The Assessment

I want to acknowledge that there are others in Elk Grove who are doing their part to try to make this a better place. I'm certainly not one of them; I bitterly complain on a lone blog and in the end this doesn't go very far.

Having recently posted about Elk Grovian trees, I found a tree assessment the city did a few years ago, found here. What I take away from this assessment is 1) there are others who realize the benefits of trees, 2) I was pretty close to their assessment with my own Franklin Blvd. 'assessment' and 3) how galactically stupid we are for thinking we can obfuscate shitty urban design with trees.

I'm not entirely facetious here. If I may quote the first section in their recommendations:

Implement best practices in tree planning, planting and maintenance:

• Design more separated sidewalks with landscape strips to replace, or add to, front yard street trees on private property;
• When front yard trees are used, design for narrower streets to optimize the street canopy...

This is exactly WHAT WE AREN'T DOING! The first two recommendations come in, and the planning department says "Can't do it. Not in our playbook." Since this assessment, I can't find one street in Elk Grove where either of these recommendations were followed. We can't do it in this city, because to do so would require us to build something other than our curvilinear, auto-dominated shitscapes and that's all our codes can deliver.

Urban planning is a joke. A joke, because since 1940 we've thrown out three thousand years of human scaled living histories for sets of motor vehicle and building codes that dictate only setbacks, street widths, parking requirements per 100sf, and other shit you can't do. They tell us nothing about how things ought to be laid out. There's no god-damn planning; it's only rule-following.

How much more obvious can it be to build narrow streets with big trees? To allow canopies to arch together? To define a sense of place? To soften hardscapes? To allow for safe pedestrian passage along with motor vehicles? This is a crucial component in what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood and we completely ignore it! A narrow street is illegal, illegal! because the codes say so! Elk Grove streets are designed to allow tractor-trailers (or...firetrucks) to pull a u-turn at any location, so fuck all you pedestrians! If you can't afford a private vehicle you're unimportant in our community. We're going to make streets wide enough so you stand a much better chance at getting killed by a speeding minivan. We're going to make it so that any chronically late suburban househusband will run you over as he can easily negotiate any street at 57mph. We're going to allow for 30 foot radius street corners so that you spend twice as much time crossing the street walking twice as far to get hit by cars moving twice as fast.

Enough!