I’m an avid amateur photographer and I’m fascinated by the intersection between photography and our built environment, especially historic photos of the cities and towns I’m familiar with so I can see where we’ve come from and how quickly things can change.

It’s interesting comparing the different feelings historic and contemporary photos evoke. The only real difference is the passage of time, but the feelings one feels looking at them are so much different. I am sure that people looking at those historic photos when they were new felt much the same as we do today looking at current pictures. In many ways, the subjects of photos probably weren’t that interesting since they were seen daily. It is just with time that they become interesting.

Watching the movie Lost in Translation is a great example of this. The movie still feels recent, even though it’s already more than twenty years old, but it shows a Tokyo that simply doesn’t exist anymore. All of that neon has been replaced by LEDs. There was recently a great exploration of this changing image of cities in cinema focused on Los Angeles and Hong Kong that dove into this in more detail. It focused on the changing sources of light in our cities, but it’s equally true for the city as a whole.

Today, we have more photos and video of our built environment that we ever have before, but in some ways, we are also more restricted in the photos we can capture. In the most recent issue of Torched, Alissa Walker’s new newsletter about the 2028 LA Olympics, she linked to some photos from LAX’s Flightpath Museum of the construction around the airport in the run up to the 1984 LA Olympics. Many of the aerial photos in that online exhibit would simply be impossible to take today.

The explosion of commercial drones has led to ever-increasing restrictions on where people can fly to document our cities. Every bit of color on this drone facilities map is a place with flight restrictions that make it difficult to take aerial photos of our cities. Combined with the blanket prohibition of flying over moving cars and people, I’m surprised we see as many aerial photos of our cities as we do.

As Orange County changes, and throughout my travels, I’m trying to be mindful of documenting the built environment we have today so that we can look back decades from now to see where we came from. Many of these photos I’m capturing today feel pedestrian. It will be interesting looking back on them decades from now to see how those feelings might change.

For the past decade, Human Transit by Jarrett Walker has been the preeminent book for non-transit planners to understand transit planning. A revised edition of the book was released earlier this year which incorporates an additional decade of experience Jarrett has obtained as a practicing transit planner. Overall, Human Transit is the best example that I’ve found of books by consultants that walk the tightrope between advocacy and execution.

Overall, Jarrett’s framework for thinking about transit is that access is the key metric that transit agencies should be paying attention to. He defines access as “the freedom to do anything that requires leaving the home.” This focus on access, and the chapter dedicated to it, is new in the revised edition. While the rest of the book has not been substantially changed, this lens of access changes the understanding of the rest of the book even if the words did not change. It provides this idea that when designed and evaluating different transit options, transit agencies should be looking at how many people will have access to jobs and school and shopping and anything else that will take them out of the house via transit versus other modes of transportation. This is a significantly different way of evaluating transit than that which was presented in the first edition.

As part of this evaluation, Jarrett identifies seven demands that people have if they are to use the transit system:

1. It takes me where I want to go.

2. It takes me when I want to go.

3. It is a good use of my time.

4. It is a good use of my money.

5. It respects me in the level of safety, comfort, and amenity it provides.

6. I can trust it.

7. It allows me spontaneously to change my plans.

In essence, these are the levers transit agencies can pull to affect the amount of access transit users have, and in turn the ridership of the transit system.

Having this type of framework is critical as our cities continue to grow and densify. Southern California especially has grown with cars as the primary, and often only, way of getting around. As is heard in nearly every community meeting across the southland, as we grow, we’re pushing up against the geometric limit of car dependency. Parking and traffic are constant issues that we face, and that’s simply because every car takes up 200 square feet of land everywhere it goes. The only way to continue ensuring people have access to jobs and services is by growing the transit network.

Human Transit is a vital book that will provide any city builder with the needed framework to discuss and understand transit options as our cities grow. In fact, Human Transit has something for all consultants, not just city builders. The introduction of the book includes a two-page section entitled “Listen to Your Plumber: Values Versus Expertise.” These two pages should be required reading for every consultant, regardless of industry. This is written in the context of transit planning, but it’s broadly applicable. The basic premise is that consultants can provide expertise, but that they must rely upon their clients to provide the values that will guide any given project. One primary role of any consultant is to ask the right questions to reveal what those values are.

This new edition of Human Transit should sit on everyone’s shelf right alongside Walkable City and Building the Cycling City. These three books provide the framework necessary for transitioning cities away from car dependency and towards greater access in growing cities.

The border of Anaheim and Garden Grove. (Photo by Brianne Lucchesi)

Whenever I leave the megacity of San Angeles, or better known as the Greater LA Area, I am struck by how unique it is. The unending expanse of built up city, from Camp Pendleton in the south up to the Angeles National Forest in the north, is unlike any human geography anywhere else in the world.

Taking the train out of Manhattan and up to Buffalo on Monday, I was amazed at how much time we spent rolling through forests and farmland. It took no time at all to get off the island and through Yonkers. From there, the landscape was dotted by towns and small cities, each one separate and distinct. These were not just distinctions based on subtle changes to the public rights of way, but true separation between where one town ends and the next begins. The same has been true in Florida and Oklahoma and Massachusetts and Washington and North Carolina. It’s even true in San Diego and the Bay Area. Southern California is the only place where every city abuts its neighbors without any separation.

So much of the discussion of urban planning, especially transportation planning, feels foreign and no applicable to San Angeles. The simple idea of connecting places with transit and high speed roads, while restricting speeds through places, makes sense in a place like upstate or western New York, but it feels completely nonsensical in Los Angeles. Any given arterial road or intersection in San Angeles is simultaneously a place and not a place. It’s a place to go, and a landscape to drive through.

Planners working in Southern California must translate and adapt the best practices and teachings of urban planning that originate elsewhere to the context of San Angeles. This is not to say that planners can ignore the best practices from elsewhere, but that we must work harder to transform our cities to accommodate planning’s best practices. City builders must focus on building up distinct places that can serve as complete communities, separate from one another, and be connected regionally.

San Angeles’ regional planning authority, SCAG (the Southern California Association of Governments), already identifies regional job centers, many of which are already connected by transit. These areas can be seen as Southern California’s version of the distinct cities and towns found elsewhere. These job centers are the future of San Angeles, and most new development should be focused within their boundaries.

To ensure these areas become the focal points for new development that will transform them into complete communities, local transit service should be provided within each job center, radiating out from the existing regional transit lines provided by Metrolink. Streets and public realm improvements should be made to ensure these areas are walkable and provide transportation options. Building upon these transportation improvements, enough housing should be built to accommodate the job demand in each center, along with all of the necessary neighborhood services like grocery stores and schools.

This would transform San Angeles from being a giant placeless expanse to being a series of distinct places with their own identities and unique personalities. This is not a transformation that can happen overnight, but a half century of consistent progress could lead to a radically transformed Southern California.

Yesterday, Rick Cole posted on LinkedIn that the City of Pasadena is working on its third revitalization plan for North Lake Avenue in the past three decades with nothing to show for the planning effort. This gets to a critical point for planning’s ability to improve cities: it won’t matter how good the plan is if it can’t be funded. A planner’s ability to understand where sources of funding come from and what funds are available is critical to creating a successful plan. This is not only true for public realm improvements like North Lake Avenue, but for the private development mandated by zoning codes as well.

City resources are finite. While many cities might have big plan to overhaul the city’s built environment entirely, such as when they do a comprehensive general plan amendment, rarely do cities have the funds for such a large undertaking. Most city funds go towards ongoing basic services like police, or towards routine maintenance like pothole repair. Only a tiny percentage of any city’s budget can be dedicated towards investments in the city’s future. Implementation of long-term plans are exactly that, investment in the city’s future.

In fact, most of these types of investments do not come from ongoing revenue, they are made with one-time funds. There are three primary avenues to deliver these one-time funds. First, many cities apply for competitive grant programs from the State or Federal government that can be used for these types of improvements, such as the Regional Early Access Planning (REAP) Grant Program, the Infill Infrastructure Grant (IIG) Program, or the Community Change Grant Program that was part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Second, cities can issue bonds and take on debt to make public realm improvements that will be paid back from the increase in tax revenue spurred on by these investments. Third and finally, cities can rely upon the private sector to make the improvements to the public realm piecemeal as the adjoining properties are developed.

It is incumbent upon planners to understand these funding mechanisms and to include them in the plans they produce for the public sector. The requirements for housing elements provide a great guide for what should be included in all plans in this respect. Housing element programs must include a timeline and source of funding for implementation. Often times, the source of funding is nothing more than the “City General Fund” or “CDBG Funds,” but it is something that commits the city to how it will spend its limited resources and forces the city to thing through where else funds might come from.

Housing elements provide a good example of the other way cities must think about project funding and the limits financing places on what gets built. One of the questions cities must answer in their housing element is whether the development standards in their zoning code create a constraint on residential development. Part of this is a question about the physical attributes of a property, and whether the allowed density can be achieved given the parking, setback, height, open space, and unit size requirements contained in the zoning code. However, part of this analysis also needs to be a determination whether any of the requirements create a constraint on housing development by creating conditions where new development is not financially viable. It is easy for cities to raise the cost of construction to a point where it no longer makes sense to build new housing through the application of building and development standards, such as requiring fire sprinklers, multiple points of egress, and 360 degree architecture. Combined, these requirements ensure that developers cannot earn a profit and that new housing never gets built.

As zoning codes become increasingly specific regarding what is allowable, cities limit what is feasible. Planners must have a basic understanding of how the requirements they institute drive the cost of construction, and how that in turn impacts the feasibility of anything being built. A zoning code that constrains development to the point where nothing gets built is no better than not allowing any building in the first place.

Every city plan, at the outset, must come from the understanding that what gets financed gets built. As part of the planning effort, planners must identify the sources of funding available to implement their plans. If no funding is available, the plan should be modified so that it can be built as best as possible with the available resources. Failure to do so results in urban planning being nothing more than an exercise in writing speculative fiction.

The permanent Temporary Flight Restriction that the FAA has granted Disney prevents me from flying a drone in this location to get a photo, so a Google Earth view will have to suffice.

Overlay zones are a popular way for city planners to expand the range of uses allowed within neighborhoods. For instance, a commercially zoned property located along an arterial roadway that is zoned for retail commercial uses might have a mixed-use overlay. This would allow the property owner to develop their property as either a strip mall or a mixed-use building with residential uses over ground floor retail. While this provides more flexibility for property owners, it is not urban planning.

The act of planning a city is to put forth a vision of what the city should evolve into. A city’s planning documents—whether that’s a comprehensive plan, general plan, specific plan, or zoning code—should enable the realization of that vision and bar the construction of anything that works against the vision. Overlay zones often provide for two opposing visions for the city that are in conflict with one another.

The problem with creating two opposing visions for the development of the city is that it becomes impossible to build a neighborhood where all of the constituent parts work well together. If, for instance, a city wants to build a walkable neighborhood, each property must contribute towards that goal. By allowing property owners the choice of building walkable developments of car-centric ones through the use of an overlay zone, the car-centric developments will diminish the quality of walkability in the neighborhood.

In fact, this uncertainty practically forces developers to build car-centric developments instead of walkable ones. For the most part, car-centric development can still be financially viable if placed within a walkable community. However, walkable developments need to be placed within a quality walkable neighborhood to survive. If a developer, even one willing to play the long game, wants to build in a neighborhood that provides the option between walkable and car-centric development, they will choose to build a car-centric development since they will be uncertain that their neighbors will continue to build out a walkable neighborhood, which would be necessary to ensure the viability of a walkable development if they were to choose to build one.

Overlays that focus on walkable versus car-centric development are not the only examples where a zoning overlay can cause problems with the buildout of a city. Anaheim loves overlays and provides a myriad of examples of why they fail to provide the basic necessities of planning. Anaheim’s Platinum Triangle is the biggest example of this failure. Approved two decades ago, the Platinum Triangle envisioned a mixed-use community in the heart of Orange County on what was at the time an industrial area. Unfortunately, the Platinum Triangle was implemented using zoning overlays and left the underlying industrial zoning intact. This has resulted in the Platinum Triangle being built out much more slowly than it otherwise would have. Worse yet, it has led to some of the industrial uses expanding over the past two decades, something that would not have been possible had the underlying zoning been changed. This has led to areas that have on-going industrial uses directly neighboring new homes. Due to the ongoing investments in these industrial uses, it can be expected that this is a condition that will remain for decades to come.

Cities change over time, so incompatible development patterns should be expected to be found next to one another at times over the history of a city. Residential streets become busies and homes convert to small shops. Industrial areas become walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. During these transition periods, it is expected that not all uses will support and enhance the final vision for the community. However, it should be the goal of any planner and every city to minimize this transition time. Overlays do nothing but extend it.

City planning documents should provide a clear vision for the future of the city that property owners, developers, and, most importantly, residents can depend on. Providing multiple competing visions for the city through overlay zones odes none of this. Overlay zones should rarely, if ever, be used in city planning.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar is a more accessible and entertaining version of Donald Shoup’s classic tome The High Cost of Free Parking. Paved Paradise cover the problem with giving our cities over to parking, why we did it in the first place, and how cities are working to reverse the tide of parking overtaking our cities. However, by focusing entirely on parking, it doesn’t address the many other ways cars are given preference in our cities and the need cars fill in our lives.

As I’ve written about before, parking is not the only, or even the first, problem we should be focusing on in our transportation system. Paved Paradise, like most any book that look at urban transit through the lens of parking, presents parking reform as the primary policy change to reform the way our cities work. Unfortunately, the reality is not that simple.

Paved Paradise provides a detailed history of how American abandoned its urban transit systems in favor of the car, and then adapted its cities to make way for the ever increasing number of cars. This, in turn, make walking and use the remaining transit more difficult, furthering their decline. In other words, cars replaced other modes of transportation, they did not reduce the amount that people traveled (in fact, they did the opposite.)

The main argument for the elimination of parking spaces is that it will reduce driving. As Grabar argues in chapter 5 of Paved Paradise, “Control over the availability of parking spaces is a key policy instrument in reducing car trips.” But this completely misunderstands the history that hi spent four chapters laying out. Cars did not replace transit and walking in cities through minimizing transportation, cars simply became an easier form of getting around. We cannot move away from the car as our primary means of transportation on the assumption that people will travel less if it’s simply more difficult to park. Reductions in travel in this way would reduce people’s quality of life in very real ways. Instead, we need to provide transportation options that make getting around easier than using the car. We need transportation options that, just like the car had done, increase the amount people travel.

A great example of this is the examination of parking pricing in cities. The entire idea behind The High Cost of Free Parking is that cities should eliminate parking minimums and price parking so that it’s 80% full all of the time, and allow the free market to dictate how much parking is produced. Paved Paradise builds on this and provides examples of cities that have pursued this approach since the release of High Cost. What Paved Paradise shows is that cities that have priced parking have simply moved where cars are parked, often from the curb into lots or structures. Pricing parking appropriately does not eliminate the need to travel, or even the number of trips taken by car, it simply rearranges where the cars end up. That is not to say that pricing parking is bad policy, it still minimizes many of the negative externalities of parking, but it does not reduce driving.

In fact, there are many ways to reduce the impact on cars in cities that do not do much to reduce driving by themselves, but are an important step to enable alternative modes of transportation in the future. Designing communities using the principles of New Urbanism is a great way to reduce the impact of the car on the city. The primary difference between traditional urbanism and New Urbanism is that New Urbanism accommodates the car while hiding them from view and reducing their impact on the streetscape. This ensures walkable communities can be walkable, and provide an alterative to the car on the block scale. These walkable blocks can then be linked together using bike lanes and transit, ensuring transportation options that are as good as or better than the car.

Overall, the focus of Paved Paradise is misplaced. Parking is a symptom of a larger transportation system that needs to be reformed, and that cannot happen based on the idea that people will travel less. Even the book’s focus on cities is misplaced. In chapter 13, which was my favorite because it featured my friend Jose Trinidad Castaneda, the author states that our housing and climate crises will be solved in the suburbs. However, most of the book is focused on Manhattan (not even the rest of NYC), with a little Chicago and Los Angeles thrown in. If the housing and climate crises are going to be solved in the suburbs, how will parking reform in these places help when people’s only options to get around is by car? By focusing monomaniacally on parking, the author misses the broader question of how we can remake our car-dependent cities to move people around without a car.