#IfIwasChiefPlanner

Since this is not a "If I were King" question, but that of a responsible head of planning, I'd focus on a variety of relatively boring changes to technical regulations most people don't know about. 

TRANSPORTATION

1. Make it legal to 'park' parklets/food trucks on the curb for parking rates.
   Use Reid Ewing's research to estimate actual parking requirements for residential development, and map the city parking requirements accordingly
2. SFPark-style program designed to ensure parking availability through appropriate pricing.
   
3. Temporary 'holiday' on car traffic for use as outdoor space
4. Enact a 'bollard warrant' for any location where a car is on the sidewalk twice
5. Any neighborhood with parking issues gets a parking pass. Parking passes can be sold and transferred; no new parking passes can be created.
6. All 2-direct cycle-ways are bollarded (to prevent drivers misunderstanding them as car-lanes).
7. Sidewalk completeness audit, including width. Following up the next year with a sidewalk condition audit. 
8. Narrow all collector streets to 2 10' travel lanes; add staggered curb extension along the street (chicanes) bulb-out the curbs accordingly, to a 25 mph standard; 3" mountable curb in truck relevant locations.
9. Replace all low-traffic intersections with roundabouts.
10. 'Bench standard' for public seating, based on Streetlight data pedestrian traffic. Sufficient seating for 2% of traffic flow. 
11. Replace arterial on-street parking with dedicated bus lanes; median running or BAT lanes where appropriate
12. Enact a curb-cut elimination program along arterial streets, to eliminate those that are too close to intersections, too long, or no longer relevant
13. Ban new drive-thrus and gas stations. 
14. Pedestrian tunnels/bridges across/under expressways at the mid-point between interchanges
15. Replace arterial bike lanes with curb separated bike-lanesx2) establish bi-directional cycleway on one side of major streets.  
16. Bikes lanes start with paint, then 'vertical paint', then curb separation. Where safety warrants (ie, where any cyclist is hit), add a jersey barrier
17. Road diets on all 4-lane roads lacking safety areas/parking
18. Get the fire chief to accept a 'length limit' for the clear space in the international fire code 
19. Curb management program for 'conflicting' locations where parking isn't being used normally, but for restaurant pick-ups or deliveries--also for Uber/Lyft
20. Replace on-street parking with bicycle lanes where feasible/appropriate
21. Speed Audit: Use Streetlight to find out where average speeds > speed limit; adjust street geometric design accordingly - special focus on extreme outliers (racing)
22. Tactical urbanism approach to add 'temporary' bike lanes through use of jersey barriers/etc.
23. Mandatory sidewalks with geometric design associated with a 25+ mph speed limit. 
24. Mid-block single-lane 'neckdown' in residential neighborhoods.  
    

LAND USE

1. Eliminate (irrelevant) fire setbacks for masonry buildings
2. Ban on new cul-de-sac--all streets must connect to another street. 
3. Establish by-right ADU designs
4. Legalize factory-built housing (limit it to larger than a trailer-width to fight off the NIMBY... maybe limit it to multi-story structures)
5. Remove billboards as a 'compliant use'.  
6. Residential zoning code that reflects fire-code building types. 
   
7. 'Vancouverism' height for set-back exchanges on commercial office
   
8. Japanese style 'shadow zoning', with height limit proportional to street width.
1. Rivers/canals may be shadowed.
9. Use 'senior housing' as a density beach-head, with 4-over-1 apartments. 
10. Awnings over the public right of way do not count as 'permanent fixtures'.
11. Legalize single-stair buildings with cross ventilation--limit # of units (or square feet/story). 
    
12. Require developers to forecast property tax revenue (and costs) associated with proposed development.
13. Mandatory condition assessments of condo structural stability. 
14. Regulate by lot coverage and building height, not FAR. 

MISC

1. Disclose all procurement costs - bids, contracts, etc.
2. Eliminate employee parking allowance; change to free transit pass
3. Publicly accessible geodatabase of all transportation assets
4. Establish a Twitter account to crowdsource pics of traffic and building code violations
5. Abolish design review
6. Require public meetings to have a zoom/call-in speaker queue, so the attendees can include evening workers and people with children.
7. Ordinance that will require a clear path on city sidewalks during construction projects
8. Require employers who pay for or subsidize parking for their commuting employees to provide an equivalent taxable cash benefit to employees who do not drive and park
   

PLANS

1. Transit Plan (Bus/Rail)
   
2. Transit Oriented Development Plan
   
3. Connectivity study, identifying missing active transport links
   
4. Freight Access - Truck routes, routes trucks are taking that they shouldn't.
   
5. Housing Audit - compare jobs-housing balance vs. regional total using 30min buffers; do it by income categories.
   

Airports and Urbanized Areas

When it comes to airport enplanements, (as with most count data) the distribution is skewed: A very small number of entities represent a large portion of the total. When it comes to airports, a very small number of airports are 'primary commercial service', meaning that the airport represents more that 1% of all passenger enplanements in America. The other day I read that there are only 17 of them, (with the rest of the 508 commercial airports making up the total [1]). 

Much is said of mega-regions and mega-region planning, but if we really want to talk urbanized areas, we need to talk travel-sheds. (Metro areas are often flawed because inclusion is done on a county-level basis). Suggests to me that we start defining urbanized area by drive to airport.

My wife's parent's would sometimes drive from Tehachepi to Long Beach to pick someone up (about 2 hours and 15 minutes).  

Urban areas get defined by commuter sheds, but in polycentric region, what is within the commuter-shed on one side of the region may not be on the other side of the region. Using airport access as a criterion gets around this particular issue. If you prefer one airport to another, you are within that urban area.

Places with multiple commercial service airports muddy the picture a bit, but might still be delineated as one urban areas, with multiple metropolitan division. 

[1]: https://www.faa.gov/airports/environmental/vale/media/vale_eligible_airports.xlsx

On discount rates

The future is uncertain. Alternate investments exist. Thus, the present value of money is higher than the future value of money. Spending it now means we could do some good now. Spending it now means we can't spend it on other things later. 

How to determine where to spend money? We make some estimates about how much benefit we are going to get for spending it one way versus the other*. Basically, we make some Silly Wild-Ass Guesses (SWAG) about how many people are going to benefit, and how much they are going to benefit. This will involve a certain amount of math, typically in quantifying how much benefit and how much that benefit is worth, which is then multiplied by how many people get the benefits. Do this for both. The one with the larger number wins. If the two things cost different amounts, it's slightly more complex: To get the benefit/cost ratio, you divide the benefit by the respective costs. Again, the bigger number wins. 

 Now, lets talk about time. 'A dollar today is worth more a dollar tomorrow', epigramatically speaking. More realistically might be '$365 today is worth more than $365 in a year'.  Because in that year, you might die, the guy who promised you the $365 might die, hyperinflation might take hold, etc. (Any inflation makes this a truism: a dollar today buys more than it will buy in the future). 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' is a way of reflecting that risk premium. 

But how much less? Nobody knows, but some rate is typically used to assess what percent less money is worth next year than the present year.

* Not spending the money isn't an option in this decision context. If you are evaluating alternatives, you are assuming you've already got (or will get) the money.