Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decline of the City Grid

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 212 posts

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#111

Post by hgomersall »

tharkun__ wrote: post #107
hgomersall wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly sure municipal, non-road space increases the value of land adjacent to it

I think brewdad is actually right about the fact that it lowers the value directly adjacent to it. But you're also correct in that it increases the value of land close to it overall. Nobody wants to have their yard directly on the path, where people walk all the time, including with their dogs and for every so many dogs that get walked there and where the owner picks up after them, there will be one that doesn't. Eve…

That's definitely a hypothesis. I'd like to see what the evidence says. Certainly, all the most premium new builds around me are those that back straight onto the parkland (that often forms part of the development).

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#112

Post by davidw »

strken wrote: post #89
davidw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to Venice, Italy if you want to get lost. Grids are the best way to lay out a city so you don't end up with ridiculous burbs like this where it's a 1.5 mile walk between adjacent lots. https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ There are far worse examples of that elsewhere in the country. Grids are also very robust to interruptions - like you remove an intersection (a crash, sewer work, whatever) and it slows…

I think there's a middle ground. If you look examples of walkable suburbs (Houten from one of the other replies, the north of Canberra in Australia) they don't just shove cul-de-sacs everywhere with no thought. Canberra in particular uses looping streets rather than dead ends, runs footpaths between houses at the midpoint of many loops so pedestrians and cyclists can move like they're in a grid, and doesn't have mult…

With a good grid, you could always close off some of the side streets to cars and let bikes and pedestrians through. With the big up front design... you better hope you got it right the first time because you are going to have more trouble changing it later.

I think that's what I like about a grid. It doesn't have to be 100% right. You can change and shape and adapt it as needs be.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#113

Post by rayiner »

jcoder wrote: post #104
rayiner wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at how human scale everything is, even the pedestrian underpass under the road. By contrast in the US, even public transit has to be built at massive, oppressive scales, with pedestrian walkways soaring multiple stories above the road: https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/354851.jpg . Awful.

Houten has a population of 50,000. Plenty of American cities much larger than that have the sort of human-scale features and transit you’re describing—they’re all over Portland, OR.

The place I linked (McLean/Tyson’s Corner) has about 50,000 people.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#114

Post by rippercushions »

nkrisc wrote: post #21
beej71 wrote: post #5

[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead] I like grids... but I'm not sure why. I live at the edge of the old grid section in my town. West of me, it turns into modern non-grid. Which I don't like. But do I not like it because of the lack of grid? Or because of the new modern wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction? I look at an old organically-grown city and it's fascinating to me; its ties to the distant pas…

You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning . Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the build…

I suspect you'd like the grid system in Sapporo, Japan, where every address has Cartesian grid coordinates in the form "North 3, West 5":

https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Sapporo#Get_around

Kyoto is similar, but unfortunately the rest of Japan is a mess: most streets have no name at all and house numbers are in construction order.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#115

Post by terribleperson »

madcaptenor wrote: post #100
dredmorbius wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try living, working, or shopping on Peachtree in Atlanta sometime.

Which one? Seriously, a few days ago I actually did a four-mile drive that at one point had me take Peachtree Industrial Boulevard to North Peachtree Road to Peachtree Road, and ended on New Peachtree Road. I didn't do this because I wanted to drive on lots of roads named Peachtree, I just wanted some ma po tofu.

Where'd you get your mapo tofu? I like what I get from S.H. Spicy Garden, but I'm open to trying somewhere new.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#116

Post by rippercushions »

mbg721 wrote: post #77

The difference between Cincinnati and St. Louis was stark to me; I grew up assuming that "north" meant "vaguely northeast until it gets inconvenient". The idea that a road can just go on in the same direction for miles and miles seemed like a sinister AI trap. Someplace like New Orleans or Montreal where the direction follows a natural feature makes way more sense in my head.

If you find your way to Bangkok's central drag Sukhumvit and keep heading east, 500 km down the road you'll find yourself at the Cambodian border, and it's still the same name.

This is particularly weird since if you head west, the same road changes its name every couple of blocks!

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#117

Post by mattlondon »

twelvechairs wrote: post #8

The big recent exemplar of street layout for a new place is Houten in the netherlands [0] which is basically focussed on a train station and walkable town square at the centre with a ring road at the edge. Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars making the car network more of a tree with dead ends rather than a grid. And making road speeds slow at the centre and fast at the edges.…

Check out Stevenage in the UK. It ain't no paradise.

It has what appears to be identical segregated cycleways and has done for 60+ years now ( https://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/wp-content/uploads/... ), yet cycle usage is less than 3% despite the town being literally designed around and built with cycleways from day 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenage

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#118

Post by twobitshifter »

twelvechairs wrote: post #8

The big recent exemplar of street layout for a new place is Houten in the netherlands [0] which is basically focussed on a train station and walkable town square at the centre with a ring road at the edge. Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars making the car network more of a tree with dead ends rather than a grid. And making road speeds slow at the centre and fast at the edges.…

you know what else is a tree with dead ends? The thousands of suburban cul-de-sacs throughout the US. It makes me wonder if there’s an opportunity to rework them into something other than houses.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#119

Post by cperciva »

robotresearcher wrote: post #90
cperciva wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you were downtown? From roughly 15th south -- the majority of the city -- pretty much all you get is suburban wasteland of detached homes.

There are lumps of density around many of the SkyTrain stops. Some of the stops used to be in the middle of nowhere, then gradually developers made them into little dense mini-metros.

Outside of the City of Vancouver, yes. Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed, Surrey City Center -- but Vancouver itself has been very resistant to development outside of the core.

The story of Metro Vancouver development can be summarized as "a city which wants to be a suburb surrounded by suburbs which want to be cities".

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#120

Post by tharkun__ »

hgomersall wrote: post #111
tharkun__ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think brewdad is actually right about the fact that it lowers the value directly adjacent to it. But you're also correct in that it increases the value of land close to it overall. Nobody wants to have their yard directly on the path, where people walk all the time, including with their dogs and for every so many dogs that get walked there and where the owner picks up after them, there will be one that doesn't. Eve…

That's definitely a hypothesis. I'd like to see what the evidence says. Certainly, all the most premium new builds around me are those that back straight onto the parkland (that often forms part of the development).

Fair enough. Different people have different tolerances, preferences and let's face it: financial options.

What exactly is "parkland"? I know some examples that I wouldn't mind being across from or backing onto with enough thick brush/tree border and others I would definitely avoid at much cost. When you say premium, is all of it premium? Asking because of course even in a premium only development someone will live next to public places. I definitely know how I would choose which place to buy if I could have any of them.

I only have anecdata but I've lived in a few places in my life so far and I can tell you that one place for example we specifically didn't buy because it was right across from an open field park with playground, baseball field and a skate park even though it was otherwise very nice. We are still close to it but we don't hear or see it except when there's a festival and live music and such. Of course someone does live there even today and there's other much larger and more luxurious houses than I could afford right next to another playground close to me. But who knows, if I hadn't found that other place I may have opted to live with the park because it was still better than what I was trying to get away from.

Post reply on HN