New Cities

If you're going to have a dense, intercity area, I suppose I'd argue that the question isn't about "human-driven cars", which brings up the largely unrealistic consideration of self-driving cars on ordinary roads, but simply: Build the city center entirely around public transit. Rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely. Why bother with buses if you have free reign where to put your rails? And as a Chicagoan, I can say that nobody in their right mind drives a car into the intercity to begin with.

Modern subway systems are automated with barrier walls and doors making it near impossible for a human to end up on the tracks. If built like this from the get-go, collisions between transit and pedestrian could be virtually zero. Plan your stations based on the distance needed to reach EVERYWHERE in a reasonable walking distance, make sure your system has the capacity to meet the daily working population, and you really don't need direct A-to-B transportation.

> Light rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely.

Heavy rail is even better, and if you're designing a city from scratch, the biggest challenges to building heavy rail aren't as much of a problem.

If you're serious about this, you need Geoffrey West,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.ht...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West

http://www.santafe.edu/about/people/directory/

Alberto Hernando de Castro, and

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S_ad8ycAAAAJ&hl=en

maybe Franz-Josef Ulm

http://www.citymetric.com/%E2%80%9Curban-physicists%E2%80%9D...

https://cee.mit.edu/ulm

And I don't know who's been doing Chinese planning, but they've obviously had some experience building cities that never became populated.

> Light rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely.

While I'm a firm believer that private cars (at least at a scale seen in the U.S.) and dense cities are fundamentally incompatible, I'm not quite onboard with getting rid of roads altogether. What about bicycles? Emergency vehicles? Construction equipment? Furniture deliveries? Deliveries of merchandise to stores? None of these things are going to be able to get around without a road network of some description, albeit hopefully one significantly reduced in scope from a typical American city.

Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-to-describe sense of 'opportunity'.

Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in population.

Because of this, our generation is stuck on the wrong side of the supply/demand bit for property. Property in uninteresting cities is very cheap, because nobody wants to be there. Property in Silicon Valley or Toronto is on fire because it's the place to be.

I think there's a critical mass kind of problem. In many ways, my quality of life in a smaller (or even very small) city could be several times higher than it currently is -- except for the people. And, for better or worse, it's the people that matter. I don't have any real desire to be the best educated, or most creative, or most entrepreneurial person in a city: I want to be surrounded by them and call them my friends.

So perhaps there's some kind of Kickstarter-like critical mass sort of system that could be put into place to kickstart small cities whereby 50 or 100 mutually interesting people committed to moving to a more remote city iff their compatriots did as well.

Of course, to make that work, there would be have to be some kind of "opportunity", which is why I'm happy to see yC-folks looking into the problem.