91–100 of 710 posts
Things that The West can learn from The East: Russia/Eastern Europe: 1. Free-for-all, mixed zoning. You own the land, build whatever you want as long as it's not a munitions factory (Most of Russia, Kazakhstan) 2. Market driven, privatized public transit (Most of Eastern Europe) 3. Small city blocks that let throught traffic. 4. Market controlled access to distric heating/cooling (Yakutsk an extreme example of privat…
If you're going to have a dense, intercity area, I suppose I'd argue that the question isn't about "human-driven cars", which brings up the largely unrealistic consideration of self-driving cars on ordinary roads, but simply: Build the city center entirely around public transit. Rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely. Why bother with buses if you…
I think light rail is awful. Heavy rail even worse. I just spent a week in Paris. Do you know much faster it's transportation is than walking? It's about a 2x multiplier. That's it. I can take multiple subway connections and get there in 30 minutes or walk the streets in 60. Several hundred billion in subway is no faster than a moving sidewalk in an airport. We can do better. We must do better.
If you give arbitrary power to those who enforce the rules, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. If you don't value predictability and consistency of enforcement, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. In fact, the rules can fit onto one page. The Ten Commandments are pretty short.
However, if you want to have a predictable body of law administered fairly, it's going to take a lot more than 100 pages. Even the Ten Commandments aren't that simple when it's time for practical application. You can simply decide on a case-by-case basis and not write down what you do, and then it will fit in 100 pages. But if you give notice to others about what your decisions are, and you are bound by previous decisions...well, that sounds a lot like a common-law system. Decisions in such a system are going to exceed 100 pages.
These things aren't as simple as it seems...there are good reasons why the Supreme Court once considered what it meant to "use" a firearm.
I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_pro…
> built for people, rather than cars I wish people would stop with this drivel. There are PEOPLE in the cars. The cities are built for people. A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc). Taking it away would be like removing computers becaus…
I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_pro…
Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something. I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.
For instance, when we lived in Padova: we'd ride bikes around the neighborhood when the weather was good. I'd walk to get groceries. My wife and I often rode bikes downtown for 'date night'. We'd take the car to do larger shopping trips on occasion, or to do things further from town. We'd take the family downtown on public transportation. So it was a 'right tool for the job' situation.
I don't think we really need any fancy, expensive technical solutions like burying cars in tunnels - just making streets a bit slower, and safer for bikes and pedestrians would be a great start.
This is a fantastic idea, I would expect no less from YC. A couple of thoughts I have off the top of my head: 1. Design with hyper-loop in mind from day one. 2. Easy access right of way for utilities, most cities bury everything which is silly, there should be an easily accessed common right of way so that fiber, water sewer etc. can be easily accessed for upgrades or repair without having to dig up the streets. 3. C…
For cable/fiber/telephone/power, overhead was common, though burying is replacing it.
But what's the alternative to burying for water and sewer? I suppose in principle you could go overhead with that, too, but that seems...unappealing in a wide number of reasons.
The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is because that is where the jobs are. This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you ima…
It would be better to move a few hundred startups. Startups sometimes grow up to be big tech companies, and it's much easier to move tiny companies. We could, uh, help with that.
That said -- perhaps you guys have the brand and connections now where you could nurture the talent/advice/investment ecosystem in an entirely new location. If so, that could be a really great thing.
I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_pro…
> built for people, rather than cars I wish people would stop with this drivel. There are PEOPLE in the cars. The cities are built for people. A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc). Taking it away would be like removing computers becaus…
Every other method of high-density transportation is also a "human amplifier" and vastly more efficient.
"Built for people" means that you aren't forced to have a car to live in a location. There are plenty of demographics that would prefer to not have a car if they could.
Removing the need for car ownership would be big step forward and communities that have this property are highly sought-after.
I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_pro…
> built for people, rather than cars I wish people would stop with this drivel. There are PEOPLE in the cars. The cities are built for people. A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc). Taking it away would be like removing computers becaus…
Many cities absolutely do prioritize cars over people - huge roads that are unsafe for other users, mandatory parking requirements, and tons and tons of neighborhoods that are predicated on the idea of using a car for pretty much all transportation.
Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-to-describe sense of 'opportunity'. Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in popu…
> Property in uninteresting cities is very cheap, because nobody wants to be there. Many more people live in 'uninteresting' cities than 'interesting' ones. They're cheap because of the relatively big supply, not necessarily because of the lack of demand.
Worldwide, situation is funnier, 50% of population lives on 1% of the land: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Where...