The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. – San Francisco (2009)

Re:The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. – San Francisco (2009) by rayiner on Friday January 25, 2013 @09:44AM (#5115583)

Northern Virginia is pretty much all a disaster. There is zero urban planning. The streets are built randomly, not in a quaint way, which makes getting around impossible. The commercial areas are built as far as possible from residential ones, which makes running to the store for milk or going out to lunch a huge time sink. The traffic is horrible as a result, even though the area isn't really that densely populated.

Compare: Westchester County to Fairfax County, roughly similarly sized suburbs. Westchester has all these cute little downtowns with grid streets (ish) built around Metro North stations. Traffic is kept under control because a large fraction of people commute to the city by rail. Fairfax County sucks in comparison. No transit to speak of, awful traffic, etc. Its the result of urban planning that basically consists of (mark of a subdivision and let the developers do whatever they want).

Arlington is tolerable, but only because development sprung up around Metro lines. Ditto Alexandria, which at least has a centrally planned downtown core.

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Re:The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. – San Francisco (2009) by mnarayan01 on Friday January 25, 2013 @10:48AM (#5115916)

  The commercial areas are built as far as possible from residential ones

This is because of urban planning.

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Re:The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. – San Francisco (2009) by ImprovedSilence on Friday January 25, 2013 @03:55PM (#5117578)

If you call that urban planning, then you can call Fairfax the worst example of "urban planning" I've ever heard of. It's a soul sucking mess of bland corporation towers, and distant developments of cookie-cutter cardboard houses squeezed onto tiny plots of land, with no way to escape to the outside air or to entertainment but by a 30 min drive on a traffic laiden freeway... No wonder their upper-class high-schools are chock full of heavy drugs, the poor kids can't escape.

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Re:The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. – San Francisco (2009) by etherael on Friday January 25, 2013 @08:23PM (#5118794)

So your exhibit A of how business and markets can make a mess of things is a county almost entirely dominated by government employers? It almost looks to me like when they have near total control over how an area evolves, they don't bother with much oversight or planning for it..

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