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New Cities

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Re: New Cities

#461

Post by derefr »

vmarsy wrote: post #164
athenot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

For the autonomous cars, it'd be interesting if they could do the equivalent of what computers do by "binding to a domain", letting things like these loaders connect to them and "drive" them onboard.

Really, the car would (should!) still be driving itself—it's the thing that gets certified on how to handle safety issues, after all; the car would just be given a dead-reckoning location target by the zone controller, which the car would get to as best it knows how, with the zone controller scanning to "see" when it had successfully boarded, just like with a human-driven car.

If there were few-enough human-driven cars, you could have a team of valet staff accompanying the train, acting as glue for the few human-driven cars in the pack.

Re: New Cities

#462

Post by tdaltonc »

hx87 wrote: post #293
massysett wrote: post #93

"How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?" If you give arbitrary power to those who enforce the rules, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. If you don't value predictability and consistency of enforcement, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. In fact, the rules can fit onto one page. The Ten Commandments are pr…

I wonder if it would be feasible to train a neural network on a large corpus of test cases where legality/illegality have already been defined, then release this neural network to the public. Sure, the process will be opaque, but it will be consistent between different users, and answers can be sought almost immediately with little to no costs. In many cases, an immediate straight up no is more valuable than a maybe…

Until someone finds an edge-case or a way to reverse engineer it.

http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling

Re: New Cities

#464

Post by thaumasiotes »

st3v3r wrote: post #447
thaumasiotes wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating what food you buy right away precludes storing food at home.

Eat some food. Not all of it. I honestly don't see how you think this is a reasonable straw man you've constructed.

Because, in my lived experience, having to carry all my groceries around did in fact mean that I was chronically short on food at home. This is a description of a real problem involved in not having a car. Calling it a strawman won't make it less of a problem.

Re: New Cities

#465

Post by davidw »

jandrese wrote: post #440
davidw wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody lives in those downtown areas anymore. People absolutely do live downtown. Indeed, one of the biggest trends in housing is people moving back in to downtowns. > It doesn't make sense to make a walking mall in an area where few people will live in walking distance. So why all the zoning regulations to forbid it? Markets generally won't build where it doesn't make sense. So let them do their job. > "big fast b…

People are moving back into a few select downtowns that are being rapidly gentrified. They are not a typical case. As for the zoning question, it's probably the result of busybody town governments trying to control every aspect of the city lest some developer ruin their perfect vision of the city. I can guarantee that if you propose to build a big shopping complex in the middle of the city you will have people out to…

> This is how a lot of regulation gets started, because someone is trying to prevent something from happening to their backyard.

There are legitimate complaints, I think - no one wants a pig offal disposal site next door in their residential neighborhood. But we've gone way overboard in letting zoning dictate what can go where.

> They are not a typical case.

But they absolutely are on YC's radar, because San Fran and the bay area in general are ground zero for the housing crisis in those kinds of desirable places.

Re: New Cities

#466

Post by archagon »

gioele wrote: post #18

I hope the winner of this call get all sent to live for 2 years in small (and not so small) unknown towns in Europe that have been growing organically for thousands of years and offer a great quality of life. Places where rich and poor, kids, young adults, adults and elderly all live happily together (modulo the usual father-and-son generational problems). Seriously, planners in "new" countries should be forced to sp…

Hear, hear. American cities have a lot of upsides to be sure, but I've never found more contentment vis-a-vis my everyday life than when I was living in cities and towns all over Europe (over the course of about a year and a half). Everything was within arm's reach, especially in regards to fresh and interesting food: you could stop by a dozen bakeries, butchers, and groceries on the way home, to say nothing of the weekly street markets. People hung out by the riverbanks, plazas, and parks to have lunch. The crooked streets, hidden stairs, and mysterious detours of an everyday walk always brought a sense discovery. And in the major cities, getting around was super simple with the efficient and reasonably inexpensive public transit. (Props to Paris!)

Whether the city was tiny or enormous, these factors seemed to somehow scale along with it. In contrast, practically every US city I've visited has felt inorganic and pre-planned. The only places in North America I've felt the European vibe in were Quebec, sort-of Montreal, and perhaps Boston. I imagine this largely has to do with the central focus on cars versus people. Quite a shame; I miss the sheer excitement of simply being a pedestrian. (The kind that isn't caused by almost being run over!)

Re: New Cities

#467

Post by trgn »

Bromskloss wrote: post #19

I want an old-fashioned city, with cobblestone and stuff, thank you. I'm sure it's not the most efficient according to one measure or another, but it's for living in, not for being a machine in. Actually, it might be the most efficient at making me happy.

Yes please! I feel like the perfect cities already exist, they're just older cities or neighborhoods from before the car existed. That's the key. The icing on the cake is that the buildings and streets in those times were build using natural materials, with delightful human touches in ornamentation and design. Just looks good.

It's the horrible car sprawl of the US, and the dominance of the machine aesthetic that makes most new cities and neighborhoods totally suck. Now, people's crotches start to tingle when they smell freshly poured asphalt, but that is the triumph of modernism, a perversion of our human impulses, the result of a sick fetish for utility, while appreciation for durability and beauty is completely stunted. Now, cobblestones, cobblestones are much more tactile, sensual if you will (I'm only halfway kidding). Plus, they last forever, needs to be leveled every half century or so, that's nothing.

I too want the cobblestones and stuff thank you.

Re: New Cities

#468

Post by mason240 »

mangodrunk wrote: post #457
mason240 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We would need to stop the trend of having a small number of large stores and move back towards having a large number of smaller stores. This would be highly inefficient and result in higher costs of goods and reduced options for consumers.

Not necessarily, and there could be potential for there to be more options. When you have those really large warehouses to buy groceries, they tend to limit the number of brands for a particular item. Also, at what cost does it come at when you have these large stores? Maybe the price might be slightly lower, but in the end is it making our lives better? Having many options isn't always a good thing.

I thought of a variety of ways to respond to this, but really this make for a great pro-car argument on it's own.

Re: New Cities

#469

Post by mikerichards »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #256
thaumasiotes wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... You can't eat when you're hungry, because you don't keep food at home. A huge portion of your week is suddenly devoted to shuttling back and forth between home and the grocery store. And you think that's not a massive inconvenience?

In a walkable city with small markets, you pop into the market as you walk past it on the way home from work, grab ~4 things for supper and carry them home. It takes about 5 minutes, and you do it 7 times a week. In a surburb, you spend some time making a shopping list to ensure you don't forget something, drive to the store, spend at least 30 minutes getting everything (it takes at least 5 minutes to walk from one e…

you pop into the market as you walk past it on the way home from work,

We're not European, we're not going to be European...ever. We just don't "pop in" to some market while we're walking by. We pop-in while we're driving by or we plan to drive 5 minutes to an awesome supermarket.

Just stop this constant crap about walking and "only if we're like some European village" crap that will never happen in America.

Re: New Cities

#470

Post by maccam94 »

mikeash wrote: post #315
st3v3r wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are precious few places where you literally can't walk or bike." Where you literally can't? No. But where current infrastructure has made it hugely impractical to? I'd say that's most of the country, especially suburbia. "I would even argue that it isn't all that important." If you're ok with driving everywhere, then no, you wouldn't think it was. Not everyone wants to do that, though. And making things friend…

The "it" which I'm saying "isn't all that important" is throughput. Not biking/walking, traffic throughput. I don't understand why everyone is coming out of the woodwork here to criticize my car-centric viewpoint and tell me how great biking or walking is. I guess it's Yet Another Example of how people on the internet can't handle the concept of disagreeing with a single point.

In the context of designing cities, traffic throughput is ABSOLUTELY important. It governs how dense the city can be and the quality of life for its inhabitants. Sure, you can have spread-out cities but that sprawl has negative effects (increased travel times, inefficient traffic patterns leading to congestion and delays, economic burden of owning a car, kids have a hard time getting around, health effects of reduced walking, etc).
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