Are you intentionally talking past urban planners? They are literally the expert on this topic.
New Cities
361–370 of 710 posts
Re: New Cities
#362I am not sure we can make cities that are great to live in beyond a certain size. I don't know about the US, but in Europe smaller cities (less than one million citizen) do not have the systemic problems than larger cities have.
However, economic activity draws people and companies in, which generates more activity. We end up with over-populated cities like Paris, and the issues that come with them: ever-increasing housing prices, large suburbs, long commutes.
So I wonder if the main issue is really cities, or how to find a way to go from large monolithic cities to several reasonably-sized cities that cooperate. The technologies involved being transportation, remote work tools, etc.
Also, when I think about cities I like in Europe, an interesting point is that they are often built on the seashore (Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Nice...).
Re: New Cities
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Agree in general - but keep in mind that $DEITY is often your neighbors. Developers generally aren't the ones pushing for restrictive zoning laws, residents are. For decades Americans have lived under the impression that businesses near homes is somehow a corrupting influence, and that putting businesses far from homes is somehow a feature and not a bug. The current suburban landscape in America is the result of both…
Agree in general - but keep in mind that $DEITY is often your neighbors.
Absolutely. I remember way back when there was discussion of what to do with the huge plot of land north of us. Corner store, maybe? The local paper quoted someone in the neighborhood, "who's going to walk to the store in the rain (which a suburban of Seattle gets a bit of)?" Umm, maybe all of the people I see out walking when I'm walking the dogs in the dead of December in the dark and the pouring rain? Back to California with you Mr. NIMBY, the rest of us deal with walking in the rain just fine.
But that's probably the guy that shows up to zoning meetings and I'm...not. Yes, I'm lazy and yes, I should fix that.
Re: New Cities
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some specific names of the cities you had in mind would be really helpful.
I don't know what item #2 means (armature prefabrication?) but Singapore is an ideal Asian city. Especially #6—Singapore is so proud of their public housing that they included an image of an HDB building on their $10 bill.
When the armature for the building is being prefabricated with a milimetre level precision by a CNC metalworking machine, and than assembled on site like lego. This is to minimize the amount of on-site metalwork
Re: New Cities
#365I 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…
> 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…
It's not drivel, it's simply the truth that often discussions about streets are framed around cars, rather than people. Now obviously people are in cars, duh, but the thing is that if you focus on the people, then you start thinking about the fact that people are capable of taking more than one form of transportation: 'hurting' cars may well be the correct solution if the people who used to drive can get an equivalent or better experience walking/biking/using transit.
> 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).
For sure, cars are very useful, particularly for going long distances or carrying lots of stuff or people. But there's other things that they're bad at: most notably, they're far less space efficient for the average case when there's just one or two people in each car. Because of that, as a city gets denser, you have to start moving people over to other, denser forms of transportation.
You're always going to have some cars, if only for business deliveries and emergency vehicles (and maybe the handicapped), but it's possible to cut the number of car trips way, way down.
Re: New Cities
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I sincerely hope anyone applying to this is very well versed in urban planning and its history world-wide, because there have been many misadventures in planning, and those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. I think this is one of the most insightful comments here vis a vis YC's plans, and it's one of the reasons I'm in the "markets" camp. I know I'd prefer to see more mixed-use, bike/pedestrian friend…
It's a tricky balance to be certain. I grew up in an Asian country with extremely laissez-faire regulations and the urban landscape was a bit hellish. Very, very economically efficient with huge economic diversity and competition, but nonetheless unpleasant (and unsafe!) in many ways. Complete freedom is likely not the right answer, but neither is the extremely prescriptive type of planning that has dominated America…
Whereabouts in Asia? That's an interesting counterpoint and example.
I agree with you completely: I'm not a 'markets' guy because I think they're the answer to all problems all the time, but because I think in this case we could use more of them.
Re: New Cities
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://cdn.slowrobot.com/524201613515576555.gif :)
It's a lovely picture, and it makes a great point. If 200 people want to get to the same place, it's far more efficient to pack them into the same vehicle going to that place. Now what happens when those 177 cars are going to 100 different places?
In practice, the places with lots of traffic congestion are dense enough to have transit going to/close to the areas with lots of demand.
Re: New Cities
#368I think a lot of these questions posed have already been answered comprehensively by urban planners. Urban planners understand how to make well crafted urban spaces that work well and make people happy.
The larger issue is that many of these known solutions aren't being implemented due to established NIMBY interests that create an intractable political situation that prevents anything but the status quo.
For example I'd point to how NYC has been transformed for the better by the shift of road space usage from exclusive car use to being more inclusive of cyclists and pedestrians. This was incredibly difficult to implement due to extreme push back from just about everyone. Eventually once people realized it was working for the better opposition started to melt away. Even with this positive example to cite, for many cities basic safety improvements such as separated bike lanes remain incredibly hard to implement due to local and business opposition.
Additionally there are funding issues. This isn't the same country by country, but in Canada at least municipalities don't have a lot of tools to raise revenue and are very poor.
Metro Vancouver had a 10 year plan to dramatically expand rapid transit but it didn't have the money to implement it. The vaguely transit-hostile provincial government wasn't about to help out. The province forced Metro Vancouver into a referendum on a new 0.5 cent sales tax to raise revenue but it was defeated.
Here we have an example where the region's planners completely understand that they need to expand rapid transit to the region to better move people around the region and increase housing affordability, but there aren't the funds available to execute on the idea due to political ideology.
Re: New Cities
#369Earlier 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 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.
I mean GPS repeaters are a thing, but there's even better options, you could install small radio beacons in the tunnels and triangulate using those. Much more precise, and cheaper than GPS repeaters.
Re: New Cities
#370Earlier 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…
you're overlooking the price differences between these two modes of shopping.