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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: New Cities

#331

Post by Shengbo »

Swizec wrote: post #14
BorgHunter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 merchan…

You can build things that can function as roads but aren't roads. Look at most European cities' inner pedestrian zones. There are roads of old, but closed to traffic and heavily modified. In case of emergency, fire engines can get in. Bicycles and pedestrians can comingle happily on a normal day. My hometown's (Ljubljana) pedestrian zone is more than a kilometer across. It's quite awesome.

I agree. Pedestrian zones that are closed off to regular traffic are very common in Europe and they're awesome.

They also boost the traffic the surrounding businesses get and make it easier for cafés and restaurants to add a terrace area.

Well-executed pedestrian zones are one of the easiest and most effective ways of making a street more liveable in my opinion.

Edit: Also, (preferably one-way)streets where the sidewalk-to-road ratio is a lot higher than usual. Case in point[1]

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5003418,19.0510879,3a,75y,17...

Re: New Cities

#332

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: New Cities

#333

Post by davidiach »

One of the things that I'd love to see you studying would be how to build cities that can scale to large numbers of people without causing some of the problems that come with growth. NY had the Grid system which allowed it to grow to its current size.

But how can we build a city that could grow to 100 million people? Can we build such a city while avoiding congestion, a city where you can travel fast and easy from one end of the city to another? How dense should such a city be? How can you make it livable? And so on.

Re: New Cities

#334

Post by zephjc »

pasbesoin wrote: post #184

Soundproofing. It's a small fraction of building cost, but one that is most often omitted because short term profit is disconnected from long-term utility and benefit. I've experienced several absolutely miserably loud neighbors. Talk about destroying my potential. I moved to a house -- way more space than I need -- to get away from it. To end up with neighbors who blasted their car stereos -- think SUB-woofers -- al…

> Soundproofing

US houses and apartments seem notoriously poorly insulated when it comes to sound. As you say, its a small extra cost, and it can allow for more people in an area (even having connected townhouses or apartments) without having to deal with neighbor noises. If you can fit 3x the number of houses into a lot and they have good sound insulation, you're producing a lot more revenue from the house sales as well as generating potentially much tax revenue for that area of land (depending on how property taxing is done there)

Re: New Cities

#335

Post by dba7dba »

Few years ago I visited someone in a suburb of Seoul. He lived in a new, massive apartment complex with dozens of 25-story high rise buildings. What really struck me was the parking situation.

The entire complex does not allow any cars on the surface within the complex. All cars are kept in underground parking lot. This allow more efficient use of land, keeps noise away from residents and real useable green space for residents.

I did not feel like I was in stuck in a concrete jungle at all.

Re: New Cities

#336

Post by gorkemyurt »

devinhelton wrote: post #58

The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is because that is where the jobs are. This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you ima…

If anything I prefer more companies to move to SF and Oakland from SV and create more awareness around solving homelessness and transit first development. I am really happy how Twitter & co transformed Tenderloin. Western Waterfront and Oakland is SF's future, Central Subway (if its extended to F.Warf) is going make it pretty easy to get to Mission Bay/Dogpatch from other parts of the city.. We need a big tech company in Hunters Point and extend the T line all the way down to HP.. More companies need to move to Oakland and push for the second BART tube..

Re: New Cities

#338

Post by justsaysmthng »

> The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part because their cities don't provide the opportunities and living conditions necessary for success.

> A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential by making better cities.

I don't think cities make it even into the top 10 reasons why people don't realize their full potential.

Here's a small list, out the top of my head:

Depending on were you live, corruption is probably in the top 3 reasons why "people don't realize their potential". Most people don't have the "guts" (or low moral standards) to participate in the corruption games that are required to climb the social ladder.

Then there's the thing called "competition". Once a person realizes his full potential (s)he will want to stay at the top as much as possible and that includes fighting others who try to challenge their dominant position.

Racism, xenophobia and other types of discrimination. Maybe not as evident in the "western" world, but still a very powerful reason in many parts of the world.

Other reasons include things like politics, poor laws and stupid fiscal policies. In general, these go hand in hand with corruption and everything else.

In my view we don't need more large cities, rather I think the solution is de-centralization and de-urbanization.

Many small high-tech independent "village-sized" cities, self contained and self-sufficient, interconnected with high-speed transport services is the way to go.

Re: New Cities

#339

Post by 16bytes »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #207
16bytes wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individually owned cars--and the infrastructure needed to support them--are a very inefficient mode of transportation, even in the use-cases that you mention. Plenty of people with children and elderly live in New York city which has among the lowest levels of car ownership in the nation. Every other method of high-density transportation is also a "human amplifier" and vastly more efficient. "Built for people" means…

> Every other method of high-density transportation is also a "human amplifier" and vastly more efficient. It might be more efficient on average, if you measure in terms of throughput. It isn't more efficient for individual people, who care more about latency. I don't want to turn a 20-minute trip into a 60-minute trip to improve throughput. I do look forward to fleets of efficient self-driving cars as a better optio…

Driving is only faster in high density areas due to misappropriation of infrastructure.

The subway, light rail, and dedicated bus lane can be faster than cars, especially when you factor in parking. This is the case in many areas of many cities that do have appropriate infrastructure in place.

For example, I can take a dedicated bus lane into my city center in about 30 minutes, whereas driving takes at least 45 minutes during rush hour. It's faster for me to drive my bike to work than to take my car.

Furthermore, if you have mixed-zoning, you probably won't have to drive 5 miles to get what you need.

This isn't about making cars illegal, it's about reducing our dependence on them.

Re: New Cities

#340

Post by deadowl »

This is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot idea. First of all, it legitimizes the kind of BS Mormon Utopia plan that [the NewVistas project is trying to accomplish in VT and Provo, UT](http://vtdigger.org/2016/06/19/residents/). It also involves massive reappropriation of the existing value populations have invested in the land. There's also no good metric for land service value other than feedback from existing stakeholders, which can be volatile in changing circumstances. I won't support a project that will have victims.

People have competing value systems. Communities grow around those value systems as they are constantly negotiated and re-negotiated over time. Asserting that one system of values is better than another is nothing short of authoritarianism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8-EEgmEWJw

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