PLANNING BLURT

I am very glad to read The City of Albuquerque’s Climate Task Force recommendations to Mayor Chavez. I get almost comatose with despair that critical changes will not happen in time for our children to inhabit anything remotely livable. These all sound like very progressive strategies. Bravo!

I would like to see a moratorium on new road construction that would make sprawling new development the dinosaur it deserves to be- (i.e. dead).

If we as taxpayers and citizens of Albuquerque, Rio Rancho, Bernalillo County, and Santa Fe County developed joint initiatives to limit new road construction this would basically increase density and therefore over time precipitate the following:
• increase existing land value by limiting the supply of cheap developable land
• emphasize profitable construction technologies that deal with infill,toxic remediation and adaptive reuse projects
• rezone existing neighborhoods to accept increased density
• increase walkable radii (see Doug Kelbaugh Noli diagrams regarding permeability of old cities versus new cities) His statement in Repairing the American Metropolis: Common Place Revisited is that if you build more roads (like Seoul South Korea) you will always need more roads. If you build infrastructure (like Tokyo) you will have build public permeability.
• make alternative transportation more attractive by increasing perceivable ‘nearness’ factor
• allow for public stewardship of habitat corridors that rely on large land mentoring like Dave Foreman's ReWilding initiatives. How do the bears get to the mountains if a road cuts their path? The answer is they don’t. They die on the highway.

This is supposed to be an ART class. Sorry it turned into a planning statement.

-Will submit NOLI diagrams to graphically support this thinking.