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New Cities

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Re: New Cities

#371

Post by galdosdi »

curryst wrote: post #174
davidw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course cars have a place too. Having two smallish children, cars are a great way for my family to get around for many things. But it's nice when they are one option among many, and not set on a pedestal as the only one. For instance, when we lived in Padova: we'd ride bikes around the neighborhood when the weather was good. I'd walk to get groceries. My wife and I often rode bikes downtown for 'date night'. We'd t…

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…

> The other thing worth mentioning is that bikes/pedestrians can go anywhere cars can, but the opposite is not true.

Your statement is only true for low speed roads. At higher speeds, it is impossible or unsafe for anyone to use the road unless they are also going at an equally high speed.

So in practice, cars do NOT function as a lowest common denominator, but actively drive out other means of transportation because the roads they prefer -- high speed roads -- cannot be safely used by pedestrians or cyclists!

Re: New Cities

#372

Post by yyyuuu »

A large part of today's population already resides in big cities around the world. Would it be more plausible to research on how we can improve the situation in the current cities, instead of starting from scratch.

It's like Software, where you come up with a large code base that is ridden with problems, but somehow works most of the times. You can either dive into that and improve it or you start writing your own system from scratch.

I am sure YC would have thought about this. Just want to know why they choose starting from scratch.

Re: New Cities

#373

Post by powera »

This is literally Burning Man.

Burning Man creates a 70000 person city in the middle of the desert from scratch every year. It's exactly what you want to prototype any number of urban design theories.

Re: New Cities

#374

Post by davidw »

mosdave wrote: post #370
bryanlarsen wrote: post #256

Earlier 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…

you're overlooking the price differences between these two modes of shopping.

There's no reason you can't combine the two. My experience in Padova was that there wasn't a huge difference, as the local supermarket wasn't a tiny corner store. Some items we'd buy in bulk less often with our car.

Re: New Cities

#375

Post by dhd415 »

rwhitman wrote: post #357
athenot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've thought about this. My thought has been, bump the street level up one story to create a pedestrian / bicycle promenade and move building entrances to the second floor. Keep the existing street below intact, with parallel parking etc. Essentially build a boardwalk above a commercial street, so that traffic can flow below. (Though for ventilation purposes, it would be best if most cars at street level were electri…

That reminds me of a 1920s drawing of the "city of the future" that had several levels of roadway with a promenade or pedestrian level on the third or fourth story: https://worldstreets.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/future-city...

Re: New Cities

#376

Post by potatolicious »

davidw wrote: post #366
potatolicious wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I grew up in late-80s Taipei, which is a different (but at the same time, recognizable) beast than modern Taipei.

Back then there was no metro, there was a sea of private jitneys and buses fighting each other for bus stops. Traffic safety was utter shit.

The government had minimal involvement in food safety. Private "certifiers" sprung up to plug the gap, but piracy of food safety certification stamps was rampant, and the whole having to check the packaging to see if some product was certified safe by your preferred certification provider was a persistent stressor.

Building codes technically existed but enforcement was non-existent. Partial building collapses were common. The skies were a tangle of wires running overhead from competing TV, phone, and other companies, each of which needed their own set of last-mile infrastructure. A lot of it was poorly installed, accidental electrocutions weren't uncommon. It was all kind of Blade Runner-esque in hindsight.

The way I see it, I lived in the libertarian paradise some HNers dream of creating, and it wasn't really all it was cracked up to be.

Re: New Cities

#377

Post by Jtsummers »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #279
st3v3r wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what was said at all. Nowhere do they say they don't keep food at home.

Eating what food you buy right away precludes storing food at home.

"right away" doesn't mean the instant you get home. It's more like the next two to three days.

Yes, in an urban environment you generally have less stored food. But usually not zero stored food. You also have less space to store it in, which makes shopping every other day more convenient. Trading off time for space and whatever conveniences urban living might provide you.

Re: New Cities

#378

Post by aerovistae »

sama wrote: post #78
davidw wrote: post #17

I 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…

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.

But people wouldn't invest their money in productive assets. Given more spare money, they buy bigger televisions and shinier cars. Financial ignorance and materialism are some of the most basic woes underpinning society.

Their thought process is well-illustrated by a recent exchange I had with some children from a background of poverty:

Me: Maybe you should save that money instead of spending it.

Them: Good point, then I can buy something more expensive next week!

---

Children they may be, but I know their parents and that mindset did not appear ex nihilo.

Re: New Cities

#379

Post by humanrebar »

nine_k wrote: post #100
humanrebar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Property in uninteresting cities is very cheap, because nobody wants to be there. Many more people live in 'uninteresting' cities than 'interesting' ones. They're cheap because of the relatively big supply, not necessarily because of the lack of demand.

This is interestingly not exactly so. Large cities have disproportionally higher share of population. Compare these areas with equal population in the US: http://www.businessinsider.com/half-of-the-united-states-liv... Worldwide, situation is funnier, 50% of population lives on 1% of the land: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Where...

I was meaning to compare, say, Washington D.C. and Memphis. Most Americans live outside the 'top tier' cities like DC, NY, SF, LA, Chicago, etc. About 26 million (out of 320 million) live in the ten largest cities in the U.S.

Even assuming half of the US lives in cities, about 130 million people live in smaller ones. My point was that smaller cities are actually more popular, and I think the numbers still support that.

Re: New Cities

#380

Post by dang »

aestetix wrote: post #83

I'm going to get downvoted for this, but here is a sentence by sentence response for as far as I could take it: Leave it to engineers who are detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people to act with a guilt complex to try to remake society in a way so they don’t feel so bad about fucking over everyone who is not a tech worker. “We want to study building new, better cities.” How about a profile of…

This comment breaks the HN guidelines in a bunch of ways, starting from the "I'm going to get downvoted" cliché.

The rules here don't require you to agree with anyone, but they do require you to be civil, not call names, and avoid gratuitous negativity. The things you're saying about others here ("engineers who are detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people", "Sand Hill Road Gordon Gecko wannabes", and so on) not only break those rules, they're pretty vicious. That's emphatically not what this site is for! If you can't restrain yourself from doing that, please don't comment here until you can.

Please (re)-read the descriptions of what we are looking for on this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

As it happens, we've been working on the largest changes to the HN guidelines since taking over from pg in 2014, and nearly all the coming changes have to do with reducing further the kind of comment you posted here.

Please note that none of this has to do with the particular view of cities, technology (or whatever the substantive topic at issue is) that you favor. On the contrary, when you express your views this way, you discredit them in the mind the neutral reader. So following the HN rules will not only help the community, it will help your argument as well.

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