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Originally Posted by Antigonish
What we see now is a 180 of post-WW2 planning. It's as if anything remotely related to that outdated style of suburban planning cannot be allowed to be integrated into contemporary planning by any means. That methods changed but the attitudes didn't and I'm not a fan of it.
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Around here I see a kind of unholy alliance between NIMBYs and the reaction to postwar planning that slants the debate too heavily against new road development. I would not want to go back to the 60's when cities were bulldozing huge areas for brownfield highways but sometimes new roads are needed. My basic reasoning is that modal shares will only get so extreme and so as a city grows, some additional road capacity will be needed. A city that's 80% suburban is not going to pleasantly go from 90% car travel to 45% as it doubles in size. 70-80% modal share is aggressive and this requires more capacity.
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I also notice a large number of people with sociology and even philosophy BAs digging their talons into important planning positions which admittingly irks me the wrong way. Not because those philosophies themselves don't have merit but I've noticed a pattern through my own experiences working for contractors on the geomatics and technical side that a lot of these people have an attitude predicated on an agenda based mostly on qualitative means rather than quantitative. In Saskatoon it was (and still is) really bad.
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The "two solitudes" of qualitative humanities style disciplines and quantitative science/math/engineering disciplines is quite old. Sometimes things went off the rails from having engineers do planning too. Notoriously traffic engineers would design whole neighbourhoods based on optimizing narrow parameters that didn't really capture what is needed to make an area desirable to be in. For an example of this look at early Cogswell Interchange redevelopment studies.
One thing I notice lately is that there are some very abstract and general bachelor's degrees. For example if you graduated high school you can go right into a degree of community design at Dalhousie. Is this really a good area of study for a 19 year old? And are people coming out with master's degrees in planning when they just did 2 similar degrees? It doesn't look like they need much math or science either. This seems like a recipe for groupthink.
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