I hope the winner of this call get all sent to live for 2 years in small (and not so small) unknown towns in Europe that have been growing organically for thousands of years and offer a great quality of life. Places where rich and poor, kids, young adults, adults and elderly all live happily together (modulo the usual father-and-son generational problems). Seriously, planners in "new" countries should be forced to sp…
You don't need thousands of years. Most European cities are much, much younger.
"Most of the founders in each startup we fund (and always the CEO) are expected to move to the Bay Area for the duration of the three month cycle." ~from about y combinator.
Isn't the reason cities are full the same reason they require this kind of thing?
Why not solve this first. If I can live anywhere and apply, maybe everyone else doesn't have to live in the valley as well.
Friend, I am aware of the "streetcar conspiracy". I am also aware that streetcars died out for reasons well beyond conspiracy. I am further aware of many areas where cars are very useful that never had streetcar systems to be destroyed by GM.
Sorry to have made assumptions. My understanding is that there was no pre-existing infrastructure suitable to cars. The dirt and cobblestone roads that existed were inadequate, to put it nicely. I have read up a good bit on such things and drawn a very different conclusion from you. In the US, personally owned vehicles are critical for sprawling suburbs and rural life. It is a big country with low density. Cars shoul…
The cyclist lobbied for some 'proper' roads to be build at first. The cars found them very useful.
What you describe about Rome seems to apply for many many European cities. Many of them seem to have "mini-downtowns" scattered about, as opposed to the downtown-in-center-and-suburbs-everywhere-else that is common in North America.
That's often because the grew by incorporating existing villages and small towns into the larger city.
Absolutely. But the benefits are such that we should aim to replicate them via planning, IMO
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…
While that may be true if you speak for yourself like a single person. But what if you are a couple, or a family?
For a long time I did not want a car but when children came, we have bought it and it help our mobility a lot, if you have full car, it is also cheaper travel than paying tickets for everybody.
For a travel inside a city I still use public transport wherever I can as it is the fastest and most green way to get around.
> Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominator? I don't own a car, and I'm sure many other people in my city don't either, so no: it's not the lowest common denominator for us: walking is. Cars are themselves very expensive and require a massive amount of infrastructure to function. Look around a city and think of al…
>They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce. That's the most ridiculous justification I've heard for anything. A thousand dollar piece of toilet paper is also massively profitable to produce, but nobody would buy it. People buy cars because they are useful. If you think most people don't enjoy the freedom they get from owning a car, you are living in a bubble. I work with people th…
I grow up with a mother without a car. Both school and shopping was within walking distance, and when we got older and chang d school within easy 15 minutes bicycle distance. And this was not in a city center, but in a suburb. And most importantly, not in the US. The problem with the US is that everything is built for cars, which means that all the distances by necessity becomes huge to fit all the roads and the parking lots. Remove those and you can place everything much closer and you won't need the car at all most days.
> Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominator? I don't own a car, and I'm sure many other people in my city don't either, so no: it's not the lowest common denominator for us: walking is. Cars are themselves very expensive and require a massive amount of infrastructure to function. Look around a city and think of al…
>They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce. That's the most ridiculous justification I've heard for anything. A thousand dollar piece of toilet paper is also massively profitable to produce, but nobody would buy it. People buy cars because they are useful. If you think most people don't enjoy the freedom they get from owning a car, you are living in a bubble. I work with people th…
I grow up with a mother without a car. Both school and shopping was within walking distance, and when we got older and chang d school within easy 15 minutes bicycle distance. And this was not in a city center, but in a suburb. And most importantly, not in the US. The problem with the US is that everything is built for cars, which means that all the distances by necessity becomes huge to fit all the roads and the parking lots. Remove those and you can place everything much closer and you won't need the car at all most days.
I got the map out the last time I was in the car. Far quicker than waiting for my phone to get a GPS lock.
I don't even want to know what kind of phone you have if unfolding a map, tracing and memorizing your route, and folding it back up is quicker than a GPS lock. On any phone I've had since 2009, GPS lock has been instant.
All I needed to do was look up the number of a junction. The rest of the route was pretty straightforward. And it was not a foldable map, just a big book. Way less faff than getting the phone out of my pocket, unlocking the screen farting about looking for a map app, waiting for it to load then get a GPS lock.
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.
Rent is the measure of the success of a city; rent is high where people want to be.
Saying you'll make "cheap housing" where people will nonetheless want to be is complete nonsense. If people want to live there the rent will go up; the only way to make the rent low is to make the place utterly undesirable.