[SDCBC] Fwd: UT Mid City Transit Article Saturday

[JonIsaacs at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/16/08 7:31:23 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
forester at johnforester.com writes:

> Whether that was due to political expediency or just plain laziness,  is 
> immaterial.  San Diego did not just come into existence 10 or 20 yrs ago.  It 
> did not just discover that it had a traffic problem.  

I have lived in San Diego county for nearly all of my 60 years.  As I recall, 
traffic problems did not surface until probably around 1980.  In the 70's I 
could drive from north county to Mission Bay early in the morning and see one 
or two cars total.  

To my educated eye, the traffic problems are recent and to a great extent a 
result of the developments outside the city limits, Carlsbad, Escondido, Vista, 
Chula Vista, etc...  

 San Diego is a new city, it grew up the era of the automobile and as such is 
dependent on the automobile.  Older cities were hubs for the surrounding 
areas so radial mass transit works reasonably well, suburbs to the city, city to 
the suburbs.  The city is quite compact.  San Diego to a large extent, is one 
large suburb with many hubs that all need to be interconnected.  How do you get 
from Del Mar to Santee or Poway via Mass Transit... 

As John points out, San Diego is an automobile era city and San Francisco was 
a big city by the time the automobile hit the scene.  In 1900, at the dawn of 
the automotive age, San Diego was a city of about 16,000, San Francisco was 
about 342,000. Since then San Diego has grown about by a factor of 70 while San 
Francisco has not quite doubled.   San Francisco was a mature city in 1900.

http://www.sandiegohistory.org/links/sandiegopopulation.htm

http://www.abag.ca.gov/abag/overview/datacenter/popdemo/sanfran.html

Jon




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