In 1853, the Mormon founders laid out an efficient street grid system, based upon the grid of Salt L

With  Milwaukee , Tulsa , Dallas , Louisville ,  Cleveland , and Atlanta advancing to the second round of Parking Madness , there are only two spaces left in the Elite Eight of parking disasters. In this installment, we re looking at two very different cities, each of which is extremely car-centric in its own way. It s San Bernardino versus Houston.
San Bernardino was, for a time, a very successful and independent rental car in london metropolitan area in Southern California. In the last few decades, the expansion of hundreds of miles of freeways to the east of Downtown Los Angeles opened up vast tracts of land to affordable housing that had historically been used for a very successful citrus industry. Today, the area around San Bernardino is known as the Inland Empire, rental car in london well known for endless suburban neighborhoods of single family homes, strip malls, and a reliance on the automobile. According to Smart Growth America, the Inland Empire is the case example of the worst sprawl in America.
In 1853, the Mormon founders laid out an efficient street grid system, based upon the grid of Salt Lake City. In the 1960 s, an Urban Renewal program saw the establishment of I-215 (which bisected the city) and the demolition of a large section of downtown to make room for Central City Mall, a largely abandoned building today. Today, the downtown area continues to struggle to attract businesses and is mostly home to a collection government offices (and parking lots).
rental car in london It s bad enough to have so much parking around a valuable transit connection, like we saw in Atlanta. But there s an extra twist in this case. This asphalt valley is directly next to an office building for Exxon Mobil (far left).
Angie Schmitt is a newspaper reporter-turned planner/advocate who manages the Streetsblog Network from glamorous Cleveland, Ohio. She also writes about urban issues particular to the industrial Midwest at Rustwire.com.
Like San Bernadino, Sunnyvale, CA also replaced its downtown with a mall in the 70s that slid into vacancies in the 90s. They re now redesigning the area better to restore the grid somewhat and add offices. But they ll never get back the cute little downtown they had. All that was spared was one very active block.
rental car in london I never visited San Bernadino when it had an active downtown. But I have visited recently, and it is just a very sad scene. The mall was obviously supposed to be the answer : using the logic (again) that some sort of retail magnet was needed to pull in suburbanites, and the magnet wouldn t work if there weren t large expanses of parking. Now you have an area that s not relevant to anyone, with an enormous white elephant (literally white, as I recall) that might be impossible to repurpose, and expensive to tear down. The entire Inland Empire struck me as a lost empire: left in the dust .
The San Bernardino example is so sad; their charming downtown and its street grid were obliterated. Theoretically, they could tear down the mall and restore the street grid, but the cost would be exorbitant. Even worse: while downtown San Bernardino rental car in london s beautiful and historic Santa Fe Station remains in use with fairly frequent Metrolink service (and infrequent Amtrak service), I-215 separates it from this area, making it difficult to leverage the station for TOD at this location, even though they are only six blocks apart. The Houston example is not as bad. It is shocking to see so much surface parking surrounding a light rail station. But: Houston s light rail is relatively new, the street grid at this location remains intact and it is located a few blocks away from the downtown freeway ring, so it is reasonable to expect that the expansion of the light rail system will probably spur development of most of those lots in the future.
Double bummer for San Bernardino today. First it loses to Houston in Parking Madness and now The Bond Buyer is reporting that the City has filed a lawsuit against California claiming that if the state docks the city s taxes to pay the $15 million the state claims San Bernardino owes as a result of dissolution of its redevelopment agency, the city will be forced to shutdown.
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