Land Use

 

 

Rules of development  Many of the community problems caused by a new development stem from the rules that determine the nature of the development. The local government tells the developer what is necessary on the basis of what it finds in two ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers) handbooks - Trip Generation, and Parking Generation. Given the major impact of these manuals on development in forcing unsustainable development upon us, we should be paying closer attention. Prof. Donald Shoup of UCLA has a new paper out, "Truth in Transportation Planning". The abstract reads "Transportation engineers often use very precise numbers to report extremely uncertain estimates, and urban planners rely on these precise numbers to make bad decisions. This paper uses two handbooks published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers - Parking Generation and Trip Generation - to illustrate the problems created by using precise numbers to report statistically insignificant estimates." I was able to scan the paper and put it into PDF format. "Truth in Transportation Planning," by Donald Shoup. Download PDF file. (340 kb)

Los Angeles Losing Out as Sprawl Capital Los Angeles has long been the prototypical sprawl city. But that has been changing as the population kept growing and some natural boundaries got in the way of outward expansion. Recently Jeff Kenworthy and Felix Laube drew some interesting conclusions from some extensive new data they had collected from some of the world's major cities, including Los Angeles. In an article entitled "Has transit missed the bus in Los Angeles?" they describe LA's surprising potential for moving away from car dependence. Download PDF file. (11 kb)