Comments on: We Need an Ambitious Transpo Bill. So How Are We Going to Pay for It? http://la.streetsblog.org/2009/04/29/we-need-an-ambitious-transpo-bill-so-how-are-we-going-to-pay-for-it/ Covering Los Angeles's livable streets movement Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:06:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Marcotico http://la.streetsblog.org/2009/04/29/we-need-an-ambitious-transpo-bill-so-how-are-we-going-to-pay-for-it/comment-page-1/#comment-5518 Marcotico Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:06:08 +0000 http://la.streetsblog.org/?p=2079#comment-5518 This is starting to remind me of my favorite article from planning school, Brian Taylor's "When finance drives planning" or something like that. In it he details how the Highway Program didn't start out as bad as it ended up. In its original design it was intended to help farmers get their products to cities, and for inter city trade to be facilitated. But along the way the State DOT's gained all the power over the money, and drove the agenda to Urban Highways. The original idea was never to have highways crisscrossing major cities, but city planners, and the street engineers got overrun by the state planners and engineers. The feds would pay 80-90% of your cost to build a 10 fwy from downtown to Santa Monica, but only 20% to build a high capacity Boulevard. We need to decouple urban transportation programs from non-urban programs, so that city dwellers, and rural dwellers don't have to fight over everything. Maybe this will leave the suburbs to pick which side of the fence they want to be on. This is starting to remind me of my favorite article from planning school, Brian Taylor’s “When finance drives planning” or something like that. In it he details how the Highway Program didn’t start out as bad as it ended up. In its original design it was intended to help farmers get their products to cities, and for inter city trade to be facilitated. But along the way the State DOT’s gained all the power over the money, and drove the agenda to Urban Highways. The original idea was never to have highways crisscrossing major cities, but city planners, and the street engineers got overrun by the state planners and engineers. The feds would pay 80-90% of your cost to build a 10 fwy from downtown to Santa Monica, but only 20% to build a high capacity Boulevard.

We need to decouple urban transportation programs from non-urban programs, so that city dwellers, and rural dwellers don’t have to fight over everything. Maybe this will leave the suburbs to pick which side of the fence they want to be on.

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