Piecemeal City Planning Decisions - Is this How our City Government should be Acting?

This past fall, as I campaigned and talked to different groups of residents, I heard all kinds of requests and ideas regarding how Redwood City should be aware of, concerned about or even solve a myriad of local problems. Every neighborhood has some issues, every resident sees things in a slightly different way, and yet instead of trying to integrate all the local neighborhood concerns into one holistic cohesive plan to move ahead, our city commissions and council continue to make decisions in a piecemeal fashion. For example, the Planning Commission has a study session tomorrow to discuss the Inner Harbor draft proposal.

Just as an exercise today I will presume I have no position on any of these ideas. My concern is that because of the piecemeal mode of our local government’s decision making, we are making decisions that are quite clearly in conflict with each other. For example, if we have decided that we are going to develop our downtown into a highly urban and dense district with high rises that include millions of additional square foot of office space as well as thousands of additional housing units, then the infrastructure needed to support this additional development and traffic means we need more roads and public transit.

Oddly though, while our city government is approving more development density, it is also narrowing roads. Take for example the highly explosive Farmhill re-striping pilot program, which was meant more than anything to reclaim a road that wasn’t quite yet a feeder road to a more local neighborhood feel. Stories of success highlight the fact that families and children can again walk back and forth in the area. However, given the already approved development downtown, the need for more high-throughput roads has really increased.

So on the one hand city government officials have approved higher density structures and on the other hand they have reduced movement in and out. One or the other is wrong. Either we want higher density and we put in the systems to support that higher density or we want a smaller town with a more walkable lifestyle. Assuming that all the new residents and commuters will ride bicycles, walk to work or take trains that are already overcrowded is simply not realistic.

Dense urban environments like San Francisco, New York, and Mexico City have extensive, fairly reliable and most of all high frequency public transportation systems. On the other side of the spectrum a distributed large urban area like Los Angeles has an expansive highway system that crisscrosses the metropolitan area. Redwood City’s piecemeal decision making process means that it now finds itself without either a real public transportation system or an extensive road feeder system to support the development currently in place, much less any additional development.

Isn’t it time to have city staff and elected officials make appropriate holistic integrated decisions and explain their decisions with bigger more logical constructs? Isn’t it time to reopen the Downtown Precise Plan and revisit the General Plan?