The Secret Cornell

Cornell’s Design Connect “Complete Streets” is a transportation “design interventions” that drops the traffic and esthetic of a “mini-city” bedroom community into the middle of a green rural landscape.

Design Connect’s “Best Planning Practices” not only accept the existence of  major urban sprawl in a rural town; they’re advocating “changes to town policy and planning procedure” to greatly increase its size and density through “urban design overlay zones,” and recommend that the town “increase density and provide affordable housing,” change zoning with “reduced minimum open space requirements,” “Density Bonuses,” and “Amended Density Requirements,” – and build a new infrastructure to accommodate that increase – merely tacking on the goals of efficiency and low carbon emissions onto what is clearly not the “best planning practice” for a rural community.

Their recommendations for Lansing include “redevelopment of underutilized properties”; while at the same time there are block after block of old wood-frame houses in downtown Ithaca that would be perfect sites for redevelopment as high-density housing, and thousands of unused acres suitable for building in Ithaca surrounding the City’s core.

The redevelopment of Ithaca’s unused and underutilized building lots, and creation of affordable and appropriate urban housing, would solve the housing shortage, require no new infrastructures, efficiently use existing bus routes, be in the closest proximity to jobs in the education, business, institutional, and health care sectors, increase access to the cultural center of the county, and have the highest possible walkability and the greatest alternative transport choices for residents, while at the same time reducing the carbon footprint for transportation to a minimum.

It would solve every one of Tompkins County’s housing and transportation problems but one: it’s a solution that Cornell does not want.

Everywhere; there is the exhortation for more, and higher-density housing in the town of Lansing: high-density housing for affordable housing, high-density housing for sustainability, high-density housing for the environment, high-density housing for lower taxes, for the aging, for reducing carbon emissions, for curing cancer, for bringing about World Peace . . . the high-density housing that Cornell plans for rural Lansing in order to maintain Ithaca’s gentrified, college-town lifestyle for students and professors.

Cornell’s Complete Streets “design intervention” takes a child’s puzzle-book approach to solving the real-world problems of urbanizing traffic; by ignoring the practical consequence of high-volume, slow-moving traffic: people will look for ways to avoid it.

Lansingville Road is a 20-foot wide rural roadway that has seen a great increase in through-cutting traffic in recent years: cars, trucks, even commercial tractor trailers speed down the middle of the road and routinely pass on the double-yellow line.  

Lansingville Road is now being recommended by Google Maps as a quicker route than the state highway; but authorities still refuse to impose speed limits, give out tickets, or even admit there is a problem.

Tompkins County claims that they don’t have the money for traffic control in rural Lansing — but they do have the money to re-pave Lansingville Road this year: further incentivizing its use as a high-speed, no law traffic corridor through a poor rural community.

Cornell’s “Complete Streets” for the town of Lansing is yet another poorly thought out solution: with a well thought out agenda — Cornell’s expansion and profit.