PlaniTulsa xxxposed for what it really is!

[Rico]

I apologize in advance for posting the following article... But I really had no idea that PlaniTulsa was some form of "left wing conspiracy".
Through the very nature of it's design was going to make us all go broke and was so anti church..

Does this guy still sell this "rag" in QTrip?

Anyhow, read for yourselves....
From the "Front Page Story of the April 29, 2010 edition of the Tulsa Beacon"





PlaniTulsa threatens American freedoms


Randal O'Toole, a scholar from the CATO Institute, said PlaniTulsa looks a lot like what Portland, Oregon did beginning 20 years ago when it embraced New Urbanism.

And that should worry people in Tulsa.

O'Toole spoke Saturday in Tulsa as part of a forum sponsored by OK-SAFE. A former professor at Yale University, O'Toole has written several books, including Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It.

"I want to talk about the American dream," O'Toole said. "To own a home, start a business, to have mobility and own property. 'Smart growth' is a threat to the American Dream. That's what PlaniTulsa is all about."

The average person in American travels 19,000 miles a year and 85 percent of that is by automobile, O'Toole said. "They (the Obama Administration) are trying to coerce people out of their cars."

O'Toole said Obama wants to raise gasoline taxes to fund light rail systems all over the country. Through extensive study, O'Toole showed that city after city that has invested in light rail has lost millions if not billions in inefficiency.

In January, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood ended cost-effectiveness rules for federal transit grants - in essence saying he was willing to fund rail projects no matter how much money they waste.

Dallas invested $550 million in light rail and the cost per year per passenger is $12,250 - enough to buy every passenger a car of their own and eliminate light rail, O'Toole said. In Austin, Texas, the bus system was operating in the black and had $200 million in the bank when it started a commuter train system.

"Then they went broke, using up the entire reserve," O'Toole said. "The director resigned in disgrace."

Proponents, like Tulsa City Councilor Rick Westcott, argue that they just want to offer people a choice.

O'Toole said flying costs 14 cents a passenger mile. A bus costs 15 cents a passenger mile and a car costs 15 cents a mile. Amtrak, the heavily subsidized passenger rail service, costs 60 cents a mile and high-speed rail costs more than 75 cents a mile.

A ticket from Orlando to Tampa in Florida (86 miles) costs $50 on high-speed rail but $20 on a Greyhound bus. If high-speed rail is offered between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, the ticket would cost four times the price of a bus ticket and save only about 20 minutes.

O'Toole said American freedoms are already dwindling in terms of property rights.

Urban planners in Oregon place restrictions on building new homes in rural areas, including: the site had to have at least 80 acres and it had to be a farm that earns at least $40,000-80,000 a year. Only 100 homes were built in the first year of those restrictions.

O'Toole said the new urbanists want people to build up, not out.

"If my house burned down, I wouldn't be allowed to rebuild it," O'Toole said. "I would have to build an apartment.

"Most Americans want to live in a single family home. Smart Growth will make housing unaffordable."

He said the new urban planners think big residential yards are "a waste of land." They want people to live in apartments on small lots.

O'Toole said people who already own a home should be okay but their children will be forced by economics to live in high-density housing in overcrowded downtowns.

In Portland, the population is loaded with couples without children. Families with children live all around Portland where the land use restrictions don't exist. The City of Portland told one church that wanted to expand that it must be closed on Saturdays, it could have only five weddings or funerals a year and its parking would be limited, O'Toole said.

The Portland light rail system cost $3 billion - more than 30 times the original forecast.

O'Toole said cities are using TIF districts to subsidize light rail systems. Under a TIF, a private company is forgiven taxes to encourage development.

"TIF district fees are just subsidies for contractors," O'Toole said. "The main winners are downtown property owners."

He said light rail is "good for some 'businesses.'"

"Light rail sends crime everywhere it goes," O'Toole said.

Another argument against densification is that America is filled with open spaces, O'Toole said. Ninety-six percent of Oklahoma is open space.

"We have a tremendous amount of open rural space," O'Toole said.

Rail service is "1930s' technology" in the 21st Century, O'Toole said.

"The rail networks are all big losers," he said.

Randy Bright, a Tulsa architect who specializes in churches, said, "New Urbanism is a movement that is sweeping the nation."

Bright, who writes a weekly column for the Tulsa Beacon, warned that New Urbanism brings "dire consequences for churches."

New Urbanism, which was born out of environmentalism, has form-based codes whose goal is to "densify populations and confine growth." This strategy inevitably leads to land shortages, higher land costs and limiting of the growth of churches, Bright said. In fact, where New Urbanism has been tried, parking for churches has been curtailed and the search for land to expand has resulted in a bidding war.

Bright said he has a series of discussions with a national proponent of New Urbanism who finally admitted she was "opposed to mega churches" and called big churches "profoundly anti-civic."

"Our churches don't understand the problems," Bright said.

For more information on Randy Bright, go to www.tulsabeacon.com and to learn more about O'Toole, go to www.cato.org


This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 and is filed under Front Page Stories.

[TheArtist]

 LOL what Tulsa has proposed is not even close to what a city like Portland has. (though from what I can tell, most Portlanders seem to like it just fine).  As for rail, what we have envisioned is tiny and imo, well thought out and could be very cost effective if we do it right and take our time. Austin for instance admits it made some mistakes and when those people came to Tulsa they told us about their lessons learned and how we could avoid making those same mistakes. Not to mention whatever rail we have is not going to be of the same scale and off in the future. Btw, cities like Salt Lake City, a very conservative BIG church city btw lol, LOVE their rail and have very much embraced it as being efficient and cost effective.

I would also argue with his numbers on "cost per mile" as much as streets cost to build, widen and maintain around here.  Is that factored into his numbers?

Think about this for instance.  Once both the Mayo Hotel and Mayo 420 lofts are done, what we will have essentially "built" is an entire new neighborhood of over 130 homes, plus a new hotel and several businesses..... not one new mile of road built, nor sidewalks or driveways, etc.   And thats more expensive transportation wise how?  

And again, NOTHING EVEN CLOSE to new urbanism is going to be applied to the VAST majority of Tulsa. We are simply allowing for good urban growth in certain small areas. Sooner or later its gonna be urban growth or no growth and then leaving it up to the suburbs to grow. We can have good urban infill or bad.

[Ed W]

It seems to me that the efforts to denigrate urban planning as a restriction on our freedoms or - as was seen in Owasso's planning meeting recently - an expensive and unnecessary tax boondoggle, are meant to undermine and cut short such planning long before it reaches the voters for their approval or disapproval.  These processes are intended to be driven by public input, and ultimately voted up or down by that same public.  Attempts to cut that process off before we vote strike me as undemocratic, paternalistic, and elitist.  This country has never been satisfied with the status quo.  We innovate.  We experiment.  And by doing so, we look to the future rather than dwell on the past.   

[Hoss]

Last name seems apropos to me...

[TheArtist]

Form Based Codes Reach Critical Mass


By Philip Langdon

Read More: http://www.newurbannews.com/15.3/fbccriticalmass.html

http://www.smartcodecentral.org/index.html


Quote:
At the American Planning Association conference in Minneapolis last year, Laura Hall noticed audience members responding differently than they had a few years ago. "When I tried to sell them on form based codes, people got impatient," Hall says. "They said, 'We don't want to be sold on it anymore. We want to know how to do it." Something is changing — for the better. Across sizable portions of the US and Canada, codes aimed at shaping communities into compact, walkable, mixed use configurations have crossed a threshold. A constituency has begun to solidify in support of form based codes (FBCs).

- Altogether, 294 form based codes have been adopted or are being prepared or proposed in the US and Canada, according to a count by Hazel Borys of the consulting group PlaceMakers. "They're in 40 states and three Canadian provinces," says Borys. "We're seeing more every week." Recent progress includes the drafting of a new zoning code for Denver, Colorado, which aims at replacing a code that has been repeatedly patched during its 53-year existence. The code being proposed in Denver pays close attention to neighborhood context. It follows by a few months the adoption of a new code in Miami, which may be implemented May 20.

Why the surge?

- In the US, says Borys, "When FBCs first started getting traction, we saw a predominance of them in the Southeast. Now it's really expanded significantly, with many of these codes being prepared or adopted in the West and the Southwest, and everyone else following." Borys, who relocated from Sarasota, Florida, to Winnipeg, Manitoba, notes, "In Canada, the West is the innovator, but here it's called 'form based bylaws.'" "A lot of places are using form based codes as an economic development tool," Borys says.

- The Form-Based Codes Institute, founded in 2004, says, "Form based codes foster predictable built results and a high-quality public realm by using physical form (rather than separation of uses) as the organizing principle for the code. They are adopted into city or county law as regulations, not mere guidelines. Form based codes are an alternative to conventional zoning." Borys adds: "The way form based codes differ from use-based codes is that they regulate the form of the built environment first, and as a secondary measure they determine the mix of compatible uses."

NIMBY softening

Other trends are also encouraging the spread of form based codes. Laura Hall says:

• Citizens who spent much of the past 20 years opposing development have learned that a "no growth"' stance is futile in the long term. Activists won a lot of battles, Hall says, but later watched as their successes were overturned, letting sprawl march on. "They're tired of the fight," Hall says. "In the meantime, they've been educated."

• Many environmentalists have been won over by the rural-to-urban Transect. The Transect and the SmartCode have the virtue of providing "a place for everything," from dense, walkable urban settlements to preserved natural terrain, Hall observes. "We've found that people living in a traditional town get the Transect concept immediately if you walk them along a local transect," says code consultant Sandy Sorlien. Hall says people increasingly desire a planning system that "creates places where people can get around on foot."

• Residents are feeling less threatened by the advocates of density. "For a long time, a lot of people thought New Urbanism and smart growth were about adding density to their neighborhood," Hall says. They've come to understand that Transect-based planning generally allows existing low-density suburban neighborhoods to remain as they are. "They can keep their house and neighborhood. There are enough [other] places where density can be encouraged. You can densify the corridors." 




SmartCode Outline PDF: http://www.smartcodecentral.org/docs/outline_code.pdf

The SmartCode supports these outcomes: walkable and mixed-use neighborhoods, transportation options, conservation of open lands, local character, housing diversity, and vibrant downtowns.

The SmartCode discourages these outcomes: sprawl development, automobile dependency, loss of open lands, monotonous subdivisions, deserted downtowns, and unsafe streets and parks.

The SmartCode is one of the family of "form-based codes" addressing primarily the physical form of building and community. It is thus unlike conventional zoning codes based on use and density, which have caused systemic problems over the past sixty years by making mixed use and walkable neighborhoods inadvertently illegal.

The SmartCode is also a "transect-based code." A transect is usually encountered as a continuous cross-section of natural habitats for plants and animals, ranging from shorelines to wetlands to uplands. The transect of the SmartCode is extended to the human habitat, ranging from the most rural to the most urban environments. This allows environmental and urban concerns to be administered in an integrated way.

The SmartCode's rural-to-urban Transect is divided into a range of "T-zones" each with its own complex character. The Transect ensures that a community offers a full diversity of building types, thoroughfare types, and civic space types, and that they have characteristics appropriate to their locations in the environment. The metrics for these T-zones should be locally calibrated.

[azbadpuppy]

Yeah, because Portland is such a s**thole of a city where nobody wants to live, and Tulsa is seriously lacking in churches. Makes perfect sense.

[sgrizzle]

I heard that Planitulsa was "a way for midtown elitists to force their views on the rest of the city" some months ago, I think by someone in this same group.

For every situation, there is a worst-case scenario, for every worst-case scenario there is at least one person with a book and a speaking tour.

[SXSW]

The Beacon is trash.  Outside of a few far-right religious folks it is completely irrelevant.  Reading it is like listening to Rush Limbaugh.  I try to avoid both.   

[Conan71]

So what does it take to make rail more efficient and cost-effective?  Is it getting the ridership up to a certain level or is it taking cues from other cities and taking costs out of construction?

Personally, I'm not a fan of raising the cost of one form of transportation (i.e. auto fuel taxes) to subsidize and promote another.  I view that to an extent as government mandating what form of transportation some people should take.  Fuel taxes are also regressive, like sales tax.  Before I get scolded, I do realize that all forms of transportation are subsidized in one way or another.  But if you keep raising the cost of operating a car, poorer people are forced onto public transportation and away from the freedom of having their own vehicle.

I like the concept of light rail.  I'm simply concerned as to how we make it cost-effective, commuter-efficient, and more than a novelty in a sprawling city like Tulsa. 

FWIW, I had no idea the Beacon was even still around either.

[Cats Cats Cats]

I heard that Planitulsa was "a way for midtown elitists to force their views on the rest of the city" some months ago, I think by someone in this same group.

Actually, Planitulsa is a way for them to live close to something besides 4 restaurants downtown and a few more on brookside.  

[TheArtist]

So what does it take to make rail more efficient and cost-effective?  Is it getting the ridership up to a certain level or is it taking cues from other cities and taking costs out of construction?

Personally, I'm not a fan of raising the cost of one form of transportation (i.e. auto fuel taxes) to subsidize and promote another.  I view that to an extent as government mandating what form of transportation some people should take.  Fuel taxes are also regressive, like sales tax.  Before I get scolded, I do realize that all forms of transportation are subsidized in one way or another.  But if you keep raising the cost of operating a car, poorer people are forced onto public transportation and away from the freedom of having their own vehicle.

I like the concept of light rail.  I'm simply concerned as to how we make it cost-effective, commuter-efficient, and more than a novelty in a sprawling city like Tulsa.  

FWIW, I had no idea the Beacon was even still around either.

I would suggest you check out Skyscraper page forums and go to their "Transportation" section.  They get really deep into these topics and you can find some insightful discussions.   I am going to start delving into it a little more myself.

One thing I have already noticed is that they make distinctions between things like "light rail" and "commuter rail" and "trolleys and street cars" "heavy rail/subways" etc. Each is seen as having a place and use where it becomes most effective. Of course these things also have to dovetail into zoning type issues. Just as when you build a highway out to some suburban area, and zone to have "higher density/traffic" malls, big box stores, apartments, etc. near it instead of single family homes and farmland lol.  You must also zone to have the proper TOD where your going to put your mass transit.

One of the interesting things I just read about light rail is how its preferable some argue absolutely necessary, for light rail to have its own right of way, above ground or what ever.  You want the trains to stop every 2-5 minutes at each station to pick up and let off passengers, and you cant have such a system work if its waiting in traffic or at stop lights.  You can link up such a light rail system to a street car or bus mass transit system, but its pretty much unanimous that light rail without very frequent stops and a dedicated right of way is useless.  Tulsa cant support that at this time.  Commuter rail possibly, streetcar/trolleys possibly (but you still have to zone to ensure future success).  As for HSR between Tulsa and OKC, I don't think we are ready for that either,,, doesn't mean we cant begin "shaping" the city and begin to lay the foundation for some future implementation.  Part of that imo would be going ahead with TOD zoning in the appropriate areas and building "starter" commuter rail and streetcar/trolley/bus routes, they too with the appropriate TOD zoning and planning.

[Townsend]

Actually, Planitulsa is a way for them to live close to something besides 4 restaurants downtown and a few more on brookside.  

4?