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Make More Land

jefftk.com

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Re: Make More Land

#261

Post by jelliclesfarm »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #257
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think America is malfunctioning compared to other countries? I have never seen anyone trip over to try and immigrate to Netherlands. US has a lot of ‘desert’ in the middle? Pray do tell..what is the name of said desert in the middle of America?

I immigrated to the Netherlands. I lived in Denver, Cleveland, new haven, NYC and San Diego. I love them all. That said, the Netherlands truly does many things better than America. It is such a great place to raise kids. America will not be great if it doesn't steal good ideas where they exist.

Would you be willing to share the nature of your immigration? I understand if you would rather not. Just curious.

Re: Make More Land

#262

Post by pyrale »

lostapathy wrote: post #151
pyrale wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food and building material would still need to commute, and the amount of energy it represents probably can't be decreased enough to make dense cities a good thing for climate change.

Building material "commuting" is a one time thing, not every day for the rest of your life like getting to work.

What we can observe in large cities is that there is a constant stream of new buildings and construction works. The "build once" model works for one building and over one lifetime, but at the scale of a large city, construction work is a constant process.

Re: Make More Land

#263

Post by pyrale »

bluGill wrote: post #147
pyrale wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food and building material would still need to commute, and the amount of energy it represents probably can't be decreased enough to make dense cities a good thing for climate change.

Food needs to be transported either way. Dense cities are better because the trucks need to make less stops on the delivery end.

The number of stops is probably less important than the distance traveled by food. Towns or small cities can have food produces locally. In large cities, food has to travel across the city, and on top of that it has to travel across the space required for farming.

This is a non-concern now of course, but in a world where we want to reduce transportation at scales serious enough to fight climate change, large cities will be a liability.

Re: Make More Land

#264

Post by Nitramp »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #259
Nitramp wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you think America is malfunctioning compared to other countries? Apparently many people are upset with their housing cost and commute situation, which I understand triggered the original post on making more land. Having lived in the Bay Area for a while, the housing/commute/living cost situation there definitely seems dysfunctional. > US has a lot of ‘desert’ in the middle? Pray do tell..what is the name of…

[Nitramp said]Apparently many people are upset with their housing cost and commute situation, which I understand triggered the original post on making more land. Having lived in the Bay Area for a while, the housing/commute/living cost situation there definitely seems dysfunctional.[..] Right. But how is America different from other countries? Mumbai and Tokyo have similar problems and they can’t expand housing outsi…

I think my comment is reasonably clear as it stands, if you don't intentional try to distort it.

Your style of argument (including the ad hominems) suggest to me you're neither interested in an exchange of ideas nor in a civilized conversation, so I don't think there's a point for me in engaging any further.

Re: Make More Land

#265

Post by pyrale »

asdfman123 wrote: post #106
pyrale wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dense cities are not envoronmentally friendly. You have to go get food further, you have to use building materials that are a major cause of pollution, etc. Any large city needs tremendous amounts of energy to work, and we have not found clean and efficient sources of energy so far. Vertical farming could help big cities rely on less energy, but so far I don't see it being scaled to the extent we need.

How much energy does it take to actually transport food into the cities from farmland? I remember reading that the amount of resources it takes is laughably small, especially when your lettuce is coming from the other side of the country anyway. But if you don't build in the city, you have to build outside of the city. Does it really take more resources to build a large housing complex than it takes to build an entir…

A quick search gives me numbers around 10-15% of the total food energy. But if you remove processing, some of the packaging and some of the retail energy consumption, that are in large part consequences of not having access to fresh food, this number is much larger.

The benefit of building smaller cities is that you can afford to have lettuce that comes from a couple kilometers away. If you build small cities, but still keep a distribution network that spans across continents, things will indeed not improve.

Also you compare dense cities to (american?) suburbs. Dense cities are indeed better. My point is that they are a local optimum, and one that is not good enough to offset the effects of climate change.

The model I would promote is cities small enough to rely on a short-distance farm network for most of their needs.

Re: Make More Land

#266

Post by masonic »

Nitramp wrote: post #187
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

america has 350 million people. california, for example, has 40 million people. netherlands has 17 million people. india has 1300 million people. population density of netherlands is 488 people/km2. population density of india is 416 people/km2. usa is 98 people/km2. we are not netherlands or india. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/netherlands/ind... : netherlands and india country comparison. https://cou…

> america functions just fine [...] I think reasonable people might disagree with that assessment. Also, as an example the South Bay (Santa Clara County) houses 2'400 ppl/km2. That's cherry picking a bit, but somewhat comparable to the Netherlands' densely populated area (the Randstad @ ~1'600/km2). The US just happens to contain a lot of desert in the middle, but that says little about the metropolitan areas. I don'…

The vast majority of Santa Clara County is rural or open space. Only the Valley north of Coyote, and the 101 corridor, are populated to any semblance of density.

Re: Make More Land

#267

Post by eru »

daxorid wrote: post #173
eru wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do need more people in San Francisco. It's one of the most productive cities in the world. But there's plenty of space there already: upwards. It's just illegal to use.

GDP per capita is a poor measure of productivity, and doesn't consider externalities. SF is pretty good at producing emotionally manipulative adtech to opt every Internet and smartphone user into a global panopticon, and also quite prolific at social media that turns our lives into perpetually distracting hedonic treadmills. Time will tell whether the "productivity" of SF was a net benefit to Civilization.

I'm just looking at people making good money for themselves (from high wages), and paying taxes for the benefit for the rest of the country.

Re: Make More Land

#268

Post by xefer »

jefftk wrote: post #205
xefer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the subjects of Boston, its new-ish Seaport District and "Make more land": was it ever under discussion to simply fill in the Fort Point Channel completely? That could have potentially knitted the Seaport development into the city itself. If I recall correctly, during the "Big Dig" work they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to run the new harbor tunnel road under the channel and deal with the water, and mud,…

> was it ever under discussion to simply fill in the Fort Point Channel completely? At the end of the linked post I reference an earlier post of mine where I propose filling in the channel: https://www.jefftk.com/p/fill-in-fort-point-channel

That was an interesting note about the FPC. It's something I've wondered about for years ... and proof I didn't read until the very end of the linked article I guess :)

It reminds me of the small vestigial canal in Cambridge, the Broad Canal, that is one of the last remnants of a much larger canal network that ran through East Cambridge. I've always wondered why that last bit hasn't been filled in. It's a man-made canal, so if anything, filling it in would restore the original land. There's an old steel draw bridge spanning the canal that I don't think has actually been opened in 20 years. The bridge is actually a bit of a burden: the state recently did a good job widening the walking/bike bath along the Charles River but there's a pinch point at the bridge because the old pedestrian walk way across the bridge is so tight it can't readily accommodate the bike traffic it gets a lot of now.

There has to be some reason why they've left the bridge. My dad said when he was a kid he remembers barges delivering coal to the power plan that runs along the north side of that canal. It's all gas powered now, but I wonder if it could use coal in an emergency and they've left access to the plant for that reason?

Re: Make More Land

#269

Post by bluGill »

pyrale wrote: post #263
bluGill wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food needs to be transported either way. Dense cities are better because the trucks need to make less stops on the delivery end.

The number of stops is probably less important than the distance traveled by food. Towns or small cities can have food produces locally. In large cities, food has to travel across the city, and on top of that it has to travel across the space required for farming. This is a non-concern now of course, but in a world where we want to reduce transportation at scales serious enough to fight climate change, large cities w…

Only if everybody is a subsistence farmer. If you want a modern lifestyle a large dense city is best: all the things you want from modern life are close and produced locally. The exceptions are food (food needs a lot of area to produce), and raw materials. These two are small enough that if they were our only use of transport (meaning you walk everywhere) they wouldn't affect climate change.

Re: Make More Land

#270

Post by bluGill »

fiter wrote: post #233
tomjakubowski wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when buses get signal priority.

Signal priority over pedestrians too?

A bus every 5 minutes carries enough people to be worth that, and leaves plenty of space in between for pedestrians to cross. (Assuming a dedicated lane). For various reasons you should get a bus to come more than once every 5 minutes, upgrade to a train. (with great dispatch you can get down to every 3 minutes, but it is better to put in a non-grade level train at that point)
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