2y ago

From an urban planning perspective, what's the worst designed aspect of your city?

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.

26 comments

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.

NYC does a lot of things right, but its subway is very clearly designed to shuffle people in and out of Manhattan. There are many trips one might take within or between Brooklyn and Queens where the fastest path is taking the train into Manhattan and back out again. There's been a long plan to build a line connecting deeper parts of Brooklyn and Queens - the Interborough Express - but as is usually the case for any infrastructure projects in NYC, it's moving very slowly and will be ludicrously expensive.
To really put that into perspective, extending the Q line about two miles and building four stations cost roughly the same amount of money as it took London to build the Elizabeth line, covering 73 miles and 41 stops. And of course, this is London, which has a lot of the same issues of being a very old, dense, and developed city.
- We should be using the Army Corp of Engineers as a full time federal team of infrastructure builders and dramatically increase it in size, but alas.
- Huh. Do you know why it's so much more expensive than London?

I currently live in Denver which has been ranked one of the worst cities for public transit design in the USA. Moving soon to Barcelona and looking forward to not owning a car.
- You can get anywhere in the city on a bus! ...in about 2 hours, with a half-hour transition from the east-west bus to the north-south bus in the middle.
- I believe you but the thought that Denver is worse in this department than where I am (Nashville) is baffling. It’s also horrible here, my area doesn’t even have sidewalks. :(

I'm going to give a narrower scope and mention something that bothers me in my neighborhood. I can bike to a park and ride for a bike-friendly train that goes directly to downtown with a decent frequency, which is fantastic! Unfortunately it's really only accessible by car, and I have to take quite a significant detour to get to it without needing to ride ~a mile on a very fast very busy main road without sidewalks :(. We're so close!

I live in an old market town (UK), so the worst aspect of my town's planning is the complete lack of any planning. 😀
In all seriousness, I'd say it's the lack of any major roads into the town. There's effectively only three roads that go into a town of 35,000 people, all with only a single lane in each direction. This is despite the fact that the town's major industries are mining and tourism, both of which need decent road infrastructure. One of the roads enters the town with a very sharp 90 degree turn, which lorries nevertheless need to navigate in order to deliver goods to shops, because all the shops are next to that road.
The people that founded the town in the 10th century really didn't give any thought to what might happen in the following 1000 years!
- While I do find it lovely to stumble around twisting alleyways in old cities, I remember being lost in a section of Florence asking "Who in the hell thought this was a good idea?"

The tramway was dismantled in 1955. It was supposed to be the march of progress, to make way for cars.
According to the mayor, unchanged for 20+ years, this policy is still valid.

The Vietnamese restaurants are too far away. MASSIVE design flaw.

Population of 100k and miles of cars? That really sounds like me playing City Skylines.
I have different complains about my city (in Europe) but one I think is easiest to solve is public transportation.
Everyone is cheering "we need metro" and we do, but metro takes time. I think we can use existing infrastructure and make it better.
More buses, more trams, free public trasport financed from sold gas, much more yellow lanes for buses, more and better buses and trams. More bike lanes. I think that's the only thing that can help us solve our traffic problem.
- Population of 100k and miles of cars? That really sounds like me playing City Skylines.
  I know right? It's terribly annoying at rush hours, especially around noon and around 5 pm. The worst part is you can't even take our otherwise pretty remarkable bus system since they also have to use those few roads.
  
  Similar like my city, but this is with two million people.
  Buses need to have reserved line.

i live in a majority sfh zoned streetcar suburb, however the area is majority walkable and not too awful for biking as a confident adult because of the grid roads for the walkable portion.
however, we are surrounded on all sides outside of this pocket of grid streets by poorly zoned sfh dominated by no sidewalk cul de sacs and 4 lane stroads with painted door zone bike lanes. the most notable areas are anywhere particularly north (rich people so literally no sidewalk) and near freeway interchanges. our south freeway interchange is the worst of them because its very stroady and has an auto dealership next to it. the others dont even try to pretend theyre not highway interchanges.

One of the highways (4 lanes on each side) into my city has residential areas on both sides of the road. This is obviously very dangerous so the government puts rumble strips and speed bumps every kilometer or so. You can imagine how irritating driving on this road is.
The city was initially planned with racial segregation in mind by our colonizers, so I do have some sympathy for our government. However, they've had 60 years to get their shit together we're stuck in a city that doesn't feel like it was designed to be lived in.

I'm in the UK, so our planning snafus aren't anywhere near as egregious as those in other places, but one that endlessly bugs me in my town is how there are two parallel high streets that are one way - in the same direction.
From a motoring perspective it makes sense, but if I cycle to work, the only (legal) way to get back home is along the busy main road that runs along side the town centre, or to go waaaay out of my way to circumvent the one way roads through a housing estate. So mostly I ride back against the flow of traffic, because the high streets aren't busy and I'd prefer to do that than tackle the main road. Makes me feel like a prick every time though.
- My town has a lot of one-way roads but mostly due to really terrible futureproofing from the 1880s. Back then a lot of streets that they considered "side-streets" were incredibly narrow. Nowadays those are suburban streets that just aren't wide enough for two cars, so they made them into one-ways.

There's glass everywhere. In a few places, there's street sweeping, but mostly not. So unless you want to go vacuum/sweep up every bike lane you use (which I've seriously considered), bike tires really don't last very long.

They built the interstate on the west side of town, so all the pollution blows into town. They built a pork processing plant on the west side of the interstate, so all of the smell blows over the interstate and into town. The main road through town is a state highway with 2 east and two west lanes plus a split turn lane. It goes directly past the high school and near some other schools. Most of the pork trucks come from the east and have to travel all the way through town. There's also two roads that travel north/south that are 2/2 with turn lane, the intersections with the state highway have a lot of accidents. Old downtown is several blocks away from any main road, so nobody goes to any business near them. They have started to focus all development near the interstate, and are trying to get developers to build near the highway, by the pork plant. It's 18 levels of pure stupidity.

In my city, we are a very small town with a very unusual road layout. It is not pedestrian friendly, nor is it friendly to cyclists. The road isn't really ever busy, but it's two lanes each direction with a speed limit of 25 mph. Because the road is wide and has two lanes, people frequently go 40 mph, and it makes crossing the street harder. In my opinion I would like to see us go down to one lane each direction, and go to normal intersections rather than the weird slip lanes that we have

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.

26 comments