This vehicular assault report was posted last Friday to a Facebook group for issues in the city of Santa Cruz, California.

(more…)

TL;DR summary: Despite claims to the contrary, the Santa Cruz Corridor Plan decreases automotive traffic impacts from development, helps improve tax revenue for infrastructure work, and indirectly discourages dispersed development in other, less regulated areas of Santa Cruz County outside of the city of Santa Cruz.

Over the past several months I’ve become acquainted with a planner who, until very recently, worked for one of the large Bay Area planning firms. Sitting next to her on the bus is like attending a graduate class on planning. I learned, for example, that the profession of urban planning emerged during the Victoria Era to mitigate the consequences of the Industrial Age by providing a healthier place for factory workers to live. They created a Utopian concept of “Garden Cities” to move workers away from filthy, polluted tenement housing. Our modern American ideal of a suburban detached home with a yard began as a social experiment by radical liberal idealists like Ebenezer Howard, who created the diagram below illustrating a “Central City” and surrounding Garden Cities all interconnected by railroads and canals.

Warning: Wonk Content Below

(more…)