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Economics and growth

Land use and transportation planning

The city under study will be San Diego and the element under consideration will be land use and transportation planning. The implementation of the growth strategy of the city highly depends on the coordination of transportation planning and land use. The strategy calls for infill, re-development, and the growth to be targeted. The strategy requires that villages of San Diego increase the choices of personal transportation and minimize transportation impacts by developing designs that pay attention to the interests of the people travelling by foot, bicycle, transit, as well as automobiles. Focused development and transit stops linking where people work and where they live, shop, and even recreate makes transit very convenient for most people. It enables a cost effective expansion of the transit services. Housing in mixed commercial areas gives several people the opportunity to live next to their place of work and at the same time support the use of shops and services in the neighborhood. As such, the city of San Diego is able to use the land use element through land use and transportation strategy. The integration of land use and transit planning is shown by the land use or transit connections map. The map helps to identify the existing designated community plan, corridors, commercial centers, and residential areas in the city that urgently need transit services.

To achieve its goals and objectives, the city of San Diego uses regional coordination to effectively guide transportation panning and land use. The city also makes use of investment in the regional facilities and the preservation of any open space that can span multiple jurisdictions while at the same time working closely with various sectors and organizations in the country to further their common goals. The City works with federal representatives and the state on regulatory, legislative, and budgetary matters that have great impacts on the city of San Diego, while at the same time working closely with counterparts in Mexico on bi-national or border issues. Governmental agencies play a very important role in the efforts of regional coordination and transportation and planning agencies. The element involves encouraging the counties and the cities to increase employment and residential concentrations in the regions with the best transit connections and preserving important open spaces. The city adopts programmes such as Integrated Regional Infrastructure Strategy, which acts as a unifying document in a number of regional initiatives that covers topics such as economic prosperity, housing, environment resource protection, and habitat preservation. The element seeks to examine and determine the City’s relationships with tribal governments, its neighboring counties, and the northern Baja California. The general plan for the City of California is designed to support and complement the aspect of transportation planning and land use.

The General Plan for the City of San Diego integrates a number of basic principles, which describe the basic structure of the City’s plan and at the same time reflecting the core values guiding its developments as listed below.

Open space network created by canyons, river valleys, parks, habitats, oceans, and beaches.

Diverse residential communities created by open space networks.

Walkable and compact mixed-use villages consisting of various scales within the community.

Employment centers for the economy.

Integrated transportation network of roadways, freeways, and transit that effectively link villages and communities to the employment centers.

Well maintained, affordable, and high quality public facilities that can serve workers, visitors, and the City’s population.

Sites and historic districts that respects the City’s heritage.

Balanced communities offering opportunities for San Diegans and share the responsibilities of the City.

A sustainable and clean environment, and

A high aesthetic standard.

An updated General Plan translates organizing principles into new policy directions. Since less than 4% of the city’s land normally remain vacant for new developments, the General Plan’s policies focuses on how to invest on the empty land and reinvest in the existing communities. New policies have been formulated to in support of the changes in the patterns of development to emphasize combining shopping, housing, civic uses, and employment uses at different scales in the village centers. By primarily directing growth towards the village centers, the strategy works towards preserving established residential neighborhoods and at the same time manage the City’s long term economic growth. The major purpose for establishing a land use element is to guide development and future growth into a sustainable development pattern while enhancing or maintaining the quality of life in the communities. The community planning and land use element provides the policies for the implementation of the city’s strategies in context of the planning programme for San Diego community. The element seeks to address the issues of land use applying to the City as a whole while at the same time identifying the community planning programme and site-specific recommendations. The land use element forms a structure that seeks to respect the diversity of the community as a whole and including policy directions that govern the community plans.

The element addresses policy consistency and zoning, process for plan amendments, balanced communities, airport land use planning, environmental land use, and equitable development. The element also has sections that cover California Coastal Act and the implementations in San Diego and the implementation and history of proposition A; the Growth Initiative of 1985. The Land Use Element dwells on seven categories of the General Plan: parks, agriculture, residential, retail and services, commercial employment, industrial employment, semi-public facilities, and so on. The land uses are normally displayed on the street system map and the general plan land use. The map is used to identify planned street system, arterials, collector streets, and freeways necessary to serve the demands of vehicular transportation resulting from the City’s development in accordance with the General Plan. The map is based on circulation system maps and a detailed land use adopted for every community. The land use categories enable a Citywide, general view of the land distribution and use.

The City of San Diego has over fifty planning areas with the community planning programme having diverse and long history; the earliest community plans having been adopted in 1960. Each document uniquely reflects the trends and issues facing the community and includes the corresponding strategies to help in implementing the community goals and objectives. The community plans represent a very significant component of San Diego’s Land Use Element since they contain detailed land designations and description of land distributions. The City has jurisdictions that state the diversity, size, and patterns of land use necessitating the community based plans of land use. As much as the community plan focuses on specific needs of the community, its recommendations and policies must harmoniously remain in line with the overall general plan, other community plans, and the citywide policies. In summary, the element is very relevant to the topic of study since land is very vital for the economic growth of any city or country and it also makes sense for the City of San Diego, which is striving very hard to develop its transportation system and infrastructure. The element is very practical since land use has always been at the interest of every nation seeking to achieve its goals and objectives of attaining high economic growths.