Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 710 posts

Re: New Cities

#301

Post by st3v3r »

mikeash wrote: post #151
chris_7 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about cities. Highways between LA and NYC are not "cities" (cities shouldn't have highways in them, see Robert Moses's destruction of New York), so I don't see the relevance (also, fly?). That image also doesn't include that one of those drivers might kill someone, and most of them will turn aggressively into crosswalks. I see and experience those turns every day in New York, and read about the unpunished dea…

I'm choosing an extreme case to demonstrate the point. The same thing applies in a city. Take a city road and fill it with people walking. The throughput will be huge. The latency will suck, and you will not want to go a long distance, even intra-city, that way. Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice? It's not because throughput sucks and they just want to stick it to the…

Using an extreme case doesn't really work in this instance.

Re: New Cities

#302

Post by eanzenberg »

cylinder wrote: post #192
xapata wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you calculate that return? Does that include the cost of capital?

I also highly doubt it factors in the returns from tax incentives / rebates / deductions / exemptions.

Gross returns is good to compare when everyone has different tax liabilities.

Re: New Cities

#303

Post by hx87 »

MajorLOL wrote: post #221
chris_7 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a narrow street, less people drive, and thus there is no issue getting an ambulance through. I see ambulances stuck in traffic on Manhattan avenues all the time (we should put grade-separated bus lanes on all of them, IMO, partially so that ambulances can always get through).

>If you have a narrow street, less people drive, and thus there is no issue getting an ambulance through. Huh? If you limit supply, demand goes down? Your logic would say that the solution to Los Angles traffic problems is to close half the lanes and wait for people to sell off their cars?

> Huh? If you limit supply, demand goes down?

It works for cars, since there are acceptable alternatives (biking, walking, carpooling, Uber, etc). It works less well for housing, as leftist NIMBYs often advocate, since one alternative (homelessness) is very unappealing, and the other (living somewhere else) just exports the problem.

Re: New Cities

#304

Post by collyw »

eslaught wrote: post #197

Perhaps this is just me, but I just don't like cities. I agree that the things listed in this article need fixing, but I also feel like they're missing the point. I grew up in a small college town (in a house), but have spent most of my adult life living in cities (in appartments). Somehow, those cities have never felt like home to me. I've always felt like I was missing something. Privacy is not quite the right word…

I can see the good and bad in both.

I grew up in suburbia, as a result I hate commuting as its just such a waste of time. I love the mountains and spent a few year living in fairly small towns. But there are no jobs there (for a techie, and remote working is hard to find), and night life is limited. Now in a dense city and I have tons of options for going out, but like you say no space, and a hassle to do any outdoor sports in comparison.

Re: New Cities

#305

Post by zephjc »

nostrademons wrote: post #246
zephjc wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The benefit of faster speeds isn't driver convenience, it's that you get cars off the road quicker for a given travel distance.

Yes but that isn't actually what happens because the use of a street or road isn't by one car from A to B but by the continuous use over time across a section of the street.

Say you had a single 1 mile arterial in a city, and it's the only way of getting from one half of the city to the other half. There are few points when a cars are "off" of it (except maybe late at night) - the rest of the time it is a near constant high speed flow.

You're not wrong to say that it gets any given car off the road quicker, but that is if you're focusing on the one driver's trip, as opposed to focusing on the use of and experience of being at that section of road. If it was an old town which had its main street become a high speed arterial, you now have an experience for any pedestrians who might want to use the (probably few remaining) stores along that road be not unlike walking along side a freeway - unfun and dangerous.

By focusing on any one driver's trip experience, and not the street experience, you're essentially damning the street experience for the potential sake of some extra time saved (if its across a city, perhaps on the order of 10 or so minutes).

Of course when you have nothing on the street worth being around (like most of El Camino Real), you want to get passed it ASAP. (SF problems are a whole other hairball of outside commuters plus residents who insist on using cars.)

Re: New Cities

#306

Post by davidw »

mikestew wrote: post #300
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…

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…

> one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks.

You should look up the zoning codes in your city, as well as a zoning map. They are incredibly detailed, and extremely prescriptive. What we have in the US is very far from a market-based solution!

And those rules and regulations absolutely have worsened with time. Look at cities from 100 years ago, how they had nice downtowns where people could walk around (and also drive, but slowly) and they were relatively dense.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...

http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/

Re: New Cities

#307

Post by hx87 »

eslaught wrote: post #197

Perhaps this is just me, but I just don't like cities. I agree that the things listed in this article need fixing, but I also feel like they're missing the point. I grew up in a small college town (in a house), but have spent most of my adult life living in cities (in appartments). Somehow, those cities have never felt like home to me. I've always felt like I was missing something. Privacy is not quite the right word…

Think about it this way: in an area with a given population, raising the population density of a subset of that area lowers it somewhere else, and you can live in that somewhere else.

That being said, better sound insulation in walls, windows, ceilings and floors is absolutely necessary in most cities, and that is where regulations should focus on (with limited or no grandfathering), not setbacks and heights.

Re: New Cities

#308

Post by mikestew »

davidw wrote: post #255
st3v3r wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, I took a different take on your original post. I'll leave my original reply, as I still agree with the point, but I see where you're going with this and heartily agree. One of my main complaints with where I live is that it's a round-trip hour to walk to any store, yet $DEITY forbid that we put a corner store anywhere in my neighborhood lest a developer be prevented from plopping another house on that plot.

Re: New Cities

#309

Post by freehunter »

collyw wrote: post #231
simonswords82 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and no one wants to go back to the pre-GPS days.

Re: New Cities

#310

Post by crusso »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #256
thaumasiotes wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I'd question those numbers: 5 minutes for urban shopping and 2 hours for suburb shopping. So you're saying that in 7 5 minute stops (35 minutes), you're able to accomplish what it takes someone else in a suburban mega-grocery store to accomplish in 2 hours?

Apart from that, though, almost anything that you can easily plan out and do in bulk is going to out-efficiency something done in smaller iterations involving a lot of repeated steps (going in, walking around, checking out, etc.).

When we go shopping on the weekends, we mostly buy for the entire week. We buy quantities of food that can make plenty of leftovers and buy water/soft drinks by the cases that last several weeks. We try to make the process as efficient as possible and we could stop by the store more often since it's close - but that would waste a lot of efficiency.

Post reply on HN