City & Town Planning Megathread

[garbon]

The Elizabeth line is great. We'll except for how it hadn't even reached one year when it started having many faults like all the other lines.

[Admiral Yi]

The slant I'm reading here is "Bloody trains pushing up the prices for locals!"
But the actual lesson behind all this I'd take is that it clearly demonstrates transit oriented development and in general improving transit links is a good idea (tm).

In other contexts this is what is called gentrification.

[Josquius]

In other contexts this is what is called gentrification.

A maligned word for a phenomena that is mixed in its blessings and curses.
Though overall if transit improvement and transit oriented development was made a priority in more places it wouldn't be an issue.

That definitely works for London where the property price increase can offset, at least partially, the cost of tunnelling and large capacity stations.  Unfortunately the main new schemes (Crossrail 2 and Bakerloo Line Extension) are dead in the water.

For the Bristols, Manchesters, Leeds, Birminghams etc the commuting requirements are just too different. You don't have the necessary density in suburban areas - a lot of commuters are coming in from surrounding towns and villages from every direction. For example, there's no way of designing a sensible commuter transit system to link Bromsgrove, Kidderminster, Leamington Spa, Lichfield etc to B'ham. The best you can do is tram systems for the suburbs and immediately neighbouring towns which don't have a significant effect on property prices or unlock a great deal of additional density.

Much of this is a self fulfilling negative feedback loop however.
Since the mid 20th century the pattern in the UK has been to prioritise car focussed sprawl which means transit is less effective so there's less investment in transit so they prioritise car focussed sprawl, so on and so forth.

The same rules of transit being desirable absolutely do apply outside of London. Look on a national level and you'll notice towns with decent train service tend to be more expensive than their neighbours without.
Theres been a fair few analyses on a more local level to show there is a transit induced priced uptick.
e.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/aug/20/distance-from-station-value-of-house-nationwide-uk

The important thing about all this stuff too is that its augmentative. Build a single line through Leeds and it'll have an effect. But build a second line that connects to the first in the centre and you've 'doubled' (not really but just for simplicity) the utility of the first line  by increasing the number of places it goes.

I don't think anyone would suggest a train to every single town in the land is feasible. But focussing new housing development on those places to which this is practical rather than in random isolated fields? Such common sense that runs afoul of NIMBYs.

[Syt]

Meanwhile, city playnning in Egypt. 

[Josquius]

Aye. Whilst the west is learning better so many developed (and new money) countries see the worst America has to offer as something to aim for.

[HVC]

So many dicks.