We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#41

Post by dsfyu404ed » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

dbatten wrote: post #15

Rather than trying to force some particular vision of "the good life" on people, what if we tried to price transportation and other things appropriately? For example, get rid of the gas tax. Toll all state and federally funded roads. Scale the toll according to the amount of wear and tear the vehicle causes for the road. Price something in to account for emissions. Make sure the tolls are high enough to pay for the r…

>Rather than trying to force some particular vision of "the good life" on people, what if we tried to price transportation and other things appropriately?

I agree with this at least.

>For example, get rid of the gas tax. Toll all state and federally funded roads...

Lets do this with public transit too. Ticket sales should cover the full price of the ride. People who walk and bike shouldn't have to subsidize public transit they don't use. They should pay a sidewalk toll instead. No reason to stop there though, lets remove tax breaks for dependents and use the money to pay for public schools. People who's kids aren't in school shouldn't be subsidizing the cost of other peoples kids. We should also bill people when they call emergency services so that the rest of us don't have to subsidize it. People who need emergency services shouldn't externalize the cost onto society, it should be priced in. Now that we've done all that let's figure out that these things are all too expensive for poor people and nowhere near cheap for the middle class. Next let's come up with some sort of voucher system so that these people can use them at reduced cost. After that we can figure out that it's cheaper to just make using all these public resources cheap/free than it is to administrate the pay per use and income based discount system we just created. /s

The point I'm trying to make is that public infrastructure is publicly funded for a reason. Having these things available to the population at near zero cost works out better for everyone than just making users pay for what they use.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#42

Post by trothamel » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #13

Someone1234 wrote: post #3

I agree, but "people" should mean all people, not just the able bodied. Cities keep on inexplicably designing these cool pedestrian only areas for the able bodied and young. There are people who can only travel limited distances, so if you set the beach front back half a mile, you've now cut it off from many older and disabled people. What I am saying is: For the physically young and able, vehicle-less areas as great…

> The distance from a car door to a shop is a good ten minutes, so she simply doesn't go there. She goes to out-of-town supermarkets with disabled bays right near the entrance. ...which is rather ironic, considering "ten-minute walk from parking lot to shop entrance" is an almost unique American suburban problem: we need huge parking lots because everybody's driving. Construct a city so that 95% of the people take pu…

Short of things like taxis and ubers and so on, is there any form of public transportation that is so dense, when it comes to stopping locations?

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#43

Post by smogcutter » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

johngalt wrote: post #24

This is one of those scaling vs. switching cost problems. If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit is better. The problem is that as a city scales up, each individual step results in continually adding infrastructure for cars without ever making the active decision to switch, and redesign the entire city. When a small town grows into a medium, it makes sense…

What large city actually developed this way?

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#44

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

the_gastropod wrote: post #40

johngalt wrote: post #24

This is one of those scaling vs. switching cost problems. If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit is better. The problem is that as a city scales up, each individual step results in continually adding infrastructure for cars without ever making the active decision to switch, and redesign the entire city. When a small town grows into a medium, it makes sense…

Small towns can be built with walkability in mind. In fact towns built before automobiles were invented were built this way: dense, narrow streets with doors opening onto the streets, multi-use buildings, blocks with mixed commerce/residential use. This is a sustainable and resilient way to build communities. Building around cars is not.

Small towns can be built with walkability in mind

This is true. Look at the bedroom communities surrounding Chicago. There are plenty of them where people take commuter rail into the city, then get around their home towns largely by foot. Cars are only used to go to the outlying malls and neighboring small towns.

Chicago is also doing something interesting with the whole notion of "streets."

Essentially, the notion is that since streets are public property, why are we allowing people to store their private property in them? Specifically, cars.

Parking spaces are being turned into miniature parks, or the parking lanes eliminated entirely in what are called "traffic calming" schemes to make streets more pedestrian-friendly.

Unfortunately, the backbone of the project -- Making it harder to park on the street to encourage people to park their private property in private parking garages -- got derailed when the mayor leased the city's parking meters to a private company for 99 years.

Now every time a parking space is removed from use (whether for a parade or a street festival or turned into a pocket park), the city has to pay the private company for that space. The payments are in the order of $30 million/year.

So, it'll be a good project in 94 years or so, when the parking spaces become public property again.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#45

Post by pasta » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

johngalt wrote: post #24

This is one of those scaling vs. switching cost problems. If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit is better. The problem is that as a city scales up, each individual step results in continually adding infrastructure for cars without ever making the active decision to switch, and redesign the entire city. When a small town grows into a medium, it makes sense…

Christopher Alexander wrote about this problem.

The trick is to make it possible for cars to come in the surroundings of a city center without interacting with people.

This post is too short to explain the details but when you have a walking area in front of shops you can have a parking area at the back side of the shops.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#46

Post by the_gastropod » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

drblast wrote: post #21

Someone1234 wrote: post #3

I agree, but "people" should mean all people, not just the able bodied. Cities keep on inexplicably designing these cool pedestrian only areas for the able bodied and young. There are people who can only travel limited distances, so if you set the beach front back half a mile, you've now cut it off from many older and disabled people. What I am saying is: For the physically young and able, vehicle-less areas as great…

Oh yes. I just had surgery that requires me to be on crutches for a few months, so I'm temporarily disabled. If you're young and able-bodied (like me pre-surgery) and want to understand what it's like to not be young and able-bodied (which you almost definitely won't be at some point) you should put your right leg in a brace, and try not to let your foot hit the ground for a day or two and try to live that way. The g…

Cars are not the only solution here. Transporting a single disabled person does not require a 100+ horsepower 2-ton vehicle.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#47

Post by earlz » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:11 PM UTC

I do a lot of traveling for business and staying in a city like Dallas, St. Louis, or some suburbia part of the bay area is absolutely my least ideal place to stay almost always. I love that uber exists, but my favorite part about traveling is walking around and doing photography so that I'm not just sitting in a depressing hotel. If everything interesting is at least 2 miles apart, it's hard to enjoy a city. And especially in Texas cities, many times there are no sidewalks so that walking even short distances is a big pain

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#48

Post by dsfyu404ed » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

kylec wrote: post #31

If walkable cities are so great, why did we ever invent cars?

Imagine having this debate in 1818. People would be complaining about horses crapping everywhere, how hitching posts waste land, how roads designed for getting ox-carts full of goods to market aren't pedestrian friendly, etc. etc.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#49

Post by paulddraper » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

> Websites like Zillow and Apartments.com offer calculations for commute length and walkability to everyday destinations like grocery stores

If I'm walking to the store, do I (a) try to carry 20+ grocery bags home for my family of five or (b) make a grocery trip twice a week? I don't love either of those.

And that's only groceries, not shopping in general. My wife got a 50lb bag of fertilizer from Tractor Supply yesterday morning. How close does that store need to be for walking to make sense? At the end of my driveway?

Basically....if you have a crowded city of apartments, sure, don't do much for cars. If you have a city of single-family residences (and three quarters of Americans do live in single-family residences), it's really hard to not build for cars.

Re: We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

#50

Post by dsfyu404ed » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #44

the_gastropod wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small towns can be built with walkability in mind. In fact towns built before automobiles were invented were built this way: dense, narrow streets with doors opening onto the streets, multi-use buildings, blocks with mixed commerce/residential use. This is a sustainable and resilient way to build communities. Building around cars is not.

Small towns can be built with walkability in mind This is true. Look at the bedroom communities surrounding Chicago. There are plenty of them where people take commuter rail into the city, then get around their home towns largely by foot. Cars are only used to go to the outlying malls and neighboring small towns. Chicago is also doing something interesting with the whole notion of "streets." Essentially, the notion i…

>Parking spaces are being turned into miniature parks, or the parking lanes eliminated entirely in what are called "traffic calming" schemes to make streets more pedestrian-friendly.

What? Why? It seems like it would be better to add additional lanes (shared left turn lane + 2 bike lanes or some similar configuration) to increase overall efficiency and throughput. When you have raised sidewalks traffic speeds don't really doesn't affect walk-ability as long as there's crossings at lights (regardless of traffic speed you won't find an opportunity to cross anywhere else if traffic is reasonably constant)