Comments by "Colorme Dubious" (@colormedubious4747) on "City Beautiful" channel.

  1. I realize that your video is time-constrained, but a key element of the death of the LOMEX project was Moses' big-picture plan to build THREE elevated expressways across Manhattan, at least one of which would have placed noisy, fume-spewing traffic jams right outside the windows of some of the city's most valuable commercial office buildings. This led to many powerful real estate barons turning against Bob the Builder, their former ally. It wasn't just a "grass roots" freeway revolt. He also pissed off the REAL powers that make New York City the center of the known universe. As Caro explains, the final nail in shadow emperor Moses' coffin wasn't his behind-the-scenes monkey business, his destruction of poor but functional neighborhoods, his displacement of at least 300,000 (possibly half a million) citizens, his deliberate financial sabotage of the NYC subway system, the financial failures of the 1939 and 1964 world's fairs, his ultimate bankrupting of the entire city, or any of his other famously notorious actions. It was the simple act of removing a beloved tree from Central Park and pissing off a bunch of moms.
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  2. Amtrak screwed our intercity rail service back in the 1990s. DFW is the top rail transit metro in Texas, with the second-longest light rail system in North America, two streetcar systems, and three commuter rail systems. They used to have a dedicated busway network (although not nearly as big as Houston's), but it's now just an ordinary HOV/HOT lane network. EDIT: second-longest.
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  3. Two plans are in development: Amtrak's and Texas Central's.
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  4. Instead of Mandalay Bay, the monorail should be extended south to the airport and north to Fremont. A streetcar line should be built along The Strip and connect to those two stations, enhancing both lines' utility and overall ridership.
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  5.  @DanNikon  Defeatism is NOT the answer.
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  6.  @DanNikon  If you aren't willing to help, could you at least get out of the way of those who are? Why are you even watching an urbanism video?
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  7.  @heribertoruizjr.5296  It's actually about 3 hours.
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  8.  @luis_zuniga  Yes. Houston also has more seats in its Theatre District than any city except New York. Galveston is a very popular tourist destination, as is DFW. Austin is a popular location for music and comedy festivals. Palo Duro Canyon is second only to the Grand Canyon for tourists who love enormous holes in the ground. America's second-largest state is an incredibly popular tourist destination ("it's like a whole 'nother country") so I suspect that Reddy was sarcastically implying that the Paseo del Rio was HIS top attraction. I can respect his opinion. It's a great place to be.
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  9. It sounds like you had terrible representation. Instead of the ADA, they should have sued under the Fair Housing Act, which includes phrasing loose enough to encompass the unfair actions of an HOA.
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  10.  @DanNikon  Perhaps you should work on your reading comprehension? I never once TOLD you what to do or what to say. I asked you QUESTIONS, as indicated by the QUESTION MARKS at the end of the sentences.
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  11.  @theoccasionalvideo  Which country was founded by Native Americans? Tawantinsuyu? It no longer exists because it tore itself apart with a civil war just as the Spaniards arrived on the scene, allowing a few hundred dudes on horses to conquer an empire of millions. Most North American tribes occupied limited territories that only a tendon-ripping stretch of the facts would justify terming a "country" and constantly warred with and conquered each other for ALL the centuries after the Siberians crossed Beringia to populate the two American continents. Most slaves in the New World were unwilling agricultural workers and built nothing permanent, unless you're referring to Irish stonemasons (slave labor was used to assist builders in many cases, notably the Capitol building, but skilled work was not performed by them). Your revisionist history does not hold up under even the most cursory scrutiny.
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  12.  @Cr3stfa113n  "slum [sləm] NOUN a squalid and overcrowded urban street or district inhabited by very poor people" -- Doesn't seem to include all those qualifiers you added. Just saying - for a friend.
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  13.  @justSTUMBLEDupon  It's been a while since I read the book but, IIRC, he arranged some cooking of the books to transfer certain debt limits/obligations to the NYC Subway in order to allow his bridge & tunnel authority to issue more debt instruments to build a toll bridge (maybe the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge or the Throgs Neck?). He did THAT one with malice aforethought. He did NOT intend to bankrupt the city as a whole, but a number of people who know things posit that the insane weight of all the debt obligations associated with his road, parks, housing, and other projects (two failed World's Fairs, attracting the U.N. headquarters, etc) put the city's collective ass in a very deep crack. The city eventually solved part of its problem by doing something Moses absolutely despised -- combining the transit authority with his bridge & tunnel authority to create the MTA.
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  14. One generally unstated objection to UGBs is that it looks a bit like typical political kicking of the can down the road (but what isn't?). I've long maintained that there is a massive amount of unrealized affordable housing that can be unlocked by implementing a single federal law: Allowing owner-occupied single-family homes to offer garage apartments, mother-in-law suites, or casitas for rental no matter what outdated zoning ordinances and HOAs say about it. Making owner occupancy of the primary residential space a requirement should allay the most common objections. The rental spaces would have to be up to code. There's already a surplus of parking in most suburban neighborhoods. It's not a magic bullet, but it would help.
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  15.  @justSTUMBLEDupon  Oh, about that tree. Moses was City Parks Commissioner for a long time and deserves credit for dramatically increasing the number of neighborhood parks and swimming pools throughout the city. He turned some truly nasty trash and coal ash dumps into magnificent parks. He's also the reason there are sportsball fields in Central Park. He evicted the sheep from Sheep Meadow in 1934 and the building that had housed them became the world-famous Tavern on the Green. In 1956, he wanted to convert a pleasantly wooded part of the park into a parking lot for the restaurant. One night, while the park was closed, he had demolition work commence and a tree was knocked down, but further demolition was stopped by threat of legal action.
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  16.  @TaylorMcChaney  Not being from here, you may have overlooked Austin's Project Connect vote last year, which passed a 7.1 billion dollar transit expansion plan. It will expand existing commuter rail service, add a second commuter rail line, add two new light rail lines, add several new BRT lines, build a pricy downtown transit tunnel, and enhance frequency systemwide. Several mobility bond issues since 2010 have already built over 50 miles of protected bikeways and there are additional neighborhood-level networks of designated "quiet streets" which provide traffic calming measures and safer bike lanes. But, sure, let's just ignore all of that and focus on a particularly contentious 8-mile segment of the one-and-only Interstate Highway in Austin!
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  17.  @Khanfuzed1  I am so pleased that we found the One True Spokesman for Every Last Single-Family Homeowner in America. Thank you for blessing us with your most august presence and ineffable wisdom.
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  18. Rails-to-Trails rights of way ARE "rail banks" and CAN be converted back to railways when deemed necessary. As most rail rights of way are roughly 100 feet wide, there'd be adequate room to incorporate two tracks and a hike-and-bike trail within them.
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  19. Six reservoirs.
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  20.  @richardthrust1126  It's a 2.2 mile starter line. Give it time to develop more ridership and service frequency will be increased. When the starter segment of the Red Line opened in 1976, it had merely 5 stations, frequency was a joke, and you'd toss two quarters into a barrel when you entered a station. It's a "little" different now.
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  21. Arlington is quite literally the most touted example of coordinated TOD in the entire country. It's been a featured "best practice" at every transit and urban planning conference I've attended over the last 20 years. You might say that people are familiar with it.
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  22. 🤣🤣🤣
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  23. 1) I feel like I've seen this before... oh, right, it's basically a video version of the 1995 Newsweek article "How to Fix the Suburbs." 2) A better example of mall redevelopment is The Crossings in Mountain View CA because it used recycled materials from the mall structure, has been completed for two decades, has an integrated CalTrain station, and will eventually also be served by the CAHSR. 3) I think you underestimate the sheer mass of people who despise their HOA.
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  24. It depends how you define "pedestrian space." If you limit your definition to parks and plazas, sure. However, there are many U.S. cities that have equipped certain streets with ultra-wide sidewalks in order to provide generous space for outdoor dining and leisurely strolling. I count those as pedestrian spaces, as well as downtown pedestrian malls/promenades (Denver, Santa Monica) and semi-enclosed downtown malls (Sacramento, San Diego). The downtowns of most American cities predate the car-crazy 20th century and are quite pedestrian-oriented. It's the developers of postwar suburbs and exurban "major activity centers" who forgot that every journey begins and ends on foot.
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  25.  @jamalgibson8139  That isn't exactly what happened in Boston. I'm fairly certain that the Big Dig was a self-contained example of egregious runaway cost overruns. It was managed by the Mass Turnpike Authority. There was supposed to be a rail link included in one of the expressway tunnels but that was killed because of the increased cost of ventilation systems due to MBTA's use of diesel locomotives. The north-south link between the two main train stations was killed due to taxpayer exhaustion, near as I can figure. A number of those originally planned rail rights of way are still available for transit expansion, once the good people of "Taxachusetts" have caught their breath and recovered from the 190% budget overrun of the Big Dig. To be fair, the city is FAR better off with the hideous Green Monster gone. There's a linear park where it used to be, and the surrounding area is eminently walkable again. The Silver Line, at least, got its new tunnel. The new bridge is much more appealing than the nasty piece of crap it replaced. Over the VERY long term, it will probably turn out to have been a somewhat reasonable investment. Like the Asia song says, only time will tell.
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  26. Absolutely incorrect. Where in the video did he say this was a NEW idea? Every neighborhood (in many different states) I've lived in during the past 60 years has had them.
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  27. Quite a few American 'burbs DO have pedestrian paths short-cutting through the chaos, especially those close to schools.
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  28. @ If you're referring to the Bradbury novel, I think you mean Celsius 232.78
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  29.  @NotJustBikes  Joe's post was factually incomplete. It wasn't really a "boulevard," it was formerly U.S. Highway 81. When US-81 was upgraded to a limited access highway (prior to its redesignation to I-35), it didn't go THROUGH the East Austin neighborhood -- and it never had. It was simply the road that bordered East Austin and downtown. As in many cases around the USA, when the freeway was widened and interchanges added or reconfigured, this ultimately resulted in fewer paths through the freeway alignment into downtown. I've never before heard that anyone was "forced" from the western side of US-81 into East Austin. Considering that the neighborhoods immediately west of US-81 in the 40s/50s were heavily commercial and top-heavy with state offices, car dealerships, and crummy motels I have some doubts about Joe's interpretation of events. As Robert Moses repeatedly demonstrated, it's not about race. It's about WEALTH. Those with wealth push highways elsewhere, which explains every senseless zig-zag on the Northern State Parkway.
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  30.  @danieldaniels7571  I hope I'm right, too! Given how they fell for Musk's idiotic sewer pipe, though, I reserve a bit of doubt. I'm old enough to remember 90s Vegas, when hopping between half a dozen different hotel peoplemovers was the only way to move up and down The Strip without enriching cabs or wearing out your shoes.
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  31. Weird, since EVERY car trip begins and ends with walking.
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  32.  @MephistoDerPudel  Most people work during the day. With other people. I'm not saying that excuses the poor design.
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  33. And yet, oddly, Texas already has more of this and is planning even more.
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  34.  @laurie7689  A number of studies have shown that busier through streets help DETER crime because there are more eyes scanning the environment. More property crimes tend to occur in cul-de-sacs, on dead-end streets, and (counterintuitively) in gated communities (where you are FAR more likely to be burgled or vandalized by your neighbor's bored kids than by a random stranger -- and police patrols are virtually nonexistent). You can still have traffic calming measures in place on busy streets. It's not as if these are mutually exclusive design choices.
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  35.  @joe_runs  International airports never really close.
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  36. What do you think you mean by "Tokyo style" and why on Earth would you want it built on the surface? Does the heavy rail subway D line extension that they're building right NOW beneath Wilshire fail to meet your exacting standards? The first new segment is supposed to open next year, so it might be a little late to change their plan.
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  37. The Seattle Monorail Project didn't merely "flame out." Seattle's citizens voted in favor of it FOUR TIMES over the years. City politicians hated the whole idea and did nothing to fulfill the desire of their citizens, ultimately killing the project. The SMP/ETC board and officers also did little to help their case by changing their plans several times, failing to keep the public engaged throughout the process, and mismanaging just about everything that could possibly be mismanaged. In the final analysis, the death blow, as usual, was administered by elected officials with their "screw you ignorant plebs" institutional attitude.
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  38. Two thoughts: 1) The railyard absolutely CAN accommodate new development! Simply deck over parts of it and build a compact mixed-use neighborhood atop the deck. 2) Those park-and-ride garages can be beneficial to their neighborhoods. Design street level retail and office spaces. The parking structure then becomes both a barrier to freeway noise AND a profitable transitional element between the freeway and the mixed-use development at the station, in addition to becoming a mixed-use structure itself. You're welcome.
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  39. That's a very narrow and shallow view of the topic. Suburbs date back at least as far as Roman times, where they were generally quite close to the city's walls and gates. Even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, streetcar suburbs were located close to central business districts. Sprawling suburban and exurban development patterns began to emerge in the 1920s when privately owned automobiles became affordable. Wealth flight became a broader middle class phenomenon after World War II, as rates of violent crime increased in urban neighborhoods.
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  40. Let's not overlook the other underlying issues with high-rise housing projects: It wasn't JUST the concentration of poverty, it was ALSO the massive employment deserts surrounding them, the lack of mixed uses, and the streets with no street-level windows. Rather than look to government to "fix" this issue, let's pursue ACTUAL solutions in the context of public/private partnerships. Eminent domain: No. Just NO. Eminent domain brought us to the most corrupt slum clearance/redevelopment scandals of the 40s and 50s, displaced at least 300,000 people under Moses' rule, and created the hellscape of urban freeways that has devastated our cities. No! NIMBYs: Also known as productive people living and working in functioning neighborhoods who keep the local economy going, pay the taxes that pay the public servants' salaries, and have EVERY right to push back when they hear the most frightening words ever to be uttered outside of a horror film: "We're from the government and we're here to help you." Doing housing right: Take lessons from various HOPE VI projects and focus investment on scattered-site, mixed-use, mixed-income development with a majority of market rate units. Take lessons from Montgomery County MD and other jurisdictions that reward(ed) developers with increased density permitting for inclusion of ADUs above and beyond the basic code requirements. Allow any owner-occupied single-family home to add a garage apartment, casita, or mother-in-law suite regardless of local ordinances or HOA rules. That alone could introduce hundreds of thousands of ADUs while the owner occupancy requirement satisfies the NIMBYs.
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  41.  @travcollier I thought I was the only nerd who tried to "arco" the SimTower. The limitations on escalators always ruined my plans for the levels between the lobby and the metro station. Good times!
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  42. That is a REMARKABLE assertion, given that a common critique of suburban streets is their insane width (typically 50 feet wide) that can easily accommodate the most ridiculous unnecessarily huge firefighting equipment. They also encourage dangerous speeds, which is why traffic calming measures are becoming more widespread.
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  43.  @barryrobbins7694  Sure. Duany, et al addressed the incoherence of winding roads and unnecessary cul-de-sacs in "Suburban Nation." They also addressed the problems caused by inappropriately wide streets serving low density single-use neighborhoods. "Strong Towns" addressed this issue from an economic perspective (calling it a "Ponzi scheme" with justifiable malice aforethought). The maze and bottlenecks, in and of their shape, do not cost us ridiculous sums of money to maintain over the decades. The streets' WIDTH does. Every foot of unnecessary width is another slice of land that cannot accommodate dwelling units (or anything else), adds undesirable impervious cover, forces the construction of additional costly utility infrastructure (which costs money to maintain), does not generate tax revenue, and costs a king's ransom to maintain over its lifetime. I stand by my assertion.
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  44.  @barryrobbins7694  The authors favor skinny streets in grid patterns and explain that cul-de-sacs should only exist where topography dictates (to conform a neighborhood to shorelines and foothills, primarily).
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  45.  @tann_man  You misspelled "wealthy." Where did YOU go to school? 🤣
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  46. It was not racism. It was classism. He accommodated the desires of the wealthy who could help him gain and maintain power, and he mowed down poor neighborhoods regardless of race because they couldn't do anything for him.
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  47. No contest: 16th Street Mall in Denver. There's a huge bus station at one end, Union Station and another huge bus station at the other, LRT stops in between, and the Free MallRide connecting all of it. Not to mention a plethora of decent restaurants, bistros, and coffee shops. The state Capitol, monuments, and several parks are a quick stroll away. I live more than 900 miles away, yet Denver is one of my all-time favorite and frequent destinations, partly because of their downtown.
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  48. @ghost mall There are at least 222 new urban communities listed in the USA alone. Very few of them are JUST "outdoor malls" like those shown, although most do offer appropriately-scaled retail space. In which "more places" do you wish to see new urbanism, specifically? Tell me which region you call home and I can probably find several examples within an easy day trip for you to go check out for yourself.
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  49. Cul de sacs were originally valuable tools to enable a neighborhood's edge to conform to its terrain, such as following shorelines and hugging foothills. Developers bastardized them into tools for jamming as many lots as possible into their subdivisions. They are now the second-best choice for those who want their neighbors' bored kids to rob and vandalize their homes (gated communities remain the VERY best choice for that).
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  50. Blaming racism for everything that went wrong is a cute way to avoid a nuanced discussion of disastrous "progressive" housing policies, but let us not shift blame away from those who deserve the lion's share thereof: Corrupt city leaders who allowed massive swaths of housing AND businesses to be razed to the ground, then offered their donors/cronies lucrative contracts to build hi-rise warehouses in which to stack and store low-income families with nary a nearby trace of shops, services, or gainful employment. Let's house 5,000 poor people in a four block area without a single job in sight - what could possibly go wrong?
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