Dude, that’s not gonna happen. As you said, it’s the voters who are the “problem.” Our City Council straight-up banned rezoning any districts to multifamily or 2-family. We have a mixed-use district in the code because we’re required to, but it must be on a plot of land of at least 50 acres along a state highway. The largest single tract of land in the city is 15 acres, and it’s not on a state highway.

We also have a minimum lot size of 1 acre and minimum street frontage for a single-family lot of 150 feet for all newly-platted lots. The citizens super duper don’t want the poor moving in.

But you also have to look at it from a different perspective. Many of these suburban towns are made up of people who actively chose to live a less-urban lifestyle, and as the sprawl approaches them they get very, very hostile. They don’t want new people or more affordable housing. They bought their houses 15 years ago when they cost 80 grand. Now people are buying those same houses for a million dollars and tearing them down to build a 7-million dollar house.

Don’t do it on Election Day. Have our spread across early voting and election day. It’ll alleviate the long waits on election day itself and allow employers to stay open since not everyone is off the same day.

That requires a public process.

And guess what voters and politicians want? More roads and more barriers to the “unwashed poor” who use transit.

That’s why they could require it. The TIA showed that the university would have an impact on the public system and the city could require them to mitigate that impact, and the university chose to build a parking circle and dedicate out as city ROW as its mitigation measure.

A local restaurant generating maybe 200 trips a day isn’t going to have the necessary traffic impact for the city to demand infrastructure upgrades.

Now, a mega-development generating thousands of daily trips is a different story. They have to mitigate.

But they can still choose how to mitigate, and it’s usually a dedicated turn lane and a traffic signal. Because if a developer has the choice between saving 1 penny and building a development that truly serves the interests of the city and the future tenants, they’ll take the penny every single time.

Great.

Your still haven’t offered a solution for how to pay for it.

Our roads are 30 years behind on maintenance, but we can patch them here and there and do one out two major projects a year. And when a street collapses it’s relatively easy to get a bond to fix it because the citizens want their roads back.

We can’t patchwork a public transit system, and the citizens are overwhelmingly against it anyway. We tried buying a single bus to shuttle people around and we had a new city manager following that backlash.

Planners aren’t kings. We’re public servants subject to the will of Council, which is made up of people who represent voters, who overwhelmingly don’t want more density, new people, etc. We have pretty much zero input on the direction of the city.

Shit… we spend way more time reviewing swimming pools for code compliance than actually developing plans. When it does come time to do a new comp plan or transportation study, almost every city outsources that to a third party company.

You can’t just decide what’s legal and what isn’t.

A public transit stop serves more than just the property in question, making it a public project and not a private development. We can’t make private developers pay for public projects. It’s illegal.

Whereas a private parking lot is specifically for that exact development, so it can be mandated.

Planning isn’t a videogame where the perfect solution is achievable. We have to work within the confines of the existing legislative and legal environment.

Once again, who is gonna pay?

The city can’t afford it without a bond, and voters will never approve an increase in taxes to remove parking and install transit that will increase local (e.g. Voter) commute times and invite the “undesirable elements” from the city they fled to the suburbs to avoid.

We can’t legally force developers to build public infrastructure that isn’t directly required due to their individual business (e.g. traffic signal or wastewater line extension).

Know what we can do? Force developers to build parking for their business through zoning ordinances with minimum parking requirements based on use. So a restaurant needs more parking spaces per square foot than an office building, which needs more than a warehouse.

Not empty businesses.

And local governments can only develop with the money they have on hand without a bond, and good luck passing a bond that removes parking, increases taxes, and, in the eye of the voters, invites “undesirables.”

Turns out our money is currently being used for things like keeping water flowing, toilets flushing, libraries open, and other civil projects.

We can make a developer build parking through Zoning codes. We can’t make them build public infrastructure that isn’t directly required for their project.

The actual day to day job of a planner is closer to Papers Please. 80% of my time is spent reviewing meeting with, reviewing plans of, or writing stag reports about private developments.

In fact, we’re so busy dealing with fights over fence height, pool lighting, and screening of HVAC equipment that most cities outsource their Comp Plan development to third party companies that specialize in it.

Clearly not voting third party because it’s never fucking worked.

If you really want to change the Dems, vote Dem in the primaries and get involved in the party at the local level. It’s shockingly easy to make real change at the local level where 50 people show up for an election.

Yes. Let’s spend multiple times our annual city budget to force people to walk in 100-degree heat 4 months out of the year to visit a local restaurant or wait 20 minutes for a shuttle.

They definitely won’t choose to go to the next town over where they can park 50 feet from the door of their destination, and our entire staff definitely won’t be let go in the blowback.

You gonna pay for it? Our city’s entire annual budget wouldn’t even begin to pay for that.

That’s where parking requirements come from.

You got a spare billion dollars for a city with an annual budget of 50 million?

Edit: And my job is to implement the vision of elected leaders as defined in the Comprehensive Plan. We handle the details, but direction is provided by Council.

I work in planning. We removed parking requirements in our downtown districts and a bunch of companies came in to buy the old abandoned buildings and expanded them into the old parking areas.

Every single retail business that moved in over the following 3 years failed because there wasn’t anywhere for the customers to park. They just went to businesses that had parking avaialbe.

If it were a wheel which way would it roll?

Jokes on them. They’re gonna need a longer lens.

Gore couldn’t prove it before time ran out because Florida had to certify it’s results and didn’t have time for a statewide recount. That’s the most important part of the Bush v Gore cases.

There’s a set election date (Tuesday following the second Wednesday in December - December 17th for 2024, but December 19 in 2000) when the ballots are cast. However, 1 will prior to that date is when the states must have the votes certified and transmitted to Congress with all legal challwnges settled. It’s the Safe Harbor Date and has been law since 1887. It was not invented by Conservative justices in 2000.

So for Gore to win, the state totals following the limited recount would have had to favor him. They did not. He lost in Florida by 537 votes after the recount. Nader received 97,431 votes in Florida.

If just 1% of the Florida Nader viewers had voted for Gore, Bush would not have been President even with the Supreme Court stopping the recount.

Yes, they have. They’ve moved both parties to the right on economic issues because a lot of the country either chooses not to vote or votes this party (which is like choosing not to vote, but with more ways resources), giving the GOP victories it shouldn’t have and teaching the Dems they aren’t conservative enough.

Yeah. Every election in the US. Everybody can vote for whoever they want. And when people vote for someone that isn’t one of the majority parties we get George W Bush instead of Al Gore.

If just 1% of Nader’s Florida voters had voted for Gore instead imagine how much better our would would be.

Your theory has been proven wrong every single time it’s ever been put to the test.