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

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

#61

Post by ghaff »

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…

I was on crutches for a few months a number of years back when I broke my foot. Fortunately, I was able to switch to mostly working from home. But it was still really eye opening. I cut out most of my travel, didn't really go into the city at all, got home grocery delivery, etc.

I did find I was able to cook so long as I kept things simple and didn't do anything that would have required moving heavy pots around. Decent takeout options are pretty limited around where I live so I felt I had to just cope with cooking the best I could.

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

#62

Post by Zaskoda »

I'm one of those folks who would love to drop everything I have going to wander off into the desert/forest/underwater/whatever with the intention of bootstrapping a new city from scratch. The more I talk about it, I've found that there are a lot of people who would love such an adventure - if we could all just find some effort worth getting behind. It's sort of like starting a hippy commune, only with high-tech intentions. I'd rather embrace the world and one-up it than to hide away from it. I meet a lot of people who agree so I'm surprised there aren't more projects of this nature getting traction.

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

#63

Post by reaperducer »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #50
reaperducer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

What? Why?

Studies show that narrower streets cause cars to drive more slowly, making neighborhoods more livable. (Less noise, among other factors.)

There are other methods used that also cause cars to slow down - road humps, textured (fake cobblestone) crosswalks, pedestrian refuge islands, pedestrian bump-outs, replacing parallel parking with angled end-in parking, etc...

When you have raised sidewalks traffic speeds don't really doesn't affect walk-ability as long as there's crossings at lights

No, walking on a sidewalk with traffic whizzing by at speed is not a pleasant experience.

increase overall efficiency and throughput

Increasing throughput is last century thinking. Current best practices is to encourage people to use transit, especially in a city like Chicago that has (in spite of its flaws) has pretty good transit for an American city.

Here's a PDF from CDOT explaining much of this: https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/cdot/st...

[Edited to add PDF link]

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

#64

Post by rootusrootus »

yongjik wrote: post #53
trothamel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sorry I wasn't clear: I meant "at the front door" for those 5% who have to drive. The rest can walk. It's good for health, and usually still faster than being stuck in the sea of single occupancy vehicles! :)

I feel like this only makes sense if you build cities of any size, even when they have 50 people, as if they are ultra-dense. The reality is that public transit takes a certain size city before it reaches critical mass and becomes superior to individual transit. Even where I live (Portland, Oregon) which is considered to have decent public transit, I would have to walk a lot and plan on 2-3 times as long if I wanted to stick with public transit. The density just isn't there yet.

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

#65

Post by takk309 »

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…

The idea of tolling roads may work well in areas with high traffic volumes. However, what about rural areas that may only see a couple thousand vehicles a day? Take a state like Montana for example. We have a few urban areas and a huge amount of rural roads. Even parts of the interstate have an annual average daily traffic (AADT) of less than 4,000 vehicles a day (I-15 near the Montana/Idaho border). [1] If these were toll roads, the toll would either have to be too expensive or it would never actually pay for itself.

[1] https://www.mdt.mt.gov/publications/datastats/traffic_maps.s...

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

#66

Post by lgregg »

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…

I think a lot of the headaches could be avoided by zoning in ways that allow for density improvements to occur. We can't just build every new city as a planned green city too (i.e. Masdar City).

I think it would be beneficial if there was some kind of standard at a state level for not just building codes but zone codes. It would also be nice if there was some kind of zoning and code for underground, so lower levels could be built as density increased (i.e. Lower Wacker in Chicago[0]) to allow vehicles to still park and travel but allow the buildings to narrow on the upper street. It would then also provide a separation of humans and cars which would help for safety. [2]

That also would allow for the potential building of middle-ground assets that are much more affordable like the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel to allow for BRT/Light Rail. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_streets_in_Chicago and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacker_Drive

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunne...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development

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

#67

Post by dbatten »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #41
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 tr…

You've basically just described a libertarian economic philosophy. We can have an intelligent conversation about whether that's a good idea or not, but it's a very serious political philosophy that lots of very intelligent people subscribe to...

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

#68

Post by takk309 »

spraak wrote: post #60
paulddraper wrote: post #49

> 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 yest…

> 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. Yes, and how those cities are designed are a big part of the problem.

Development standards rarely satisfy everyone's needs/wants. It is more efficient to build at a high density, but that may not necessarily mean that we should all conform to that mentality. A lot of us don't want to live in dense urban environments.

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

#69

Post by throwaway0255 »

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…

Optimistic visions of how government services should work need to take into account the dysfunctional and extraordinarily inefficient nature of the system you're plugging those responsibilities into.

If you have the State of California implement this system, it's going to add 10 hours of paperwork and phone calls to every year of every adult's life in perpetuity forever with no hope of ever being improved or rolled back.

Whatever you initially think should form the basis for these tolls will be completely thrown out 5 years later, and the tolls will be used as a generalized fungible revenue source for the state.

So your proposal is effectively "raise taxes and create more jobs that don't actually produce anything and make it more expensive to drive."

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