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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: New Cities

#601

Post by Steltek »

SeoxyS wrote: post #573
sama wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something. I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.

I think simply banning private car ownership in cities might be a good idea. It'd change the entire incentive system to focus more on building strong public transportation. We'd still have taxis / Uber / on-demand self-driving cars for when that's the most convenient option, of course.

That's... an unrealistic step. You can't wish a functioning transit system into existence overnight. Even if a metro region was comfortable throwing its entire weight behind transit, it would still take many years to develop.

A good first step is introducing a congestion charge or a peak hour toll. That shifts the fungible traffic patterns and would ease up rush hour jams. The revenue is then applied towards transit development, which eventually produces a desirable rush hour balance between people interested in paying more for car service and people who use the more economical transit system.

Re: New Cities

#602

Post by Turing_Machine »

rando18423 wrote: post #527
davidw wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think very few people are saying "no cars, ever!". We have one and find it very useful, like you say. What many people are realizing is that cars should not be the be-all and end-all of urban design in the US.

Hong Kong is fucking awesome to get around. Why not moving sidewalks like they have there with the Midlevels Escalators? I used that to walk from Midlevels to Central every day and loved it.

Hong Kong has a population density of 6,544 people/km^2.

The United States has a population density of 35 people/km2.

Re: New Cities

#604

Post by niels_olson »

brett40324 wrote: post #492
Finnucane wrote: post #3

Why start from scratch? Just send 100,000 nerds and hipsters to Detroit or Buffalo with some VC funding and see what happens.

I agree with this approach. Whos gonna pay for 100,000 outlandish salaries? If they all only earned 10 usd an hour....You do the math.

I think you're missing the point. No one dreams of paying developers $10/hr to live in Detroit. The salaries are high legitimately. But the quality of life per $ in SF is questionable. I have a friend who manages 500 engineers and can afford a 3rd story walk up loft next to an elevated freeway.

Re: New Cities

#605

Post by rspeer »

hammock wrote: post #395
dhd415 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of a 1920s drawing of the "city of the future" that had several levels of roadway with a promenade or pedestrian level on the third or fourth story: https://worldstreets.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/future-city...

Downtown Chicago comes pretty close with subway on the lowest level, trucks and commuter rail above that, and cars/pedestrians on the surface. There is also a large network of pedestrian tunnels which is useful in winter (and when coming from aforementioned commuter trains). And until 2003, there was even an airstrip only 2mi from downtown.

As a somewhat frequent visitor to Chicago, I like the idea of the pedestrian tunnels, but they don't seem like a practical way to get around.

They're basically the separately-operated basements of stores, hotels, and office buildings networked together. Usually one of them between you and your destination will decide to lock the doors.

I've found myself nearly under my destination, encountering a locked door, and having to backtrack and find my way out through a fitness club.

Re: New Cities

#606

Post by Turing_Machine »

googletazer wrote: post #416
wangchow wrote: post #162

Instead of paying taxes people should be forced to do mandatory community service. That will help close the wealth-gap and force wealthy people to intermix with the working class.

Sounds a lot like sending engineers to potato fields to collect potatoes and get to know the country side. I don't know a single instance of where compulsory "mixing" of wealthy and less wealthy yielded a decrease in the wealth gap.

Yep. Both Mao and Pol Pot thought sending the intellectual class out to do forced manual labor was a wonderful idea.

It didn't end well.

Re: New Cities

#607

Post by Steltek »

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…

Latency is very much a function of how your city is laid out. For my Boston commute, the bike is by far the fastest option (30min) followed by the subway (40min, ~$70 monthly pass) and finally the car (1hr+ and $250 a month to park at work). Boston is more of an Old World city than New: despite the complaints, we have a functioning transit network and it's quite dense.

Self driving cars will lead to a death spiral of congestion. Because driving is even "easier", it will become more prolific and that will greatly increase travel times because cars simply can't scale, autonomous or not. And no, autonomous cars won't be legally allowed to drive bumper-to-bumper to save space.

Re: New Cities

#608

Post by shams93 »

curryst wrote: post #174
davidw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course cars have a place too. Having two smallish children, cars are a great way for my family to get around for many things. But it's nice when they are one option among many, and not set on a pedestal as the only one. For instance, when we lived in Padova: we'd ride bikes around the neighborhood when the weather was good. I'd walk to get groceries. My wife and I often rode bikes downtown for 'date night'. We'd t…

Changing the way cars function inside the city is only part of what would need to change. Near me things just aren't laid out well for pedestrians. It would take me about an hour to walk to the nearest grocery store (not counting corner stores, because all they sell is junk food). Biking should be much shorter, though I can't say I've ever tried. We would need to stop the trend of having a small number of large store…

In los angeles you hit spots that are impossible to pass on foot you cant just walk across the city over on la cienega the side walk cuts off and its cars and trucks only no bikes either. I lost both my front teeth and broke a foot being hit by a car.

Re: New Cities

#610

Post by elihu »

gorkemyurt wrote: post #586
elihu wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your spot looks really good, but according to Google it's a "Wildlife area", so politically it's not likely to be easy to get approval to turn into a city. For me, proximity to Silicon Valley is not a priority. My suggestion is to use land in NW Oregon in the coast range. Most of it is very rugged, but there's some sort-of-flat land in the general vicinity of Saddle Mountain that's currently used to grow lumber. It's…

Another good option! I've always wondered why NW Pacific US coast is very underutilized. How is the climate like there? Pretty much the same as Portland? I agree with you that there needs to be a University to create a tech hub, but I think that's the easiest to take care of if YC and big tech companies are behind this plan.. You can easily convince big name universities to start satellite campuses or even better you…

Weather is similar to Portland, but as you get closer to the coast you get less temperature extremes. The coastal mountains do get snow in the winter, though, due to elevation. There's probably more rain.

I think in general people don't build there because it's harder/more expensive to build on hilly terrain, there aren't many jobs in the area, roads are relatively sparse, and though the landscape is beautiful in general, the way it's logged means there's little species diversity and the land always looks like it has a bad haircut.

I'm sure there are hundreds of other plausible sites we could find by spending a little time with Google Maps. Most of them will have something wrong with them, otherwise cities would have been built there already. However, some of the problems may be features in the right context. For instance, hilly terrain might deter real-estate developers from trying to build 100-houses-at-a-time developments and encourage the kind of people who are willing to make the effort to use the geography to their advantage.

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