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

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

devonzuegel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 344 posts

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

#101

Post by pm90 »

joshuaheard wrote: post #55

Visiting the Leonardo Da Vinci museum, I saw an exhibit where Leonardo did an urban design plan. In it, he made the street level pedestrian only. Under the street was another level for horses and wagons (cars and busses today), where each building had an underground entrance to this level through an underground garage. This seems like an elegant solution in an urban area from the man who invented the helicopter, para…

Except that it would also be ridiculously expensive. If construction costs reduce in the future due to automation though, might be workable.

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

#102

Post by bluGill »

rootusrootus wrote: post #64
yongjik wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It isn't lack of density, that is a symptom. We don't allows stores, jobs and houses to be within walking distance of each other. As a result you have to drive everywhere. As a result you have to have a car. As a result we need space for lots of cars, as a result things are spread out.

If you had stores and jobs within walking distance of your house you would not need a car. As a result you wouldn't find a car worth having. As a result you wouldn't need all the space dedicated to the car. Also as a result you would take public transportation.

It also hurts that our focus on not allowing change means that even when someone is willing to spend their own money to tear down a smaller house/apartment to replace it with something larger we won't allow it. Thus areas that "want" to grow denser cannot do that. The only option is to grow outwards. That means people need to be farther out, which implies more time in a car, which implies more roads and parking spaces, which in turn means less density is possible.

Note that the above is simplistic. I ignored many other factors. It is a complex problem and no one change can solve it.

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

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #91
djsumdog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply not true at all. There were countless small towns in America that had streetcars. It scales up quite well too. Your town turns into a city? Demolish the park-n-rides and turn them into stores. I hate this bullshit of "America is too spread out for transit." No, it is now. It's only happened in Jena, Germany is a town of $100k with 4 trams and 3 intercity rail stations. Chattanooga, TN, home of the famo…

> I hate this bullshit of "America is too spread out for transit." No, it is now. It's only happened in Unfortunately, the American population has also exponentially grown in that same time period. It really isn't that easy to switch back to streetcars or light-rail or bicycling, and if someone figures out how, it'll probably be the biggest infrastructural development of the next fifty years.

> Unfortunately, the American population has also exponentially grown in that same time period.

Even if that were true (I'm pretty sure even with immigration, the doubling time of the US population has been increasing over that period, so the growth has not been exponential, which would be constant time to any given multiple) why would that particular shape of the growth curve make a difference?

If you are just misusing "exponential" to mean "fast", more population in the same area makes mass transit more, not less, viable an alternative to individual transit.

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

#104

Post by pm90 »

slededit wrote: post #94
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…

Its pretty great to get groceries the day of on your way home from work. Ingredients are fresh, and nothing sits around wasting away in your freezer or fridge. Your town has to be setup well for it though.

This exactly! I recently moved to SF and just love that on my walk back home I can just stop by and get the things I need to make dinner for the night. No more buying a ton of stuff and storing in the fridge.

As for the heavy stuff: many stores offer home delivery. There are also other apps that have people deliver stuff to your home for a small fee. Definitely doable.

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

#105

Post by lgregg »

pm90 wrote: post #98
earlz wrote: post #47

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 esp…

Texan cities are all very car friendly and pedestrian unfriendly. It is just not possible to get anywhere without a car, and people will look at you strangely even if you walk down to the grocery store a mile away or so. One fine Houston morning, my friends and I decided to walk down to the strip mall for lunch after a night out; the sidewalks were unmaintained and cracking, but also... we were the only ones walking!…

The suburb (south Houston suburban city) my mom lives in has a token sidewalk for people to run or walk their dogs. That's literally 90-95% of the type of uses I see there minus one guy I see every once and awhile who looks like he's going to or coming from work. It's pretty sad.

I do get one thing, it is really hot in Houston, so I think that plays a lot into the mentality of cars vs walking, at least there.

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

#106

Post by post_break »

pm90 wrote: post #98
earlz wrote: post #47

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 esp…

Texan cities are all very car friendly and pedestrian unfriendly. It is just not possible to get anywhere without a car, and people will look at you strangely even if you walk down to the grocery store a mile away or so. One fine Houston morning, my friends and I decided to walk down to the strip mall for lunch after a night out; the sidewalks were unmaintained and cracking, but also... we were the only ones walking!…

It doesn't help that it's 100F with 100% humidity.

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

#107

Post by scythe »

coldtea wrote: post #90
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…

> If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit is better. Were did that came from? In a small town, you can get by fine with walking, bikes and so on -- like tons of Europeans do in tons of small (and even larger) towns, including towns where cars are totally forbidden and others were (because the town was built in medieval times and its buildings still stand ju…

>>>If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. [...]

>W[h]ere did that came from? In a small town, you can get by fine with walking, bikes and so on

This isn't really the point. Sure, you can build a small town which prioritizes walking over cars. There are even examples in the US, such as Helen, Georgia. However, most people (US) would not prefer to live in such a town. In Europe, those towns are already in place, and people already live there.

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

#108

Post by lgregg »

njarboe wrote: post #74
Zaskoda wrote: post #62

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 inten…

Need a kickstarter like system. Get 10,000 people to deposit $10,000 and you have got $100,000,000 to acquire a nice plot of land, set up planning and governance, and incorporate a new town. I'd be interested in seeing plans for such towns and would be interested in living in one. Or one billionaire with similar ambitions.

I'd be down. I would be curious of how the governance would work for a situation like city-funding(?). Would funders get some special say, or are they simply along for the ride?

What if a corporation started a city instead of a billionaire? "Hello, welcome to Amazon!"

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

#109

Post by jimmaswell »

I wonder if all these sour grapes about cars will simmer down if a generation comes along that can more easily afford them again.

The area I live in is pretty dense (a mixed commercial-suburbanish area in the most densely-populated state) and also very car-enabled, and it works out fine. The stores I go to are within minutes of driving for me, and work is 10-15 minutes away. I don't know the official term for such a thing, but near my apartment is what's like a micro-city that you can easily walk/bike around while car use isn't very hampered. The major grocery store's plaza gets a large parking lot and otherwise there are street parking areas. In the other direction are major high-traffic roads that connect to interstates. There are also major businesses around here with tech jobs, and they use large complexes with their own large parking lots. There's a lot I don't like about New Jersey but this kind of mixed area seems to work out really well and makes me question the necessity of block-style cities where it's just depressing concrete towers in a grid as far as the eye can see.

Maybe there are more solutions that just take some imagination to support both cars and others in increasingly-dense areas. More car bridges, extra lanes by replacing some sidewalks with sky bridges, underground tunnels, parking lots on the roofs, more reversible lanes, allow motorcycles to use shoulders. Just brainstorming here but I don't like the idea of throwing out the baby with the bathwater with cars - nothing else provides the same freedom to spontaneously go wherever you want on your own terms instead of being beholden to transit schedules or only being able to go as far as you can walk or bike.

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

#110

Post by asteli »

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.

My favorite is the Spanish city of Girona (couple of hours north of Barcelona by train). You can walk clear across the city in a half hour, but the buildings are typically 3-7 stories tall.
Post reply on HN