New Cities

I gotta agree with thescriptkiddie, C:S is an imperfect model of how traffic behaves.

> Self-driving cars (or just ubiquitous turn-by-turn navigation) could change this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding the neighborhood entirely, but as long as drivers have imperfect information about traffic conditions and tend to take the shortest route to their destination, this will remain a problem.

Self-driving cars or drivers with good mapping are still limited where they can go when they have a street hierarchy to deal with, forcing all cars onto the same few arterials.

> Oftentimes, the solution to a traffic problem is simply to bulldoze a few intersections. By doing this, you give cars a buffer. It increases the median trip length but it also increases vehicle speed and road throughput by more.

This is all well and fine in a game, but increasing street speeds kills the street life (figuratively, and sometimes literally). Slower but more constant speeds are better for everyone involved. For walkers, bikers, and even drivers. Ask yourself this: would drivers flip their shit more often when going slow but steady down 15-20 mph hour streets with stop signs (or roundabouts), or when they're stuck at long traffic lights regardless of how many lanes they have?

Those are mostly cases of the courts trying to interpret laws in creative ways to reach conclusions they like. Cases like Bond and Yates prove that many prosecutors are willing to stretch laws, and get many courts to agree with those broad interpretations of the law.[1][2] My view is that they should read the laws more strictly.

Do you expect the average citizen to have read all the civil and criminal laws of your state and country, in addition to all the opinions by appelate courts? If the answer to that is no, then you should not expect that citizen to abide by a body of law of which they are unaware. You might as well write the laws in secret and hide them from the people, because the current volume of law is equivalent to obfuscation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_v._United_States_(2014)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States

May I say: My intuition is that starting totally from the absolute beginning won't work. Relatively recently (in city building terms) a black community that tried to do that, I remember listening to 99% Invisible about it, and it didn't work out.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/soul-city/

It is better to be an adjunct to an existing city near a river or a seaport. Look at China and how they have Special Economic Zones, they are connected to existing cities, right?

I know China builds cities from the start but with their scale they're probably a special case and besides it's thought to be more organic the way they do it (e.g. they don't build some infrastructure like footpaths until they see evidence of how real people use the existing environment).

That's a special case though, nobody else apart from India has that kind of scale.

Perhaps this is just me, but I just don't like cities.

I agree that the things listed in this article need fixing, but I also feel like they're missing the point.

I grew up in a small college town (in a house), but have spent most of my adult life living in cities (in appartments). Somehow, those cities have never felt like home to me. I've always felt like I was missing something. Privacy is not quite the right word. Perhaps solitude.

Growing up, I could easily find space to be alone (and I mean, truly alone) . In my current city, there is literally no way to do that. My appartment is cramped, and low sound isolation means I can hear the neighbors. If I go outside to the park, there is approximately a person per couple thousand square meters (and the noise carries further). If I go to a coffee shop or other public place, it's even more crowded. I can go to the mountains, but it's about an hour by car to get there, and even then there are people around. (Unsurprisingly, the further I have to go, the less likely I am to do it on a regular basis.) This inability to have space has lead to a sort of mild chronic anxiety. Suffice it to say, I don't like cities, but I'm stuck where I am for other reasons.

So I can't exactly say I'm eager for even more population density. Some of the problems above could possibly be mitigated (e.g. better sound isolation), but the broader issues of how much personal space is really necessary just seems like it's not on people's radars. Is this just not an issue for other people? Am I crazy?

I hope that any discussion of better cities includes this as a component.

It's frightening how completely disconnected from the real world this is.

  The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part
  because their cities don't provide the opportunities and living conditions
  necessary for success.

No, the world is full of people not realizing their potential largely because most people just don't. Whether it's just that someone is not motivated to do more than is necessary, or the real social problems that affect people all around the world, in both cities and suburban communities.

• The guy serving you your hamburger isn't realizing his full potential because he grew up in a lower-middle class family who didn't encourage him to do well in school or go to college, he grew content with his boring life hanging out with his friends and working paycheck to paycheck, and he honestly has no good reason to try to achieve more.

• The single mother with the two kids and a heroin addiction isn't realizing her potential because when her high-school sweetheart husband left her she had trouble getting a job, so generations of misogyny & patriarchy convinced her she can only turn to stripping to pay the bills, got hooked on drugs and alcohol, and is now locked into a slow circling of the drain.

• The young black man in prison isn't realizing his potential because generations ago the systemic racism of our country pushed his family into a tightly impoverished community with no businesses, no access to transportation, almost no education, no access to family planning, and rampant drug and alcohol abuse, which the country then took advantage of by creating for-profit prisons and mandatory minimum sentences to convert most of the people in his community into a series of bad choices which only result in debt, incarceration, teen pregnancy, drug addiction, and crime as a survival tactic.

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  A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential
  by making better cities.

I've lived in cities most of my life. Their problems are not engineering problems, they are social problems. You can't "unleash potential" without first convincing the people who live there to vote for it, work hard for the change, and of course pay more tax money for it.

• Why do we have too much traffic congestion and not enough parking?

○ Because the city - and its residents and taxpayers - refuse to pay for better public transportation.

• Why do cities not have better transportation?

○ Because politicians [and voters] fight over how to spend what little tax revenue they collect.

• Why don't the residents pay more tax money to fix the problems in their city?

○ Because a combination of high unemployment and low wages due to a concentration of wealth and corporate power refusing to raise wages while profits have skyrocketed have left citizens with very little left over money. Food and housing comes before transportation taxes.

• Why do cities not have affordable housing?

○ Because rich white people don't want to live next to poor black people.

• Why isn't there a diverse range of people living and working in cities?

○ Because first you have to create economic and social equality for a diverse range of people and grow an actual population thereof, rather than pockets of socioeconomically disadvantaged minority groups.

• Why aren't cities constantly evolving?

○ Because some are able to successfully resist housing price inflation and gentrification, while others have a stagnant economy, and others are simply consistent in their status quo.

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If you need to make a better city to realize your potential (which is stupid, since we were still realizing our potential before we had "great" cities), you first need to solve your social and economic problems before the city can be better. But this is a boring, depressing, non-"startupy" answer, so never mind me.