common sense for the common good

A Study In Contrast

July 12th, 2008 by Vihar Sheth
Posted in Design, Sustainability, Transportation

Katie and I head back east (to the Midwest) tomorrow after 10 days of sun and fun, and a little bit of learning. We spent most of our time in Sacramento and San Francisco, though we drove between the two cities and got out to Marin County and the Valleys Napa and Sonoma.

From the perspective of sustainability, California is definitely a study in contrast. San Francisco is probably the only major city in the state that is truly sustainable from an urban design perspective. It’s European in character, has great public transit and is very, very dense. My wife and I took the Muni bus and train system on every trip around the city but one; we had to take a cab to a city seeing office ’cause the jokers forget to pick us up! The transit buses are zero-emission vehicles and are connected to a massive web of electric lines that run throughout the city. My only complaint is that they aren’t the prettiest things in the world, and they’re everywhere. But, no black smoke coming out of the tailpipes like back in St. Louis. Hell, even some of the FedEx trucks we saw were hybrids!

Sacramento, on the other hand, is worse than St. Louis from a sprawl standpoint. Massive four-lane streets connect every neighborhood in the suburbs. Admittedly, we didn’t get to spend much time in the urban core of the city but I doubt that would have made much of a difference on my opinion. City cores themselves are relatively sustainable purely from a density standpoint. How far the suburbs stretch in a metropolitan area is an entirely different story. The suburbs of Sacramento seem to have been developed using the following strategy: move outward from downtown until there’s a precipitous drop in land prices, build a neighborhood, and then do it again. What this has done is create acres and acres of undeveloped land between major developments. These pieces of land have signs on them, advertising parcels of developable lots, but no one seems to be biting.

That’s all for now. Heading out, on the bus, to dinner on our last night in Yerba Buena!



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