New Cities • Hacker News Board

Re: New Cities

#241

Post by JshWright » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

zardo wrote: post #208

JshWright wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's tough to plan for the tactical needs of a firefighting operation. I don't see any good way of getting around the need for a big mobile toolbox that has a lot of flexibility in where it positions itself (i.e. not on rails).

Re: New Cities

#242

Post by kafkaesq » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

cbr wrote: post #135

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…

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) No way. Spend some time in satellite-view in a mapping program and you'll see that there are huge areas of farmland that could be cities. There's a lot of space on the p…

There are huge areas of farmland that could be cities.

Which aren't ringed by (and hence, downwind from) mega-ranches? Or correctional facilities? Which have access to adequate water resources (already heavily constrained in many of these areas) to support massive human settlements? And close enough to lakes, parks, and other attractions so that people would actually... want to live there?

Not so many.

And the genuinely fallow areas which do exist should probably be protected as such, and/or restored further to their pre-cultivation state.

Re: New Cities

#243

Post by baron816 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

I have long had a vision for building a new city-state in a relatively unpopulated part of the world and just allowing millions of immigrants to move there (the tough part would obviously be getting the government that owns that territory to go along with it).

Hopefully in 15-20 years, when energy (from solar?) is abundant and cheap, making stuff like water desalination and vertical farming cheap, a place like Western Australia would be inhabitable. That way, you could open the floodgates for ten or hundreds of millions of immigrants to escape oppressive and corrupt regimes and start anew within a liberal democracy. All that cheap labor would make it easy to build out extensive subway lines and high rises.

Re: New Cities

#244

Post by phyzome » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

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…

That's me! Our closest supermarket is 10-15 minutes away. I have:

  - Carried the bags
  - Used a backpack
  - Used a push-cart (can carry groceries for 5 people for a week)
  - Biked (with panniers)
  - Biked (with a trailer -- can carry groceries for 10 people for a week)
  - Jogged, when I just needed something small on short notice for a cooking project!

It's totally fine, because our neighborhood is very walkable.

Re: New Cities

#245

Post by cyphunk » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

How about this one: should we have cars at all? Is the tech-topia of self driving cars going to actually cut down the parking lot landscape of US cities or increase it?

Re: New Cities

#246

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

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…

The benefit of faster speeds isn't driver convenience, it's that you get cars off the road quicker for a given travel distance. Each city has a carrying capacity for the number of cars that may be on its roads at once, which is determined by the length of the road network and number of lanes. They also have a certain number of trips generated, which is determined by population. The number of cars on the road = trips generated * average travel time per trip. When that exceeds the carrying capacity of the city, average travel time increases, which causes a cascading effect that eventually results in gridlock.

The same effect plays out locally, on each individual stretch of road. When integral(# of incoming cars - # of outgoing cars, time) > carrying capacity of road, the road backs up, which increases the time required to traverse it, which further exacerbates the backup. This is why multi-lane arterials can reduce congestion; they can move a lot of cars off a given stretch in a short period of time, and provide a linear buffer where momentary oversupplies can collect without backing up the previous intersection.

You can also see this effect by looking at traffic maps of say, SF (grid layout) vs. Sunnyvale (arterial/collector):

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7811106,-122.4106957,16z/dat...

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3724565,-122.0375532,15z/dat...

Both of them have shitty traffic, but in SF the traffic spills away from Market street onto many of the side streets, such that no matter where you go it'll be gridlock. In Sunnyvale, much of the traffic is confined to major arterials like El Camino or Matilda, which are slow but still move, and side-streets that parallel them are often relatively clear.

Re: New Cities

#247

Post by jkaunisv1 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:21 PM UTC

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…

Oh, and subsidize coffee houses in the Austrian style. Don't expect private businesses to create the kind of places that create a sense of community in cities and facilitate chance interactions between different groups of people.

Re: New Cities

#248

Post by ocdtrekkie » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:21 PM UTC

joshmlewis wrote: post #11

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…

This is a good idea when considering how people will get around in their daily routines, but I'd be interested in hearing your perspective on how goods, services, and infrastructure would operate with entirely no roads? Specifically getting food/goods/supplies to businesses, restaurants, hospitals, and other facilities that are required for such a city to exist. You could potentially utilize rail for this but then yo…

Sorry about the delay, I'm rate limited here on HN.

As another commenter suggested, emergency vehicles especially could still use pedestrian walkways, which would still be needed to get from station to endpoint, and should be sufficiently wide to allow a lot of free movement. The so-called last mile. As a perk, pedestrians and bicycles are easier to move to part ways for emergency vehicles.

I think that a lot of freight could be handled the same way. A limited number of licensed carriers could operate light mule vehicles to bring freight from the nearest station (assuming rail stations had decent cargo-unloading stops as well) and operate along pedestrian walks during low traffic hours. (Your mail and your deliveries should not be delivered during regular starts or ends of the work day, or mealtimes. I'd go so far as to say construction traffic should be in the dead of night.) Since they'd need to coexist with pedestrians, but only travel a very short distance, from the nearest station, I'd propose these would be slow as heck, and since they wouldn't be traversing rough terrain, they could have extremely low ground clearance as well.

The key importance is that these pedestrian walkways be first and foremost, for pedestrians, and that personnel transportation vehicles be non-existent along them. The occasional off-peak freight cart isn't going to be a huge burden on transportation efficiency or pedestrian safety.

Re: New Cities

#249

Post by collyw » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #189

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…

Indeed. With a car, in a place designed for cars, I can go from ideation to grocery store or department and back inside of half an hour. In a place "designed for people" where neither homes nor stores have parking, such an errand consumes an entire afternoon. (Walk to bus stop, wait for bus, take bus to train, wait for train, ride train, walk, etc. Though I suppose it's easier if you can afford to live a short walk f…

Come and try Barcelona. I have a number of supermarkets within 5 minutes walk of my house. Driving is a bit of a pain in the arse here (mainly because I don't want to pay for parking for my crappy car, so I park it 15 minutes cycle away).

Re: New Cities

#250

Post by ghaff » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

ph0rque wrote: post #47

The trend has been people moving to cities. However, I wonder if that will be reversing any time soon, with people moving out of (large) cities and into smaller towns?

The supposed "millennials are moving to cities" trend isn't the universal trend it's often made out to be. The actual trend seems to be more along the lines of college-educated 25-34 year-olds are moving to a small number of mostly coastal urban locations.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...