The constitution mandates that we build highways, but not bike lanes. So says Duncan Hunter, a freshman Republican congressman from suburban San Diego.

I'm not making this up. A short interview with Hunter, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, posted by DC Streetsblog is the talk of the alternative transportation crowd.

"SB: But you're OK with mandating highways?"

The clamp on local governments in California grows only tighter and tighter.

The number and detail of state mandates continues to increase. The ability to raise revenue continues to decrease. The amount of litigation never decreases. Redevelopment is in doubt. Keeping a city or county out of financial or legal trouble seems to get more difficult every year.

Those were the implicit – and sometimes explicit – messages during the UCLA Extension Land Use Law and Planning Conference in Los Angeles last Friday. As always at the conference, expert practitioners and analysts reviewed last year's lawmaking, rulemaking and courtroom activity, and speculated about the year ahead. It was difficult to detect many rays of light for cities or counties.

When organizers of the UCLA Extension Land Use Law and Planning Conference sponsored sessions on ethics in previous years, yawns and frequent checking of cell phones was the overwhelming response.

They expect a far more engaged audience this year for the session titled "Unringing the Bell: When Land Use Decision Making and Ethics Collide."

A case involving the relationship of the Subdivision Map Act with the Coastal Act and Mello Act has been accepted for review by the state Supreme Court.

A National Football League team could be playing in downtown Los Angeles in less than five years.

So says Tim Leiweke, president of AEG, the development company owned by Phil Anschutz that wants to build a downtown football stadium.

Public transit was one deciding factor when free agent pitching ace Cliff Lee chose to sign a contract with the Philadelphia Phillies last week. I am not making this up.

The left hander had previously pitched for the Phillies, and his wife, Kristen, enjoyed urban living in Philadelphia, including its abundant transit options. She didn't care for the Dallas area, where her husband played last season for the Texas Rangers.

"We liked the easy travel on a train for our kids to other cities and the good cultural experience for them here," Kristen Lee told the Philadelphia Daily News.

Twenty years from now, while we scoot up and down the state on 200 mph trains, we could look back on the current "train to nowhere" episode and laugh at the furor over the project's starting point.

Or, twenty years from now, as we crawl up and down Interstate 5 and Highway 99 in bumper-to-bumper traffic, we could look back on the "train to nowhere" episode and cry over a decision that killed high-speed rail's chance of ever succeeding.

Or, twenty years from now, we may simply look back at the "train to nowhere" episode and smile, comfortable that we never sent tens of billions of dollars down that rat hole.

There have not been a great many surprises in the world of California land use planning and real estate development during 2010. At least that's what I can see now, with the year nearly complete. But in late 2009, I made three predictions for the coming year that turned out to be about half right.

My three predictions were:

• Housing production will increase. This was too easy, and I was right. But not by a lot.

• The SB 375 backlash will start to hit. A number of builders and local government officials jumped off the SB 375 bandwagon this year, but I expected the fallout to reach the general public. It didn't. I got this one half right.

It appears the federal government is on the verge of reducing funding for public transit and other means of "alternative" transportation. Such cutbacks could be bad news for California, where alternative transportation is mainstream and the state government is barely solvent.

What the government builds and where it builds things can have a major impact on a community and on the way generations of people live their lives. The siting of college campuses in California provides a poignant, and depressing, case study.