I'd live in a big city if more cities and building architects cared about green spaces and noise. I'm glad people are doing research here.
Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
61–70 of 429 posts
Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
#62I wonder what city will be the first to ban private cars and allow all streets to work this way.
Oslo is aiming for 2019: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/04/oslo-is-on-tr...
Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to ban cars. You just need to design around people instead of cars. Remove parking minimums. Don't put on-street parking but rather leave it to the free market to handle parking solutions (Yes, that means people pay to park.) Subsidize public transit but road maintenance must be paid by automobile-based taxes. Don't require density, but always zone for the next bigger thing. (The neighborhood is single…
How is that designing around people? First you are going to make all the people in the cars nuts because they can't find parking, so they won't come. Next all the people who find public transport tedious and slow won't come. (Yes, even the best public transport is not anywhere near as a good as a car that goes direct, and where you can actually leave your stuff in the car.) Next all the people who hate living in dens…
Luckily, for people like you, you have the vast majority of the world's land area to work with. Cities take up very little space.
Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Japan doesn't ban cars in its cities. Why would doing so reproduce their results?
Tokyo's grid is much finer in the residential areas,and has a calm atmosphere. Manhattan's roads are highways everywhere. A great reduction in noise and increase in safety would make it more pedestrian friendly.
Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
#65I love wide pavements as a pedestrian, alas London is in the grip of a cycle paths fetish and in many instances, they eat up pavements with some cases reducing pedestrian access and seen some which have reduced the pedestrian area to one foot due to the oversight of sheltered bus stops consuming the other side of the pavement. I'm not against cycle paths and indeed for them, but not when they erode away pedestrian ac…
That's true in Seattle right now too. The city has been building bicycle lanes all around the city -- and yet cycling is down as a percent of commuters for the fifth straight year in a row. We could have dedicated that space to larger sidewalks and greener boulevards, instead of sparsely populated bicycle lanes. (Like London, we don't have great weather -- and we also have lots of steep hills. But city planners keep…
Seattle has the insanity of having obligatory bicycle helmet laws. No city has ever had a successful bike-sharing scheme with laws saying you need to wear a helmet.
No city with that law has ever had any amount of cycling either.
Medellin has plenty of hills and cycling, London has plenty of rain and cycling. Rain and hills won't kill you, unlike the pollution from cars
Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
That concept has already been implemented. Urban planners who practice it call it "new urbanism". It has been a mixed bag, but is better than the "malls-connected-by-highways" approach of many suburban development s.
Too much density decreases the quality of life. Overcrowdedness, very long waiting times at every establishment or government office, increased ease of pickpockets etc. to "disappear into the crowd", higher prices. You already see all this in many existing cities; you want that, but worse? I'll take malls connected by highways over that any day. Malls are nice and cars are a better experience than transit/walking in…
Malls and freeways aren't really financially tenable, long term.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...
Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
#67Lol America. Where walkable streets are justified by economics and not humanities.
Exactly! It makes me laugh in the article that they have to point out the sidewalks and say that "most" of the pictures happen.
Only in the US does this happen. Such a weird, unhealthy, wasteful, polluting country. So happy to not be from there.
Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
#68I'd live in a big city if more cities and building architects cared about green spaces and noise. I'm glad people are doing research here.
The problem is the cities citizens. Northern European cities such as Copenhagen are pretty quiet, despite their high density.
Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
#69I've often wondered why somone moderately wealthy doesn't just start a super dense town, e.g. everything within 100 acres, and be within 10 miles of a major city. Create tons of these at a 50K people/sqmi density and implement some sort of hub spoke transportation with the major city being the hub and it could work!
The Woodlands, TX is the closest thing in the US. 2,500 people/sqmi 100k town outside of Houston. Started in 1974. At least as far as large scale current corporate city developments.
Re: Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive
#70I've often wondered why somone moderately wealthy doesn't just start a super dense town, e.g. everything within 100 acres, and be within 10 miles of a major city. Create tons of these at a 50K people/sqmi density and implement some sort of hub spoke transportation with the major city being the hub and it could work!
There have been efforts along these lines, but with big hairy projects that need to involve city planning, public transport, building and other big hairy parts... It's hard to get everything perfect.
Anyway, things like this are happening to an extent. Israel is currently well in a building boom. A lot of the new development within the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem areas are like this, especially on the outskirts of suburburban towns. 100 buildings on a couple hundred acres, near train stations. 50-100 families per building.
Some good, some bad. It's very land efficient, which is important considering population density. Its easier to plan, and produce housing stock fast.
Being big corporate development, it can feel a little soulless. You get high density on the outskirts of suburban towns, which generally average 3 stories in the older centres. Still, all the walkable, shopable, cafeable streets are in the old centre, not the outskirts regardless of density.
That gets to the last point.... there's a limit to how much these things can be designed. Architects sometimes seem to think (when they get excited) that peoples use of places is dictated by the design of those places. I think causation runs both ways.
Grafton Street (Dublin street often used as an example of walkablility) is a packed, lively, window shopping and street performance centre because of its culture. Pedestrian only, and all its things other physical characteristics got way because of the culture, not just the other way around.
Culture takes time, and is not always designable. This is a gotcha with a lot of big ideas in planning & architecture. Cities are how they are for reasons other than just buildings, often causation runs the reverse way...