New Cities • Hacker News Board

Re: New Cities

#291

Post by davidw » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

underwater wrote: post #277

davidw wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Affiliate links feel spammy because it makes it hard to determine whether your recommendation is altruistic or financially motivated.

It might be a difficult problem for an AI to solve, but I think most people could look at my comments and replies and determine that it's an issue I care deeply about.

Re: New Cities

#292

Post by rtkwe » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #226

wrsh07 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars or bikes are great because vehicle + roads = a fairly robust network [if done well, no single points of failure]. That's not usually the case for public transit. [Agreed about real estate. Although dense cities are very eco-friendly, it might be hard to motivate dense cities when real estate isn't super expensive. Manhattan grows upward because it's expensive to grow any other direction]

Bikes may be great but cars are terrible for cities. They take a ton of space and require massive amounts of restrictions on non-car traffic. Space is the biggest premium in a city. If a fraction of the space that was devoted to car traffic was instead devoted to public transit, public transit would be far more efficient and robust than cars.

Maybe in denser cities or downtown but where I live and work if I wanted to take a bus my easy 9 mile 20 minute drive becomes 60 to 90 minutes with 3 bus changes. That's a lot of ground to make up.

Re: New Cities

#293

Post by hx87 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

massysett wrote: post #93

"How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?" If you give arbitrary power to those who enforce the rules, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. If you don't value predictability and consistency of enforcement, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. In fact, the rules can fit onto one page. The Ten Commandments are pr…

I wonder if it would be feasible to train a neural network on a large corpus of test cases where legality/illegality have already been defined, then release this neural network to the public. Sure, the process will be opaque, but it will be consistent between different users, and answers can be sought almost immediately with little to no costs. In many cases, an immediate straight up no is more valuable than a maybe suspended over months or years.

Re: New Cities

#294

Post by jvm » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

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.

> An amazon affiliate link to a 2.5 star book

It's rated 2.5 stars because he was attacked by the Breitbart brigade.[1]

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/06/andrew-breitbart-fa...

Re: New Cities

#295

Post by exDM69 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:42 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…

> 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've carried 30+ kg of groceries on my bike panniers, about 15 to 30 min of ride to the store. Regular city bike with off-the-shelf panniers, not a cargo bike (which would easily take 100+ kg).

But quite honestly, I'd much rather get the groceries delivered to my home. I sometimes do but the websites to order the food are so bad that it takes more time to fill the order form that it's faster to ride to the store.

Bike is my primary means of transport for 8 months of the year because my city is awfully designed traffic-wise (if you need to cross the town east-west). A moderately fast bike ride beats any form of transport (including a car) on my daily commute.

Re: New Cities

#296

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:43 PM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #240

thaumasiotes wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: New Cities

#297

Post by elsurudo » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:43 PM UTC

G43nm45ji wrote: post #252

elsurudo wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, streetcars in such a congested city only really work when they have their own rights-of-way. Is the Spadina streetcar done yet?

Re: New Cities

#298

Post by sliverstorm » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #157

devinhelton wrote: post #58

The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is because that is where the jobs are. This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you ima…

Paul Graham had an essay once where he suggested the critical element was a university: http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html Build a top-notch research university and convince a dozen of the smartest professors and a few independently-wealthy angel investors to move there, and you'll soon have a city. Because where top professors go, students will go. Where you have smart & ambitious students and adventurous mone…

He's saying a university is a key step for a tech hub, not for every city.

Re: New Cities

#299

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

underwater wrote: post #277

davidw wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Affiliate links feel spammy because it makes it hard to determine whether your recommendation is altruistic or financially motivated.

[deleted]

Re: New Cities

#300

Post by mikestew » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #200

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…

> 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…

Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this

No, they're not. I've seen the markets in action, and one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks. As the my sibling comment points out, markets are great for maximizing incoming for the stores leasing space in the malls. One prime example I'm thinking of was 25 years ago, let's go to Google's sat view and see if much has changed...nope, looks like it's just as car-centric as it was when I lived there.

Now one can go all "no true Scotsman" on me, what with regulation and all, but there has been regulation long before either of us were born so one might as well argue that are no true markets because the sky is blue. It also ignores the fact that folks like the Simons (owners of malls across the U. S.) might have a little hand in how those regulations get written. What regulation has brought about in cities like Redmond is that if you're building streets, you're building them for everyone so there will be sidewalks and bike lanes.