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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: New Cities

#201

Post by delinka »

zephjc wrote: post #191
nostrademons wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. It's worth playing some Cities:Skylines (which has a fairly accurate traffic simulator, particularly with the Traffic++ mod) to understand how the road hierarchy came into being. Or, for that matter, trying to drive through a grid-based city like Manhattan or SF. You get very large traffic jams. The problem is intersections, and particularly intersections where traffic…

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 p…

Did you intend to paste the same quote twice?

Re: New Cities

#203

Post by cylinder »

ploxiln wrote: post #136
16bytes wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individually owned cars--and the infrastructure needed to support them--are a very inefficient mode of transportation, even in the use-cases that you mention. Plenty of people with children and elderly live in New York city which has among the lowest levels of car ownership in the nation. Every other method of high-density transportation is also a "human amplifier" and vastly more efficient. "Built for people" means…

I live in NYC. I enjoy being able to take the subway to many world-class establishments in under 45 minutes. If/when I have children, I'm getting the fuck out of here. Many (most?) people do the same. There are huge numbers of people here, so of course there are lots of children here. They're either super wealthy, or really not living up to my standards for quality of life. (I was not raised in a big city.) If you se…

Same here. Also, the people who can afford it and have been in Manhattan their whole lives often have a car or two parked in garages. Brooklyn and Queens are still very car heavy as well.

Also, after a while, those who can afford it (or those who can't but still spend) use Uber / Lyft / Gett / Juno / etc liberally. I haven't been in the subway for at least two months because I can't stand it anymore, and it's especially disgusting in summer.

No car ownership is no way to live your whole life. I feel trapped here. No, I do not want to go through the hassle of renting every time I want to get out of town either. As far as daily commuting, underground systems always suck especially for longer trips. I like above ground commuter trains of hiqh quality, and I like cycling when there's investment in infrastructure and shower / lockup facilities everywhere. Unfortunately not the case.

Re: New Cities

#204

Post by coryfklein »

nostrademons wrote: post #138
zephjc wrote: post #25

Look to how Tokyo does things. A few takeaways: - mixed use zoning: reduce requirement for long trips by mixing many compatible types of commercial with residential, and remove single housing type developments. Also, allow many smaller apartment complexes mixed with single family houses, instead of segregating housing types. - street design: No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. That is, no more dead-end str…

> No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. It's worth playing some Cities:Skylines (which has a fairly accurate traffic simulator, particularly with the Traffic++ mod) to understand how the road hierarchy came into being. Or, for that matter, trying to drive through a grid-based city like Manhattan or SF. You get very large traffic jams. The problem is intersections, and particularly intersections where traffic…

> Self-driving cars ... could change this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding the neighborhood entirely

Self-driving cars can do even better than that - they can eliminate the "stopping" nature of the intersection entirely. If the self-driving cars are able to determine the position and speed of other cars approaching the intersection, you can just have the traffic streams pass right through each other. [1]

[1] Autonomous Intersection Management: Traffic Control for the Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pbAI40dK0A

Re: New Cities

#205

Post by davidw »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #182
curryst wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 store…

> 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). There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house? I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food. Being able to do it all at once…

> I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food.

We mostly walked or biked to the local grocery store in Italy. It led to more fresh food, as you buy stuff in smaller quantities and eat it right away. A large backpack is fine for moving stuff. It worked for our family of 4.

Re: New Cities

#206

Post by jkaunisv1 »

Make internet a basic utility, paid through taxes, that requires no activation. I've never had to explicitly pay for water or have it turned on/off when I switch apartments, it would be amazing for internet to be the same.

See Pattern Language/Christopher Alexander for ideas on how to design the physical spaces to work for the people who will be using them, including random passersby.

Put cars lowest on the priority list. To me it feels like you should only need a car to travel between neighborhoods, though there would need to be a solution for elderly/less mobile folks.

Build the city near some beautiful nature, and then put a free public transit line that gets people from the city center to there, fast. I live about a 10 minute drive/30 minute bike ride from a beautiful national park, but I rarely go there because it's not fast and easy to get there.

Subsidize a good amount of small office/storefront space for new businesses. Let people try out ideas for shops and businesses without going into crazy debt just to sign a lease.

Make efficiency/sustainability requirements for building WAY higher than the norm. In many climates, AC/heating isn't actually needed if you invest a bit more in building materials upfront and build intelligently.

Re: New Cities

#207

Post by JoshTriplett »

16bytes wrote: post #98
ars wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Individually owned cars--and the infrastructure needed to support them--are a very inefficient mode of transportation, even in the use-cases that you mention. Plenty of people with children and elderly live in New York city which has among the lowest levels of car ownership in the nation. Every other method of high-density transportation is also a "human amplifier" and vastly more efficient. "Built for people" means…

> Every other method of high-density transportation is also a "human amplifier" and vastly more efficient.

It might be more efficient on average, if you measure in terms of throughput. It isn't more efficient for individual people, who care more about latency. I don't want to turn a 20-minute trip into a 60-minute trip to improve throughput.

I do look forward to fleets of efficient self-driving cars as a better option; that could meaningfully replace driving. Trains and buses alone cannot.

Re: New Cities

#208

Post by zardo »

JshWright wrote: post #59
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

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'd forgo roads entirely. Tough to get a firetruck somewhere without roads. We have come a long way in reducing the fire risk in new construction buildings, but 'stupid finds a way' is far from being a solved problem.

Firetrucks are designed to work on roads, not the other way round.

It's important that a transportation system account for all needs, but fire trucks aren't a need they are one potential solution to the emergency response use case.

Re: New Cities

#209

Post by galfarragem »

Architect here.

New cities normally don't work as expected: cities are like a living organism, they need time to mature. Lots of research was already made on these subjects (most people are not aware of it) and even if some ideas are really good, status quo makes any change very difficult.

By the other hand the knowledge fronteer is still near on building cities in different environments/planets, so IMO, YC should go on that direction instead.

Re: New Cities

#210

Post by gre »

pasbesoin wrote: post #184

Soundproofing. It's a small fraction of building cost, but one that is most often omitted because short term profit is disconnected from long-term utility and benefit. I've experienced several absolutely miserably loud neighbors. Talk about destroying my potential. I moved to a house -- way more space than I need -- to get away from it. To end up with neighbors who blasted their car stereos -- think SUB-woofers -- al…

Light pollution is big for me too. I want to be able to see the stars and the Milky Way at night, why not? It's tangential to noise pollution.
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