What Good Urban Planning Looks Like

[digital_sandlapper]

Wow! Just discovered a way cool website from the Sierra Club on what good urban planning (community transformations) look like:

http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/community...tions/index.asp

There's a total of around 6 different cities, each with 3-4 transformation renderings that you click through to see the sort of transformation we all dream about. This slideshow should be REQUIRED viewing for all city (and state) leaders who are woefully inadequate in the "vision" department! I would especially like Assembly Street to be given this vision, as we've all discussed here before.

[Galley]

Fantastic!

[Spartan]

Thats a good link. The people do renderings like that are basically what make planning understandable to the masses. Many people have trouble seeing that kind of vision without a rendering, and I'm all for helping people to understand what it is we're advocating for.

[JCT]

Great link indeed. Several of these examples include road diets, which are unfortunately are often not well received in this state. Maybe attitudes are changing though.

[Spartan]

They are not an easy sell to SCDOT. The only places in SC that have tried and/or accomplished a road diet (in the modern sense) are Greenville and Spartanburg... but its only been accomplished on on city-maintained streets in both cities.

I know that Spartanburg has toyed with the idea of doing a road diet on a state road (Asheville Hwy), but I've only heard it in passing so I don't know if anything came of it.

That said, SCDOT could probably be convinced if the right people came together. They are already ahead of Georgia and NC when it comes to their complete streets policy and implementation of bike lanes, sidewalks, etc.