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

New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 710 posts

Re: New Cities

#161

Post by thescriptkiddie »

nostrademons wrote: post #138
zephjc wrote: post #25

Look to how Tokyo does things. A few takeaways: - mixed use zoning: reduce requirement for long trips by mixing many compatible types of commercial with residential, and remove single housing type developments. Also, allow many smaller apartment complexes mixed with single family houses, instead of segregating housing types. - street design: No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. That is, no more dead-end str…

> No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. It's worth playing some Cities:Skylines (which has a fairly accurate traffic simulator, particularly with the Traffic++ mod) to understand how the road hierarchy came into being. Or, for that matter, trying to drive through a grid-based city like Manhattan or SF. You get very large traffic jams. The problem is intersections, and particularly intersections where traffic…

I really enjoy C:S, but even with Traffic++ the traffic simulation is pretty wonky and shouldn't be taken as reflective of reality.

But here's some advice if you're having trouble with traffic jams in your grid systems: use more one-way streets. If you've converted your city over to a 100% one-way grid and still have backups, you probably need to work on your mass transit and freight rail systems. I've made functional cities where every single road was open only to pedestrians, cyclists, and service vehicles. No cars.

Re: New Cities

#162

Post by wangchow »

Instead of paying taxes people should be forced to do mandatory community service. That will help close the wealth-gap and force wealthy people to intermix with the working class.

Re: New Cities

#163

Post by caublestone »

We asked this question as a case study in interviews. It's interesting to see what people believe is most important to citizens and how they optimize around it. We found it takes a quality full stack systems engineer who can communicate people's needs and a rational large scale solution in 30 minutes.

Re: New Cities

#164

Post by vmarsy »

athenot wrote: post #109
sama wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something. I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.

Cars in tunnels is a great idea, just like the subway: burry it so as to not impact life on the surface. Unfortunately, it is very expensive to operate that way. The easiest tunnels to build are the ones Paris did for their subway a century ago: dig up the soft limestone under the street, lay tracks, close it up. But you still need to deal with ventilation (especially for non-electric cars), fire suppressant, evacuat…

To avoid accidents and other dangers, I'd see a mechanism where you park your car in a pod, and the pod is on rails, and it is getting routed automatically to your destination, that way even "dumb cars" could use it. There's already a system in France where you can park your car on a train, but loading/unloading isn't optimized at all, it's like loading/unloading a ferry : some batch processing. A steaming process would be more efficient

That wouldn't remove the need for ventilation and other things you mentioned if that system is underground. But it could be above the ground , on buildings 2nd floors, where the first floor would be retail stores and whatnot

Re: New Cities

#165

Post by baybal2 »

fudged71 wrote: post #132
baybal2 wrote: post #82

Things that The West can learn from The East: Russia/Eastern Europe: 1. Free-for-all, mixed zoning. You own the land, build whatever you want as long as it's not a munitions factory (Most of Russia, Kazakhstan) 2. Market driven, privatized public transit (Most of Eastern Europe) 3. Small city blocks that let throught traffic. 4. Market controlled access to distric heating/cooling (Yakutsk an extreme example of privat…

What are "green arrows"? And why do they significantly improve throughput?

Green arrow is an additional traffic light signal that lets right turn on red. It is usually computer controlled in big Russian cities

Re: New Cities

#166

Post by Erwin »

The Monocle is a cosmopolitan magazine with short features on just this sort of thing.

Their journalists constantly travel around the world and evaluate schools, public services, transportation etc., publish a yearly top lists of cities etc. They've collected some of their features in books: here's their latest, "How to make a nation": https://monocle.com/film/affairs/monocle-preview-how-to-make...

Re: New Cities

#167

Post by markplindsay »

yyyuuu wrote: post #91
baybal2 wrote: post #82

Things that The West can learn from The East: Russia/Eastern Europe: 1. Free-for-all, mixed zoning. You own the land, build whatever you want as long as it's not a munitions factory (Most of Russia, Kazakhstan) 2. Market driven, privatized public transit (Most of Eastern Europe) 3. Small city blocks that let throught traffic. 4. Market controlled access to distric heating/cooling (Yakutsk an extreme example of privat…

Some specific names of the cities you had in mind would be really helpful.

I don't know what item #2 means (armature prefabrication?) but Singapore is an ideal Asian city. Especially #6—Singapore is so proud of their public housing that they included an image of an HDB building on their $10 bill.

Re: New Cities

#168

Post by zephjc »

JshWright wrote: post #59
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

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…

> I'd forgo roads entirely. Tough to get a firetruck somewhere without roads. We have come a long way in reducing the fire risk in new construction buildings, but 'stupid finds a way' is far from being a solved problem.

See another of my posts about road vs street definitions. Note that a lot of suburban wide streets are built that way to meet fire codes written to accommodate overly-large trucks. A suburban town doesn't need giant trucks where smaller, cheaper, more maneuverable trucks can do the work. Combined with ubiquitous hydrants - which have disappeared from many US suburban subdivisions - they are more than enough fire safety for anything under 4 stories. Regulations to accommodate these huge trucks have helped ruin the human scale of streets in many places. Also note that existing old cities have become a lot more safe by using superior materials, installing sprinkler system, etc etc.

Re: New Cities

#169

Post by brewdad »

nickff wrote: post #149
maxerickson wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So pointing a loaded pistol at a clerk while robbing a store is then not using the firearm?

No, pointing any firearm at a clerk would be assault (with a weapon), whether or not it was loaded. If I told you that I went to a shooting range and used my gun, what would you think? That I'd pointed it at stuff? If I said that I went out onto the street and used my rifle, you would not surmise that I had looked over the iron sights. note: I do not own a firearm

So assault...using a firearm.

Re: New Cities

#170

Post by kafkaesq »

rocky1138 wrote: post #129
massysett wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New cities aren't going to happen, but it's not a space issue. There's plenty of space in the middle of Kansas.

New cities are happening, just not in North America. Consider Astana (Kazakhstan), Ordos (China), Shenzhen (China). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City

Which is precisely my point -- you might want to look at how the regimes like those in charge of Kazakhstan and China operate. In particular, as to how they "leverage" their populations complying with these grand futuristic visions.

Not to mention the... ironic outcomes of some of these spectacular initiatives:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-18646243

Post reply on HN