Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive • Hacker News Board

Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

#421

Post by throwaway1X2 » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 1:38 AM UTC

trgn wrote: post #50

emodendroket wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there's the one example everyone loves to trot out. Japan is different from the US in a lot of ways and we can't just wave a wand and turn New York into Tokyo (or Cleveland into Sapporo, for that matter).

In NYC you certainly could. It takes banning cars for personal transport and expand the subway. The city would improve tremendously. Not quite like waving a wand, but doesn't require tearing down and rebuilding either.

Tokyo has an average of 0.5 cars per household, which is on par with NYC. So, how will banning cars suddenly in NYC turn NYC into Tokyo, where cars aren't banned?

Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

#422

Post by stretchwithme » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

kiliantics wrote: post #376

stretchwithme wrote: post #194

I look forward to a time when vehicles and pedestrians aren't interacting at all. Vehicles should be below where people walk and ride bikes. Either roads are designed to be underground or we one layer up from existing roads. And that's were storefronts will be. Robotic construction is going to drive down construction costs dramatically, so I think it will be feasible. Vehicles will be totally electric a few decades f…

I remember parts of Hong Kong being designed like this when I visited 10 years ago. It felt a little awkward but I could see this working nicely. Ideally we'd just remove the need for cars altogether though. Maybe freight could come in underground.

Yes, it will come in underground. Freight and people too, as they already do in NYC on the subway and PATH train.

It won't happen all at once, of course. But it will happen in most places.

Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

#423

Post by jimmywanger » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 7:17 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #371

jimmywanger wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, increased density is off the table without massive forced birth control/a massive die off. The population of the world has massively spiked in the last fifty years, the trend is continuing especially in poor countries, and all these people have to go somewhere. A dense city is the only place for them to go and try to support themselves, since there isn't enough good land around for subsistence farming. Density…

This article entirely concerns the United States and changing policy to encourage more density in its cities, so I'm not seeing the relevance of third-world birth rates. Prosperity does tend to significantly reduce birth rates.

> Prosperity does tend to significantly reduce birth rates.

Ah, so you support closed borders? "Shithole" countries tend to make lots of babies that want to come to non-shithole countries. So you think the United States should shut down more immigration and move towards a more rural and dispersed society?

Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

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Post by metargz » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 7:40 AM UTC

lazerpants wrote: post #323

luckydata wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you live, but you clearly never experienced a city the way it's being described by the others in this thread. I currently live in the US in a small town in the midwest after a long stint in California (socal first then bay area). Previously I lived for a few years in Madrid, an extremely dense city by western standards. I used to walk home from the office (roughly a mile and a half) when the weathe…

To play devil's advocate, I have a lot of your current problems and live in NYC in a pretty dense area. Back when I lived in a far more suburban city I was able to play golf with friends, go hiking, and take road trips to see places and people. Restaurants were much more affordable and I rarely needed a reservation, stores weren't completely swarmed with people during the times I could visit them (which makes buying…

The kind of challenges you face in a city surely depends on its size. NYC is very big. Fortunately, Madrid is smaller, cheaper and its public transit system is incredible for the size of the city, so you'd probably find it more manageable.

Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

#425

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 7:59 AM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #194

I look forward to a time when vehicles and pedestrians aren't interacting at all. Vehicles should be below where people walk and ride bikes. Either roads are designed to be underground or we one layer up from existing roads. And that's were storefronts will be. Robotic construction is going to drive down construction costs dramatically, so I think it will be feasible. Vehicles will be totally electric a few decades f…

[deleted]

Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

#426

Post by rorykoehler » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 8:57 AM UTC

lstyls wrote: post #392

brailsafe wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where it's important to consider the often sprawling nature of suburbs and how they're inherently unwalkable. While that is definitely a problem, it seems to be a sprawling problem.

Its not a suburb or sprawl problem. It's a car problem. I now live in Manhattan, the most densely populated chunk of the US. Any time I walk somewhere I spend about half the time waiting for lights so that I can safely cross a street. Cars are massively subsidized by government.

In Singapore they are experimenting with putting all traffic beneath the ground in new residential neighbourhoods.

Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

#427

Post by touringcomplete » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 8:04 AM UTC

I partially agree.

Davis, CA is extremely walkable but it’s not exactly Stanford/Palo Alto.

Stanford/Palo Alto is sort of walkable, but ridiculously economically-productive.

Amsterdam, SF and Manhattan are very walkable and very productive.

LA is not walkable yet very productive.

Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

#428

Post by dionidium » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 8:17 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #274

pcwalton wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To a degree that stands in stark contrast to Europe. Over 60% of the population of Germany's capital lives in the city proper. Just 11% of the population of America's capital lives in the city proper. Eh, D.C. is an outlier due to its special legal/territorial status. And the numbers are uneven in Europe as well. In Los Angeles, 3,976,322/13,131,431 (30.3%) of the population of the metro area lives in L.A. proper.…

Out of the 10 largest U.S. cities, only San Antonio has a majority of the population of its metro area. Most aren't even close, at 20-30%. Out of the 10 largest EU cities, only three have less than half the population in the core city: Madrid, Paris, and Hamburg. And Madrid is close to the line--48%.

You can't use political borders in this way. You're trying to make an argument about population differences between cities and their suburbs, but every city defines these borders differently (to sometimes include almost all of their "suburbs", sometimes none, and everything else in between).

The key to recognizing how absurd this is: your argument would have to drastically change if each city moved its political borders +/- 15 miles in either direction, but nothing on the ground would actually be any different (that is, there wouldn't suddenly be more people living in one kind of environment and fewer in the other, although, definitionally, that would appear to be the case).

These lines are politically drawn. They don't support arguments of the kind you're making.

Why does San Antonio have a much larger share of its metro's population than does San Francisco? Because the borders of San Antonio extend to cover ~465 square miles to San Francisco's ~44. What does that tell us about these two cities? Basically nothing. (In fact, this information directly misleads us into thinking all sorts of things that aren't true (for example, that San Antonio might be bigger than San Francisco).

Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

#429

Post by sgc » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:15 AM UTC

dfee wrote: post #293

sgc wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

27.5 residential and 39 commercial, but the problem remains. It isn't that big of a deal. Creating different depreciation schedules for different items on a property should be done no matter what (fences are 5 years, for example).

I’m going to ask for your source. Not because I doubt you, but because I wonder what other interesting depreciations exist. I never knew a fence had a 5 year tax lifetime.

Have you ever seen a fence with a post about an inch from a building wall? That is great to reduce decay, but it also makes it a separate structure and depreciable as a fence instead of an extension of the building. Or so they say. I find it hard to imagine it would actually matter to an auditor. And yes, best source is the IRS. Appliances for example have their own depreciation schedule, etc. What I do is on any larger purchase just quick search in the depreciation tables to help make the decision on how/whether to do it. But many items are now 100% depreciable first year with the new tax codes, and I am not up to snuff on that at all.