicates and gets closer to the idea that a community is actually comprised of, say, a polyglot (?) of oftentimes disagreeable and mostly self-interested individuals, and usually wholly lacking in that unified vision, the holy grail of accomplishment for many planners. And donā€™t say a diverse community because that too barely cuts through the inherent homogeneity and implied goodness that community suggests. Planners seem to regularly deploy community as if there was a class of accepted expertise to support such a broad an encompassing concept. These days, I am thinking about what word is apropos and more honest than community.
 
Gedunker said:
This is one of my recurring nightmares, even though I know it can't happen here. Fairfax County, VA Home Addition. How anybody in the permitting section didn't see this and think "I'm not sure about this..." is a wonder.
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They may have thought such, but if it met the applicable procedures and regulations....they are likely legally required to approve it. Especially in a Dillon's Rules county/state.

Devil's in the details though...as always.
 
mendelman said:
They may have thought such, but if it met the applicable procedures and regulations....they are likely legally required to approve it. Especially in a Dillon's Rules county/state.

Devil's in the details though...as always.
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Of course.

I might have called the owner, though, and asked if they really understood what they were going to be building, how it would impact the neighbor, etc. Apply a little face-to-face concern to maybe head off the hideous result everyone sees now.
 
That's pretty rough. I've had a spite addition (not near that bad). We approved it because it met the requirements and were required to do so. It sucks but we didn't have a reason not to.
 
In the first city I worked for we had a daylight plane which prevented things like this since it gave a slope built off the property line:
 

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Reno has a line in its code that says no new downtown building can cast a shadow on a residential structure or park between 11 am and 1 pm on December 21. Very specific.
 
jumbach said:
Reno has a line in its code that says no new downtown building can cast a shadow on a residential structure or park between 11 am and 1 pm on December 21. Very specific.
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I guess that ensures no shadows for homes and parks between at least 11:00 and 1:00 (and except for the solstice, for more time than that).

But, correct me if I am wrong, wouldn't it be nice to have some shade from the noontime sun in Reno?
 
Here is the exact code:

(2) Residential Shading
Structures that exceed 35 feet in height, as defined by 18.09.207, shall not cast a shadow on residentially zoned property between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on December21, except structures allowed up to 45 feet in height may shadow other properties designated MF-21or MF-30.

(3) Public Parks and Plaza Shading
No structure may cast a shadow on public parks or plazas between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on December 21.

- RMC 18.04.101

Faust_Motel said:
I guess that ensures no shadows for homes and parks between at least 11:00 and 1:00 (and except for the solstice, for more time than that).

But, correct me if I am wrong, wouldn't it be nice to have some shade from the noontime sun in Reno?
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Yeah, that December sun gets fierce. It may even melt ice.

It's 10 and 2, not 11 and 1 . . . code quoted below.
 
jumbach said:
Here is the exact code:

(2) Residential Shading
Structures that exceed 35 feet in height, as defined by 18.09.207, shall not cast a shadow on residentially zoned property between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on December21, except structures allowed up to 45 feet in height may shadow other properties designated MF-21or MF-30.

(3) Public Parks and Plaza Shading
No structure may cast a shadow on public parks or plazas between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on December 21.

- RMC 18.04.101
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So how did you enforce this? Did you actually calculate the shadow line based on position and height?
 
bureaucrat#3 said:
So how did you enforce this? Did you actually calculate the shadow line based on position and height?
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One of the guys in the office (who was in my "layoff cohort") was in charge of this. Too much math for me though. In one case, the developer just decided to make his condo building 34 feet tall, cleverly avoiding the issue, since 34-foot-tall buildings can cast all the shadows they want.
 
"Traffic has increased significantly along the US-95 corridor since the last traffic count, conducted in April 2020 . . ."

You don't say. Why not compare it to the 2015 number? An April 2020 number is meaningless.

Jim
 
jumbach said:
"Traffic has increased significantly along the US-95 corridor since the last traffic count, conducted in April 2020 . . ."

You don't say. Why not compare it to the 2015 number? An April 2020 number is meaningless.

Jim
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When working in a college town, we would have developers try to do traffic studies in June or July. City schools are out and 20,000 college students and professors have vacated the city.
 
Well, I am not a lawyer, but this looks to be about an open-and-shut case of "open and notorious" use for adverse possession I have ever seen. This house was built in 2000, and I discovered this when she called to ask about a fence. Talk about a negative setback!

I didn't point out the obvious to her. It will come out soon enough when the surveyor comes out.

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Our parcel layers are routinely off by that much on the ortho, but the surveys people do rarely come back looking as egregious. It does tickle me that a woman came into the office one day telling my boss that "Faust granted me adverse possession!"
jumbach said:
Well, I am not a lawyer, but this looks to be about an open-and-shut case of "open and notorious" use for adverse possession I have ever seen. This house was built in 2000, and I discovered this when she called to ask about a fence. Talk about a negative setback!

I didn't point out the obvious to her. It will come out soon enough when the surveyor comes out.
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Thatā€™s why I didnā€™t say anything. I doubt this would go unnoticed for decades like it has.
Faust_Motel said:
Our parcel layers are routinely off by that much on the ortho, but the surveys people do rarely come back looking as egregious. It does tickle me that a woman came into the office one day telling my boss that "Faust granted me adverse possession!"
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mendelman said:
They may have thought such, but if it met the applicable procedures and regulations....they are likely legally required to approve it. Especially in a Dillon's Rules county/state.

Devil's in the details though...as always.
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The YIMBYs of reddit love this, mostly because it isn't, in fact, in their backyard.
 
Doohickie said:
The YIMBYs of reddit love this, mostly because it isn't, in fact, in their backyard.
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I do take pleasure telling a complainant that the thing their neighbor is doing is 100% compliant and, in doing our job (as we are often chided to do) we had to issue the permit.

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Vernon, California. (Population 112)

ONE block of SFR's, surrounded by nothing but several square miles of industrial.

Sometime, drive around the "city" on Google Maps. Fascinating, and apocalyptic.

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jumbach said:
Vernon, California. (Population 112)

ONE block of SFR's, surrounded by nothing but several square miles of industrial.

Sometime, drive around the "city" on Google Maps. Fascinating, and apocalyptic.

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Just call it workforce housing and move on. I had Korean company that really wanted to build dorms for their employees. They typically tried to bring over unmarried workers or married males without their families for 2-3 years and wanted them to live in a single unit. The said it built comradery. It didn't sit right with me or the Planning Commission for numerous reasons and it eventually went away.
 
Our county has a little town of 230 population that has no zoning but does have four cell towers within a cpl of blocks.
 
jumbach said:
Here is the exact code:

(2) Residential Shading
Structures that exceed 35 feet in height, as defined by 18.09.207, shall not cast a shadow on residentially zoned property between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on December21, except structures allowed up to 45 feet in height may shadow other properties designated MF-21or MF-30.

(3) Public Parks and Plaza Shading
No structure may cast a shadow on public parks or plazas between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on December 21.

- RMC 18.04.101


Yeah, that December sun gets fierce. It may even melt ice.

It's 10 and 2, not 11 and 1 . . . code quoted below.
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Glad I do not have to enforce that code.
 
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