City administration is trying to kill off the ARPs as fast as they can, replacing them with Local Area Plans that are wider scale, less detailed, and more permissive of change and densification.
I always wonder if we've got the whole system backward to create a great, sustainable and resilient city. To me, our system historically seems to remove local control (or even Council control) over local mobility choices, while granting at-least some level of indirect influence to random hyper-local politics and neighbours over land use. It should be the other way around - locals should have far greater control on their community's mobility (apart from the major network decisions), but far less local influence on land use.
The old ARPs were part of this problem - hyper detailed on land uses, often to the point of impractically and unsustainability. Plans easily became outdated and there was never much land use future-proofing in place to accommodate vast changes in growth and market conditions over time. They were too small and duplicative, making keeping them updated impractical from the day they were written.
Meanwhile all the mobility and traffic issues were hived off to black-box processes outside local influence such as the traffic signal warrant system, that prevents any real mobility improvements that would actually address concerns that inner city communities identified for decades - cut-through traffic, pedestrian safety, traffic noise, student safety around schools, crosswalks.
The result is communities where change in land uses have been slower, more political, more complicated and ultimately more expensive to the net loss of affordability and population capacity in the community. While the actual day-to-day issues of living in these communities were often ignored or removed from the debate of what communities can influence all together - it essentially started a long process in which communities are incentivized to pull all the land use levers they can, because they have so little control over the mobility side.
What would be ideal is a land market that can efficiently respond to changing demands and build density where and when it is needed, but a mobility system that actually responds to local needs first on all non-major corridors. So many of the perceived ills of density are really just "there's going to be too many cars here" issues that can better be addressed from restricting the cars, not restricting the density.
