New Cities • Hacker News Board

Re: New Cities

#501

Post by malyk » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #419

16bytes wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving is only faster in high density areas due to misappropriation of infrastructure. The subway, light rail, and dedicated bus lane can be faster than cars, especially when you factor in parking. This is the case in many areas of many cities that do have appropriate infrastructure in place. For example, I can take a dedicated bus lane into my city center in about 30 minutes, whereas driving takes at least 45 minut…

Yes, you can take a bus into your city center faster at rush hour. That's exactly what public transit is really good at: getting people to a common destination at a common time. Now, how fast can you get from an arbitrary point in the city to an arbitrary point in the city at an arbitrary time of day?

I just spent a couple of weeks and paris/barcelona and I'd say you could probably do it faster by subway/walking than by car especially when you figure in the cost/annoyance of finding and paying for parking.

There's a huge "but" there though. We rode the metro over 30 times in those two cities and never waited for a train for more than 3 minutes. Both cities have trains coming every 4 minutes at all hours of the day (as far as I can tell). That is something we would have to fix in most US cities that have public transportation.

I mean, it must feel like the third world here for a European visitor who comes to DC or SF (the two cities I'm most familiar with) and tries to ride the metro. 12 minutes between rush hour trains in DC and 20 or 24 minutes between trains in DC and SF outside of rush-hour.

When you can pop into a metro that is ~5 minutes from your flat, be on the train in less than 4 minutes, and be within ~5 minutes walk of wherever you want to be...why would you own a car, pay insurance, pay for a parking spot at home, pay for gas, and then pay for parking at a location when public transit is so convenient?

Re: New Cities

#502

Post by vkou » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

whazor wrote: post #27

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #13

> We now have major technologies such as smart grids, autonomous vehicles, etc Not really. Autonomous vehicles are still coming. We don't know what infrastructure we'll need to support them just yet. Will there be a standardized way of powering / recharging them? What non-autonomous needs will they have and how to we handle them (because there will be some e.g. mechanical repair, rescue, etc)? Sure we can "guess" bas…

We have autonomous vehicles once you forbid pedestrians on the road.

Don't just forbid pedestrians - you also need to forbid the existing hundred million or so non-autonomous vehicles.

Re: New Cities

#503

Post by rfrey » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 9:58 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #182

curryst wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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). There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house? I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food. Being able to do it all at once…

A surprising (to me) benefit of going from a car-based life for 35 years to a car-less life is that more frequent grocery trips have given me incentive to move away from processed foods to fresher foods.

Shopping once every 7 or 10 days obviates the advantage of the freshest produce, meat, etc. but when I'm shopping every couple days it makes a difference, and I've enjoyed cooking and eating more.

Re: New Cities

#504

Post by malyk » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #161

nostrademons wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. It's worth playing some Cities:Skylines (which has a fairly accurate traffic simulator, particularly with the Traffic++ mod) to understand how the road hierarchy came into being. Or, for that matter, trying to drive through a grid-based city like Manhattan or SF. You get very large traffic jams. The problem is intersections, and particularly intersections where traffic…

I really enjoy C:S, but even with Traffic++ the traffic simulation is pretty wonky and shouldn't be taken as reflective of reality. But here's some advice if you're having trouble with traffic jams in your grid systems: use more one-way streets. If you've converted your city over to a 100% one-way grid and still have backups, you probably need to work on your mass transit and freight rail systems. I've made functiona…

According to Jeff Speck (https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/d...) 1 way streets have a negative economic impact for the business that line those streets. Which I think makes intuitive sense. Anyway, that doesn't matter in C:S, but it probably matters in the real world.

Re: New Cities

#505

Post by BinaryIdiot » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #396

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be pretty awesome and is very doable today. Good idea! You wouldn't even need roads really just stations everywhere to get on some sort of train type of vehicle that you can hop on and get to any part of the city. Hell make them smaller and more frequent and when you get in you put where you want to stop so it can skip stops, etc.

Trollies. They leave the roads open for other forms of transportation. They can be made to move slow enough that people can embark/disembark while it's in motion. Some level of automation can allow them to realize they're full and skip stops unless requested by a passenger. Hell, you could put a button or offer a phone app so people can request it to stop at a particular stop instead of flagging it down like a bus. A…

Hmm not bad. Embarking / disembarking sounds difficult for the handicapped but I'm sure that's work-around-able. I'd be interested in seeing more cities adopt quick transportation like this even if it's in a different but similar form.

Re: New Cities

#506

Post by Symmetry » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 10:07 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #465

jandrese wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are moving back into a few select downtowns that are being rapidly gentrified. They are not a typical case. As for the zoning question, it's probably the result of busybody town governments trying to control every aspect of the city lest some developer ruin their perfect vision of the city. I can guarantee that if you propose to build a big shopping complex in the middle of the city you will have people out to…

> This is how a lot of regulation gets started, because someone is trying to prevent something from happening to their backyard. There are legitimate complaints, I think - no one wants a pig offal disposal site next door in their residential neighborhood. But we've gone way overboard in letting zoning dictate what can go where. > They are not a typical case. But they absolutely are on YC's radar, because San Fran and…

You could always have Japanese style zoning. To simplify a lot, you can build houses in residential zones, you can build stores or houses in commercial zones, and you can build factories, stores, or houses in industrial zones. So people who want peace and quite have a place for it and nobody is allowed to surprise you with a pig offal disposal site next door. But if people really want to build houses in an industrial zone they can.

Re: New Cities

#507

Post by com2kid » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 10:09 PM UTC

justinator wrote: post #475

Kalium wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that with infrastructure in place, cars enable an immense amount of individual flexibility? To my mind, it seems somewhat plausible that cars rose to dominance because they enabled individual flexibility for the masses atop pre-existing and extensible infrastructure.

Flexibility? I don't own a car, and haven't for the last decade (and only had a car for maybe a year of my life). This year, I've been driven in a car about four times in > 170 days. So let me talk about flexibility. Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year…

> Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you.

I own a reliable econo-box that I bought years ago. Maintenance is almost nil, parking is less time than it'd take me to use public transit (which is relatively bad where I live), and underground parking comes with my condo.

I am a huge advocate of public transit, but I'll say that cars are pretty nice.

Re: New Cities

#508

Post by ghaff » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 10:10 PM UTC

rwhitman wrote: post #472

dhd415 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yea it's also a pretty common sci-fi / cyberpunk fantasy city design dating back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis , influenced by the Art Deco "city of the future" ideas like this floating around at the time. In NYC at least the lower levels are already present. But the only part where we got the pedestrian level correct so far is the High Line... which has been hugely successful. There's really no reason these types of pa…

Except that in most cities including New York it's going to be difficult to build something like that in the absence of an existing structure and right of way. The High Line is also in effectively a post-industrial area which is now highly gentrified but wasn't previously exactly prime real estate. And it's still not really located for day to day pedestrian movement as opposed to recreation.

Re: New Cities

#509

Post by malyk » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 10:12 PM UTC

elsurudo wrote: post #214

simonswords82 wrote: post #186

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Yep, what you describe is very similar to my experience of many European cities including Barcelona.

Yes, the Eixample district of Barcelona is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample Actually it was planned to have a lot more green space (the blocks were only supposed to have housing on two sides so as to leave the other sides unimpeded), but market forces prevailed, and all the green space is now walled off. Shame. The district is still a lot more liveable than basically any place I've seen in North…

I stayed off the Urquinaona a couple weeks ago and really enjoyed that area of the city. Yes, there was a pretty high amount of vehicular traffic around that area, but it was full of street life and an easy base to get around the city from.

Re: New Cities

#510

Post by petra » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 10:16 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #445

dragonwriter wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

If externalities are present, there is no general solution to the problem of optimizing either individual net utility or social net utility. Markets don't do it perfectly, but no other solution does any better, and in fact the most common alternative, government regulation, does worse on average.

How do markets optimize net social utility ? let's be more concrete , let's talk about a market with modern advertising ?