This is not a joke. The only funny thing about this is that the article and report (below) are not about Portland, but about the Twin Cities. Everything said about the Twins could just as easily apply here.
Conclusion: All of the planners in the US must have gone to similar schools, read the same books on planning and want all our cities to be clones of whatever the books say we should look like. And we would all have the same lifestyle options just as they plan for us - only our geography would differentiate us.
How did we ever get along without Central Planning?
Read the blog post use the link for the full report on The Antiplanner website. It's no coincidence that the wbsite is run by Cato Institute Fellow, Randall O'Toole, an expert in land use and transportation.
Excerpt:
Stuck in Traffic
If you are stuck in traffic in the Twin Cities, says this new report, don’t blame population growth; blame the Metropolitan Council, the region’s metropolitan planning organization.
The Metropolitan Council’s official attitude is, “We can’t build our way out of congestion, so we will provide alternatives to congestion” in the form of light rail, bike paths, and maybe a few high-occupancy/toll lanes. The council’s 2040 plan has $6.9 billion programmed for transit improvements, $700 million for bike paths, and $700 million for road improvements. That means 8 percent of the funds goes for the 90 percent of the people who drive to work while 83 percent goes for the 6 percent who take transit.
Beyond providing alternatives, many of the council’s policies actually make congestion worse. These include traffic calming, giving transit priority at traffic signals, giving buses priority at metered freeway ramps, increasing urban densities, and complete streets programs that take lanes on busy streets from cars and giving them to bicycles when safer bike routes would have been available on parallel streets.
Use link to continue.
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