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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: New Cities

#251

Post by zephjc »

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?

I think you have this internal representation of what "going to the store" means which is based on the North American suburban lifestyle of doing everything by car. This is not the model most of the world uses, especially not in old European cities.

Re: New Cities

#252

Post by G43nm45ji »

elsurudo wrote: post #152
tmaly wrote: post #72

For me cities with great public transportation are key. New York still has a lot of cars, but the subway system is quite extensive. Portland, OR has one of the best bus systems I have seen. I wish they had more light rails than they do. When I was last there they were just completing the second one. Paris has a great subway system that is very clean, and their roads are very walk able. Montreal and Toronto have great…

IMO Toronto's system is not so great, especially for a city its size. A city that size (especially one with as much congestion!) should have a comprehensive subway system (see Barcelona for a great example), not a measly 2.5 lines. Sure, downtown the transit is pretty good, but move outside of that, and things aren't all there.

I love streetcars, but since there are too many cars on the road, trying to get around downtown is a joke. That said I take the King which is known for being one of the worst I think. It's faster for me to walk a lot of the time.

Re: New Cities

#253

Post by superuser2 »

ginko wrote: post #225
superuser2 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone living in a place "designed for people", my trip to the grocery stores means putting on my shoes, walking down the stairs and across the street. The next department store is about 200m down the street.

Is this Manhattan?

Because in Chicago I think that describes about 10 blocks (a few hundred staggeringly wealthy people in the most lavish of luxury condo towers). The rest of us have some tiny, price-gouging convenience stores nearby but have to go ~20 blocks for a real supermarket, 4-5 miles to downtown for a Target or Macy's. Taking the train is less of a hassle than parking in the Loop, but it's still a hassle.

Re: New Cities

#254

Post by Finnucane »

niels_olson wrote: post #15
Finnucane wrote: post #3

Why start from scratch? Just send 100,000 nerds and hipsters to Detroit or Buffalo with some VC funding and see what happens.

This does actually seem like the cheapest option.

Right now Realtor.com lists the median price per sq. ft in SF as $818, Buffalo is $72, and Detroit is $22. So you could cut your housing cost by 90 percent just by moving to a different city. These folks say they don't want to build a 'liberterian techno-utopia', but it's not clear what else they're offering if they are uninterested in investing in actual cities where people actually live.

Re: New Cities

#255

Post by davidw »

st3v3r wrote: post #227
davidw wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this, but they aren't allowed to function any more in most cities in the US because of the amount of rules and regulations about what can be bu…

No, markets are a great way of finding what makes the most money for those who build the stores. That may be "the best" solution that is also aligned with the interests of the people who live there, but it might not be.

Central planning has been a colossal failure both in terms of the economy at large, and in terms of urban planning.

If someone can make money by building a store, that's great, what's wrong with it?

Zoning should be about keeping truly noxious activities away from residential areas, not about keeping a corner store away from where people could possibly walk to it.

Re: New Cities

#256

Post by bryanlarsen »

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?

In a walkable city with small markets, you pop into the market as you walk past it on the way home from work, grab ~4 things for supper and carry them home. It takes about 5 minutes, and you do it 7 times a week.

In a surburb, you spend some time making a shopping list to ensure you don't forget something, drive to the store, spend at least 30 minutes getting everything (it takes at least 5 minutes to walk from one end of the store to another), spend time waiting in line and checking out, drive back, unpack, et cetera. The whole process takes about 2 hours.

Which is the massive inconvenience?

Re: New Cities

#257

Post by sauceweak »

jacobolus wrote: post #219
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.

It’s a $3.99 kindle book written by a career political blogger. Imagine the amazon reviews as the comments on a newspaper site.

Since people frequently buy off of Amazon, the parent is not banking on people buying the kindle book, he's banking on them clicking his affiliate link and buying a bigger ticket item some time today which will net him more commission. The affiliate link to the $3.99 ebook is just to get them in the door and his affiliate cookie planted.

So regardless of the review content, the fact that the parent felt the need to add an affiliate link to a $3.99 kindle book leads me to believe his choice was not based on the merit of the book, but because he wants to skim a few bucks off the HN crowd.

Re: New Cities

#258

Post by JshWright »

zephjc wrote: post #168
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.

See another of my posts about road vs street definitions. Note that a lot of suburban wide streets are built that way to meet fire codes written to accommodate overly-large trucks. A suburban town doesn't need giant trucks where smaller, cheaper, more maneuverable trucks can do the work. Combined with ubiquitous hydrants - which have disappeared from many US suburban subdivisions - they are more than enough fire safe…

Absolutely. There is currently a trend in the US towards smaller emergency vehicles, and I expect that to continue.

US fire truck manufacturers are starting to look at their European brethren (companies like Metz out of Germany) for examples of how to accomplish the necessary tasks on much smaller platforms.

I think we're still a long ways from being able to do away with fire trucks entirely though. Firefighting is a very dynamic activity, with a lot of contingencies that need to be covered, and the 'big toolbox on wheels' model works very well.

Re: New Cities

#259

Post by hx87 »

eldavido wrote: post #142
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.

Don't get too depressed; the value of real estate has been falling for 100 years relative to business equity and other productive assets, and most real estate assets are hugely leveraged today. I somewhat doubt a lot of the debt capital, which is optimized for relatively predictable payouts over long timeframes (with good reason -- this stuff funds pensions and universities) would shift to funding higher-productivity…

Productive assets aren't necessarily high-risk, high-return though: that's what blue chips like IBM and GE are for, and they're far more predictable than, say, the Florida real estate market.

Re: New Cities

#260

Post by meggar »

tmaly wrote: post #72

For me cities with great public transportation are key. New York still has a lot of cars, but the subway system is quite extensive. Portland, OR has one of the best bus systems I have seen. I wish they had more light rails than they do. When I was last there they were just completing the second one. Paris has a great subway system that is very clean, and their roads are very walk able. Montreal and Toronto have great…

If we build our city like a cruise ship, we can choose our climate.
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