San Diego

Nobody's going to give San Diego County an award for park planning -- we hope! -- on its "Waterfront Park project," which is more accurately described as the "subsidized garage project."

Despite what CA's courts say, San Diego insists on plans to widen freeways in its 2050 Regional Transportation Plan, even if it defies the state's ambitions to reduce climate-changing car dependency.

The California Court of Appeals yesterday confirmed a lower court ruling that the environmental impact report (EIR) for San Diego's long-range regional transportation plan was inadequate. The EIR, said the court, underplayed the impact of the emissions that would result from its highway-building, sprawl-inducing plan.

It's been interesting to watch the scrutiny building around how police handle collisions between cyclists and drivers in New York City. It's become something of a scandal the way devastating or fatal crashes involving cyclists are rarely prosecuted or even investigated.

California residents living in sprawling suburban developments could save billions of dollars every year if they lived in denser, urban zones and along transit corridors, according to a study released today by smart growth and transit advocates TransForm. Analyzing four metropolitan areas--Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Sacramento--Windfall for All found that shifting populations in those regions to denser development along transit corridors would save save $31 billion per year, or $3,850 on average per household [Report Summary PDF].

City planners have been on the hook for some of the last century's greatest metropolitan mishaps: urban freeways and "slum clearance," arbitrary minimum parking requirements, and land use laws that have left little room for the mingling of uses. Understandably, today's planners are a bit humbled. But when planning directors from some of North America's most progressive cities spoke at City Hall this week about the political challenges that face urban planners, several of them said the field needs to move beyond worrying about past mistakes.