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The Miami area cannot have much sprawl due to the Everglades to the West and Ocean to the East. There is no where else to grow. What sprawl exist in Miami is just about the maximum amount the city will ever see. Miami will only grow up and more urban.
I feel like endersdrift just got done arguing that LA was MORE polycentric and hence "more sprawled." Which one is it?
Riverside/SB is an outlier in southern california because as a UA it never really established its own sustaining industry. It was planned to be a high tech cluster like OC and it was expected that the warehousing industry would spawn other economic activity. Basically, it's a severely economically depressed urban area that happens to be adjacent to a few other merely economically troubled urban areas. People in the inland empire commute to OC and LA much more than people in OC/LA/Ventura commute to each other. Lancaster/Palmdale is similar but actually has more local jobs compared to its population.
Also, I just want to point out how patently false this "history" is: "Los Angeles was one of the world's first low density urbanized areas, resulting from its large geographic metropolitan area. Due to the threat of earthquakes, the city couldn't build upward so it built outward. This in turn, caused wide automobile ownership from residents so they could effectively traverse the large region."
LA had a large metro early on because it had lots of oil which it could use to make electricity cheaply, which it used to power the famous red car interurban lines that established LA's far-flung semi-urban form. Plenty of other places had land. LA just had the means early on to give cheap access to it.
It wasn't until the 1933 Long Beach Earthquake that people thought LA was susceptible to large quakes. SF was considered "where earthquakes happened."Height limits were imposed in 1906 not because of earthquakes, but because the city leaders wanted the sunshine to get down to the street level. It was the same reasoning behind NYC's famous 1916 zoning resolution.
Interesting history. The height limit was really to allow sunshine to hit the streets?
California's urban areas - San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Central Los Angeles, downtown San Diego, even downtown Sacramento and downtown San Jose - are more urban and walkable than almost anywhere in Florida, aside from Miami. And Miami has a TON of unwalkable sprawl. South Beach is the only real exception, and it's not very big.
If you're gonna just talk about the downtowns of CA being walkable, than it's only appropriate that we talk about SoFlas various walkable downtowns. South Florida's walkable areas are waaaaay more than just South Beach. All following places are walkable areas of South Florida:
Downtown Fort Lauderdale
Las Olas
Fort Lauderdale Beach
Downtown West Palm Beach
Downtown Delray Beach
Downtown Boca Raton
Downtown Lake Worth
Downtown Hollywood
Hollywood Beach Boardwalk
Coral Gables
South Miami
Downtown Kendall
Downtown Miami Lakes
Coconut Grove
Palm Beach Island
Downtown Miami
Downtown Palm Beach Gardens
Regarding the thing people keep saying about being hemmed in by natural features and state/federal land, this is true for the following:
Honolulu, LA, Miami, the Bay Area and New Orleans. I've heard that Vegas is also quite impacted by BLM land surrounding it. Not incidentally, these are all among the very highest mean density urbanized areas in the US.
Also, did we agree that "sprawl" means auto-dependent (for sake of our discussion)? Because I just checked and every stat I find online has LA a good few percentage points above Miami. Not that either are all that great.... but something else to consider.
And, the LA MSA and the Miami MSA have almost the same average commute times (about 28 minutes).
If you're gonna just talk about the downtowns of CA being walkable, than it's only appropriate that we talk about SoFlas various walkable downtowns. South Florida's walkable areas are waaaaay more than just South Beach. All following places are walkable areas of South Florida:
Downtown Fort Lauderdale
Las Olas
Fort Lauderdale Beach
Downtown West Palm Beach
Downtown Delray Beach
Downtown Boca Raton
Downtown Lake Worth
Downtown Hollywood
Hollywood Beach Boardwalk
Coral Gables
South Miami
Downtown Kendall
Downtown Miami Lakes
Coconut Grove
Palm Beach Island
Downtown Miami
Downtown Palm Beach Gardens
Ah way more than that, really all of Miami except maybe South Miami, Doral, and Homestead are walkable. Maybe Westchester too.
Also, did we agree that "sprawl" means auto-dependent (for sake of our discussion)? Because I just checked and every stat I find online has LA a good few percentage points above Miami. Not that either are all that great.... but something else to consider.
And, the LA MSA and the Miami MSA have almost the same average commute times (about 28 minutes).
Really because the link you just posted has Miami ahead but you say Miami is behind?
Here's an actual report on data: http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/congestion_data/tables/national/all_nat_cong_tables.pdf (broken link)
LA is 3rd worst
SF is 5th worst
Miami is 11th worst
Having lived in Miami without a car I'll tell you why it has the image it has of not being walkable:
Heat.
Miami is hot and the foliage of palm trees don't offer much shade. They designed it around that with dense strip malls on every main street set right in front of densely packed houses and apartments because few are willing to walk in the heat. It absolutely is walkable but doing so even a short walk, means sweating. Combine that with the idea that a large majority of Miami residents may not be wealthy by US standards but they came to Miami to live the better life from places with no air conditioning or highway system, and the car and air conditioning become symbols of how far they've made it.
I once went to lunch with this girl in school and when I couldn't find parking by the building we were going to I parked on the other side of campus since thats where I was going to be at the end of the day. Now this is a very very very small campus and just walking the 10 minutes from one side to the other her sister happened to drive past and stopped in shock to see her walking. This is just the Miami mentality, its not a fault of Miami the city as far as its walkability goes. I made that same walk multiple times a day, I enjoyed it. But most see Miami as the end all be all of wealth and prosperity - the cuban promised land if you will. If you were to wind up in paradise and told you had to walk in 90 degree weather you'd be taking an air conditioned car too.
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