by Altus on Thu Jan 13, 2011 8:18 am
My wife works at Aviva. She takes a ride share van, which starts it's trip in Marshalltown, made up of all Aviva employees. Of her peers in the van she's the closest to the office, and we live north of Bondurant. My neighbor also works west and takes a ride share from Ankeny.
We're no different than Chicago or DC, for example. The difference is that instead of ride share vans, they have trains that reach out quite a distance. People still live Way out west in Chicago (or north), and work downtown. The suburbs also have major headquarters located in them. The north run out of DC reaches out like 20 or 30 miles, doesn't it?
We'll need a few more million people around here before trains could becomes self sustaining. Our paradigm is going to take a while to shift. I do think that the old inter-urban line would have been great to capture and rebuild...
As long as I've studied and been involved in City Planning, one thing has held true; people act similarly, regardless of the generation. We wouldn't have hundereds of books talking about first and second tier, inner and outer rings, third and fourth rings, etc. if this were not the case. Most people do not want to live downtown. So many aspects of it are great, the romanticism is inviting but, in the end, we're in the American paradigm. Wide open spaces. Not saying it's right, but that's the case.
Specific to our metro, DSM and it's power brokers should have been planning for the annexation of the smaller towns generations ago. Why would a company, built purely for profit, locate 15 or 20 miles one way or the other? MONEY. The competition between the suburbs is far too much for DSM to tackle on it's own at this point.
If we want to talk about attainable effeciencies, let's think about consolidating about 40% or 50% of our 99 counties. Think of the energy savings.
