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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: New Cities

#231

Post by collyw »

simonswords82 wrote: post #175
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.

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.

Cars and tunnels existed for a lot longer than GPS.

Re: New Cities

#232

Post by st3v3r »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #218
davidw wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So... You can't eat when you're hungry, because you don't keep food at home. A huge portion of your week is suddenly devoted to shuttling back and forth between home and the grocery store. And you think that's not a massive inconvenience?

That's not what was said at all. Nowhere do they say they don't keep food at home.

Re: New Cities

#233

Post by mikeash »

davidw wrote: post #217
mikeash wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know why it takes too long? Because it's illegal to build things that people need on a day-to-day basis near where they live in large swaths of the US. Some people want their car-centric lifestyle, and hey, that's fine too (as long as they're paying for it); I think the problem is that it's simply not a choice for many people due to the central-planning style zoning regulations entrenched in much of the countr…

I completely agree. My objection is simply to the idea that increasing throughput matters when talking about the merits of cars versus other forms of transportation.

Re: New Cities

#234

Post by MagnumOpus »

vmarsy wrote: post #164
athenot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars in tunnels is a great idea, just like the subway: burry it so as to not impact life on the surface. Unfortunately, it is very expensive to operate that way. The easiest tunnels to build are the ones Paris did for their subway a century ago: dig up the soft limestone under the street, lay tracks, close it up. But you still need to deal with ventilation (especially for non-electric cars), fire suppressant, evacuat…

To avoid accidents and other dangers, I'd see a mechanism where you park your car in a pod, and the pod is on rails, and it is getting routed automatically to your destination, that way even "dumb cars" could use it. There's already a system in France where you can park your car on a train, but loading/unloading isn't optimized at all, it's like loading/unloading a ferry : some batch processing. A steaming process wo…

> you park your car in a pod, and the pod is on rails

Why not have seats on the pod, that way you don't have to ferry around a 2-tonne car. Indeed if you have solved smart automation, why have rails at all? Presto, you arrive at the idea of self-driving taxis as a public service.

Re: New Cities

#235

Post by st3v3r »

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…

They're built for people in cars. They're not built for people not in cars.

Re: New Cities

#236

Post by mixmastamyk »

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…

A grocery cart is the classical solution, e.g.:

https://www.amazon.com/Whitmor-6318-2678-Deluxe-Rolling-Util...

They do make bigger ones, but much bigger and you're better off with a second person.

> Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.

Another perspective, a ten minute walk a few times a week is much better for quality of health (therefore life) than taking a car everywhere.

Re: New Cities

#237

Post by hammock »

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…

Spoken like someone who has never lived in a city. If the store is a 10min walk away, you go a few times a week. And/or you use one of those old lady carts.

Re: New Cities

#238

Post by davidw »

sauceweak wrote: post #202

Since the parent felt the need to use an affiliate link, here's a direct link to The Rent Is Too Damn High - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/ An amazon affiliate link to a 2.5 star book doesn't really establish confidence in someone's recommended reading list.

I earn the equivalent of a few beers a month from affiliate links, but hey, if you feel that it's better to give that money to Jeff Bezos, that's your prerogative. I'm always happy to buy a beer or two (the entire proceeds of my ill-gotten gains!) at 10 Barrel or Crux or someplace for anyone who happens to visit Bend.

Mostly though, since your account is new, we're ok with capitalism and making a bit of money here on HN, as long as someone isn't an obvious spammer. I think you can verify that I'm not via my comment history.

As to why the book has 2.5 stars:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R32HZILGX1BRRX/ref=cm_cr_rdp_p...

It's a pretty succinct and high level account of what's wrong with cities in the US.

Re: New Cities

#239

Post by jkaunisv1 »

mmalone wrote: post #224
jkaunisv1 wrote: post #206

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…

Interesting that you mentioned pattern language. My brother is an architecht, I'm into tech. I remember asking him about Alexander / pattern language after reading GoF, et. al. and he hadn't heard of him. He looked into it and was kind of like shrug . Seems Alexander isnt't super mainstream in the architecture community, and his ideas weren't that revolutionary. My read is that he's better know to software engineers…

I've heard of his books being required reading in some architecture courses, and I've heard many architects don't care as you said.

Whether or not his ideas were revolutionary, just going on the way new developments in my city are built, they could really stand to take a page out of his book. Everything is just a big rectangular box plopped down on a rectangular grid with ugly materials. I assume it's all optimized for cost. So right now I don't have much respect for the architecture community.

Re: New Cities

#240

Post by mixmastamyk »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #211
JoshTriplett wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's more efficient for you to make one trip to the store rather than several, it's even more efficient for the store to send one truck to make deliveries to many people in one trip. Even more so if enough people do so that the store can switch from a storefront laid out for customers (with cashiers, displays, and tags on shelves) to a warehouse.

That's true. But they don't. Safeway has a long-running delivery program, but they sure aren't pushing it very hard. The system in Shanghai, where you might expect delivery to be popular, is that supermarkets operate their own buses which stop near your home. It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.

That's called a cart, see above.
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