Drive through LA with an urban planner

To append to this morning’s post on LA’s transportation issues, I want to post this discussion Street Films had with an urban planner there. I know I’ve posted a lot about LA’s urban design lately, but since it’s been the protagonist of urban sprawl in America, I figure they are a good microcosm of the movement for alternative transport.

The urban planner makes a solid argument about parking. Certainly the need to park our cars consumes a lot of urban space. That pushes buildings away from streets and sidewalks and forces development outwards. But the real problem is free parking. Free parking provides an incentive to drive. She makes the case that we should charge (more) for parking in order to encourage use of alternative transport.

It’s the plastic bag approach. To cut down on use of plastic bags, some grocery stores started charging .5¢ or .10¢ per bag and people switched to paper or boxes instead.

She also made a pretty devastating critique of contemporary urban design. She said that urban planners see streets simply as a “place to move cars,” making them nothing more than a “sewer pipe.” That mindset disconnects the street and highway from the city, hence our indifference to sprawl.