Making our cities better, one mistake at a time

I was talking with Ron Blatman, the Producer of an upcoming TV series, Saving the City: Remaking the American Metropolis. I’m a person who is always working hard to understand how we can improve the quality of life of our cities. Therefore, I was very interested to get his take on this, to see if there are patterns others can use.

As you can imagine, the answer is not simple. We delved into something that city planners like to focus on, which citizens are painfully aware of: traffic. This includes how to balance public transport vs. private cars or Uber with Lyft. Here’s what Ron had to say.

Everybody would say ‘we really should invest in some sort of a transit system.’ But it's a chicken and egg situation. You wait until you have the density and then you lay the tracks. Or do you do it the way Dallas did and then densify around those tracks, and you project out 2030 years in the future. If they did their transit oriented development right and if they developed along the rail line correctly, then they know they basically built the system to be able to handle that.

Los Angeles is trying something different. L.A. is actually surprisingly dense, especially in the core. From downtown all the way up to the ocean is 20 miles, and they are in the middle of spending billions of dollars to keep expanding their light rail system.

They are allowing enormously intense projects to build stations and LA is doing everything right. That is, if you look at the textbook, they're doing everything right.

And here's the conundrum. L.A. has been losing rail ridership for five years running.

And you scratch your head and go: “How's this possible? It's dense. It's crowded. L.A. is building all the [transit] stations. [Additionally, they are building] 10, 12 and sometimes 20 and 30-storey buildings for density to be at the stations. They're doing everything right, and yet they're losing riders...

One of the reasons I've read as to why those numbers are going down is [that] as the general economy was improving… what happens in L.A. is that it is obviously still a big sprawling mess. And if you really want to get around, if you have to commute by taking some sort of transit, you would still need a car…

So when the economy has been improving and you're going through with these transit lines into poor neighbourhoods. Well, if the economy is improving and there's more money for people to spend, the first thing they're going to do is a sign of having made it is to buy a car… And of course, you don't want to say “Well, only rich people can drive” - so it's a really interesting conundrum... It's a, you know it's a catch 22.”

Cities are incredibly complex systems involving literally millions of moving parts (humans included). There are no cookie-cutter solutions that can apply to every city. But if we want to make our urban areas better, a good place to start is to look at what has worked before and where (and what hasn’t).

And that’s the recurrent pattern.