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New Cities

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Re: New Cities

#171

Post by inglondon »

These are some of the things that come to mind:

- Prioritise streets for walking / light autonomous electric vehicle use

- Build underground streets or lanes that are designed for an autonomous delivery network. Getting rid of trucks and other large vehicles from the ground level road network will greatly easy congestion

- Zone for indoor / vertical farms for delivery to local stores

- Mix residential and commercial zones to allow for short commute times for residents

- Metro to speed up longer trips within the city

Utopian, yes. Impossible, no. [Edited for formatting]

Re: New Cities

#172

Post by rrrichter »

hydandata wrote: post #21

I have always really liked stuff from https://www.thevenusproject.com/ some of their ideas might seem crazyish but overall I think anybody thinking about designing new cities ought to at least take a look.

agreed. I went there on a tour one time, it was amazing.

Re: New Cities

#173

Post by drabiega »

mikeash wrote: post #151
chris_7 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dea…

I'm choosing an extreme case to demonstrate the point. The same thing applies in a city. Take a city road and fill it with people walking. The throughput will be huge. The latency will suck, and you will not want to go a long distance, even intra-city, that way. Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice? It's not because throughput sucks and they just want to stick it to the…

> Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice?

It's just anecdotal, but in my experience most of the people I know who live in places where having a car is an actually choice don't own them at all, i.e. people who live and work in city centers.

Due to the US's terrible public transportation infrastructure, however, that's not a real choice in most places. If you want to work, you or someone in your household is going to need a car and it's going to eat up an uncomfortable portion of your income.

Re: New Cities

#174

Post by curryst »

davidw wrote: post #95
sama wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course cars have a place too. Having two smallish children, cars are a great way for my family to get around for many things. But it's nice when they are one option among many, and not set on a pedestal as the only one. 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 t…

Changing the way cars function inside the city is only part of what would need to change. Near me things just aren't laid out well for pedestrians. It would take me about an hour to walk to the nearest grocery store (not counting corner stores, because all they sell is junk food). Biking should be much shorter, though I can't say I've ever tried. We would need to stop the trend of having a small number of large stores and move back towards having a large number of smaller stores. That comes with it's own trade offs in planning an efficient city.

The other thing worth mentioning is that bikes/pedestrians can go anywhere cars can, but the opposite is not true. If we made streets that were "bike only" cars wouldn't be able to access them. Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator.

Re: New Cities

#175

Post by simonswords82 »

sama wrote: post #78
davidw wrote: post #17

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.

Cars underground is a great idea but you'd need to find a way to make GPS work, especially since GPS is necessary for autonomous cars which are obviously a thing of the future.

Re: New Cities

#176

Post by frabbit »

ars wrote: post #68
davidw wrote: post #17

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…

> A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).

Speaking as someone who has children and bicycles with them I find that other peoples' "very very useful" tool is something that detracts from my quality of life and prevents us from doing things that we value and prioritize.

Obviously there needs to be a balance between these two extremes: On the one hand we have the current situation where you are subsidized to drive your brood of 18 to the Bulk Mall of America and on the other lies my set of preferences which involves the distribution of goods to local outlets by a smaller number of trained drivers/robots.

Re: New Cities

#177

Post by nickff »

brewdad wrote: post #169
nickff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, pointing any firearm at a clerk would be assault (with a weapon), whether or not it was loaded. If I told you that I went to a shooting range and used my gun, what would you think? That I'd pointed it at stuff? If I said that I went out onto the street and used my rifle, you would not surmise that I had looked over the iron sights. note: I do not own a firearm

So assault...using a firearm.

I believe that most (all?) laws refer to such behavior as assault 'with a weapon' or 'with a firearm'. Google auto-corrects 'assault using a firearm' to 'assault with a firearm'.

Re: New Cities

#178

Post by narrator »

I think the main thing that a city needs to be special is to have strong opinions on city related things, like the design of public spaces and what the cultural identity of the place is. Otherwise, things end up as a generic strip mall sprawl. When a city takes an interest in art and design and a community focuses on expressing the cultural identity of its inhabitants, it can gain an identity and become more than just a collection of people who just happen to live there for economic reasons.

Re: New Cities

#179

Post by mikeash »

drabiega wrote: post #173
mikeash wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm choosing an extreme case to demonstrate the point. The same thing applies in a city. Take a city road and fill it with people walking. The throughput will be huge. The latency will suck, and you will not want to go a long distance, even intra-city, that way. Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice? It's not because throughput sucks and they just want to stick it to the…

> Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice? It's just anecdotal, but in my experience most of the people I know who live in places where having a car is an actually choice don't own them at all, i.e. people who live and work in city centers. Due to the US's terrible public transportation infrastructure, however, that's not a real choice in most places. If you want to work,…

There are precious few places where you literally can't walk or bike.

There are a lot of places where it's impractical to do so, because it takes too long, and so people mostly don't. That's despite the fact that walking or biking would increase throughput, because throughput isn't all that matters. I would even argue that it isn't all that important.

Re: New Cities

#180

Post by kafkaesq »

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.

There's plenty of space in the middle of Kansas.

Aside from the environmental issues, and the fact that not too many people would be crazy about living there -- what about the generations-old farm families who just... don't want to sell? At any price?

Which is what I meant about there being few places of significant scale (aside from protected wilderness areas that ought to remain as such) that are genuinely "empty."

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