[spdrun]

It’s not terribly complicated. Run a walking path between cul-de-sacs, along property lines. Big enough for bicycles and pedestrians, not big enough for cars.

[spdrun]

No harm in going to your bank. Worst they can tell you is no.

Title agency will handle the actual transaction/title insurance anyway. You might need to ask a lawyer to draw up the actual sale contract.

Or you can buy the standard sale contract forms used by brokers here. Apparently, you don’t actually need to be a broker, though they charge you double if you’re not a “member.”

http://store.car.org/car-standard-forms.html

Using a “borrowed” copy without paying would probably be a copyright violation, but draft/sample forms seem to be available for free…

http://www.car.org/3550/pdf/283726/396788/809175/RPA_11-14_Draft11%28Web_Post%29.pdf

[spdrun]

So the logical extension of your idea is to replace parts of San Diego with Kowloon walled cities? 🙂

I see no problem with encouraging Eastern-type “sprawl” where you have smaller individual houses (not McHouses) on a true network of streets, often with businesses and business centers mixed in. It’s the network aspect, as opposed to having only a few entrances from major roads, that does wonders for walkability and biking.

[spdrun]

If you think about it, Silicon Valley is pretty darn suburban, other than San Francisco itself. And it’s been the center of innovation for the past 40 years or so.

Don’t get me wrong: I like dense cities. But I don’t see Manhattan (or even Boston) style density as a pre-requisite to innovation.

[spdrun]

Will self-driving cars just encourage sprawl to the point that commuting becomes annoying again?

But carli has a good point: transit can be made self-driving as well. If you don’t need a motorman, it becomes cheaper to run shorter rail vehicles more frequently. If you have enough vehicles running, you can also change up the routings, have more “lines” that are combinations of parts of formerly distinct lines. Maybe move from a “train” paradigm to a “pod” technology, where pods carry 10-20 people rather than 40-80 in a rail car.

Rail has certain advantages over rubber tires. Easy to power electrically without worrying about care and feeding of batteries. Inherently self-guiding. Easier to do high speeds as compared to cars. When I lived outside of Philly, you could look through the front windows of the trains into the driver’s cab and see the digital speedometer. It was surprising to see those 1950s-era railcars get up to 65-70 mph between towns a few miles apart at most when the streets connecting the towns had speed limits of 30-40 mph.

Less friction compared to rubber tires on asphalt. (Believe it or not, a single person can push a modern rail car with roller bearings by hand: try that with a bus or truck!). Also, tracks tend to be visible and it’s obvious where stops are, so people tend to actually use rail transit. Self advertising.

[spdrun]

Santa Barbara is a quaint place. But it has no major interstate, no large international airport, no big companies… a place where rich old people live. Boring!

Some people like to live in a place like that, though. Not everyone wants to live in NYC, London, or Singapore.

Nothing wrong with the lack of big companies — smaller companies and universities tend to be less horrible to work for anyway. I wouldn’t mind living in a Santa Cruz, S.L.O., or Santa Barbara honestly, but I wouldn’t want it to change to a megalopolis.

All of the master-planned communities that I’ve seen have ended up being poor simulacra of vibrant urban neighborhoods. Lots of ticky-tacky chain businesses on the ground floors, little that’s fun or interesting.

I’d sooner live somewhere like North Park, Golden Hill, the beach cities, or even SESD, all of which grew organically versus being built by the same Stepford developer.

[spdrun]

To play Beelzebub’s attorney: different cities are different. Why does San Diego need to emulate denser cities in order to be “world-class?” And why does it need to have the label of “world-class” rather than just being an enjoyable and beautiful place to live?

[spdrun]

When I used to go to the county dump when fixing up a house on the NJ shore, they’d weigh your car before you emptied it, then after and charge accordingly.

[spdrun]

It will probably take 10-15 years to do. Meanwhile, there’s a perfectly good rail line running along the coast about 2.5 miles away.

It looks like the UTC blue line extension will share the Coaster’s right-of-way for much of the way, making a lot of it easy to build.

San Diego Plans Extension to Its Trolley Network, Mostly Skipping Over Inner City

So building a long divergent right-of-way to Carmel Valley would likely be more expensive and time-consuming.

It’s a shame that the Blue Line isn’t being built now. With improved signaling and train control systems, the trend is for regulators to grant exceptions to allow lighter rail cars to use “heavy” rail lines.

Blue Line should have had shared/interchangeable tracks with the Coaster line and been electrified at 25,000 volts A.C. (world standard) or 3,000 volts D.C. (if they didn’t want transformers in the cars) not at lower trolley voltages. Done right, it could have been a back-door way to start electrifying the main coast line towards LA.

[spdrun]

AN: you have to start somewhere, but money is finite. I’d argue that:
(1) If possible, extension of the light rail to Sorrento Valley (and interconnection with the main coast line trains there)
(2) Double tracking as much of the main coast line as possible between L.A. and San Diego.
(3) Electrifying the same (watch the NIMBYs scream “OMG … EMF!”)
(4) New Coaster station at Del Mar Heights Road
(5) Separated bikeway and/or walkways roughly parallel to Del Mar Heights road. Bus transit from One Paseo to the Coaster.

… would be a better use of money than a light-rail extension that dead-ends at One Paseo. Unless the developers want to pay for it themselves.

(4) and (5) should be priorities and are doable.

[spdrun]

Well, train to One Paseo isn’t happening for the next ten years at least. Consider the fact that PLANNED completion for the UTC extension is 2019 (make that 2020-1), an extension further north hasn’t even been planned, and the amount of red tape and NIMBYism involved in coastal CA.

[spdrun]

Light rail from UTC to the intersection of El Camino Real and Del Mar Heights is another ~5 miles, probably longer since the terrain isn’t flat. Connecting to the coast line and running on existing tracks, then up Del Mar Heights isn’t an option due to the grades involved (unless one wants a light rail cog railway!).

That’s almost half the length of the existing 11 mile extension. Who will pay for it and deal with environmental/NIMBY issues?

What about a station on the existing main coast line at Del Mar Heights Road and bus rapid transit east/west along the road? And if we’re dreaming, electrify and double-track the coast line from San Diego to LA while we’re at it and use lightweight electric trains that can accelerate hard between stops to cut schedule times. Right now, the lumbering diesel double-deck dinosaurs that they use are far slower than they need to be.

Temporarily, there could also be bus transit between One Paseo and Sorrento Valley station, maybe down Del Mar Heights to Solana station as well.

[spdrun]

As an aside, this developer is pitching Uber as a solution for the lack public transit.

Uber is a good replacement for taxi dispatchers. Transit it is not.

[spdrun]

Density doesn’t make for a good development, necessarily. It’s a combination of mixed-use (ability to walk to interesting businesses), access to transit, access to jobs, access to interesting aspects of nature (beach or mountains), interesting architecture, interesting people. Something that can’t easily be replicated in a planned community.

The best dense neighborhoods grow organically. To give an extreme example, would you rather live in a dense area of tower blocks with nothing on the ground floor, or somewhere like a less dense college town with houses walking distance to woods and/or a beach? (Think of Santa Cruz if you’ve been there.)

Personally, I’d pick a 2 bedroom condo or bungalow in North Park or one of the beach cities over this thing.

[spdrun]

Is it possible to bike on the roads connecting the development to the coast road?

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