421–430 of 710 posts
Instead of paying taxes people should be forced to do mandatory community service. That will help close the wealth-gap and force wealthy people to intermix with the working class.
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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…
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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…
Obviously mass transit can help if it is reliable, cheap, and expansively deployed in the city, but that's not a typical case in the US. Otherwise you're going to have to accommodate cars, and lots of them. That means big fast busy roads that are unfriendly to pedestrians.
Also, it's nothing for me to bike 5 miles to go somewhere by myself, but if I have to bring my 3 year old twins along and then haul several kilos of groceries or other heavy/bulky items back that bike ride starts to look rather impractical.
Are you intentionally talking past urban planners? They are literally the expert on this topic.
And yet, there's virtually nothing within reasonable walking distance from my house, and there is no commercially-zoned land nearby that would allow someone to open up a coffee shop/corner store/restaurant/pub/whatever. Literally no community-oriented locations anywhere nearby. In the summer, it's possible to bike to Safeway, but summer doesn't last all that long and then there's a pile of snow on the ground again. I…
Didn't they try something like this in China already?
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> 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…
Nobody lives in those downtown areas anymore. It doesn't make sense to make a walking mall in an area where few people will live in walking distance. Obviously mass transit can help if it is reliable, cheap, and expansively deployed in the city, but that's not a typical case in the US. Otherwise you're going to have to accommodate cars, and lots of them. That means big fast busy roads that are unfriendly to pedestria…
People absolutely do live downtown. Indeed, one of the biggest trends in housing is people moving back in to downtowns.
> It doesn't make sense to make a walking mall in an area where few people will live in walking distance.
So why all the zoning regulations to forbid it? Markets generally won't build where it doesn't make sense. So let them do their job.
> "big fast busy roads"
You can't build your way out of congestion: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/californias-dot-admit...
Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-to-describe sense of 'opportunity'. Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in popu…
I'm not sure how you're defining "important" but I think it's safe to say that the list cities many people 'the place to be' has changed quite a bit from 100 years ago. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle would not have been on that list 100 years ago. But Cleveland and Pittsburgh probably would have been. So I would argue that things actually are kind of flexible. Of course, many cities would stay on the last - e.g. New York. That said, your point still stands that the list hasn't noticeably grown despite massiveky increased population (if anything I bet it's shrunk), which is kind of counterintuitive.
I totally agree with your larger point about the need for a critical mass of people to move to a city though. It's a tricky problem to solve.
I think it's worthwhile to look at small cities that have recently become much more popular - Portland OR, Austin TX, and Asheville NC. Their recent histories might provide some insights into how small cities go from being backwaters to attractive alternatives to the big coastal metropolises.
The biggest gap in this discussion, thus far -- the elephant in the room, as it were: there's almost no room left on the planet for building "new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of course not just the meticulously designed city core; but the whole meta-city that will grow around it -- with suburbs, transportation links, etc). Sure, there might be a few -- a very small few -- bona-fide brown zones here and t…
there's almost no room left on the planet for building "new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of course not just the meticulously designed city core; but the whole meta-city that will grow around it -- with suburbs, transportation links, etc) No way. Spend some time in satellite-view in a mapping program and you'll see that there are huge areas of farmland that could be cities. There's a lot of space on the p…
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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?
Then it’s much more efficient to cluster those 100 different places into a few compact areas, so that most of the people can walk or bike, or take the subway. The problem is when those 200 people want to go to 100 different places spread throughout hundreds of square miles of evenly low density suburban sprawl like a modern US metropolis.
Absolutely. But there will always be people who want to get to locations spread all around even a metropolitan area (as well as further-flung locations around that area), and while it's possible to build a public transit network to get them there, with enough throughput to cover the volume of people, the latency will still be worse than a point-to-point trip directly from point A to point B.
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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 tha…