Oklahoma City's growth: A path that's unsustainable

[SEMIweather]

Nice article in the Oklahoman today about how OKC might finally be coming around to limiting some of the sprawl in the outer portions of the city limits. Includes a good overview of the city's history of basically planning and building new roads well outside of Downtown before new developments were even planned for those area. I'd say this is still continuing to a certain extent today with the proposed eastern turnpike probably being the most notable example. All in all though, the city is clearly going to run into problems sooner rather than later in terms of housing developments far outpacing the road infrastructure. Best example of this is the proposed Kilpatrick Turnpike extension which will have to take an overly curvy route in order to avoid several large subdivisions in the far SW portion of the city.

Given the history of the city, I won't pretend to have a lot of confidence that OKC is actually going to start standing up to developers and limiting the endless subdivisions that have popped up over the past couple of decades, especially given that one of the solutions proposed in the article is simply to de-annex some of the city's land to the surrounding suburbs, who would then presumably let developers build in order to collect additional property tax revenue. Still, it will be interesting to see what happens, as the Metro certainly doesn't look to stop growing anytime soon.

http://newsok.com/article/5505468

[Bobby5280]

I think the quality of urban and suburban planning in metro OKC has been pretty bad in terms of planning for future traffic needs. It's not just a failure on the part of Oklahoma City's planners. It also falls at the feet of planners in suburbs like Mustang, Edmond, Newcastle and Yukon as well as the state government for failing to have overall vision for the future.

There has been good work, such as the projects to transform downtown Oklahoma City. But we're not getting rid of cars any time soon. We're still going to need things like freeways and turnpikes for connecting cities and moving people around so many areas outside of a city center.

The problem is so many suburbs have simply adopted a policy of almost always saying "yes" to any development project, no matter what it did to obstruct a painfully obvious, important traffic corridor. The South extension of the Kilpatrick Turnpike is a perfect example of this. Some idiots allowed a developer to build a few blocks of McMansions directly in the path of where the Kilpatrick Turnpike should have been extended. South Sara Road was the natural location for the extension. But new big box stores, schools and other stuff swallowed up this corridor. So now we have a stupid, very curvy alignment that hooks into Airport Road rather than go farther South to hook over to Norman. Piss poor planning.

There's plenty of things that annoy me about Texas, but I will give them credit for planning future freeway corridors as much as 30 years in advance. Build a divided street with a wide median in the middle. Then build the freeway later when you need it. Oklahoma can't seem to manage something like that.

[coatimundi]

Does OKC have a regional association of governments, like other large urban areas do?
Planning disconnect between municipality and county governments often seems to be the biggest hurdle in limiting sprawl.

[Plutonic Panda]

Does OKC have a regional association of governments, like other large urban areas do?
Planning disconnect between municipality and county governments often seems to be the biggest hurdle in limiting sprawl.

Yes. ACOG

http://www.acogok.org/

[sparker]

Then the next question would be:  does ACOG have enforcement powers as to growth limitations or facility characteristics?  Many of these regional groups' roles are limited to advisory and/or interagency coordination; actual legal "teeth" remain with the separate jurisdictions.  Relatively few metro areas have elected to cede jurisdictional power to an independent regional entity (of course, metro Portland, OR comes to mind as one that has done just that).  It's unlikely that cities & counties needing a continuous flow of new $$ to fund services and public works can and will resist the siren song of funds flowing from developers unless there's an intervening -- and often contrarian -- enforcement agency present.   

[bandit957]

They sound as bad as Cincinnati.