> What should a city optimize for?
People. People will have to live and work their, so people should be the focus.
New Cities
341–350 of 710 posts
Re: New Cities
#342I 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…
Old cities suck. Their layout is literally derived from concentric walls to keep invaders out. I love the history and architecture, but from a usability perspective they're far from ideal.
Re: New Cities
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumption here is without cars cities would be laid out exactly the same. What if there were by laws that every high rise above x floors has y retail space on the ground floor. In this case most of your daily needs would be serviced by a trip down. Once a week/month you may go to a larger store.
In San Francisco and Chicago, I experienced no shortage of tiny, expensive corner stores, restaurants, boutiques, etc. That's the kind of stuff that seems to go into the ground floors of residential towers. The hassle was accessing (the local equivalents of) Target, Kroger, Best Buy, etc.
What are the problems with the small stores that you describe?
- expensive? - few products? Something else?
If pricing is an issue the question becomes,
How do you assist small retailers compete with massive chains?
A problem I have thought about quite a bit as my dad once owned a small corner shop He had to close it as the chains make it impossible to compete on price with bulk buying discounts.
I believe what happens is due to the layout of our cities we end up with large chains, malls and big box retailers. It's a virtuous cycle...
Re: New Cities
#344Earlier 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 ...assuming perfect knowledge and the absence of externalities, either of cost or benefit, since (assuming perfect knowledge of costs and benefits) markets optimize the net utility of the direct participants in each exchange, but not net social utility (because externalities are ignored.)
I think most urban planning has gone far, far beyond actual noxious externalities, to be honest. I agree there's a line somewhere, but in the US, the balance is completely out of kilter.
Re: New Cities
#345Earlier 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 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…
Would you build rail transit underground in a new city? A large part of why subways are even things to begin with was because they were added late in the development of most cities that justify building them. Newer cities like Dallas have above ground commuter rail exactly because the city still had room to build it above ground.
If anything, it is much more valuable to segment the city in ways that you don't need subways or roads. You should have districts that are internally navigable strictly by foot, bikes and tram between adjacent districts, and only have rail / road when going beyond the local microcosm of city.
You want greenery anyway, you might as well put it in the bounding lines between regions of your city and have the roads / rail between those to minimize noise pollution outside of the transit hubs.
Re: New Cities
#346Earlier 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?
Kinda, yeah. Keep in mind, this is traffic, not selling goods. "Supply and demand" economics doesn't really apply in the same fashion.
If you widen streets and add more lanes, then more people drive, until they've filled up that street's capacity. But they don't really stop driving.
Re: New Cities
#347Earlier 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…
Did you intend to paste the same quote twice?
I did not, thank you; fixed :)
Re: New Cities
#348Check up on what Haussmann did in Paris. He got many things right.
Re: New Cities
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
It's more like 10, and you probably don't do it 7 days a week. You take a bus or train to your convenient stop near the market. Walk into the market, grab a basketful of goods, pay, walk home.
Re: New Cities
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I hope the aspiration for new cities would start with the presumption of density. An experiment like this should be trying to solve a problem, not just add more urban sprawl, and you don't get a city culture off preplanned road infrastructure and zoning laws.