My last piece on nodal development felt like a demolition, throwing an idea meant for urban areas out of the rural planning conversation. (I doubt its supporters feel I succeeded, but that's normal.) The question that always comes after demolition, though, is what's next?
I'm not sure there has to be a "next", at least not a "next grand story". As it turns out, we already have a set of planning tools that came before the county's push for nodal development, built on years of listening to the people of Dryden and a careful study of its carrying capacity and infrastructure. I'm not going to say that the Dryden Comprehensive Plan (10.6MB PDF) is perfect - it's definitely not - but that vision at least seems much less likely to create sprawl and traffic in the name of opposing sprawl and traffic than does the current zoning vision.
Here's a rough comparison, though the discussion of hamlet zones is far more uncertain than it seemed then.
I'll have more on this, but got enough questions from people that it seemed worth pointing to an alternate direction.
Posted by simon at March 5, 2011 6:35 AM in nodal development , planning and zoning