I too lived in Austin and was always irritated by the bizarre geography, which meant that visiting friends often involved miles and miles of freeway driving. I never realized that this design was intentional. I did know, though, that it was counterintuitive that the town’s development was perpendicular to, rather than parallel to, the river.

I lived in Austin, TX, for a year and a half. It is another city where the deliberate planned development dynamic was “vertical” rather than “sprawled”. (Let me say that the planned alternative to sprawl would be called spoke-and-hub, and you should compare vertical to spoke-and-hub).

The vertical approach in Austin required strong travel corridors north to south, and limited, highly inefficient travel corridors running East-West. This was done deliberately.

I think the consensus is that the deliberate vertical approach, at least in Austin, has caused far more difficulties than any possible benefit. No one except for the die-hard original advocates in Austin of verticalism named any advantage whatsoever.

There are a few geographies where verticalism is natural and inevitable. In all other cases, free development always leads to spoke-and-hub.

Here is a possible solution, automated parking.
http://tinyurl.com/3gh6cq

This is private enterprise at work.

I have a theory about this: all of the socialists that constantly push this crap just purely hate the idea of people spending time alone. People who are alone can think thoughts that the socialists cannot control and they might think thoughts that the socialists don’t like. I doubt if the socialists think this consciously, but deep down in their nasty little hearts, I think that’s what they want.

“But after six years as one of five directors of Greenpeace International, I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs.”

“Sadly, Greenpeace has evolved into an organization of extremism and politically motivated agendas.”

“We all have a responsibility to be environmental stewards. But that stewardship requires that science, not political agendas, drive our public policy.”

I take from BW’s post that the Sierra Club has devolved the same way. Their agenda is not driven by science, or any rational sense of urban planning and problem solving, but strictly by ideology, and what is simply a holier-than-thou attitude translated into inflexibility. This is part of the sic transit Gloria Mundae of classical liberalism. It has deteriorated, to use the word of Max Weber, into “its oversimplifications … atomism …utopianism” (and) “naive cults of nature, progress and happiness.”

The environmental impact!

It truly left me speechless, and dumbfounded.

Having grown up in New York City, I always thought that a trip on the Staten Island Ferry was not only the best monetary deal in town but also well worth the subway ride from the Bronx, so I can certainly agree with your fondness for ferry travel in San Francisco’s more benevolent climes.

But, as I learned in my undergraduate Urban Economics class, there are two important concepts in mass transit; one is mass and the other is transit. Unfortunately, the SF Bay Area evolved more along the urban sprawl dynamic than vertical New York. Where I grew up in the Bronx, our neighborhood was mostly five or six story apartment buildings and a three block walk would take me to either of two subway lines, the IND and the IRT. Similarly, a two block walk would take me to two different bus lines.

While I was no stranger to using mass transit in my New York youth, back then, it made sense in the cost vs. time analysis. I don’t think we have the necessary predicates out here in the Bay Area for a successful mass transit system. What results are subsidized systems that have no real hope of ever being economically sound. While there are certainly individuals and “communities” that benefit from the current efforts, we are, in actuality, just putting band-aids on a bad application of a good idea.

Do the taxpayers of America really need to subsidized boat trips for the people of Marin county?