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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: New Cities

#121

Post by kylec »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #73
kylec wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see what self-driving cars and plans and 3D printers have to do with it. You can have friends and be near everything you need in a small town of 20,000 people. They have grocery stores and hospitals and pretty much anything else you'd need. Amazon will still deliver in 2 days with Prime shipping. What I'd like to avoid are the large financial costs associated with living in a large city. I'd also like…

If that's what you want and you don't mind shit weather, move to Ithaca, NY. I saw what the Valley had to offer when I worked at Apple and came away with the same grumblings you mention. Upstate New York in general is a great place for the kind of living you describe. For not much money you could buy - or even better build - a home in the middle of nowhere with a 30 minute drive into town with very light traffic most…

The weather wouldn't bother me, but I wouldn't be able to move out of SV without giving up my current job and salary. That's the part I'd like to change - I want to separate the decision of where to work from the decision of where to live. Once I can do that, there are a lot of places that I would be interested in moving to.

Re: New Cities

#122

Post by massysett »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #106
massysett wrote: post #93

"How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?" 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 pr…

I disagree. If you site the city in the US, you can use the existing governance models. Most of the what YC wants to do can be done with local zoning ordinances (tied together with restricted deeds or community lands trusts/co-ops), with the populace (hypothetically made up of citizens who are conducive to this experiment) voting at the local city government level. This is not new territory. They're building a master…

Local zoning ordinances don't fit in 100 pages. The huge body of real estate law that is necessary to give force to restricted deeds doesn't fit in 100 pages.

Maybe they mean their 100 pages looks something like "The Law of the City of Newcity is identical to the Law of Dallas, with the following changes:"? Well, the law of Dallas does not fit in 100 pages.

Law is complicated because we have built a complicated society. This cannot be willed away by talking about 100 pages.

Re: New Cities

#123

Post by dirtae »

I hope that as part of this, some investigation will be done into pluralistic representation and better voting systems (e.g., Condorcet method[1]). If there is a minority viewpoint that can get, say 20% of the vote, but cannot get a majority in any given district, it would be nice if that minority viewpoint could still get some representation on city council, etc., as opposed to "winner take all" type of elections.

(I'd like to see this at the state and national levels too, but that's a big task, so starting at the city level seems best.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

Re: New Cities

#124

Post by loceng »

bagels wrote: post #22

This has been tried before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California

Different times, and maybe that'll be a good place to start - with lots of land available.

Re: New Cities

#125

Post by chris_7 »

mikeash wrote: post #107
chris_7 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars do not amplify throughput, they reduce it. http://urbanist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454714d69e2017d3c37d8a...

The throughput of a column of people walking from NYC to LA would be quite good. But I certainly wouldn't want to cross the country that way. Other things matter too.

This is about cities. Highways between LA and NYC are not "cities" (cities shouldn't have highways in them, see Robert Moses's destruction of New York), so I don't see the relevance (also, fly?).

That image also doesn't include that one of those drivers might kill someone, and most of them will turn aggressively into crosswalks. I see and experience those turns every day in New York, and read about the unpunished deaths almost daily. Enough of it.

Re: New Cities

#126

Post by fudged71 »

apendleton wrote: post #41
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #13

> We now have major technologies such as smart grids, autonomous vehicles, etc Not really. Autonomous vehicles are still coming. We don't know what infrastructure we'll need to support them just yet. Will there be a standardized way of powering / recharging them? What non-autonomous needs will they have and how to we handle them (because there will be some e.g. mechanical repair, rescue, etc)? Sure we can "guess" bas…

> Autonomous vehicles are still coming. Autonomous privately owned vehicles on shared rights of way are still coming. Centrally managed autonomous vehicles on dedicated rights of way are here already -- think inter-terminal trains at airports. If private car ownership is up for discussion (and it's explicitly called out here), you could imagine, for example, an urban plan where people got around on a macro level on a…

I get the feeling that a bike share program of electric bicycles could have huge implications.

Re: New Cities

#127

Post by jrowley »

zephjc wrote: post #55
BorgHunter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Light rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely. While I'm a firm believer that private cars (at least at a scale seen in the U.S.) and dense cities are fundamentally incompatible, I'm not quite onboard with getting rid of roads altogether. What about bicycles? Emergency vehicles? Construction equipment? Furniture deliveries? Deliveries of merchan…

It's important to make a semantic distinction between 'streets' and 'roads'. A typical one is: Streets are things which are where humand can play, people bike and walk, go to stores, around the places we live and work, etc. They are 'Places' where people can live about their day to day lives. Very human-friendly. 'Roads' which are higher-speed connectors between Places. Highways are a very high-speed type of roads. I…

This is interesting stuff. Where'd you learn about this distinction?

Re: New Cities

#129

Post by rocky1138 »

massysett wrote: post #104
kafkaesq wrote: post #50

The biggest gap in this discussion, thus far -- the elephant in the room, as it were: there's almost no room left on the planet for building "new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of course not just the meticulously designed city core; but the whole meta-city that will grow around it -- with suburbs, transportation links, etc). Sure, there might be a few -- a very small few -- bona-fide brown zones here and t…

New cities aren't going to happen, but it's not a space issue. There's plenty of space in the middle of Kansas.

New cities are happening, just not in North America.

Consider Astana (Kazakhstan), Ordos (China), Shenzhen (China).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astana

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City

Re: New Cities

#130

Post by maxerickson »

aestetix wrote: post #112
maxerickson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for your clarity, I downvoted the generic slur that you kicked things off with.

That's reasonable. I was pretty upset when I started writing the piece, and feel more rational now. However, by "aspie" I specifically mean someone detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people. Is there a better word you would suggest I could use?

Well, "detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people" would directly be an improvement if that is what you specifically mean.
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