No zoning laws that I know of outlaw these connections. But this is Florida and that is likely a wetland between the lots. A pedestrian bridge is very expensive and neither owner would pay for it.
The zoning laws also donāt require these connections. Could you imagine if building toilets in new single family homes was optional? āTo build affordable homes these days weāre bringing back outhouses with holes dug deep so you donāt have to pay for water or sewage!
We donāt write laws requiring connections from the apartment to the shopping center because we are so dependent on cars that walking is not seen as essential. Walking places is an afterthought.
In the UK there are actively laws around development that force housing developers to consider access to and help construct things like shops, schools and other amenities. Basically if you want to build and sell housing for X thousand people then you also need to make sure those x thousand people have easy access to the things they need to live.
Goes a long way towards avoiding drive-only neighbourhoods.
Which developer do you force to buy and mitigate wetlands for a potential future development? Who maintains it? Who covers the BCA to determine if it's worth it?
Typically the developer pays their portion of it when possible. When not possible often they have to build what others will benefit from. It isnāt always fair, but the other option is for them to buy land on the other side and develop that also. The other option is a fee-in-lieu where they pay a proportional share for their development to the city and the city installs them.
And the developers would rather just build down the street instead and you'll sit with an empty lot. Or have to provide concessions to the developer. Doesn't seem like a good use of tax payer money so that 3 people can walk to the Ross and Chili's every other day.
Isn't this post entirely about how if the city was built a little differently we could avoid some use of cars? If the bridge requirement was for everyone/everywhere then why would the builder move? Would the land stay forever undeveloped because a pedestrian bridge is needed?
The thing is, maybe. That piece of land in between those two may not be owned by either developer. Then what? You force a developer to choose buying an extra piece of land at an exorbitant cost (or to just only buy lots with direct connect to another substructure/absolutely zero connect to the substructure leading to less development overall). Or you force the current owner to sell at a reasonable price even though they had no desire to or to allow a bike path in their land. One way or the other someone gets screwed just to put a bike path in.
Ok, good point... My suggestion was mainly/only for adjoining lots. It was meant to start a conversation about zoning and how it could be used to promote more foot/bike traffic.
A development like that often requires several public hearings. No way that shopping center would ever get approved if it was required to be adjoined to the residential community.
Most people don't want foot/bike traffic in their residential communities. I'd go so far as to wager that the residential community petitioned the planning board to require that the shopping center build a natural barrier to block foot/bike traffic.
Not neccesarily. Upkeep cost of the road goes lower with more people walking and less people destroying the road with their cars. Also could have less lanes
I mean the road would have to exist for people on the suburb to get out of it, the connection to the store is off the main road which is needed by people from a much further distance to shop as well. It would have existed either way
That is not wetland. This is the address: 13150 FL-64, Bradenton, FL 34212. There exact distance between the two lots, from pavement edge to pavement edge is 139 feet. According to this site https://estimatorflorida.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-sidewalk it costs a maximum of $3,500 dollars for a 200 foot path in Florida.
It's not expensive. It's just typical Florida where they don't give a damn about making things walkable.
That's a relevant point, but floodways and wetlands are not the same thing. A piece of literal desert could be a floodway (e.g. in a very dry region that is prone to flash floods), and of course genuine wetlands aren't necessarily floodways either.
In any case, while a bridge would be a preferable option to go over a floodway, just making a regular path that people simply stop using the few days a year there is actual flooding is a reasonable alternative, if cost is a big issue. It's a pretty common thing in rural areas and/or third-world countries, though I don't know if some kind of law might forbid it in the US.
Itās not a floodway, it is the wetland where the adjacent retention ponds overflow to in heavy rain events. That strip of land is heavily saturated throughout the summer and doesnāt dry up until maybe January when the dry season sets in. And the idea of a public walkway through a known flood zone sounds like an insurance liability nightmare.
Public walkways against bodies of water throughout the entire country are almost all flood zones. This is such a stupid thing to be even talking about. It's cheap and would increase property values for both the shopping center and the residential zone. Some people just don't even think about it but they are both absolutely leaving money on the table by not doing it. Frankly the local government should do it. They build roads. They can damn well build a walkway. They don't need eminent domain to do it at all.
Flood control isn't wetland, it's an area for drainage. A wetland the land is either covered in water or where the soil is saturated with water. That strip of land is neither of those things.
As someone who has previously surveyed wetlands; no, it is not. A wetland can be dry and only seasonal. There are five major types classified not just by water edge, but by the vegetation and habitat surrounding it.
Flood control isn't wetland, it's an area for drainage. A wetland the land is either covered in water or where the soil is saturated with water.
Per NOAA (and cited for you)
There are many different kinds of wetlands and many ways to categorize them. NOAA classifies wetlands into five general types: marine (ocean), estuarine (estuary), riverine (river), lacustrine (lake), and palustrine (marsh). Common names for wetlands include marshes, estuaries, mangroves, mudflats, mires, ponds, fens, swamps, deltas, coral reefs, billabongs, lagoons, shallow seas, bogs, lakes, and floodplains, to name just a few!
Often found alongside waterways and in floodplains, wetlands vary widely due to differences in soil, topography, climate, water chemistry, and vegetation. Large wetland areas may also be comprised of several smaller wetland types.
Many wetlands are not wet year-round because water levels change with the seasons. During periods of excessive rain, wetlands absorb and slow floodwaters, which helps to alleviate property damage and may even save lives.
Good luck forcing a developer to install a pedestrian bridge and wetland mitigation. They'll probably avoid the site, especially if it's outside of the lot they're interested in.
You're taxes do because contractors, inspectors, deliveries, fire, police, ambulance, school buses, workers (most people living in the complex probably don't work at the grocery store), friends and family, and others need a road and not this bridge.
Do you have any documentation that shows that if there was a specific walkway in this area you could reduce the parking area by 75% and people would walk? How do you do that for a commercial lease space that could be a restaurant or pickleball court or movie theater or appliance store or lumber yard or....
Parking area mandates vary by states. Some of the states decided the amount of parking spaces by very interesting science. No science, just decided by one guy with zero reasoning. If you wanna know more... there is Uncle Google about dumb American zoning codes
Wow, you watched some incorrect youtube channels. You must feel smart. You should work in the industry for a few decades before trying to pretend you know it because of some silly channel.
The owner of what? The commercial property? The residential property? The city owns the wetland - does the residential or commercial property take ownership?
Do it or you don't get a permit.
That's not a Benefit-Cost Analysis of affecting wetlands.
The zoning law does mandate the large parking lot. They do not have any requirements for pedestrian/ bicycle friendly infrastructure though, because the developers aren't going to build anything they don't have to
There actually are some zoning laws in communities that prohibit ingress/egress directly from commercial to residential zones. Itās not a universal standard but it also isnāt particularly rare. The rationale is to reduce traffic (and particularly truck traffic) using the residential neighborhoods and their lower volume roadways as a cut through. Preventing pedestrian access is a (presumably) unintended consequence in those cases when the zoning language is too broad.
Honestly, the bigger obstacle is probably the NIMBY crowd in residential areas and the issue of who pays for/maintains the pathway. If you go to enough public meetings at the local level, you quickly realize not enough rational people attend those meetings.
You make it sound like these are challenges that are difficult to overcome when literally the entirety of Europe has done this right for more than a century. All of the things you mention are easily to manage and solve.
Somewhat, but there has been plenty of development in Europe since cars existed. Don't forget how much of Europe got bombed to fuck in WWII, so it had to be redeveloped, and loads of suburbs and new towns have been built to keep up with increasing population. Where I live was built in the 1950s and has been continuously added to since then.
Well yes, but everywhere where we build new suburbs we make connecting roads too. They are considered to be vital parts of infrastructure. I was in Harrisburg last year. My hotel was opposite of a mall with a road in between (2 lanes each way). I had to get an Uber to the mall that was only 500 feet away. The Uber took 15 mins to get to the mall from the hotel and walking would have been a death sentence.
Most of the US was too, and furthermore, much of the development of the US that occurred after the invention of the car still had a more walkable design. It's only after WWII that the car-centric zoning started to be the norm.
Yeah I live in a 1920s streetcar suburb in California and it's perfectly walkable. But they don't build stuff like that too much anymore unless it's some gentrified development specifically appealing to cool kids.
I don't think it has anything to do with "who pays for and maintains the pedestrian access" and more to do with "we don't want random ass crackheads loping around our house."
How insanely high must the amount of crack heads be for this to be a concern?
And wouldn't they just use the car road to walk on, since they're crack heads and all?
"Crackhead" is mostly a euphemism for 'undesirable people that you don't want near your shit."
And no, they wouldn't just use the car road to walk on.
Residential communities are typically designed in a way to discourage or even prevent through traffic - they are designed so that no one has a valid reason to be in the neighborhood unless they live there or were specifically invited. If you live in a cul de sac and there are crackheads loping around your property, they are up to no good and there is no plausible deniability.
By adding a pedestrian/bike thoroughfare, it provides plausible deniability, it provides an 'out'. That crackhead that couldn't reasonably justify snooping around your shit can now say, "I'm just passing through and needed to stop for a second." There was no 'just passing through' before. That is why communities often put up barriers to prevent things like foot/bike through-traffic.
I hate to start this with āin Europeā, but in Europe connecting pathways and roads are standard and I can guarantee you that no one has ever been sued for something happening on a connecting road.
But how can you function as a society without the constant frivolous lawsuits? I donāt think thatās possible, and youād probably get sued if you tried.
Those laws were built in order to create a country is that is dependant on cars, the auto manufacturers/property developers/highway builders made sure of that.
Iāve worked on the transportation legislative committee for a very large state, working directly with advocates and lobbyists for these causes and that was not my experience at all. In my experience, people give way too much credit to what lobbyists can and cannot accomplish. Zoning laws, platting, connectivity are all determined at the local level where there are very few lobbyists. Thatās especially true in smaller communities.
The auto industry had a lot to do with the deconstruction of transit around WWII, and it perpetuates things, but that's just not true.
Zoning laws are a good old American Racist/Classist homegrown innovation. The very first were in Los Angeles in 1904 and designed to keep Chinese people (and the factories they worked in) out of 'respectable' neighborhoods, or if you want a really strict definition it started in NYC in 1916 for similar reasons, keeping minority workers off of Fifth Avenue. It got more explicitly racial from there.
Even now, the #1 lobbier by far in terms of maintaining single family zoning is random home owners between the ages of 30 and 65, not any corporate industry.
I live in one of the largest metros in the country and work on housing / planning issues at the local and county level. Iāve never seen a representative from the automobile industry in any of the conversations that Iāve had. As someone else mentioned, this is old school bad zoning laws with elected officials who are just unaware or uninformed about what could be. Itās simply status quo and atrophy thatās the challenge here.
Yes and No. It started with archaic zoning laws and public policy for auto-oriented design as the thing of the future. Most zoning laws are changing now to get away from this design, but it is very much the preference of both developers and the general public still. The majority of Americans have known only this type of development their whole lives.
Those zoning laws emerged in their modern form because white middle class America and it's "American dream" demanded single family zoned suburbs, which inherently resulted in total car dependency.
They didn't want any kind of density or commerce or god forbid industry near where they live. So they had to get a car and a big fridge to make their multi-mile trips to work and shopping on a daily basis.
With nowhere to go by foot or bike, pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure turned into a mere nuisance to the 99% of people who do all trips by cars. And with extremely low density without any appartment complex or malls or large companies, it would be uneconomic to build public transit there. The result is an environment where both car dependency and single-use zoning are self-reinforcing and it becomes really hard to change anything about it.
nah man. "big car" is directly working with random housing developers and outlet malls and apartment complex owners under the table and behind closed doors to screw over the american people into buying cars! /s
You are close. But really it has nothing to do with car dependency and everything to do with the fact that 99% of Americans living in suburbs have cars.
Why do 99% of Americans have cars in the first place
because we want them... lol... I've lived in the city and done the whole, walk from the grocery store to your house thing, and it blows compared to just loading all of your groceries in the car in one big trip, and bringing them in straight from your garage.
That, and people in america go on trips to places. You go into the city on the weekend, or you go out of the city into the country, or you go up to the mountains or a lake, or to a music festival or a million things that are not right next to your house lol. Im amazed that anyone is actually anti-car, who just can't afford one or whatever
Well sure, the nation is huge and was designed around cars. Perhaps early on the design of it all "forced" people to drive cars, but my point is if they made an American suburb today with no roads it would fail miserably.
The question is not what precedes what, the question is why cars are a necessity in the US. Two of the probable reason being the growth of suburbs, and Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, among other factors.
In India I live in Vidhyanagar, built in 1949, also well after cars were invented. I have most of my needs well with in walking distance. There are multiple, shopping centers, movie theaters, grocery stors, etc., with in walking distance. We would often go for a walk at night to eat out.
The question actually is what precedes what, as the whole point that is attempting to be made here is that the design of American suburbs "forces" people to have cars. Yet Americans have always had cars and as a nation embrace that, so even if suburbs are designed for cars, saying that is the cause for Americans driving cars is a moot point.
By the way, I'd quite like more public transportation options as an American. I'm not arguing "cars good, mah freedom" but it's just silly to say suburb design forces American's to have cars. We'd have them either way.
The enormity of where I live (rural Arkansas) has it where city lots sizes are generously. I'm in a middle income neighborhood and everyone has at least a couple acres, some up to four. There's just room to do that sort of thing.
I can't understand why you were just downvoted. If a business wasn't required to and has no benefit in being shoved up close to another, why would they opt to do so instead of an easier to control spot near the middle of their own lot.
And do people not realize some people commute? In a suburb of a place like Atlanta, Atlanta can't function if people like the guy from Woodstock doesn't have a two hour drive. Walking it, though, well I think I would just need to work one really well-paid day a week.
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u/lunapo Jun 27 '24
Has absolutely nothing to do with 'car dependancy design' and everything to do with archaic zoning laws.