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Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

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Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

#291

Post by anigbrowl »

xyzzyz wrote: post #234
oscardssmith wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an entirely self inflicted problem. Just run the busses every 5 or 10 minutes, and have twice as many busses.

In Seattle, a typical local bus trip costs the transit company around $10, while the ticket costs around $3. Running twice as many buses would result in cost of something like $18-20 per ride, which would make it require even more subsidies than it already receives.

I really think the answer to this is to run much smaller and cheaper buses instead of the extremely expensive big ones that only have a few occupants. Shuttle buses cost around $60-70k vs >$600k for a new full size bus. Of course, driver labor is also a significant cost, but I think it's easier to find shuttle bus drivers as it only requires a class B license.

Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

#292

Post by stefanve »

brnt wrote: post #286
stemlord wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive seen several attempts at master planned neighborhoods with little town center type things with the idea that youd rarely have to leave, around South Florida growing up, and even lived in one for a few years. They all failed miserably. I feel like ones that succeed are just lucky. These communities can have basic predetermined guidelines to how growth can happen but the actual growth needs to happen organically. Y…

99.99% of the Netherlands is planned construction, we seem to be doing allright.

while that is true, a lot of the house are for sale and people will make small changes. Also local governments ask for input from the people that live there. Shops can come and go as these are mostly rentel spaces. So while we do a lot of planning there is still room to make it your own. This village seems to be a Holliday park like experience. With only rentals and pre defined shops

Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

#293

Post by mjevans »

ShroudedNight wrote: post #282
mikepurvis wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability. Planning for coverage allows you to tell individual taxpayers that they're "served" by the transit they help fund, but most will never use it because it's infrequent and the routes take forever to get anywhere. Optimizing for ridership…

> The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability. That's definitely my experience in York Region (north of Toronto for those unfamiliar) and Ottawa. Far too many bus stops, but wait times > 15 minutes _per route_ outside all but the most peak parts of rush-hour. Including on their "b…

Busses are the thing that needs to be self-driving first (after trains, which can already be). Combined with automated passing spots.

The worst about busses is when they come every 30 min, but already arrive full. Or when they have more than one bus for a given timeslot and don't dock the less-full bus first.

Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

#294

Post by TeMPOraL »

kolinko wrote: post #274
ethanbond wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well… most towns/subdivisions with zealous planning suck. The best cities in the world appear to be very organically grown. Maybe this is an illusion?

Half of Polish cities were rebuilt using central urban planning and came up awesome (build quality aside). There were a few rules: - 5-10 min walk to kindergarden/school and local stores - 3-5 min walk to a bus stop - tons of green space - taller buildings but varied in size and angles so that there is both ample space and variety This is my place I lived in when studying: https://goo.gl/maps/VQqNEY8rcjScsGFg6 (not e…

There's also the classic - Nowa Huta, a former city and now part of Kraków, built next to Tadeusz Sędzimir Steelworks (formerly Vladimir Lenin Steelworks) - "nowa huta [stali]" translates to "new steelworks".

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

Here's how it looks:

https://goo.gl/maps/5v8zZHpPtZ7Cik7b7

I'm linking to a traffic map, because it's best at highlighting the structure of the place. See the big roads forming straight lines, crossing to form distinct cells? This was intentional, top-down design. Zoom on a cell, see how it's made from apartment blocks surrounding shared, green communal areas.

It's currently the greenest place in Kraków, and despite having a reputation of a dangerous place in late 90s[0], it's one of the nicest and most family-friendly areas in the city.

The urban legend I grew up with goes, this cell-based design is partially for defensive purposes: during a ground conflict, spaces between outermost apartment blocks form choke points and could be barricaded to close off the sub-district.

There's another, less happy story that I've heard - that the steelworks and the city of Nowa Huta were purposefully placed by the Soviets on the most fertile soil in the area, destroying it in the process, in order to get the Poles to urbanize more and generally to spite them. I haven't found a confirmation of this - it might be an urban legend, but it's one that's widely believed over here.

--

[0] - Since taken by other districts; last I heard, Kurdwanów was the prime "hot zone". By "dangerous" I mean "you can get robbed at knife point" and "you can get beat up by hooligans". The joke goes, hooligans that lived in Nowa Huta have since grown up, started families, and don't have time for petty crime anymore.

Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

#295

Post by pottertheotter »

ngoel36 wrote: post #249
djrogers wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to HN. Couple of thoughts; first, it’s kinda weird for you to introduce yourself as a ‘founder’ - I’ve been around developers and real estate all my life, and I’ve never heard anyone use that term to describe what they do. Makes me wonder if you see this as more of a housing subscription service than a community? Which leads to my second thought - what’s the thought process behind this being a rental-only thi…

@djrogers -- Ryan was also on the founding team of OpenDoor. I can promise you Steve Ross, Michael Fuchs, Steven Roth, and Jerry Speyer all describe themselves as founders. The greatest leaders in real estate do, because they have innovated to build something people want. And Culdesac is very much a startup.

As someone who has worked in both the tech startup world and as an institutional investor, I’m with @djrogers that it comes off weird. When I first read Ryan’s comment, I thought “ick, what a weird thing to call yourself a founder of a development.” I think the problem is the messaging—there is Culdesac the company and Culdesac Tempe the development, but for someone looking at this for the first time, it’s not clear that there are two entities. So it sounds like Ryan is saying he’s the founder of a development.

I spent a number of years as an institutional investor, and the people you mentioned would say they are founders of funds, firms, companies, etc., but they would say that they were the developer of something like Culdesac Tempe.

Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

#296

Post by jusssi »

flemhans wrote: post #148

At the same time, "Master Planned" areas in actual Europe tend to be super horrible to live in, due to the detachment from what actually makes a place livable. (And the transportation part is generally already solved in Europe). Here in Copenhagen, everybody loves the 100-200 year old areas way more than the newly built ones.

Wouldn't a 100-200 year old city area be much more likely to have originally been "Master Planned" than a modern development?

Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

#297

Post by deltasixeight »

closeparen wrote: post #203
deltasixeight wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A master plan doesn't hurt, they could get it wrong but it's not that much worse than haphazard randomness. The good cities you see aren't good because of early planning. They're good because of constant vigilance to improve and maintain. Subway systems for example aren't usually part of the master plan of the city at inception but are the result of constant vigilance to improve. Meanwhile western US suburbia is the…

American suburbia is exactly as planning codes require it to be. It's just hard to imagine that they could be this bad.

Those aren't "planning" codes, it's more rules and guidelines. Development is still largely free and left to the market so long as they stick within the guidelines.

Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

#299

Post by Ericson2314 »

jusssi wrote: post #296
flemhans wrote: post #148

At the same time, "Master Planned" areas in actual Europe tend to be super horrible to live in, due to the detachment from what actually makes a place livable. (And the transportation part is generally already solved in Europe). Here in Copenhagen, everybody loves the 100-200 year old areas way more than the newly built ones.

Wouldn't a 100-200 year old city area be much more likely to have originally been "Master Planned" than a modern development?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh and quite nice too.

The undercurrent behind https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-... is our romanticized notion of the past actually under-emphasizes the planning that did occur. After those overzealous tower-and-park modernists, we did a big romantic counterrevolution in aesthetics that ironically justifies the even more current neoliberal weak state planning as the default.

I recommend https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo... for trying to weave the needle right for yes planning but also yes a little relativism and humility.

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