If you're going to have a dense, intercity area, I suppose I'd argue that the question isn't about "human-driven cars", which brings up the largely unrealistic consideration of self-driving cars on ordinary roads, but simply: Build the city center entirely around public transit. Rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely. Why bother with buses if you have free reign where to put your rails? And as a Chicagoan, I can say that nobody in their right mind drives a car into the intercity to begin with.
Modern subway systems are automated with barrier walls and doors making it near impossible for a human to end up on the tracks. If built like this from the get-go, collisions between transit and pedestrian could be virtually zero. Plan your stations based on the distance needed to reach EVERYWHERE in a reasonable walking distance, make sure your system has the capacity to meet the daily working population, and you really don't need direct A-to-B transportation.
> 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 merchandise to stores? None of these things are going to be able to get around without a road network of some description, albeit hopefully one significantly reduced in scope from a typical American city.
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.
This is the exact kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would still call it a road, though, if it can support limited vehicular traffic. "Pedestrian road", maybe. It's a good point, though, that you can support the use cases I mentioned without resorting to the more typical "road-for-cars, sidewalk-for-people" paradigm.
It's important to make a semantic distinction between 'streets' and 'roads'. A typical one is:
Streets are things which are where humand can play, people bike and walk, go to stores, around the places we live and work, etc. They are 'Places' where people can live about their day to day lives. Very human-friendly.
'Roads' which are higher-speed connectors between Places. Highways are a very high-speed type of roads.
In a typologically healthy region, there is a clear distinction between streets in roads, but in the US there is a blurring, and we often see what are sometimes dubbed 'stroads' - a mutant street-road hybrid, the sort of thing we typically see in the US with wide, fast, multi-lane streets, lined with strip malls and the like. They're hostile to human and make walking between locations at best boring and tedious, and at worst dangerous.
This is a good idea when considering how people will get around in their daily routines, but I'd be interested in hearing your perspective on how goods, services, and infrastructure would operate with entirely no roads?
Specifically getting food/goods/supplies to businesses, restaurants, hospitals, and other facilities that are required for such a city to exist. You could potentially utilize rail for this but then you face the last mile problem. Additionally considering things like emergency services, rail seems like it would be entirely inefficient for getting someone immediate medical attention.
Sorry about the delay, I'm rate limited here on HN.
As another commenter suggested, emergency vehicles especially could still use pedestrian walkways, which would still be needed to get from station to endpoint, and should be sufficiently wide to allow a lot of free movement. The so-called last mile. As a perk, pedestrians and bicycles are easier to move to part ways for emergency vehicles.
I think that a lot of freight could be handled the same way. A limited number of licensed carriers could operate light mule vehicles to bring freight from the nearest station (assuming rail stations had decent cargo-unloading stops as well) and operate along pedestrian walks during low traffic hours. (Your mail and your deliveries should not be delivered during regular starts or ends of the work day, or mealtimes. I'd go so far as to say construction traffic should be in the dead of night.) Since they'd need to coexist with pedestrians, but only travel a very short distance, from the nearest station, I'd propose these would be slow as heck, and since they wouldn't be traversing rough terrain, they could have extremely low ground clearance as well.
The key importance is that these pedestrian walkways be first and foremost, for pedestrians, and that personnel transportation vehicles be non-existent along them. The occasional off-peak freight cart isn't going to be a huge burden on transportation efficiency or pedestrian safety.
I think light rail is awful. Heavy rail even worse.
I just spent a week in Paris. Do you know much faster it's transportation is than walking? It's about a 2x multiplier. That's it. I can take multiple subway connections and get there in 30 minutes or walk the streets in 60.
Several hundred billion in subway is no faster than a moving sidewalk in an airport.
When you have a city as dense as Paris, you can access the whole city in 30 minutes using transportation. That's more people, offices, cafes, museums and parks that sprawling city will fit into two hours car commute radius.
The city centre is essentially car-free, with a ring-road highway around it. The centre is dense enough to have most things you'd want, but small enough that you can walk across it quickly.
Tough to get a firetruck somewhere without roads. We have come a long way in reducing the fire risk in new construction buildings, but 'stupid finds a way' is far from being a solved problem.
See another of my posts about road vs street definitions. Note that a lot of suburban wide streets are built that way to meet fire codes written to accommodate overly-large trucks. A suburban town doesn't need giant trucks where smaller, cheaper, more maneuverable trucks can do the work. Combined with ubiquitous hydrants - which have disappeared from many US suburban subdivisions - they are more than enough fire safety for anything under 4 stories. Regulations to accommodate these huge trucks have helped ruin the human scale of streets in many places. Also note that existing old cities have become a lot more safe by using superior materials, installing sprinkler system, etc etc.
Absolutely. There is currently a trend in the US towards smaller emergency vehicles, and I expect that to continue.
US fire truck manufacturers are starting to look at their European brethren (companies like Metz out of Germany) for examples of how to accomplish the necessary tasks on much smaller platforms.
I think we're still a long ways from being able to do away with fire trucks entirely though. Firefighting is a very dynamic activity, with a lot of contingencies that need to be covered, and the 'big toolbox on wheels' model works very well.
Firetrucks are designed to work on roads, not the other way round.
It's important that a transportation system account for all needs, but fire trucks aren't a need they are one potential solution to the emergency response use case.
It's tough to plan for the tactical needs of a firefighting operation. I don't see any good way of getting around the need for a big mobile toolbox that has a lot of flexibility in where it positions itself (i.e. not on rails).
Right now Realtor.com lists the median price per sq. ft in SF as $818, Buffalo is $72, and Detroit is $22. So you could cut your housing cost by 90 percent just by moving to a different city. These folks say they don't want to build a 'liberterian techno-utopia', but it's not clear what else they're offering if they are uninterested in investing in actual cities where people actually live.
I don't know about Detroit, but Buffalo is in the midst of an amazing if long overdue recovery from its status as a dying old blue collar rust belt town. It wasn't the nerds and hipsters that pulled this off though, it was a few large wealthy real estate developers who saw a town with potential which due to collapsed real estate prices could be developed at a bargain.
Detroit has the advantage of being in the middle of an enormous well-developed network of streets and highways. I see no need to start from scratch when we already have underutilized infrastructure.
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.
In San Francisco, your friend likely manages a sweatshop. The engineers on the floor are the high-tech equivalent of the immigrant women working the rows of sewing machines in a Chinatown clothing factory. The manager is the guy who sits in the little room on the side watching the floor to make sure no one takes too long of a pee break. Today's high-tech sweatshops are clean and have toys in them, but the essential economic relations are the same.
Sam, I meant how much is YC funding on the research side? Shoot me an email, I know some people in Miami working on some related topics, happy to connect you.
Those "unpopulated Chinese ghost towns" are all populated now, a few years after they were built. The government just builds them a while before forcing the nearest subsistence farmers to move into them.
It's like Spike Japan, the blog that visits towns on holidays and claims they've been abandoned for years, because all the residents are gone on holiday.
Public transit infrastructure and especially rail/subway seems like a huge common denominator for 21st century cities that people are really attracted to living in: See the Bay Area, Boston, NYC, DC
So I think, "how do you build legitimate rail transit into an existing city without it currently" is an interesting question for people researching and thinking about this topic.
Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-to-describe sense of 'opportunity'.
Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in population.
Because of this, our generation is stuck on the wrong side of the supply/demand bit for property. Property in uninteresting cities is very cheap, because nobody wants to be there. Property in Silicon Valley or Toronto is on fire because it's the place to be.
I think there's a critical mass kind of problem. In many ways, my quality of life in a smaller (or even very small) city could be several times higher than it currently is -- except for the people. And, for better or worse, it's the people that matter. I don't have any real desire to be the best educated, or most creative, or most entrepreneurial person in a city: I want to be surrounded by them and call them my friends.
So perhaps there's some kind of Kickstarter-like critical mass sort of system that could be put into place to kickstart small cities whereby 50 or 100 mutually interesting people committed to moving to a more remote city iff their compatriots did as well.
Of course, to make that work, there would be have to be some kind of "opportunity", which is why I'm happy to see yC-folks looking into the problem.
Beat me to it. Without some sort of income guarantee, most people would not move to remote cities.
edit: not sure why this is controversial. other than retired folks, who would move to the middle of nowhere as a result of this "kickstarter" if they aren't going to be guaranteed a job there?
Basic income is absolutely one route, but I can think of a few others. A startup could thrive in a smaller city where their employees could achieve a high quality of life without extraordinary expense. You'd still have to solve the recruiting problem, however, and employees would be wary of lock-in effects.
> Property in uninteresting cities is very cheap, because nobody wants to be there.
Many more people live in 'uninteresting' cities than 'interesting' ones. They're cheap because of the relatively big supply, not necessarily because of the lack of demand.
I was meaning to compare, say, Washington D.C. and Memphis. Most Americans live outside the 'top tier' cities like DC, NY, SF, LA, Chicago, etc. About 26 million (out of 320 million) live in the ten largest cities in the U.S.
Even assuming half of the US lives in cities, about 130 million people live in smaller ones. My point was that smaller cities are actually more popular, and I think the numbers still support that.
> Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in population.
I'm not sure how you're defining "important" but I think it's safe to say that the list cities many people 'the place to be' has changed quite a bit from 100 years ago. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle would not have been on that list 100 years ago. But Cleveland and Pittsburgh probably would have been. So I would argue that things actually are kind of flexible. Of course, many cities would stay on the last - e.g. New York. That said, your point still stands that the list hasn't noticeably grown despite massiveky increased population (if anything I bet it's shrunk), which is kind of counterintuitive.
I totally agree with your larger point about the need for a critical mass of people to move to a city though. It's a tricky problem to solve.
I think it's worthwhile to look at small cities that have recently become much more popular - Portland OR, Austin TX, and Asheville NC. Their recent histories might provide some insights into how small cities go from being backwaters to attractive alternatives to the big coastal metropolises.
To underscore your point a bit more, NYC's population actually declined from 7 to 8 million in the 1970s. I recall a poll done in the mid-eighties where more than half of New York City residents said they would move to a different city if they felt they could.
During this period artists and musicians took advantage of the cheap rent and renewed New York's status as cultural center, rebooting the gentrification process. The same thing was going on in Portland 15 years ago, where a lot of musicians and writers I knew at the time had insanely low rent, and incredible communities of like-minded people with a lot of free time. There may be other factors that contribute to why some cities take off this way and others don't, but the depression/rejuvenation cycle seems to have a momentum of its own.
> the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today
Silicon Valley was not a "place to be" 100 years ago. Maybe 200 years ago during gold rush.
New Orleans was more of a "place to be" before Hurricane Katrina.
In general, I agree that North America was remarkably stable in the last 100 years. Europe and Asia were much more affected by the world wars. Afghanistan and Iraq were much more places to be 20 years ago.
I don't think opportunity is actually that difficult to describe, it seems to mostly be a product of labor markets. Either there's an untapped well of excess labor (like the post-war boom in Phoenix, AZ) or there are jobs in a high unemployment environment (like what's fueling growth in the bay area now).
In the case of Phoenix, they went from 99th in the US to 9th in about 30 years in large part due to the government building air force fields and pilot training camps. When everyone went back there after the war and realized they needed jobs, industry was happy to fill the gap because there was high competition among labor.
Similarly the bay has developed obviously because of tech, but for most of that early tech, the US government was the primary customer. Not just transistors, but before that, radio and telegraph research and operator training was done for/on behalf of the Navy.
That is all to say that the next step probably won't be fueled by some small-batch kickstarting program. People won't relocate en masse if they don't have long-term motivation. I think the best bet for inciting development of New Cities is mass investment by the government training people to do things like build and operate solar farms in the great plains, understand and combat coastline destruction in the gulf, etc.
If the government commits to buying clean energy and prioritizes investing in it's development, it can have a big say in where that happens and I think that's a great opportunity to rebuild dying old cities or start from scratch since so many people have abandoned those places already.
Because of this, our generation is stuck on the wrong side of the supply/demand bit for property.
Speak for yourself. I've tried living in high demand cities the world over and frankly I find the supposed interesting bits are better and more valuable when visiting than living there (food, art and culture, typically). After having great jobs on a few continents I have returned to live in a second tier city in China, and 15 years after my first visit it's still awesome! (Startup costs: ~$0. Food: Great. People: Interesting. Supply-chain: Taobao) Sure, it has its limitations, but we are less than a half-day flight from heaps of interesting countries (half of Asia) and can get to Paris direct in 10 hours. The biggest issue is education for children, but even in the west this is an issue and I believe there will be novel solutions to this problem emerging in the next five years.
> We now have major technologies such as smart grids, autonomous vehicles, etc
Not really. Autonomous vehicles are still coming. We don't know what infrastructure we'll need to support them just yet. Will there be a standardized way of powering / recharging them? What non-autonomous needs will they have and how to we handle them (because there will be some e.g. mechanical repair, rescue, etc)? Sure we can "guess" based on trends but we won't know for sure for probably another 10+ years what a brand new city will really need in this regards.
Same with smart grids especially with solar power becoming more efficient they may almost be unnecessary in 10-20 years (unlikely maybe but it's theoretically possible).
> There are many high-level questions we want to think through[...]And there are tactical questions we want to dig into
So there is a bit of reason to why most cities come up sorta "organically". Like NYC there was planning, sure, but that planning came from trends or requirements from the populous which happened over time. Engineering a full city from the group up sounds good but the majority of the people using the city are, well, people. People change. Technology changes. Political opinion changes.
Maybe you'll succeed in having a solid plan agreed upon by a majority but by the time the plan is taken and put into action and built a large amount of time will pass and I do not believe that original plan will still be as optimal or valid by the time it is completed. Then you'll have to do what every city does: improve, change laws, build stuff here and there that you originally thought you wouldn't do.
Ultimately it seems like a very interesting exercise but I do not believe in its practicality.
> - Adora Cheung, Sam Altman
Wait, Adora is part of YC? I thought after all of the drama around HomeJoy and the people it may or may not have sold to she had just basically disappeared. I had no idea she was part of YC.
Edit: just to clarify (because I'm not sure it came off correctly) I just didn't know Adora was part of YC and am curious as to her role, etc not to bring up any drama or other bs. I had just assumed she went on to found another company as that seems to be the norm for many founders.
Autonomous privately owned vehicles on shared rights of way are still coming. Centrally managed autonomous vehicles on dedicated rights of way are here already -- think inter-terminal trains at airports. If private car ownership is up for discussion (and it's explicitly called out here), you could imagine, for example, an urban plan where people got around on a macro level on automated elevated light rail, and on a micro level by foot or bike.
That would be pretty awesome and is very doable today. Good idea! You wouldn't even need roads really just stations everywhere to get on some sort of train type of vehicle that you can hop on and get to any part of the city. Hell make them smaller and more frequent and when you get in you put where you want to stop so it can skip stops, etc.
Trollies. They leave the roads open for other forms of transportation. They can be made to move slow enough that people can embark/disembark while it's in motion. Some level of automation can allow them to realize they're full and skip stops unless requested by a passenger. Hell, you could put a button or offer a phone app so people can request it to stop at a particular stop instead of flagging it down like a bus.
Automation is easy, they follow tracks. Put them on various, intersecting loops. They could probably be more self-contained, rather than using the grid constantly. If personal vehicles are banned, you only have to contend with pedestrians, cyclists, emergency, maintenance, and perhaps delivery vehicles.
Hmm not bad. Embarking / disembarking sounds difficult for the handicapped but I'm sure that's work-around-able. I'd be interested in seeing more cities adopt quick transportation like this even if it's in a different but similar form.
I was really surprised by that too. Looking at her and her co-founder's handling of the shutdown as well as the overall fact that they just couldn't execute (raising money isn't executing). I'm not sure what track record and skills she really brings to this.
I competed with Adora when I was running Exec. Under Adora, Homejoy had impressive execution on the early stage: they were very good at customer acquisition, hiring talented employees, and raising capital. All things that are important in the early stage startups.
Homejoy had missteps after that initial period. But sometimes you learn as much or more from failure as you do from success.
The entire reason they failed was because they were paying more for customers than they were getting in return and even more importantly they were not retaining customers very well. It was a bleeding ship for a very, very long time until it went bust.
I could be great at customer acquisition no matter what the product if I'm losing a lot of money on each acquisition. Typically people hold up metrics such as NPR or usage as far more important than installs / initial acquisitions.
> Homejoy had missteps after that initial period. But sometimes you learn as much or more from failure as you do from success.
While I certainly agree from the latter (I know the very first project I ever lead was a HUGE failure and one of the most amazing learning experiences of my life) I'm not sure that necessarily qualifies someone to give start-ups advice. Sure you can tell them how you fucked up but without real experience in applying those lessons it's hard to see much value in it compared to most of the other partners at YC.
Hence why I was curious what her role was. If she's just leading this work or partnering on it then that might be a good fit. But if it's sitting down and giving advice to start-ups I'm not so sure I'd take it without a larger grain of salt than I would most of the other YC folks.
I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem ) .
The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think: http://amzn.to/28W6et9
Edit - I'll add that I think it's great that YC is spending some money to look into this, as it's a huge issue for many desirable, productive cities these days. Huge as in billions of dollars:
There are PEOPLE in the cars. The cities are built for people.
A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).
Taking it away would be like removing computers because they are too fast so we should all do things by paper again.
I think another way to phrase things would be to segregate types of traffic more.
Through-traffic should be invisible (underground).
Local traffic should be mostly segregated from foot traffic. If there's a block, the "front" of things should be entirely pedestrian / bike with vehicle access in the rear (the alley - but likely larger in this case).
See my bit elsewhere in this thread about Japan - small slow streets need less or even no use segregation. Part of the equation is that small streets discourage fast driving, but also when walking/biking on those small streets becomes the 'new normal', drivers will tend to be extra cautious, expecting slow bikes or walkers anywhere
The throughput of a column of people walking from NYC to LA would be quite good. But I certainly wouldn't want to cross the country that way. Other things matter too.
This is about cities. Highways between LA and NYC are not "cities" (cities shouldn't have highways in them, see Robert Moses's destruction of New York), so I don't see the relevance (also, fly?).
That image also doesn't include that one of those drivers might kill someone, and most of them will turn aggressively into crosswalks. I see and experience those turns every day in New York, and read about the unpunished deaths almost daily. Enough of it.
I'm choosing an extreme case to demonstrate the point. The same thing applies in a city. Take a city road and fill it with people walking. The throughput will be huge. The latency will suck, and you will not want to go a long distance, even intra-city, that way.
Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice? It's not because throughput sucks and they just want to stick it to the man.
> Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice?
It's just anecdotal, but in my experience most of the people I know who live in places where having a car is an actually choice don't own them at all, i.e. people who live and work in city centers.
Due to the US's terrible public transportation infrastructure, however, that's not a real choice in most places. If you want to work, you or someone in your household is going to need a car and it's going to eat up an uncomfortable portion of your income.
There are precious few places where you literally can't walk or bike.
There are a lot of places where it's impractical to do so, because it takes too long, and so people mostly don't. That's despite the fact that walking or biking would increase throughput, because throughput isn't all that matters. I would even argue that it isn't all that important.
Do you know why it takes too long? Because it's illegal to build things that people need on a day-to-day basis near where they live in large swaths of the US.
Some people want their car-centric lifestyle, and hey, that's fine too (as long as they're paying for it); I think the problem is that it's simply not a choice for many people due to the central-planning style zoning regulations entrenched in much of the country.
I completely agree. My objection is simply to the idea that increasing throughput matters when talking about the merits of cars versus other forms of transportation.
"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 friendly for cars tends to make it harder for walking and biking.
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.
No, it's because people with a car centric viewpoint push solutions that prioritize the car to the exclusion of other things, making cars a requirement.
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).
Cars are also super space-wasters. They do nothing but sit for 80-90% of the time (which is one reason why car sharing is making more sense to people). In a lot of cities, especially newer ones built out since WW2, you will find a large percentage of space dedicated to parking lots. Not even necessarily parking structures (which cost a lot more per car) but just free to park flat lots, with nothing going on there.
It's a lovely picture, and it makes a great point. If 200 people want to get to the same place, it's far more efficient to pack them into the same vehicle going to that place.
Now what happens when those 177 cars are going to 100 different places?
Then it’s much more efficient to cluster those 100 different places into a few compact areas, so that most of the people can walk or bike, or take the subway.
The problem is when those 200 people want to go to 100 different places spread throughout hundreds of square miles of evenly low density suburban sprawl like a modern US metropolis.
> Then it’s much more efficient to cluster those 100 different places into a few compact areas, so that most of the people can walk or bike, or take the subway.
Absolutely. But there will always be people who want to get to locations spread all around even a metropolitan area (as well as further-flung locations around that area), and while it's possible to build a public transit network to get them there, with enough throughput to cover the volume of people, the latency will still be worse than a point-to-point trip directly from point A to point B.
I'm assuming you live in San Francisco? As a visitor, it seemed to me that this was more due to the insane car-bus road-sharing conflicts, the inability of Muni buses to accelerate up a hill, and the deluge of 4-way stops.
Nope. Chicago suburbs, actually. But that's how long the buses take out here in the suburbs, and how long it's taken me in downtown Chicago before. I don't go on the buses that often, and this is one reason why.
The buses can have 20-40 stops in those 4 miles, mind you. I don't mean it's all due to traffic.
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 that you aren't forced to have a car to live in a location. There are plenty of demographics that would prefer to not have a car if they could.
Removing the need for car ownership would be big step forward and communities that have this property are highly sought-after.
I live in NYC. I enjoy being able to take the subway to many world-class establishments in under 45 minutes.
If/when I have children, I'm getting the fuck out of here. Many (most?) people do the same.
There are huge numbers of people here, so of course there are lots of children here. They're either super wealthy, or really not living up to my standards for quality of life. (I was not raised in a big city.)
If you see lots of children around NYC, consider the case of cars. I don't have a car in the city, and no one I know does. But there's clearly many cars all over, more than can really fit in the roads and curbs and parking garages. Having a car in NYC is a huge pain in the ass. It's not a great car experience. Same with children.
Same here. Also, the people who can afford it and have been in Manhattan their whole lives often have a car or two parked in garages. Brooklyn and Queens are still very car heavy as well.
Also, after a while, those who can afford it (or those who can't but still spend) use Uber / Lyft / Gett / Juno / etc liberally. I haven't been in the subway for at least two months because I can't stand it anymore, and it's especially disgusting in summer.
No car ownership is no way to live your whole life. I feel trapped here. No, I do not want to go through the hassle of renting every time I want to get out of town either. As far as daily commuting, underground systems always suck especially for longer trips. I like above ground commuter trains of hiqh quality, and I like cycling when there's investment in infrastructure and shower / lockup facilities everywhere. Unfortunately not the case.
My wife was rabidly anti-car (living in the northeast) until one summer a friend went out of the country and left their car with us. The precise word she used was "free" - we were free to get groceries on the fly, we were free to go out of town. We just had an enormous number of options open up to us, as our travel overhead / travel radius improved so dramatically.
It was freeing.
I never had to argue with her after that; when we had the chance to acquire a car, we did.
I find this sentiment interesting because I have the complete opposite feeling that you have. In my view, NYC is light-years ahead of Atlanta (where I live) when it comes to walkability, bikeability, and public transit. I would love to live in a city like yours.
Given that Atlanta is nowhere near NYC in those regards, it's weird that I feel trapped every time I get in a car here.
I don't own a car because I feel free without a car.
This goes to show me that even though I think NYC, Portland, Minneapolis, et al. would be amazing to live in, there are many other opinions and sentiments. :-)
I feel like this comment applies to Manhattan but not greater NYC. I also live in NYC and many of my coworkers have children. They all live out in Queens, though. Areas like Forest Hills have a cute suburban feel and are car-friendly but also afford solid public transit options. Sure, it might cost more than a comparable house in the suburbs, but you can find a full house for under $1mm.
> 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 option; that could meaningfully replace driving. Trains and buses alone cannot.
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.
Yes, you can take a bus into your city center faster at rush hour. That's exactly what public transit is really good at: getting people to a common destination at a common time.
Now, how fast can you get from an arbitrary point in the city to an arbitrary point in the city at an arbitrary time of day?
I just spent a couple of weeks and paris/barcelona and I'd say you could probably do it faster by subway/walking than by car especially when you figure in the cost/annoyance of finding and paying for parking.
There's a huge "but" there though. We rode the metro over 30 times in those two cities and never waited for a train for more than 3 minutes. Both cities have trains coming every 4 minutes at all hours of the day (as far as I can tell). That is something we would have to fix in most US cities that have public transportation.
I mean, it must feel like the third world here for a European visitor who comes to DC or SF (the two cities I'm most familiar with) and tries to ride the metro. 12 minutes between rush hour trains in DC and 20 or 24 minutes between trains in DC and SF outside of rush-hour.
When you can pop into a metro that is ~5 minutes from your flat, be on the train in less than 4 minutes, and be within ~5 minutes walk of wherever you want to be...why would you own a car, pay insurance, pay for a parking spot at home, pay for gas, and then pay for parking at a location when public transit is so convenient?
Europe definitely has better public transit. And parking is a problem in an urban area (though that issue goes away with a taxi or self-driving car).
But I think you're glossing over a fair bit with your description:
> When you can pop into a metro that is ~5 minutes from your flat, be on the train in less than 4 minutes, and be within ~5 minutes walk of wherever you want to be
...assuming that where you want to be is within 5 minutes of a metro station on the same line that's near your house and boarding at that particular 4-minute interval. Most trips between two arbitrary points involve at least one line change, which then involves another around of waiting; depending on the nature of the change, it may also involve a walk between stations. That adds up.
I'd like to have a public transit infrastructure that's comparable in latency to getting into a car sitting in your own driveway, going directly to your destination, and parking in the readily available free parking at that destination. I'd love to not have all the wasted space associated with driveways, garages, and other parking infrastructure. But I don't see a path to that even with European-level public transit.
You mentioned Barcelona, so I pulled up Google Maps, and picked a couple of random points roughly 20 minutes apart (by car) within the city, one of them a major landmark / tourist attraction and the other a residential area. Here's the map: https://goo.gl/maps/VCzEJEn3q3k . 24-35 minutes by car, depending on traffic. 67 minutes by public transit, including 20 minutes of walking, one line change, and 40 minutes of transit.
Here's a second example: https://goo.gl/maps/MWGqrSMsFGp . Directions between an event center and a shopping center, both in downtown and near major transit lines. Much better case for public transit: 29 minutes by transit, with no line change. By car: 12-18 minutes depending on traffic.
At least in the longer wait to travel via transit, if you're used to the trip, you get to read or listen to music, and just watch for your stop rather than the constant vigilance of driving. But that doesn't make up for roughly 2x travel time.
You are definitely correct. I did the same thing for Paris right after posting. Times were 1.8-3x what driving would be. But, experience tells me that the extra time oftentimes tends to not be an issue, mostly because of the cognitive differences between operating a personal vehicle and passive transportation.
But if you are in a rush and you know parking will be easy then yeah, jumping in the car would be fastest.
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.
Having centralized mess halls serving bland, but nutritious meals (rather than individual kitchens and nice restaurants) and hot-bunk dorms with people sharing beds in shifts (rather than individual bedrooms) would also be "more efficient".
No one's going to take your car away (see my other answer, above/below). It's more a matter of making it legal to construct neighborhoods where it is not nearly mandatory to have one to live.
Many cities absolutely do prioritize cars over people - huge roads that are unsafe for other users, mandatory parking requirements, and tons and tons of neighborhoods that are predicated on the idea of using a car for pretty much all transportation.
I think this is a valid point, in that it serves as the other side of the coin to the arguments of your parent poster. Other than transportation and carrying ability, cars also amplify things like consumption of energy, physical space, and so on.
I think this is probably why the question in the original article, "What should a city optimize for?", is really the MOST important one to answer.
If your goal is to keep housing costs low, for example, then presumably you'll want to optimize for space (based on the prevalence of suburbs, this seems to be the presumption reason for high housing costs). Since cars amplify use of space (parking, roads, gas stations, etc), then it follow that despite their other benefits, you would want to minimize vehicular traffic to mitigate this effect.
In other words, I think when people say things like "people should make cities that are for people" what they might be trying to imply is "people should make cities that are not for cars, because there are other things that I think should take priority".
Not really - I didn't say "get rid of all the cars". He's creating a false dichotomy. Cars are fine for many things, but shouldn't be the top priority, but one of many ways of getting around.
> A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).
Speaking as someone who has children and bicycles with them I find that other peoples' "very very useful" tool is something that detracts from my quality of life and prevents us from doing things that we value and prioritize.
Obviously there needs to be a balance between these two extremes: On the one hand we have the current situation where you are subsidized to drive your brood of 18 to the Bulk Mall of America and on the other lies my set of preferences which involves the distribution of goods to local outlets by a smaller number of trained drivers/robots.
With a car, in a place designed for cars, I can go from ideation to grocery store or department and back inside of half an hour.
In a place "designed for people" where neither homes nor stores have parking, such an errand consumes an entire afternoon. (Walk to bus stop, wait for bus, take bus to train, wait for train, ride train, walk, etc. Though I suppose it's easier if you can afford to live a short walk from the train itself).
The dramatically slower pace of life, turning any outing into a huge ordeal, is definitely not a good thing. Give me Manhattan-quality public transit or let me use my damn car.
"Park 'n ride" is a seriously underrated idea. A small, urban core where the jobs, businesses, entertainment, etc. is, blanketed in dense and frequent transportation, with trains out to the affordable residential neighborhoods, and plentiful, cheap parking at the neighborhood train stations. Chicago does this nicely.
As someone living in a place "designed for people", my trip to the grocery stores means putting on my shoes, walking down the stairs and across the street. The next department store is about 200m down the street.
Because in Chicago I think that describes about 10 blocks (a few hundred staggeringly wealthy people in the most lavish of luxury condo towers). The rest of us have some tiny, price-gouging convenience stores nearby but have to go ~20 blocks for a real supermarket, 4-5 miles to downtown for a Target or Macy's. Taking the train is less of a hassle than parking in the Loop, but it's still a hassle.
I lived in three different apartments in uptown and edgewater and was able to walk to a supermarket within a half-mile. Two of the locations were also close to other general shopping choices. All three were close enough to the El to get us whereever else we wanted to go. Downtown Evanston is similar or maybe even better. I get your point that this model is not common in the US - but I believe that's the entire point of this article - how can cities be designed to be more livable?
Come and try Barcelona. I have a number of supermarkets within 5 minutes walk of my house. Driving is a bit of a pain in the arse here (mainly because I don't want to pay for parking for my crappy car, so I park it 15 minutes cycle away).
The assumption here is without cars cities would be laid out exactly the same. What if there were by laws that every high rise above x floors has y retail space on the ground floor. In this case most of your daily needs would be serviced by a trip down. Once a week/month you may go to a larger store.
In San Francisco and Chicago, I experienced no shortage of tiny, expensive corner stores, restaurants, boutiques, etc. That's the kind of stuff that seems to go into the ground floors of residential towers. The hassle was accessing (the local equivalents of) Target, Kroger, Best Buy, etc.
What are the problems with the small stores that you describe?
- expensive?
- few products?
Something else?
If pricing is an issue the question becomes,
How do you assist small retailers compete with massive chains?
A problem I have thought about quite a bit as my dad once owned a small corner shop
He had to close it as the chains make it impossible to compete on price with bulk buying discounts.
I believe what happens is due to the layout of our cities we end up with large chains, malls and big box retailers. It's a virtuous cycle...
> How do you assist small retailers compete with massive chains?
Is the problem that they can't compete, or that they don't have to? When driving isn't the main method of getting around, but instead walking augmented by potentially high-latency public transit is the main method, the cost to the consumer of small distance differences between notionally "competing" institutions becomes quite high, which means that they have less need to actually compete with one another: they have captive hyper-local markets with effective moats.
It's not drivel, it's simply the truth that often discussions about streets are framed around cars, rather than people. Now obviously people are in cars, duh, but the thing is that if you focus on the people, then you start thinking about the fact that people are capable of taking more than one form of transportation: 'hurting' cars may well be the correct solution if the people who used to drive can get an equivalent or better experience walking/biking/using transit.
> A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).
For sure, cars are very useful, particularly for going long distances or carrying lots of stuff or people. But there's other things that they're bad at: most notably, they're far less space efficient for the average case when there's just one or two people in each car. Because of that, as a city gets denser, you have to start moving people over to other, denser forms of transportation.
You're always going to have some cars, if only for business deliveries and emergency vehicles (and maybe the handicapped), but it's possible to cut the number of car trips way, way down.
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.
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 take the car to do larger shopping trips on occasion, or to do things further from town. We'd take the family downtown on public transportation. So it was a 'right tool for the job' situation.
I don't think we really need any fancy, expensive technical solutions like burying cars in tunnels - just making streets a bit slower, and safer for bikes and pedestrians would be a great start.
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 stores and move back towards having a large number of smaller stores. That comes with it's own trade offs in planning an efficient city.
The other thing worth mentioning is that bikes/pedestrians can go anywhere cars can, but the opposite is not true. If we made streets that were "bike only" cars wouldn't be able to access them. Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator.
> 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).
There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?
I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food. Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.
If it's more efficient for you to make one trip to the store rather than several, it's even more efficient for the store to send one truck to make deliveries to many people in one trip.
Even more so if enough people do so that the store can switch from a storefront laid out for customers (with cashiers, displays, and tags on shelves) to a warehouse.
Safeway has a long-running delivery program, but they sure aren't pushing it very hard.
The system in Shanghai, where you might expect delivery to be popular, is that supermarkets operate their own buses which stop near your home. It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.
No, we're not talking about a 10-minute walk. You responded to my comment 'It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.'
A cart is not actually responsive to that, because it reintroduces the other problem.
> There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?
> I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food.
We mostly walked or biked to the local grocery store in Italy. It led to more fresh food, as you buy stuff in smaller quantities and eat it right away. A large backpack is fine for moving stuff. It worked for our family of 4.
We had food at home, and went to the store 2/3 times a week. It was 5 minutes away by bike, so popping over was no problem, and it meant more fresh fruit and vegetables in our diet, too, which was nice. It was not an inconvenience, nor a "huge portion of my week". It was a small store that was quick to go through and get what I needed, not something like Costco. We did bulk buying elsewhere for other stuff, too, and took the car. It's nice to have the choice.
"right away" doesn't mean the instant you get home. It's more like the next two to three days.
Yes, in an urban environment you generally have less stored food. But usually not zero stored food. You also have less space to store it in, which makes shopping every other day more convenient. Trading off time for space and whatever conveniences urban living might provide you.
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.
I think you have this internal representation of what "going to the store" means which is based on the North American suburban lifestyle of doing everything by car. This is not the model most of the world uses, especially not in old European cities.
Right...I've lived in Vienna and Berlin for over a decade (including a wife and child) and we never owned a car, and generally popped into the nearest supermarket for fetching backpack-sized loot every couple of days.
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 end of the store to another), spend time waiting in line and checking out, drive back, unpack, et cetera. The whole process takes about 2 hours.
I'd question those numbers: 5 minutes for urban shopping and 2 hours for suburb shopping. So you're saying that in 7 5 minute stops (35 minutes), you're able to accomplish what it takes someone else in a suburban mega-grocery store to accomplish in 2 hours?
Apart from that, though, almost anything that you can easily plan out and do in bulk is going to out-efficiency something done in smaller iterations involving a lot of repeated steps (going in, walking around, checking out, etc.).
When we go shopping on the weekends, we mostly buy for the entire week. We buy quantities of food that can make plenty of leftovers and buy water/soft drinks by the cases that last several weeks. We try to make the process as efficient as possible and we could stop by the store more often since it's close - but that would waste a lot of efficiency.
It's more like 10, and you probably don't do it 7 days a week. You take a bus or train to your convenient stop near the market. Walk into the market, grab a basketful of goods, pay, walk home.
If the choice is between driving to the store 1x a week vs 7x a week, then you have an excellent point, but if the choice is between driving 1x a week and walking 5-7x a week, in the long run the latter is much better for my health, and it replaces time I spend on the treadmill in the gym.
> almost anything that you can easily plan out and do in bulk is going to out-efficiency something done in smaller iterations
Not always. When I cycle or catch the bus home, I pop into the shops near my house, grab some stuff I need, and then continue on the way. Or I grab stuff at the supermarket near work, and cycle home with it in a bag.
Now I don't need to plan a big trip. I am already traveling to go home.
There's no reason you can't combine the two. My experience in Padova was that there wasn't a huge difference, as the local supermarket wasn't a tiny corner store. Some items we'd buy in bulk less often with our car.
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.
Where besides NYC? Nowhere. Americans like their cars. They like to drive. America is not the collectivist/statists that represent modern HN...which is pretty sick.
Hackers are anti-establishment! Hackers are not conformists that defer to government minders!
The insanity in your comment is the idea that urban density is the statist / authoritarian / corrupt central planning piece.
Try reading Louis Hyman's "Debtor Nation," particularly the bits on FHA and the creation of a national (and heavily subsidized) mortgage market.
The sub/exurbs, the essential symbiotes of car culture, are the dirigiste statist artifacts.
(yes, also a lot of the people who want to have you sell your Nissan Armada are also like that, and it's fair of you to call out statist authoritarian where you see them. But it's lunacy to suggest that suburbs and car culture just represent an organic Choice of the Free Market™)
It would be inconvenient to drive the American suburban minivan in traffic to the megamart on 5 acres of parking lot 3 miles outside a suburban sprawl, yes.
But for a large fraction of the world, it's more like this:
1. Step off bus you took home from city center job, having decided dinner recipe on the ride.
2. Buy fresh produce from independent grocery store on same block as bus stop.
If I'm hungry, I grab more food when I drop by the grocery store. Unless my hunger pangs are randomly distributed in time and unrelated to my eating schedule, how is that a massive inconvenience?
I think that depends on what your trip from home to the store is. Is it a pleasant 10 minute trip on down a country road or in an exciting, bustling city, or is it a 10 minute trip along a despotic road with nothing going on and which screams "cars only! no humans allowed!"? I prefer getting smaller grocery loads more frequently when the store is nearby, but when the trip is an ordeal, you go fewer big trips to avoid that as much as possible. A pleasant 15-20 minute walk to a store is much nicer than a 10 minute drive through an oppressive roadscape.
Spoken like someone who has never lived in a city. If the store is a 10min walk away, you go a few times a week. And/or you use one of those old lady carts.
Then you did something wrong. Don’t you pass on the way from school/uni/work to home by a store anyway? just hop out of the bus, buy stuff, and walk the rest.
That's me! Our closest supermarket is 10-15 minutes away. I have:
- Carried the bags
- Used a backpack
- Used a push-cart (can carry groceries for 5 people for a week)
- Biked (with panniers)
- Biked (with a trailer -- can carry groceries for 10 people for a week)
- Jogged, when I just needed something small on short notice for a cooking project!
It's totally fine, because our neighborhood is very walkable.
I live in the centre of a largish city in Europe. Here there's a few supermarkets less than five minutes away on foot, and the last one closes at ten every day of the week. They're also on the way to and from most other places I go. Usually I just buy what I need for tonight and tomorrow on my way home, or go after dinner when I'm likely to want a quick walk anyway.
Of course, I don't have kids and am generally not a very busy person, so it might not work for everyone.
Because the serfs working in all the 24 hour establishments don't themselves need a life. There are also noise issues in mixed use neighborhoods as seem to be being advocated for. And business volumes don't justify 24 hour operation of most businesses.
> Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?
I've carried 30+ kg of groceries on my bike panniers, about 15 to 30 min of ride to the store. Regular city bike with off-the-shelf panniers, not a cargo bike (which would easily take 100+ kg).
But quite honestly, I'd much rather get the groceries delivered to my home. I sometimes do but the websites to order the food are so bad that it takes more time to fill the order form that it's faster to ride to the store.
Bike is my primary means of transport for 8 months of the year because my city is awfully designed traffic-wise (if you need to cross the town east-west). A moderately fast bike ride beats any form of transport (including a car) on my daily commute.
A surprising (to me) benefit of going from a car-based life for 35 years to a car-less life is that more frequent grocery trips have given me incentive to move away from processed foods to fresher foods.
Shopping once every 7 or 10 days obviates the advantage of the freshest produce, meat, etc. but when I'm shopping every couple days it makes a difference, and I've enjoyed cooking and eating more.
You can perfectly do it by walking or by bike. But still, how are you going to buy fresh meat/fish or even some fruits/vegetables by shopping only once a week? I go shopping usually 3 times a week, and it is a very enjoyable and relaxing activity.
> 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. That comes with it's own trade offs in planning an efficient city.
Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this, but they aren't allowed to function any more in most cities in the US because of the amount of rules and regulations about what can be built where.
No, markets are a great way of finding what makes the most money for those who build the stores. That may be "the best" solution that is also aligned with the interests of the people who live there, but it might not be.
Central planning has been a colossal failure both in terms of the economy at large, and in terms of urban planning.
If someone can make money by building a store, that's great, what's wrong with it?
Zoning should be about keeping truly noxious activities away from residential areas, not about keeping a corner store away from where people could possibly walk to it.
Ah, I took a different take on your original post. I'll leave my original reply, as I still agree with the point, but I see where you're going with this and heartily agree. One of my main complaints with where I live is that it's a round-trip hour to walk to any store, yet $DEITY forbid that we put a corner store anywhere in my neighborhood lest a developer be prevented from plopping another house on that plot.
Yeah, my point is that it's impossible to say a priori what the mix of stores and single family houses and apartments and barber shops and other things should be, and where they should all be located. Markets are a good way of dealing with complex problems like that. They're not perfect, but better than the alternatives.
Agree in general - but keep in mind that $DEITY is often your neighbors.
Developers generally aren't the ones pushing for restrictive zoning laws, residents are. For decades Americans have lived under the impression that businesses near homes is somehow a corrupting influence, and that putting businesses far from homes is somehow a feature and not a bug.
The current suburban landscape in America is the result of both overzealous urban planners, too eager to create a magnum opus of central planning, and the residents who eagerly bought into the concept believing that the best life is a carefully manicured, highly restrictive one.
This is also why I'm skeptical of YC's thing here - this smells lot like how these misadventures in central planning have begun in the past. Sam's thought elsewhere about relocating startups to help bootstrap the new city's economy is also a bit disconcerting - these exist, they're called company towns, and they tend to be economically fragile (all non-diverse economies are) and good examples of central planning run amok.
I sincerely hope anyone applying to this is very well versed in urban planning and its history world-wide, because there have been many misadventures in planning, and those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
> I sincerely hope anyone applying to this is very well versed in urban planning and its history world-wide, because there have been many misadventures in planning, and those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
I think this is one of the most insightful comments here vis a vis YC's plans, and it's one of the reasons I'm in the "markets" camp. I know I'd prefer to see more mixed-use, bike/pedestrian friendly cities, but ultimately I'm wary of even my own "plans" and think the freedom to have people doing different things, and let cities evolve naturally beats even the best of plans.
It's a tricky balance to be certain. I grew up in an Asian country with extremely laissez-faire regulations and the urban landscape was a bit hellish.
Very, very economically efficient with huge economic diversity and competition, but nonetheless unpleasant (and unsafe!) in many ways.
Complete freedom is likely not the right answer, but neither is the extremely prescriptive type of planning that has dominated American cities since the 50s, the type that Jane Jacobs rails against in her famous book.
Oddly enough we were really good at this between the late 1800s and early 1900s. The places in America that people continue to enjoy being (and now have become enormously unaffordable) have almost all come of age in that era. I'm still not entirely sure what the x-factor was, but part of it was probably a more "gardener/enabler" philosophy to urban planning than the "prescriptivist/masterpiece" thought that dominates now.
Planning in many places in that era was more about setting the foundations for the market to grow productively, rather than monumental projects designed to micromanage the conditions of every day life. See for example the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 in NYC.
Whereabouts in Asia? That's an interesting counterpoint and example.
I agree with you completely: I'm not a 'markets' guy because I think they're the answer to all problems all the time, but because I think in this case we could use more of them.
I grew up in late-80s Taipei, which is a different (but at the same time, recognizable) beast than modern Taipei.
Back then there was no metro, there was a sea of private jitneys and buses fighting each other for bus stops. Traffic safety was utter shit.
The government had minimal involvement in food safety. Private "certifiers" sprung up to plug the gap, but piracy of food safety certification stamps was rampant, and the whole having to check the packaging to see if some product was certified safe by your preferred certification provider was a persistent stressor.
Building codes technically existed but enforcement was non-existent. Partial building collapses were common. The skies were a tangle of wires running overhead from competing TV, phone, and other companies, each of which needed their own set of last-mile infrastructure. A lot of it was poorly installed, accidental electrocutions weren't uncommon. It was all kind of Blade Runner-esque in hindsight.
The way I see it, I lived in the libertarian paradise some HNers dream of creating, and it wasn't really all it was cracked up to be.
Agree in general - but keep in mind that $DEITY is often your neighbors.
Absolutely. I remember way back when there was discussion of what to do with the huge plot of land north of us. Corner store, maybe? The local paper quoted someone in the neighborhood, "who's going to walk to the store in the rain (which a suburban of Seattle gets a bit of)?" Umm, maybe all of the people I see out walking when I'm walking the dogs in the dead of December in the dark and the pouring rain? Back to California with you Mr. NIMBY, the rest of us deal with walking in the rain just fine.
But that's probably the guy that shows up to zoning meetings and I'm...not. Yes, I'm lazy and yes, I should fix that.
"If someone can make money by building a store, that's great, what's wrong with it?"
There can be plenty of things wrong with it. I don't subscribe to the idea that whatever makes money is instantly the best thing.
And I never said that I want to keep corner stores away from where people could walk to it. I said that leaving everything up to the "free market" doesn't always yield the best solution for everyone. It only yields the most profitable solution for those with the money.
> And I never said that I want to keep corner stores away from where people could walk to it.
That's currently what we have; nothing at all resembling a free market where you can buy a piece of property and more or less do what you want with it. The rules and regulations in place are absolutely about enshrining the car-centric city.
With a more market-oriented solution, some people could have their "burbs" and others could have other kinds of housing and neighborhoods.
I'm sorry, but I completely disagree. A market based solution has no reassurance whatsoever that this would happen. As I said, markets only work to find the solution that makes more money for those with capital. That does not mean that it will be the best solution for those that actually live there. It's just as likely that a piece of property would be turned into a trash dump or strip club than it would be turned into a grocery market.
The rules don't come about because someone wants to stop a corner store from being built in their neighborhood. They want to stop the Walmart or the Lowe's or the strip mall. In addition to added traffic, you're now encouraging people from outside the neighborhood to come in, with the attendant risks.
The net often gets cast too widely though - so that the corners stores can't be built either.
I live in a quiet mostly rural neighborhood. I wouldn't object to a corner store replacing the nearest house. I would object to the house and all of its land getting cleared to drop a home depot in.
Unfortunately, zoning regulations prohibit both - as if there were no difference between them.
Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this
No, they're not. I've seen the markets in action, and one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks. As the my sibling comment points out, markets are great for maximizing incoming for the stores leasing space in the malls. One prime example I'm thinking of was 25 years ago, let's go to Google's sat view and see if much has changed...nope, looks like it's just as car-centric as it was when I lived there.
Now one can go all "no true Scotsman" on me, what with regulation and all, but there has been regulation long before either of us were born so one might as well argue that are no true markets because the sky is blue. It also ignores the fact that folks like the Simons (owners of malls across the U. S.) might have a little hand in how those regulations get written. What regulation has brought about in cities like Redmond is that if you're building streets, you're building them for everyone so there will be sidewalks and bike lanes.
> one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks.
You should look up the zoning codes in your city, as well as a zoning map. They are incredibly detailed, and extremely prescriptive. What we have in the US is very far from a market-based solution!
And those rules and regulations absolutely have worsened with time. Look at cities from 100 years ago, how they had nice downtowns where people could walk around (and also drive, but slowly) and they were relatively dense.
Nobody lives in those downtown areas anymore. It doesn't make sense to make a walking mall in an area where few people will live in walking distance.
Obviously mass transit can help if it is reliable, cheap, and expansively deployed in the city, but that's not a typical case in the US. Otherwise you're going to have to accommodate cars, and lots of them. That means big fast busy roads that are unfriendly to pedestrians.
Also, it's nothing for me to bike 5 miles to go somewhere by myself, but if I have to bring my 3 year old twins along and then haul several kilos of groceries or other heavy/bulky items back that bike ride starts to look rather impractical.
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 protest for all kinds of reasons. They will protest because it will raise their land values (and taxes) too much and force them to move. They will protest because it will bring in people and ruin their "quiet" neighborhood. They will protest because it will affect local water prices. This is how a lot of regulation gets started, because someone is trying to prevent something from happening to their backyard.
> 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.
You could always have Japanese style zoning. To simplify a lot, you can build houses in residential zones, you can build stores or houses in commercial zones, and you can build factories, stores, or houses in industrial zones. So people who want peace and quite have a place for it and nobody is allowed to surprise you with a pig offal disposal site next door. But if people really want to build houses in an industrial zone they can.
People will definitely still complain about that factory. People move into houses directly under the approach path for an airport then try to get the airport shut down because of the noise. People will move in next to a sewage treatment plant and then complain about the smell.
Purple are the areas for which any zoning restrictions at all exist – in the rest, no zoning regulations exist, as long as you follow normal building law, and get a normal permit, you can build what you want, skyscraper or single family home.
Sometimes they look like this: http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/919a.pdf (Very restrictive new post-2005 development, only terraced housing, single family housing, and some small apartment buildings), or sometimes they look like http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/907.pdf (left half is "mixed use", right half is a shooting area), but sometimes they have no regulation at all except specifying "have around 40% mixed use, mkay?". Or even like this http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/919c-1.pdf where there are some dotted arrows with the label "foot paths", kinda showing where maybe someday foot paths will be made (IRL they were made completely differently, after demand has been evaluated based on where people walk the grass down)
This is probably a far better mix than the overly restrictive situation in the US – regulations are good when they help consumers, small businesses, or to keep the market balanced, but regulations to help developers make profit are often a bad idea.
Thank you for the glimpse into your zoning codes - I rarely get a chance to hear ones from other countries explained, and they are always a fascinating counterpoint.
As you can see, if there is zoning, it’s often decided together with the developer – and has building heights, shape of roof, amount of floors and windows, etc already included.
Generally, the largest difference is that we just zone 90% of what we zone as mixed use, and let the market decide what it’ll be.
> No, they're not. I've seen the markets in action, and one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks.
That's almost never "the market" in action. For one thing, street design is obviously under the purview of the local (and possibly state and federal) department of transportation, not private developers. Plus, local zoning regulations usually have minimum parking requirements that strongly incentivize those kinds of car-centric shopping malls. It's hard to build a pedestrian-friendly area if the law says you need to use a ton of space (often more space than is used for the actual buildings) for car parking.
> Now one can go all "no true Scotsman" on me
It's not "no true scotsman", it's simply the truth that it's the government pushing car-centric design. Now, in some cases the market might ALSO want car-centric design, but it's hard to tease that out when the rule of law is so strong to begin with.
<Ugh, HN hit the reply limit, so I'll have to make a sibling comment.>
From a post from davidw further down: You should look up the zoning codes in your city, as well as a zoning map.
I'll take you up on that, as it's been ages since I last did, and I don't recall having done so to any great detail for my adopted city of Redmond. And I get the impression that you might be a little more recently informed than I, so I should get caught up in the conversation. :-)
> Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this
...assuming perfect knowledge and the absence of externalities, either of cost or benefit, since (assuming perfect knowledge of costs and benefits) markets optimize the net utility of the direct participants in each exchange, but not net social utility (because externalities are ignored.)
I think most urban planning has gone far, far beyond actual noxious externalities, to be honest. I agree there's a line somewhere, but in the US, the balance is completely out of kilter.
If externalities are present, there is no general solution to the problem of optimizing either individual net utility or social net utility. Markets don't do it perfectly, but no other solution does any better, and in fact the most common alternative, government regulation, does worse on average.
In the absence of externalities, this should be obvious. And in the presence of externalities, I did not claim that markets optimize either net social utility or net individual utility. I claimed only that markets work at least as well as any other solution (and that government regulation works worse, on average).
As far as your specific example, modern advertising, is concerned, I'm not clear about whether you think externalities are significant in this case or not.
> The other thing worth mentioning is that bikes/pedestrians can go anywhere cars can, but the opposite is not true.
Your statement is only true for low speed roads. At higher speeds, it is impossible or unsafe for anyone to use the road unless they are also going at an equally high speed.
So in practice, cars do NOT function as a lowest common denominator, but actively drive out other means of transportation because the roads they prefer -- high speed roads -- cannot be safely used by pedestrians or cyclists!
There's nothing that stops setting the speed limit on a highway to 25 MPH and allowing non-motorized transit. In San Francisco they did that to a highway along the waterfront, and vehicular traffic still moves fine.
Exactly right. Jurisdictions need to make these decisions intentionally, or else it is possible to make roads that not all users can use. Manhattan avenues are very similar to this, and are surprisingly usable for all three modes -- they are limited to 25 MPH, and are not limited access freeways, but can feel like one to a motorist in medium or better traffic because they are one way and the signals "travel" up the avenues at 25 MPH -- so as long as you can go the speed limit, you never need to stop, which is great for motorists, yet they're still reasonably usable by pedestrians and cyclists -- it helps that the speed limit is self enforcing in that there's no point in going much faster since then you'll hit a red light. The only thing that could make it better is probably to reduce to 20 MPH.
> Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator.
The lowest common denominator? I don't own a car, and I'm sure many other people in my city don't either, so no: it's not the lowest common denominator for us: walking is.
Cars are themselves very expensive and require a massive amount of infrastructure to function. Look around a city and think of all the cars, streets, parking lots, highways, etc, used for cars. Then think how that all impacts any other mode of transportation other than vehicles. Go deeper and imagine a world without those cars - what to do with all this new-found space?
The words you're looking for is, "status quo". Cars are on the, "status quo" pedestal. They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce. Damn the long-trail environmental cost of them, or how they've influenced the design of our modern cities.
Have you considered that with infrastructure in place, cars enable an immense amount of individual flexibility? To my mind, it seems somewhat plausible that cars rose to dominance because they enabled individual flexibility for the masses atop pre-existing and extensible infrastructure.
Flexibility? I don't own a car, and haven't for the last decade (and only had a car for maybe a year of my life). This year, I've been driven in a car about four times in > 170 days. So let me talk about flexibility.
Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you.
What would you do with all this time you know have? So many things! I can't even imagine what to do first!
Cars enable convenience, not flexibility. But it comes at a huge price: a financial price, an environmental price, and a huge price on the standard of living in the negative direction - not just for people living in fancy cities: the oil field worker, the car factory worker, the people living in third world countries mining some of those conflict materials you all need. There's no free lunch.
You can argue about a single car, and how much convenient it is for the individual, but we're talking about something we've produced in the hundreds of millions. There's huge effects of this invention.
You know what happens to cars and cities? People live far away from their jobs. Then they talk about their hellish commute. And how much gas costs. And how their neighborhood is boring. And how there's not parking. And how the car needs to go into the shop. And on and on and on. These may all be transparent to you, but without a car, I hear it all the time, and I'm happy - so very happy to be off that spinning wheel.
Having lived in Europe a little while (had to do something with all that free time!), intelligent, forward-thinking people, living in cities without cars, because these cities were designed before cars. Other options are created, like public transportation system (and bike sharing schemes) that don't have whatever stigma they have in the states.
I don't know for this topic if I'm willing to trade "flexibility" for a massive amount of complexity.
Friend, I live a life not so different from yours. I'm suggesting that other people choose to have cars now - and historically as well - because they find that the advantages for them outweigh the disadvantages for them.
You may want to consider that other people may make their choices for reasons they personally find compelling in the context of their individual lives.
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.
> Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you.
I own a reliable econo-box that I bought years ago. Maintenance is almost nil, parking is less time than it'd take me to use public transit (which is relatively bad where I live), and underground parking comes with my condo.
I am a huge advocate of public transit, but I'll say that cars are pretty nice.
You sound like you are justifying your own choices with a strawman argument about what it's like to own a car.
My annual maintenance costs + insurance + licensing on my 15 year old car are about the same cost as renting a car for two days.
I think you vastly overestimate the cost of owning an older car.
Im also not sure you understand the term flexibility in the way most people do. Right now (as in within 10 minutes), I can be on my way up to Lake Tahoe or off to Yosemite. There is no other form of transportation that can work that quickly. Even with an amazing rail and bus network, you are beholden to the schedule and the overhead of local transit to the long distance station. With public transportation your life is dictated by the schedule of the transit, with a car you just leave whenever you feel like it.
Your point about taking your car and heading to Tahoe and Yosemite, strictly speaking, is correct. However, speaking only for myself, I do not find it particularly urgent to make long-distance trips - presumably for leisure - within ten minutes of making the decision.
The bigger question is - why is it strictly necessarily to have to use it for ten minutes - just to get milk?
And while most places in the US simply do not have it, the solution to public transportation scheduling is that they run so frequently no one bothers to check the schedule. This is, admittedly, a chicken-or-the-egg problem in most US cities, although some are starting to get it.
>they run so frequently no one bothers to check the schedule
Great if you live on a route popular enough that they do that. You are screwed otherwise. Even if you do live on a popular route, it also doesn't solve the problem if you want to go somewhere unpopular.
>I do not find it particularly urgent to make long-distance trips - presumably for leisure - within ten minutes of making the decision.
Good for you, but not that relevant for people that do. Waking up Saturday morning and deciding to drive out to a destination like this, spend the night, and then drive back the next day is not considered unreasonable.
>The bigger question is - why is it strictly necessarily to have to use it for ten minutes - just to get milk?
Because I need milk for a recipe I just found online and I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the next train, ride for 10 minutes, shop for 5 minutes, wait 15 minutes for the return train, and then ride for 10 minutes. And those times even generously assume I live right on a stop and there is a store right on a stop.
>Great if you live on a route popular enough that they do that.
I was alluding to the fact that it a circular problem - frequent routes (within reason) become popular routes.
>it also doesn't solve the problem if you want to go somewhere unpopular.
The vast majority of trips are to popular locations, by definition. Everyone can still use cars for unpopular destinations.
>Waking up Saturday morning and deciding to drive out to a destination like this
One can wake up in the morning and decide to take a weekend trip without a car. The difference? It will take probably about an hour to get underway.
Meanwhile, a person in an urban area can have all of these car advantages for infrequent uses such as weekend trips or going somewhere unpopular with far less expense by having a Zipcar account.
Because I need milk for a recipe I just found online and I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the next train
Your perspective is very narrow. I asked why you should have to drive to get milk, your response is because you don't want to take a train to get milk.
There is a far simpler option than either of those.
Having grown up in rural US, where owning a car is a necessity of life - 15 miles to the nearest store on 45mph roads with no sidewalks - and now living within Seattle, it's not quite so bad. Taking 1 bus to another city costs as much as gas to drive there and back, so commuting feels more expensive on top of feeling less convenient.
If you don't live inside a major city, or if you live in a car-friendly area, parking and storing your vehicle is very cheap - often free. Parking and insurance combined may be less than $200/month.
When you have a family, or a business group, traveling by car has the added advantage that the rest of the group is unable to become separated from you along the way. Sorry to sound tautological or pedantic, but it's an often-overlooked point. It's almost like putting your family into a ZIP file - on arrival, everyone will still be in the car, nobody will get lost on the way or take the wrong turn. Like young classmates holding a rope on school outings.
While that may be true if you speak for yourself like a single person. But what if you are a couple, or a family?
For a long time I did not want a car but when children came, we have bought it and it help our mobility a lot, if you have full car, it is also cheaper travel than paying tickets for everybody.
For a travel inside a city I still use public transport wherever I can as it is the fastest and most green way to get around.
I lived in a small city on the French Atltantic coast, where I can walk and bike in the city, but I have to drive to go anywhere outside of the city. Having a car is not really an option here; it's mandatory.
I also lived in Paris, where I used public transports exclusively. I hadn't a car.
Honestly, in both cases, there is no free lunch. In Paris, most people don't have a car, but yet they still live far away from their jobs and have hellish commute.
I agree that cars bring a lot of complexity, but stuffing all people in the same area also bring its share of complexity.
Perhaps you should read some history. IIRC, at some point, car companies bought up public transit infrastructure and shut it down because less public transit was good for sales.
Friend, I am aware of the "streetcar conspiracy". I am also aware that streetcars died out for reasons well beyond conspiracy. I am further aware of many areas where cars are very useful that never had streetcar systems to be destroyed by GM.
Sorry to have made assumptions. My understanding is that there was no pre-existing infrastructure suitable to cars. The dirt and cobblestone roads that existed were inadequate, to put it nicely. I have read up a good bit on such things and drawn a very different conclusion from you.
In the US, personally owned vehicles are critical for sprawling suburbs and rural life. It is a big country with low density. Cars should not be necessary in the big city. Those that are designed well make it possible to live without a car. In much of America, it is quite challenging to live without a car. This is partly due to choices we have made, not because it had to be that way.
>They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce.
That's the most ridiculous justification I've heard for anything. A thousand dollar piece of toilet paper is also massively profitable to produce, but nobody would buy it. People buy cars because they are useful.
If you think most people don't enjoy the freedom they get from owning a car, you are living in a bubble. I work with people that could take the caltrain and get to work faster, but they still choose their car because of the flexibility in schedule and destinations it gives them.
Also, walking is not the lowest common denominator if you have a job far away, have small children, or have a disability.
Cars were very successfully marketed as status symbols and expressions of personal identity. Having a nice car in the suburbs meant your family was safe from the evils of the city.
The entire government apparatus spent decades and untold fortunes making the car the fast and flexible option. We now have the benefit of hindsight that tells us it was a massively inefficient use of public funds.
I am from Brazil. Here around 1950 the government deliberately gave priority to roads over railroads and rivers as a way to attract car factories, hoping to get their taxes and create employment.
Currently in Brazil the laws about import cars are extremely draconian, and taxes are overall sky high, crappy local made cars are frequently 2 times the EU or US price of the same, but higher quality model.
People still get in terrible debts, paying sometimes interest that totals several times the principal, to buy cars anyway, not because they are useful, but because frequently they are the only choice. For example in Rio de Janeiro, because of the Olympics, the government deliberately canceled public transportation routes connecting poor areas to the touristic areas, forcing people of poor areas to use cars, specially because parts of the route are impossible to cross on foot (mountains with no hiking trails, with the passage being road tunnels)
Or that for the world cup, the government declined several train proposals in favour of making "light train over road" routes, where you just build gigantic roads on pillars and place buses on them.
I grow up with a mother without a car. Both school and shopping was within walking distance, and when we got older and chang d school within easy 15 minutes bicycle distance. And this was not in a city center, but in a suburb. And most importantly, not in the US. The problem with the US is that everything is built for cars, which means that all the distances by necessity becomes huge to fit all the roads and the parking lots. Remove those and you can place everything much closer and you won't need the car at all most days.
You don't really seem familiar with the U.S. suburbs. They weren't built for cars, they were built for agriculture originally, then for people who wanted yards, land, and more freedom.
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. I could walk to two grocery stores, but each took 30 minutes each way. I also grew up across from both my grade and middle school, a horse ranch, a gym, and a massive park.
I loved my childhood because we could play full field soccer games, rugby, football (American), etc. However, if my parents wanted to get anything you had to drive.
Most people on HN don't appear to realize what it's like growing up or living outside of the west or east coasts of the U.S. or Europe. It's not that it was built for cars, it was built for farms and agriculture, nothing is wrong with that either.
I lived for two years in Ann-Arbor, not that many hours drive from Chicago. Almost all of US suburbs were built to be suburbs planned for everyone to drive whenever they wanted to get somewhere. They aren't countryside that organically grown into suburbs. It's just ridiculous how long it takes to just cross the parking lot outside a mall by foot if you get the idea to actually walk there.
We had a forest behind our house, a soccer field where we also played bandy in the winters, 10 minutes walk to the horse range, a golf course that also was used for cross country skiing in the winters, 5 minutes to the commuter train that took you to the city center in 15 minutes, lakes we swam in the summers and ice-skated in the winters. Markets for food within easy walking distance and a decent mall within easy bicycle distance. I bicycled everywhere when I didn't use public transport. I didn't even bother to get a drivers licence until I was a bit over 30, and the only reason I got it then was because I was planning some long holidays in the US. You don't need to center you society around cars and driving to have a very high and pleasant standard of living.
I grow up with a mother without a car. Both school and shopping was within walking distance, and when we got older and chang d school within easy 15 minutes bicycle distance. And this was not in a city center, but in a suburb. And most importantly, not in the US. The problem with the US is that everything is built for cars, which means that all the distances by necessity becomes huge to fit all the roads and the parking lots. Remove those and you can place everything much closer and you won't need the car at all most days.
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.
Anecdata as a counter example: Germany has a really high density of stores (I am living in Berlin and have ~10 supermarkets within 1km distance) and is also known for its extremely cheap groceries. The margins of the supermarket chains are razor thin, but the high density of stores is one of the reasons why you don't need a car at all in bigger German cities - in addition to good public transport.
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.
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, evacuation, flooding and general maintenance. In the best-case scenario, tunnels are just very expensive.
Then there are places like Atlanta (sitting on granite) or San Francisco (in a fault zone) where things get a lot more complicated.
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 would be more efficient
That wouldn't remove the need for ventilation and other things you mentioned if that system is underground. But it could be above the ground , on buildings 2nd floors, where the first floor would be retail stores and whatnot
> you park your car in a pod, and the pod is on rails
Why not have seats on the pod, that way you don't have to ferry around a 2-tonne car. Indeed if you have solved smart automation, why have rails at all? Presto, you arrive at the idea of self-driving taxis as a public service.
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.
Would you build rail transit underground in a new city? A large part of why subways are even things to begin with was because they were added late in the development of most cities that justify building them. Newer cities like Dallas have above ground commuter rail exactly because the city still had room to build it above ground.
If anything, it is much more valuable to segment the city in ways that you don't need subways or roads. You should have districts that are internally navigable strictly by foot, bikes and tram between adjacent districts, and only have rail / road when going beyond the local microcosm of city.
You want greenery anyway, you might as well put it in the bounding lines between regions of your city and have the roads / rail between those to minimize noise pollution outside of the transit hubs.
I've thought about this. My thought has been, bump the street level up one story to create a pedestrian / bicycle promenade and move building entrances to the second floor. Keep the existing street below intact, with parallel parking etc. Essentially build a boardwalk above a commercial street, so that traffic can flow below. (Though for ventilation purposes, it would be best if most cars at street level were electric.)
Raising the street grade one story has been done before, when flush toilets were introduced in the late 1800's. Notably in Seattle and Chicago but in pockets other low-lying cities as well.
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.
For an extreme (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) version of that, see The 5th Element. Everything happens in the sky and street-level becomes this shady area filled with trash and thugs. :)
Yea it's also a pretty common sci-fi / cyberpunk fantasy city design dating back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, influenced by the Art Deco "city of the future" ideas like this floating around at the time.
In NYC at least the lower levels are already present. But the only part where we got the pedestrian level correct so far is the High Line... which has been hugely successful. There's really no reason these types of park-like promenades only have to be built on top of existing disused structures however. More could be built, it's just that people need to understand that there is return on investment for building an elevated pedestrian-only street level.
Except that in most cities including New York it's going to be difficult to build something like that in the absence of an existing structure and right of way. The High Line is also in effectively a post-industrial area which is now highly gentrified but wasn't previously exactly prime real estate. And it's still not really located for day to day pedestrian movement as opposed to recreation.
Totally agree, it would be a political and engineering mess to try and implement on an existing busy street. The conditions were very ripe to experiment with the high line.
Not an easy thing to develop certainly, but relative to the cost and level of engineering effort needed to build new subway tunnels, I'm surprised that adding transportation improvements at street-grade and then bumping the street up one level, isn't something that ever gets considered. We could run effective BRT through Manhattan, or surface light rail to solve the crosstown transportation problem.
Imagine how much easier getting from Queens and Brooklyn to the Lincoln and Holland tunnels would be by car or bus if say 39th St, Canal St moved the pedestrians to an elevated walkway. What if Times Square's tourist bottleneck could be eliminated by raising Times Square?
Anyhow, unlikely to happen probably ever, but fun thought excercise
"I've thought about this. My thought has been, bump the street level up one story to create a pedestrian / bicycle promenade and move building entrances to the second floor."
This (sort of) already exists in Minneapolis (and to a much smaller extent, St. Paul and Duluth) courtesy of the skyway system.[1]
It's very well done and has created a completely separate urban ecosystem overlaid on top of the existing, street level, downtown.
Or you have hot humid cities like Fukuoka and Taipei that move a lot of the pedestrian and retail underground. I think the best solutions depend a lot on the local weather conditions.
Don't get too depressed; the value of real estate has been falling for 100 years relative to business equity and other productive assets, and most real estate assets are hugely leveraged today. I somewhat doubt a lot of the debt capital, which is optimized for relatively predictable payouts over long timeframes (with good reason -- this stuff funds pensions and universities) would shift to funding higher-productivity assets if given the chance.
Ultimately, you have to realize that not everyone in the world has the appetite for the kind of high-risk, high-return sort of lifestyle and pursuits that YC founders and partners do/did. A large swath of the population is content to earn their 2-3%/year on real estate, which when levered 3:1 or 4:1, gets up to 10-12%/year, which is a pretty good return in the world of non-VC/non-SV investing.
Productive assets aren't necessarily high-risk, high-return though: that's what blue chips like IBM and GE are for, and they're far more predictable than, say, the Florida real estate market.
Reminds me of Walt Disney's original plan for Epcot, with pedestrian-only on the surface, and trains and supply trucks underground. You can find his presentation (very Howard Stark-like) on Youtube (v=sLCHg9mUBag).
Cars underground is a great idea but you'd need to find a way to make GPS work, especially since GPS is necessary for autonomous cars which are obviously a thing of the future.
I don't even want to know what kind of phone you have if unfolding a map, tracing and memorizing your route, and folding it back up is quicker than a GPS lock. On any phone I've had since 2009, GPS lock has been instant.
All I needed to do was look up the number of a junction. The rest of the route was pretty straightforward. And it was not a foldable map, just a big book. Way less faff than getting the phone out of my pocket, unlocking the screen farting about looking for a map app, waiting for it to load then get a GPS lock.
GPS is helpful, and key, to autonomous cars. But let's not forget the various ways GPS can be hacked. We need multiple methods of navigation (visual/radar/lidar to stay within lines and avoid obstacles, inertial/GPS like aircraft use to sanity check your inputs, ground-based authenticated systems to identify current location (imagine being able to poll an intersection for its identity, we already have computers at every intersection with traffic lights)).
If we rely too strongly on GPS, we eliminate many existing roadways with tunnels, and many convenient constructs like parking decks, or new tunnels where they make sense.
GPS is more key for long term navigation and knowing when the car should look for a turn. Simple road following through LIDAR and other local sensors is enough for 90-99% of tunnels today since they are mostly just single roads from point A to B without required turns.
I mean GPS repeaters are a thing, but there's even better options, you could install small radio beacons in the tunnels and triangulate using those. Much more precise, and cheaper than GPS repeaters.
I think he means more like madrid for instance. All the traffic is underneath the walkway level in the downtown area. It is really great to not have any cars. Because of this they have room for giant plazas everywhere and it makes for a much more pleasant experience.
Cars or bikes are great because vehicle + roads = a fairly robust network [if done well, no single points of failure].
That's not usually the case for public transit.
[Agreed about real estate. Although dense cities are very eco-friendly, it might be hard to motivate dense cities when real estate isn't super expensive. Manhattan grows upward because it's expensive to grow any other direction]
Bikes may be great but cars are terrible for cities. They take a ton of space and require massive amounts of restrictions on non-car traffic. Space is the biggest premium in a city.
If a fraction of the space that was devoted to car traffic was instead devoted to public transit, public transit would be far more efficient and robust than cars.
Maybe in denser cities or downtown but where I live and work if I wanted to take a bus my easy 9 mile 20 minute drive becomes 60 to 90 minutes with 3 bus changes. That's a lot of ground to make up.
I hope the aspiration for new cities would start with the presumption of density. An experiment like this should be trying to solve a problem, not just add more urban sprawl, and you don't get a city culture off preplanned road infrastructure and zoning laws.
It's an interesting question: how does one maximize the potential interconnections between people and places? I know that when I'm in a dense city, it definitely feels like there are a lot more places and things I can visit than when I'm in a suburban area with a car.
But that needs to be balanced with the desires of some to have fewer connections, but perhaps more yard. And some people honestly desire to have fewer connections and live further away from others.
However, what if the suburban area was more varied in locations: smaller businesses and corner markets mixed in with residential areas? Right now most suburban development consists square miles of nothing but residential cul-de-sacs peppered with massive clusters of big box stores that require huge parking lots and must serve large numbers of people to survive. People want the big box stores because they think they save money, but the same savings are possible with lots of small stores as long as there's a real market and clever people running small businesses. With that type of sparse use of land, greater distances between things on average but with the speed of cars, would that allow more interconnections than density?
I think that over the past few decades, that those that desire the yard, and those that desire fewer interconnections have been able to prevent those that want density from building it. There's a clear undersupply of dense locations and a clear oversupply of sparse locations.
I think the key is to have lots of diversity so that many experiments can be tried. Right now there have been few styles that have been tried with cars, and though I personally consider it a failure in that I don't want to live like that, there are plenty of people that consider density to be a failure and would never want to live like that. Any solution(s) to cities should be able to meet everybody's desires.
You notice how they get more and more pedestrian friendly over time – but the first one is already bikable, walkable, has a bus line cutting through it, and is still usable by car.
This is a typical residential suburb – but, as you might have noticed on bing maps, at several points, stores and services and small businesses already popped up. A dentist, two physiotherapy and a logotherapy practice, a small bakery and shop.
Currently there are discussions about a small supermarket coming into the area.
Maybe later some more stores, and some buildings might be replaced with new ones that have on the lowest floor businesses instead.
I think that any prosperous city will end up with some level of sprawl as people who prefer more space or businesses that need more space move to the area. Part of the goal will be to make sure that doesn't force the city center into becoming like every other with poor walking access.
Such a drive is likely not stable. 9 mile 10 minute drives, in rural areas, are stable. But unless your economy is moribund, once that's up to 20 minutes, chances are good that ten years from now that same drive will be 45 minutes.
Eh looking just at those numbers maybe, I'm kind of in an odd area the most direct way is via mostly slow residential streets. If I swing wide to the longer highway route it's 2 minutes faster but further (11 miles ~18 minutes) and more annoying dealing with traffic (where I merge onto 40 I have to get over 4 lanes in a short time) so I usually take the slower but more pleasant route.
It was far worse at my old apartment 5 miles in 11 minutes became 50 minutes if I took the bus.
I'm in RTP which is far from moribund but Durham where I live is getting the least new residents it seems.
In the U.S., we've collectively done a lot, culturally and legally, to make real estate a principal savings vehicle for many if not most people, and this has had a lot of negative consequences. Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation (http://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulation...) by is a good introduction to some of them. Chapters 7 – 9 in particular explain how the 1970s saw the growth of zoning restrictions that have driven housing costs in urban areas relentlessly up.
I'd be curious about alternate land-ownership structures or incentives that make people view housing more as a service than as a good store of value. I don't know what that might mean in practice, but the idea itself seems important to me.
>I'd be curious about alternate land-ownership structures or incentives that make people view housing more as a service than as a good store of value. I don't know what that might mean in practice, but the idea itself seems important to me.
Look no further than the BLM and leasing on public lands. Grazing, etc.
To list a few of the advantages of home ownership:
1. tax write off on interest. But with interest rates low, that is not as usefull as it has been in the past.
2. A few states such as texas, have some additional asset protection on your primary residence in case of bankrupcy
3. homstead exemption on property tax (approximately first $100,000 property value), varies by county.
4. property tax freeze above age 65.
5. some capital gains exemptions for primary residence.
but a store of value is a store of value. Would you be ok with people buying treasury bonds as a store of value ? Or would you incentivise higher risk investments, how ?
Also, private schools, golf and tennis clubs also price out a lot of people. Not too different from zoning restrictions.
But people wouldn't invest their money in productive assets. Given more spare money, they buy bigger televisions and shinier cars. Financial ignorance and materialism are some of the most basic woes underpinning society.
Their thought process is well-illustrated by a recent exchange I had with some children from a background of poverty:
Me: Maybe you should save that money instead of spending it.
Them: Good point, then I can buy something more expensive next week!
---
Children they may be, but I know their parents and that mindset did not appear ex nihilo.
> I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place.
I don't think this is a good view to take as a fully general statement. People invest capital in real estate because they get benefits from it. If the benefits they get are worth more to them than the benefits they would get from any alternative uses of the same capital, then putting that capital into real estate is optimal for them.
> it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.
If spending more money on real estate increases its value to the people who use it, then it is a productive asset. I think you are taking too narrow a view of what "productive" means. Instead of seeing it as "make housing/office space cheap", I think you should be thinking of it as "make housing/office space give more value for a given investment". In other words, don't make it cheap; make something people want. Making it as cheap as possible might not always be the best way to do that.
> I'm not sure what you mean by more value from an investment?
I mean that people get more benefit from it. What specifically counts as a benefit depends on the person.
> the appartements are exactly the same as they were twenty years ago.
This is going to depend a lot on what area you are in. In my area, much of the housing is fairly new, because either old housing was torn down and replaced, or housing was expanded into land that used to be something else (mostly farms or woods).
> I don't see how I can get more 'value' out of an appartement that is older, not renovated, and costs twice as much.
Any capital investment depreciates, and eventually you will need to reinvest in it in order to continue getting value from it. But suppose the average dwelling lasted 50 years before needing to be renovated or replaced, instead of 20. That would be an obvious benefit, even if the original purchase price of the dwelling was higher; in fact many people might be willing to pay the higher price in order to get a dwelling that would last so much longer.
Of course I understand that this is not what we currently see in most housing markets. But I think it is highly relevant to the question of whether "make housing cheaper" is always the right goal if you're trying to reinvent housing.
I've seen a few city designs with an elevated pedestrian walkway on the third floor.
I think part of the problem is how to grow trees in that environment. We have pretty good data on how important greenery is to happiness.
I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day, looking across at a store front that has had a high rate of turnover. It's on the wrong side of a busy, complicated intersection, but the back half of the building is still in a high pedestrian traffic area.
It occurred to me that if they tore out the building and replaced it with an arcade, they'd solve several problems. They'd get more modest square footage store fronts on the edge of an existing retail area, and they'd break the psychological barrier that keeps people from going around the block.
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.
Rent is the measure of the success of a city; rent is high where people want to be.
Saying you'll make "cheap housing" where people will nonetheless want to be is complete nonsense. If people want to live there the rent will go up; the only way to make the rent low is to make the place utterly undesirable.
You've mentioned demand for housing as a determinant of rents - but there is also supply of houses and apartments. You can make rents lower by building more, and quality of life can stay the same or improve provided that your infrastructure and regulations are well thought out.
Thoughtful critique / history of Smart Cities. Adam Greenfield's book 'Against the Smart City (The city is here for you to use)' is required reading for anyone interested in the topic.
Old cities were built in much more unregulated ways, without planning commissions, neighborhood meetings, zoning and other bureaucracy. Just people filling their own needs on their own property.
They were regulated by materials and physics. Automobiles, HVAC, steel, etc. throw all of that out the window and can result in urban environments that aren't great for humans.
The kind of density you get in European towns built in the 1890s were higher than the typical SFH or 4 story max zoning limits in many places experiencing housing crises today.
If SF was rows and rows of 6-8 story buildings instead of being %50+ SFH, it would have a lot more capacity than it has today.
Old cities suck. Their layout is literally derived from concentric walls to keep invaders out. I love the history and architecture, but from a usability perspective they're far from ideal.
If by usability you mean ease of commuting then many old cities have been able to address this by building new infrastructure while preserving their character.
Amsterdam is an old, concentric, beautiful and imo quite user friendly city (as long as you don't drive a car). Commuting is very easy either by bike, tram, metro, or train.
For me the ideal city is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to get around (among many other things I'm omitting here). Make it beautiful and make it efficient. That's a challenge - but feasible.
Safety > Cleanliness was the argument back then (not to assume they know they were filthy). Take both of those out of the equation, and there are still other reasons for density.
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 spend some time in "old" countries, if not to learn the good things, at least to learn their mistakes.
Sometimes I wonder if Americans fucked themselves by creating cities with roads and cars in mind, thereby ruining the organic walkability of naturally sense cities which were historically limited by the distance one could reasonably walk in a given day for their regular necessities.
The only old American city that I think stands a chance is Philadelphia, which has a great number of single-lane one-way streets, which allow emergency services to get to where they need quickly enough while providing a decent amount of walkability. But then again, the original plan for Philadelphia is a hilarious testament to the utter failures of centralized city planning.
" Penn planned a city on the Delaware River to serve as a port and place for government. Hoping that Philadelphia would become more like an English rural town instead of a city, Penn laid out roads on a grid plan to keep houses and businesses spread far apart, with areas for gardens and orchards. The city's inhabitants did not follow Penn's plans, as they crowded by the Delaware River, the port, and subdivided and resold their lots"
-https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia
Wider streets are good for getting a lot of stuff through - up to a limit. Los Angeles and Atlanta are full of massive highways of cars that barely move.
Larger streets also hurt street side commerce. Nothing chokes off wakability and storefront business vitality like multi-lane one-way streets.
EDIT: I feel compelled to mention from my experience that in Rome, the most active streets with the most vibrant businesses were not the arterial roadways - those seemed to mainly serve large businesses, government buildings, and tourist traps - but rather the tiny twisted streets in place for many centuries.
I think open straight streets don't fire up our spacial memory in the same way, and as a result aren't really "places" in our minds in the same way as more intricate and varied environments.
Recent Philadelphian transplant here: They move or take a different street. It's interesting that people here have accepting that if they're driving and a taxi stops to drop someone off, they just wait 30 seconds to proceed, or backup and take a side street over a few blocks to proceed around the blockage.
If you have a narrow street, less people drive, and thus there is no issue getting an ambulance through. I see ambulances stuck in traffic on Manhattan avenues all the time (we should put grade-separated bus lanes on all of them, IMO, partially so that ambulances can always get through).
Yes. To decrease demand, you limit supply so that the price goes up. This can work dramatically if you increase price high enough that alternatives are cheaper.
In the case of transportation, price is measured in time and convenience as well as dollars.
So we want to shrink our road infrastructure to drive the cost up in terms of pollution, fuel costs, time and convenience? This way less people will drive. I would propose that you are forgetting that you are going to price transport into the hands of the wealthy and business who will effectively rent-seek to loan cars or taxi people who cant afford a car around.
The idea of shrinking our roadways to discourage use of vehicles is challenging in a practical sense and it just cleaves off another aspect of life for business and the wealthy to enjoy without plebs interfering with the roadways they paid & still pay for.
It works for cars, since there are acceptable alternatives (biking, walking, carpooling, Uber, etc). It works less well for housing, as leftist NIMBYs often advocate, since one alternative (homelessness) is very unappealing, and the other (living somewhere else) just exports the problem.
The other thing I think Philadelphia has going for it is that rising water levels from global warming won't affect it as much as they will affect cities right on the ocean, or islands like Manhattan. The Delaware and Schuylkill rivers will rise, but the city won't be hit as hard as the coastal cities.
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!)
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 have always really liked stuff from https://www.thevenusproject.com/ some of their ideas might seem crazyish but overall I think anybody thinking about designing new cities ought to at least take a look.
Fresco was unique in that all of his designs were based on testable, quantifiable evidence based assessments of reality. His designs for cities ended up looking like "utopias" because he started at the evidence based engineering level and built up from there, not because he imagined a utopia and worked backwards from his "vision".
Most of the issues facing engineers when designing a city are issues with the way in which monetary economics works against efficient design, implementation of best practices, and sharing of resources. As cities and neighborhoods with attractive qualities of socialabilty become scarcer, gentrification leads to their destruction through over-valuation from increased market demand.
It is nigh impossible to build a "shining city on the hill", where there is opportunity and abundance and happiness, and expect that the rest of the world will sit idly by in their squalor and applaud the achievement.
(Anyone who's seen The World's End with Simon Pegg et al has seen what the UK 'Garden Cities' look like -- the big rectangular drag with all the pubs on it is Welwyn Garden City's town centre)
I believe I've seen it off in the distance from Highway 395. Always wondered what it was.
Geographically, it's the third largest city in the state. At 200 square miles, it's four times as big as San Francisco. I bet most people in California don't even know it exists.
Here's a different attempt at building a community in the California desert, from decades earlier:
Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"
Ray Oldenburg "great good place"
Booker T Washington: Up from Slavery
I'd skip figuring out cities. Start with how to create neighborhoods that work? Where citizens can be educated, participate in their local government, and find work at the neighborhood level.
- 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 streets, which lead to collectors, which lead to arterials - you're bottlenecking a huge population through a very small, fast, and unsafe road system. Instead, make the streets highly connected, and narrower to encourage slower but steadier car traffic, and blocks shorter. Porous streets networks can route around bottlenecks and can have many more concurrent cars than even crazy-huge Texas-style freeways.
- no big street setback requirements: encourage density by removing crazy suburban-style setbacks.
Edit: I wanted to make a plug for form-based zoning, which is zoning where the form (building type) is zoned, not its use. This doesn't necessarily refer to its style (Neoclassical, Modernist, etc) but how it interacts with the surrounding buildings on the street. E.g. buildings above a certain size might not be allowed in an area, and not be allowed to take more than N number of yards of street frontage. Setbacks of a certain size might be prohibited, or allowed. This allows of a reasonable number of mixed uses like restaurants, shops, and other day to day commercial uses to coexist with residential. This does not mean that heavy/noxious industry can be built up there. This was the error the Euclid v. Ambler decision made 100 years ago: they threw the baby out with the bathwater by restricting zoning by type; there is not a small amount of racism that came with Euclidean/exclusive zoning, e.g. removing a formerly viable way for immigrants to start a business with a house above (a la Bob's Burgers) and thereby increasing the barrier for success.
> - street design: No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. That is, no more dead-end streets, which lead to collectors, which lead to arterials - you're bottlenecking a huge population through a very small, fast, and unsafe road system. Instead, make the streets highly connected, and narrower to encourage slower but steadier car traffic, and blocks shorter. Porous streets networks can route around bottlenecks and can have many more concurrent cars than even crazy-huge Texas-style freeways.
Those are pretty recent designs, but I like them for the most part. I agree, as long as you are not hampering human movement, keep car traffic slow and safe for said human movement, networking with bike paths is fine in my book. In an existing dendritic US-style street system, retrofitting with bike paths between streets is a really cheap and easy way to encourage biking (the hardest part is probably dealing with existing property rights)
I remember seeing some video on civil engineering twenty years ago where they talking about how that was a major mistake they had learned from. Arteries just cause traffic jams, while permeable neighborhoods allow traffic to diffuse through it.
That's basically the north-of-mainstream thinking in urban planning, right? I certainly agree with you, but I also think it is a wasted opportunity to just build what leading thinkers agree is a good idea.
More or less. Some aspects of Western urban planning are rather big on things like Complete Streets, where you have segregated bike lanes added between sidewalks and street. These are fine for wider streets as seen in many American cities, but smaller streets which force cars to slower speeds don't necessarily bikes and even pedestrians segregated.
This seems to be the default building style in much of Japan. You will still find larger streets which are arterial in nature, but they're usually still very bikeable and walkable, and still porous to smaller streets like the one linked above.
Japan is designed with public transport in mind. Most everywhere in Japan is within train/bus/bike/walk distance. You don't need 4 lane high ways when there are maybe a few dozen cards on any particular stretch of the high way at any given time. I drove from Nara, Nara to Naruto, Tokushima via highway and saw maybe ten other cars on the highway. That's a distance of 174.5km; roughly a 2 and 1/2 hour drive. If I drove for 2 and 1/2 hours on any stretch of highway in California, I'd see ten cars every few minutes.
Less cars in the road, in general, means roads can be more narrow.
For sure. As I understand it a lot of the build-out in Tokyo into what were more rural areas was done by the railroad lines - build a km or two, add a station and more developed land, repeat.
The lack of on-street parking was something I noticed visiting Japan. Streets can be much smaller when they don't have 20-24 feet of parking. In the US, a massive percentage of our most valuable land goes to subsidized vehicle storage. It's insane.
It's worth playing some Cities:Skylines (which has a fairly accurate traffic simulator, particularly with the Traffic++ mod) to understand how the road hierarchy came into being. Or, for that matter, trying to drive through a grid-based city like Manhattan or SF.
You get very large traffic jams. The problem is intersections, and particularly intersections where traffic backs up to the previous intersection. When this happens, a traffic jam tends to spread across the whole city; incoming traffic can't clear the bottleneck fast enough, so the bottleneck just grows like a cancer until it envelopes a whole neighborhood.
Oftentimes, the solution to a traffic problem is simply to bulldoze a few intersections. By doing this, you give cars a buffer. It increases the median trip length but it also increases vehicle speed and road throughput by more. It turns out that the major contributor to traffic jams is the acceleration of having to start/stop at traffic lights and when turning.
Self-driving cars (or just ubiquitous turn-by-turn navigation) could change this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding the neighborhood entirely, but as long as drivers have imperfect information about traffic conditions and tend to take the shortest route to their destination, this will remain a problem.
(I've had great success with using pedestrian paths to provide cut-throughs between dead-ends and nearby intersections, though. And with providing pedestrian paths under or over those intersections so that people don't have to wait for stoplights to cross the street and don't stop traffic with their jaywalking. The game unfortunately has pretty terrible pathfinding for pedestrians and won't let you build compact staircases, so this limits their usefulness to real problem intersections, but in real life I think many suburban cities could drastically improve their walkability/bikeability just by building raised pedestrian footbridges over their major arterials.)
I really enjoy C:S, but even with Traffic++ the traffic simulation is pretty wonky and shouldn't be taken as reflective of reality.
But here's some advice if you're having trouble with traffic jams in your grid systems: use more one-way streets. If you've converted your city over to a 100% one-way grid and still have backups, you probably need to work on your mass transit and freight rail systems. I've made functional cities where every single road was open only to pedestrians, cyclists, and service vehicles. No cars.
According to Jeff Speck (https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/d...) 1 way streets have a negative economic impact for the business that line those streets. Which I think makes intuitive sense. Anyway, that doesn't matter in C:S, but it probably matters in the real world.
Is this assuming all streets are one-way? If they are, than I wouldn't expect an economic impact on businesses. Since the amount of products people buy - and the money they are willing to spend - should stay the same, than the total money influx would remain constant. Therefore, the only change would be how this money is distributed. Since all stores would lie on one-way streets, none would be more impacted than the other.
It's definitely about the specific businesses that are on the one way street. And I might recall (been awhile since I read the book), that he specifically used the example of changing from two way to one way and that the result is businesses on the affected street lost revenue.
It makes intuitive sense. When a street is two way cars pass by both directions each day increasing the likelihood of stopping at a store on that street. When streets are one way, then stores only get people driving by once a day, and so they lose revenue.
I gotta agree with thescriptkiddie, C:S is an imperfect model of how traffic behaves.
> Self-driving cars (or just ubiquitous turn-by-turn navigation) could change this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding the neighborhood entirely, but as long as drivers have imperfect information about traffic conditions and tend to take the shortest route to their destination, this will remain a problem.
Self-driving cars or drivers with good mapping are still limited where they can go when they have a street hierarchy to deal with, forcing all cars onto the same few arterials.
> Oftentimes, the solution to a traffic problem is simply to bulldoze a few intersections. By doing this, you give cars a buffer. It increases the median trip length but it also increases vehicle speed and road throughput by more.
This is all well and fine in a game, but increasing street speeds kills the street life (figuratively, and sometimes literally). Slower but more constant speeds are better for everyone involved. For walkers, bikers, and even drivers. Ask yourself this: would drivers flip their shit more often when going slow but steady down 15-20 mph hour streets with stop signs (or roundabouts), or when they're stuck at long traffic lights regardless of how many lanes they have?
The benefit of faster speeds isn't driver convenience, it's that you get cars off the road quicker for a given travel distance. Each city has a carrying capacity for the number of cars that may be on its roads at once, which is determined by the length of the road network and number of lanes. They also have a certain number of trips generated, which is determined by population. The number of cars on the road = trips generated * average travel time per trip. When that exceeds the carrying capacity of the city, average travel time increases, which causes a cascading effect that eventually results in gridlock.
The same effect plays out locally, on each individual stretch of road. When integral(# of incoming cars - # of outgoing cars, time) > carrying capacity of road, the road backs up, which increases the time required to traverse it, which further exacerbates the backup. This is why multi-lane arterials can reduce congestion; they can move a lot of cars off a given stretch in a short period of time, and provide a linear buffer where momentary oversupplies can collect without backing up the previous intersection.
You can also see this effect by looking at traffic maps of say, SF (grid layout) vs. Sunnyvale (arterial/collector):
Both of them have shitty traffic, but in SF the traffic spills away from Market street onto many of the side streets, such that no matter where you go it'll be gridlock. In Sunnyvale, much of the traffic is confined to major arterials like El Camino or Matilda, which are slow but still move, and side-streets that parallel them are often relatively clear.
> The benefit of faster speeds isn't driver convenience, it's that you get cars off the road quicker for a given travel distance.
Yes but that isn't actually what happens because the use of a street or road isn't by one car from A to B but by the continuous use over time across a section of the street.
Say you had a single 1 mile arterial in a city, and it's the only way of getting from one half of the city to the other half. There are few points when a cars are "off" of it (except maybe late at night) - the rest of the time it is a near constant high speed flow.
You're not wrong to say that it gets any given car off the road quicker, but that is if you're focusing on the one driver's trip, as opposed to focusing on the use of and experience of being at that section of road. If it was an old town which had its main street become a high speed arterial, you now have an experience for any pedestrians who might want to use the (probably few remaining) stores along that road be not unlike walking along side a freeway - unfun and dangerous.
By focusing on any one driver's trip experience, and not the street experience, you're essentially damning the street experience for the potential sake of some extra time saved (if its across a city, perhaps on the order of 10 or so minutes).
Of course when you have nothing on the street worth being around (like most of El Camino Real), you want to get passed it ASAP. (SF problems are a whole other hairball of outside commuters plus residents who insist on using cars.)
> Self-driving cars ... could change this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding the neighborhood entirely
Self-driving cars can do even better than that - they can eliminate the "stopping" nature of the intersection entirely. If the self-driving cars are able to determine the position and speed of other cars approaching the intersection, you can just have the traffic streams pass right through each other. [1]
Tokyo has many intersections with over/underpasses. The 2-4 lanes in the middle go over or under the intersection. The outer lanes connect to the intersection.
Something that also doesn't help with a lot of intersections is dense street parking (blocks line of sight for approaching traffic). It's problematic in cities and getting worse in suburbs. The street I grew up on, was generally empty of parked cars making it a great place to ride or skate in the 1980s. Now, that same street has loads of parked cars - people have second cars, use the street instead of their garage, or their adult children have cars.
Roundabouts would also drastically help many US cities currently relying on all-way stops.
Isn't a large contributing factor to this people being in the intersection ("blocking the box" in NYC) when the light turns red, causing literal gridlock? People, myself included, have a visceral aversion to sitting at a light as it cycles through and not moving, so the instinct is to move forward even if you're going to be sticking into the box a little bit. Then the person behind you does it because they've been waiting just as long as you, and suddenly the perpendicular traffic can't move at all because you're blocking their green light.
I always thought that was why I saw posted fines for blocking the box in NYC but never saw such signs elsewhere (although I've never driven in California).
There is an example of a player of SimCity creating the optimal city which consisted of a reusable grid of components ensuring everyone had access to work and services within a reasonable distance from their homes [1]. There were a lot of assumptions that went into it - including perpetual access to water and a completely flat layout - but it at least seemed to validate the belief I have had that a city at heart simply needs to fulfil a certain set of needs within a reasonable radius and the people can take it from there.
When I lived in Rome briefly I was astounded at how livable it was. Throw a dart at a map of Rome and as long as you don't hit a major park, ruin, government building or the Vatican, you can reasonably assume that within a walkable radius, you will find grocers, restaurants, convenience stores, bars, hairdressers, gelato shops (there is a LOT of gelato in Rome), and everything else you need in your daily life. The tiny twisted streets barely offer enough room for a single car at a time - and my hat is off to the brave individuals who choose to drive through them - but because everything is so dense, you really don't need a car. You barely need public transit either, unless your place of work is too far to walk most days. It is also worth noting the majority of buildings in Rome are within 3-6 stories high, much unlike the American expectation that city centers feature enormous skyscrapers that pack people like sardines. Ultra-dense Manhattanized city centers may be efficient, but they lack the ancient and livable simplicity of old European cities.
Exception: Australia manages brilliantly to merge dense city centers with far-flung suburbs with an excellent mix of trains, light rail, and busses, which allow residents of large cities to get around easily without needing a car at all.
What you describe about Rome seems to apply for many many European cities. Many of them seem to have "mini-downtowns" scattered about, as opposed to the downtown-in-center-and-suburbs-everywhere-else that is common in North America.
Actually it was planned to have a lot more green space (the blocks were only supposed to have housing on two sides so as to leave the other sides unimpeded), but market forces prevailed, and all the green space is now walled off. Shame.
The district is still a lot more liveable than basically any place I've seen in North America, however.
I stayed off the Urquinaona a couple weeks ago and really enjoyed that area of the city. Yes, there was a pretty high amount of vehicular traffic around that area, but it was full of street life and an easy base to get around the city from.
> unlike the American expectation that city centers feature enormous skyscrapers that pack people like sardines
Most skyscrapers in Manhattan at least are either for commercial use or feature large apartments/luxury condos (designed to solicit foreign investment). Average urban joe working a nebulous media job does not live in a skyscraper, although they may work in one.
People in NYC are "packed like sardines" into similar 3-6 story low-rise row houses just like in many European cities. This is because NYC was built up prior to many now-standard zoning regulations, so it follows a more similar pattern to older European cities.
The issue is affordability -- apartments near my office would cost 3x or more per month than where I currently live. How does Rome handle this?
Mass transit making distances more manageable without a car, mixed zoning means that there aren't as many areas that are just offices, and areas that are just apartments
If all offices are spread around the city , then there's nothing special about the apartment next to the office. Of course the area could just generally be nicer...
What about rethinking to what extent large cities are and will still be necessary? Thanks to the internet, lots of jobs that required going into an office every day can now be done remotely. As collaboration tools get better, I'm hoping that companies will become more receptive to allowing this.
The company I work at in SV does not allow remote work, but I've heard from a few of my teammates that if it did, they would seriously consider moving away from the area to someplace with a much lower cost of living. I would too.
When cars and planes drive themselves and 3D printers are as good as Star Trek replicators, then maybe cities will be unnecessary. Until then, you will always need to live near the things you want - including friends.
I don't really see what self-driving cars and plans and 3D printers have to do with it. You can have friends and be near everything you need in a small town of 20,000 people. They have grocery stores and hospitals and pretty much anything else you'd need. Amazon will still deliver in 2 days with Prime shipping.
What I'd like to avoid are the large financial costs associated with living in a large city. I'd also like to avoid other issues caused by large population density, like the fact that traffic is always backed up getting to the ocean on the weekends here. Also, people like me leaving cities would mean that there would be less demand for housing, less traffic, etc for the people that want to stay. Everyone wins.
If that's what you want and you don't mind shit weather, move to Ithaca, NY. I saw what the Valley had to offer when I worked at Apple and came away with the same grumblings you mention.
Upstate New York in general is a great place for the kind of living you describe. For not much money you could buy - or even better build - a home in the middle of nowhere with a 30 minute drive into town with very light traffic most times of the day. Like you say, everything you need is relatively close, and Amazon Prime still delivers in 2 days.
The weather wouldn't bother me, but I wouldn't be able to move out of SV without giving up my current job and salary. That's the part I'd like to change - I want to separate the decision of where to work from the decision of where to live. Once I can do that, there are a lot of places that I would be interested in moving to.
Every time I travel to silicon valley I'm amazed how difficult it can be to find electricity. It may seem like a small thing, but I think accessible electrical outlets should be as important as public water fountains. Similarly, water fountains and bathrooms should be accessible!
I'm really fascinated by the way that Dubai is designed in terms of industry-specific districts, it gives you scalability but also network effects and serendipity. They also have overground driverless trains. Masdar city nearby has an underground driverless car system and sustainable architecture, a very attractive model.
It is surprise to me, that though a lot of technologies seem to make location less important (internet, video conferences, online stores, better transportation), ppl ten to cluster around few hub cities.
Importance of network effect is increasing faster than advantage of tech allowing distributed work. I wonder if this trend will be permanent or will shift at some point.
Something I've always thought about is smart traffic. If nobody else is at the intersection I shouldn't have to wait at the red light. On a large scale the economic benefits would be amazing - faster transport, higher car mileages across the board (fewer hard stops for cars), increased efficiency, happier people.
I've extensively researched the concepts of hub and spoke models for cities and town centers for suburbs.
I think a very effective way to design cities is to have the following:
1. A densely developed urban core that sets quotas on what % of apartments must fall within whatever's considered middle class pricing, as well as a quota for a minimum % of apartments that must be for purchase rather than rent. The former prevents cities from being turned into ghost town banks for the wealthy to park their money, and the latter gives citizens an opportunity to build equity if they desire/have the means to.
Also, there should only he height restrictions on buildings if there's a structural reason for it, not because "it'll ruin the character of the area" or "my views of Central Park will be blocked".
2. Suburbs should be a healthy middle ground between densely developed and suburban sprawl. Living in houses the size of a box isn't appealing, but neither are mcmansions that are 15-20 minutes to the nearest retail center. The concept of strip malls and office parks should be completely scrapped in favor of walkable town centers with multi level parking garages on the perimeters. These town centers should be mixed use, so that people have plenty of options to work, shop, entertain themselves, dine, etc within a reasonable distance from their homes. The town center layout promotes a sense of community and socializing. Suburban towns should have a size limit, and each town should have a light rail station that runs alongside the main road/highway so citizens can easily commute between towns and to the city center without traffic congestion.
When a town becomes fully developed, rather than progressively building smaller and smaller houses to increase density, a new town should be built at the adjacent free land with its own town center. This results in the hub and spoke model of suburb towns that are mini cities surrounding the main urban core, rather than sprawled bedroom communities that have no economy of their own.
3. Between each city should be a low cost and high speed transit option like a maglev or Hyperloop, so that citizens have the option to live in neighboring cities and commute to work in a reasonable amount of time.
4. Zoning should be designed to quickly and easily adapt to growing cities, so that what is zoned as suburban can change to urban as a city grows, and the perimeter of suburbs would grow to account for that. This would occur to a certain limit, and when a city reaches a max size where sprawl is a problem, a new planned city must be built in an optimal place in the state to start the cycle all over again.
In addition to underground subway systems for urban cores and light rail for suburbs, there should be uber style shared car/bus services to fill in the gaps.
As for energy, there should be a heavy emphasis on wind, solar, and nuclear.
The role of regulations should be quality of life protection, not special interests. That means a reasonable minimum square footage for apartments and houses depending on the number of bedrooms, but not a limit on tower heights.
The trend has been people moving to cities. However, I wonder if that will be reversing any time soon, with people moving out of (large) cities and into smaller towns?
The supposed "millennials are moving to cities" trend isn't the universal trend it's often made out to be. The actual trend seems to be more along the lines of college-educated 25-34 year-olds are moving to a small number of mostly coastal urban locations.
The biggest gap in this discussion, thus far -- the elephant in the room, as it were: there's almost no room left on the planet for building "new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of course not just the meticulously designed city core; but the whole meta-city that will grow around it -- with suburbs, transportation links, etc).
Sure, there might be a few -- a very small few -- bona-fide brown zones here and there that are virtually depopulated and where one can more or less from scratch. But by and large, and realistically speaking, the real question is how to redesign and rethinking existing cities. Which conceptually speaking is a much harder question.
The other elephant in the room is the inevitability of massive forced dislocations of existing populations in these "failed" urban areas (or so they will be declared) -- perhaps on a scale never seen before (that is, outside of modern China or the early decades of the Soviet Union). And BTW, there's no getting around the term "forced" here -- no matter how you try to incentivize it, some people just aren't gonna want to uproot themselves (and destroy the organic connections they have made with others in their "failed" or "poorly optimized" communities) for the sake your grand vision, slide decks and TED talks.
It's either that -- or build out in the jungle somewhere. But of course (with the earnest suport of a certain very famous YC board member) we've been down that route already:
Which is precisely my point -- you might want to look at how the regimes like those in charge of Kazakhstan and China operate. In particular, as to how they "leverage" their populations complying with these grand futuristic visions.
Not to mention the... ironic outcomes of some of these spectacular initiatives:
Aside from the environmental issues, and the fact that not too many people would be crazy about living there -- what about the generations-old farm families who just... don't want to sell? At any price?
Which is what I meant about there being few places of significant scale (aside from protected wilderness areas that ought to remain as such) that are genuinely "empty."
The biggest issue is the investment money to build the infrastructure, housing, etc. And of course, crucially, business draw to live there.
I suppose if Silicon Valley types like YCombinator who invest the money, and Google (Larry Page regularly talks about Google building a city) who is a large industry were to go forth on one of these model city type projects, the initial draw would be those exact things. If Google wanted a model city to work, Google should ensure that Google is the first business to move a large portion of it's workforce there with major incentives for people to do so. People serving that initial seed workforce other services would follow.
A new city would be founded much the way they did in the old days: Company towns.
there's almost no room left on the planet for building
"new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of
course not just the meticulously designed city core;
but the whole meta-city that will grow around it --
with suburbs, transportation links, etc)
No way. Spend some time in satellite-view in a mapping program and you'll see that there are huge areas of farmland that could be cities. There's a lot of space on the planet.
There are huge areas of farmland that could be cities.
Which aren't ringed by (and hence, downwind from) mega-ranches? Or correctional facilities? Which have access to adequate water resources (already heavily constrained in many of these areas) to support massive human settlements? And close enough to lakes, parks, and other attractions so that people would actually... want to live there?
Not so many.
And the genuinely fallow areas which do exist should probably be protected as such, and/or restored further to their pre-cultivation state.
A new city would be much denser than the suburban and exurban sprawl that currently fills our demand for new housing, and so would end up in taking much less farmland than continuing along the current path.
(And the amount of farmland we're talking about, both for new cities and for sprawl, is small as a fraction of total farmland.)
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 741 ms ] threadModern subway systems are automated with barrier walls and doors making it near impossible for a human to end up on the tracks. If built like this from the get-go, collisions between transit and pedestrian could be virtually zero. Plan your stations based on the distance needed to reach EVERYWHERE in a reasonable walking distance, make sure your system has the capacity to meet the daily working population, and you really don't need direct A-to-B transportation.
Heavy rail is even better, and if you're designing a city from scratch, the biggest challenges to building heavy rail aren't as much of a problem.
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 merchandise to stores? None of these things are going to be able to get around without a road network of some description, albeit hopefully one significantly reduced in scope from a typical American city.
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.
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...
Streets are things which are where humand can play, people bike and walk, go to stores, around the places we live and work, etc. They are 'Places' where people can live about their day to day lives. Very human-friendly.
'Roads' which are higher-speed connectors between Places. Highways are a very high-speed type of roads.
In a typologically healthy region, there is a clear distinction between streets in roads, but in the US there is a blurring, and we often see what are sometimes dubbed 'stroads' - a mutant street-road hybrid, the sort of thing we typically see in the US with wide, fast, multi-lane streets, lined with strip malls and the like. They're hostile to human and make walking between locations at best boring and tedious, and at worst dangerous.
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/5/22/engineers-shoul...
Note his definitions are a little different than what I used, but have roughly the same point
Specifically getting food/goods/supplies to businesses, restaurants, hospitals, and other facilities that are required for such a city to exist. You could potentially utilize rail for this but then you face the last mile problem. Additionally considering things like emergency services, rail seems like it would be entirely inefficient for getting someone immediate medical attention.
As another commenter suggested, emergency vehicles especially could still use pedestrian walkways, which would still be needed to get from station to endpoint, and should be sufficiently wide to allow a lot of free movement. The so-called last mile. As a perk, pedestrians and bicycles are easier to move to part ways for emergency vehicles.
I think that a lot of freight could be handled the same way. A limited number of licensed carriers could operate light mule vehicles to bring freight from the nearest station (assuming rail stations had decent cargo-unloading stops as well) and operate along pedestrian walks during low traffic hours. (Your mail and your deliveries should not be delivered during regular starts or ends of the work day, or mealtimes. I'd go so far as to say construction traffic should be in the dead of night.) Since they'd need to coexist with pedestrians, but only travel a very short distance, from the nearest station, I'd propose these would be slow as heck, and since they wouldn't be traversing rough terrain, they could have extremely low ground clearance as well.
The key importance is that these pedestrian walkways be first and foremost, for pedestrians, and that personnel transportation vehicles be non-existent along them. The occasional off-peak freight cart isn't going to be a huge burden on transportation efficiency or pedestrian safety.
I just spent a week in Paris. Do you know much faster it's transportation is than walking? It's about a 2x multiplier. That's it. I can take multiple subway connections and get there in 30 minutes or walk the streets in 60.
Several hundred billion in subway is no faster than a moving sidewalk in an airport.
We can do better. We must do better.
The city centre is essentially car-free, with a ring-road highway around it. The centre is dense enough to have most things you'd want, but small enough that you can walk across it quickly.
Tough to get a firetruck somewhere without roads. We have come a long way in reducing the fire risk in new construction buildings, but 'stupid finds a way' is far from being a solved problem.
US fire truck manufacturers are starting to look at their European brethren (companies like Metz out of Germany) for examples of how to accomplish the necessary tasks on much smaller platforms.
I think we're still a long ways from being able to do away with fire trucks entirely though. Firefighting is a very dynamic activity, with a lot of contingencies that need to be covered, and the 'big toolbox on wheels' model works very well.
Maybe a bit narrower/shorter though.
You still get the volume but don't have to punish the people who live in an area for the 0.001% of the time fire trucks need to be there.
It's important that a transportation system account for all needs, but fire trucks aren't a need they are one potential solution to the emergency response use case.
If we built one it would require $tens of billions of capital, but we have some interesting ideas about how you might finance it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.ht...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West
http://www.santafe.edu/about/people/directory/
Alberto Hernando de Castro, and
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S_ad8ycAAAAJ&hl=en
maybe Franz-Josef Ulm
http://www.citymetric.com/%E2%80%9Curban-physicists%E2%80%9D...
https://cee.mit.edu/ulm
And I don't know who's been doing Chinese planning, but they've obviously had some experience building cities that never became populated.
It's like Spike Japan, the blog that visits towns on holidays and claims they've been abandoned for years, because all the residents are gone on holiday.
So I think, "how do you build legitimate rail transit into an existing city without it currently" is an interesting question for people researching and thinking about this topic.
Good luck!
Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in population.
Because of this, our generation is stuck on the wrong side of the supply/demand bit for property. Property in uninteresting cities is very cheap, because nobody wants to be there. Property in Silicon Valley or Toronto is on fire because it's the place to be.
I think there's a critical mass kind of problem. In many ways, my quality of life in a smaller (or even very small) city could be several times higher than it currently is -- except for the people. And, for better or worse, it's the people that matter. I don't have any real desire to be the best educated, or most creative, or most entrepreneurial person in a city: I want to be surrounded by them and call them my friends.
So perhaps there's some kind of Kickstarter-like critical mass sort of system that could be put into place to kickstart small cities whereby 50 or 100 mutually interesting people committed to moving to a more remote city iff their compatriots did as well.
Of course, to make that work, there would be have to be some kind of "opportunity", which is why I'm happy to see yC-folks looking into the problem.
edit: not sure why this is controversial. other than retired folks, who would move to the middle of nowhere as a result of this "kickstarter" if they aren't going to be guaranteed a job there?
If everyone gets money and freedom, where do food and shelter come from?
Many more people live in 'uninteresting' cities than 'interesting' ones. They're cheap because of the relatively big supply, not necessarily because of the lack of demand.
Worldwide, situation is funnier, 50% of population lives on 1% of the land: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Where...
Even assuming half of the US lives in cities, about 130 million people live in smaller ones. My point was that smaller cities are actually more popular, and I think the numbers still support that.
More people have kostabis than have picassos. Does that make kostabi more popular?
I'm not sure how you're defining "important" but I think it's safe to say that the list cities many people 'the place to be' has changed quite a bit from 100 years ago. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle would not have been on that list 100 years ago. But Cleveland and Pittsburgh probably would have been. So I would argue that things actually are kind of flexible. Of course, many cities would stay on the last - e.g. New York. That said, your point still stands that the list hasn't noticeably grown despite massiveky increased population (if anything I bet it's shrunk), which is kind of counterintuitive.
I totally agree with your larger point about the need for a critical mass of people to move to a city though. It's a tricky problem to solve.
I think it's worthwhile to look at small cities that have recently become much more popular - Portland OR, Austin TX, and Asheville NC. Their recent histories might provide some insights into how small cities go from being backwaters to attractive alternatives to the big coastal metropolises.
During this period artists and musicians took advantage of the cheap rent and renewed New York's status as cultural center, rebooting the gentrification process. The same thing was going on in Portland 15 years ago, where a lot of musicians and writers I knew at the time had insanely low rent, and incredible communities of like-minded people with a lot of free time. There may be other factors that contribute to why some cities take off this way and others don't, but the depression/rejuvenation cycle seems to have a momentum of its own.
Silicon Valley was not a "place to be" 100 years ago. Maybe 200 years ago during gold rush.
New Orleans was more of a "place to be" before Hurricane Katrina.
In general, I agree that North America was remarkably stable in the last 100 years. Europe and Asia were much more affected by the world wars. Afghanistan and Iraq were much more places to be 20 years ago.
In the case of Phoenix, they went from 99th in the US to 9th in about 30 years in large part due to the government building air force fields and pilot training camps. When everyone went back there after the war and realized they needed jobs, industry was happy to fill the gap because there was high competition among labor.
Similarly the bay has developed obviously because of tech, but for most of that early tech, the US government was the primary customer. Not just transistors, but before that, radio and telegraph research and operator training was done for/on behalf of the Navy.
That is all to say that the next step probably won't be fueled by some small-batch kickstarting program. People won't relocate en masse if they don't have long-term motivation. I think the best bet for inciting development of New Cities is mass investment by the government training people to do things like build and operate solar farms in the great plains, understand and combat coastline destruction in the gulf, etc.
If the government commits to buying clean energy and prioritizes investing in it's development, it can have a big say in where that happens and I think that's a great opportunity to rebuild dying old cities or start from scratch since so many people have abandoned those places already.
Speak for yourself. I've tried living in high demand cities the world over and frankly I find the supposed interesting bits are better and more valuable when visiting than living there (food, art and culture, typically). After having great jobs on a few continents I have returned to live in a second tier city in China, and 15 years after my first visit it's still awesome! (Startup costs: ~$0. Food: Great. People: Interesting. Supply-chain: Taobao) Sure, it has its limitations, but we are less than a half-day flight from heaps of interesting countries (half of Asia) and can get to Paris direct in 10 hours. The biggest issue is education for children, but even in the west this is an issue and I believe there will be novel solutions to this problem emerging in the next five years.
Not really. Autonomous vehicles are still coming. We don't know what infrastructure we'll need to support them just yet. Will there be a standardized way of powering / recharging them? What non-autonomous needs will they have and how to we handle them (because there will be some e.g. mechanical repair, rescue, etc)? Sure we can "guess" based on trends but we won't know for sure for probably another 10+ years what a brand new city will really need in this regards.
Same with smart grids especially with solar power becoming more efficient they may almost be unnecessary in 10-20 years (unlikely maybe but it's theoretically possible).
> There are many high-level questions we want to think through[...]And there are tactical questions we want to dig into
So there is a bit of reason to why most cities come up sorta "organically". Like NYC there was planning, sure, but that planning came from trends or requirements from the populous which happened over time. Engineering a full city from the group up sounds good but the majority of the people using the city are, well, people. People change. Technology changes. Political opinion changes.
Maybe you'll succeed in having a solid plan agreed upon by a majority but by the time the plan is taken and put into action and built a large amount of time will pass and I do not believe that original plan will still be as optimal or valid by the time it is completed. Then you'll have to do what every city does: improve, change laws, build stuff here and there that you originally thought you wouldn't do.
Ultimately it seems like a very interesting exercise but I do not believe in its practicality.
> - Adora Cheung, Sam Altman
Wait, Adora is part of YC? I thought after all of the drama around HomeJoy and the people it may or may not have sold to she had just basically disappeared. I had no idea she was part of YC.
Edit: just to clarify (because I'm not sure it came off correctly) I just didn't know Adora was part of YC and am curious as to her role, etc not to bring up any drama or other bs. I had just assumed she went on to found another company as that seems to be the norm for many founders.
Autonomous privately owned vehicles on shared rights of way are still coming. Centrally managed autonomous vehicles on dedicated rights of way are here already -- think inter-terminal trains at airports. If private car ownership is up for discussion (and it's explicitly called out here), you could imagine, for example, an urban plan where people got around on a macro level on automated elevated light rail, and on a micro level by foot or bike.
Automation is easy, they follow tracks. Put them on various, intersecting loops. They could probably be more self-contained, rather than using the grid constantly. If personal vehicles are banned, you only have to contend with pedestrians, cyclists, emergency, maintenance, and perhaps delivery vehicles.
Astana is a good example of this type of a designer city
I was really surprised by that too. Looking at her and her co-founder's handling of the shutdown as well as the overall fact that they just couldn't execute (raising money isn't executing). I'm not sure what track record and skills she really brings to this.
Homejoy had missteps after that initial period. But sometimes you learn as much or more from failure as you do from success.
The entire reason they failed was because they were paying more for customers than they were getting in return and even more importantly they were not retaining customers very well. It was a bleeding ship for a very, very long time until it went bust.
I could be great at customer acquisition no matter what the product if I'm losing a lot of money on each acquisition. Typically people hold up metrics such as NPR or usage as far more important than installs / initial acquisitions.
> Homejoy had missteps after that initial period. But sometimes you learn as much or more from failure as you do from success.
While I certainly agree from the latter (I know the very first project I ever lead was a HUGE failure and one of the most amazing learning experiences of my life) I'm not sure that necessarily qualifies someone to give start-ups advice. Sure you can tell them how you fucked up but without real experience in applying those lessons it's hard to see much value in it compared to most of the other partners at YC.
Hence why I was curious what her role was. If she's just leading this work or partnering on it then that might be a good fit. But if it's sitting down and giving advice to start-ups I'm not so sure I'd take it without a larger grain of salt than I would most of the other YC folks.
Recommended reading:
http://www.strongtowns.org/
http://marketurbanism.com/
The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think: http://amzn.to/28W6et9
Edit - I'll add that I think it's great that YC is spending some money to look into this, as it's a huge issue for many desirable, productive cities these days. Huge as in billions of dollars:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/here-s-how...
I wish people would stop with this drivel.
There are PEOPLE in the cars. The cities are built for people.
A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).
Taking it away would be like removing computers because they are too fast so we should all do things by paper again.
Through-traffic should be invisible (underground).
Local traffic should be mostly segregated from foot traffic. If there's a block, the "front" of things should be entirely pedestrian / bike with vehicle access in the rear (the alley - but likely larger in this case).
http://urbanist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454714d69e2017d3c37d8a...
That image also doesn't include that one of those drivers might kill someone, and most of them will turn aggressively into crosswalks. I see and experience those turns every day in New York, and read about the unpunished deaths almost daily. Enough of it.
Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice? It's not because throughput sucks and they just want to stick it to the man.
It's just anecdotal, but in my experience most of the people I know who live in places where having a car is an actually choice don't own them at all, i.e. people who live and work in city centers.
Due to the US's terrible public transportation infrastructure, however, that's not a real choice in most places. If you want to work, you or someone in your household is going to need a car and it's going to eat up an uncomfortable portion of your income.
There are a lot of places where it's impractical to do so, because it takes too long, and so people mostly don't. That's despite the fact that walking or biking would increase throughput, because throughput isn't all that matters. I would even argue that it isn't all that important.
Some people want their car-centric lifestyle, and hey, that's fine too (as long as they're paying for it); I think the problem is that it's simply not a choice for many people due to the central-planning style zoning regulations entrenched in much of the country.
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 friendly for cars tends to make it harder for walking and biking.
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.
Now what happens when those 177 cars are going to 100 different places?
The problem is when those 200 people want to go to 100 different places spread throughout hundreds of square miles of evenly low density suburban sprawl like a modern US metropolis.
Absolutely. But there will always be people who want to get to locations spread all around even a metropolitan area (as well as further-flung locations around that area), and while it's possible to build a public transit network to get them there, with enough throughput to cover the volume of people, the latency will still be worse than a point-to-point trip directly from point A to point B.
The buses can have 20-40 stops in those 4 miles, mind you. I don't mean it's all due to traffic.
Every other method of high-density transportation is also a "human amplifier" and vastly more efficient.
"Built for people" means that you aren't forced to have a car to live in a location. There are plenty of demographics that would prefer to not have a car if they could.
Removing the need for car ownership would be big step forward and communities that have this property are highly sought-after.
If/when I have children, I'm getting the fuck out of here. Many (most?) people do the same.
There are huge numbers of people here, so of course there are lots of children here. They're either super wealthy, or really not living up to my standards for quality of life. (I was not raised in a big city.)
If you see lots of children around NYC, consider the case of cars. I don't have a car in the city, and no one I know does. But there's clearly many cars all over, more than can really fit in the roads and curbs and parking garages. Having a car in NYC is a huge pain in the ass. It's not a great car experience. Same with children.
Also, after a while, those who can afford it (or those who can't but still spend) use Uber / Lyft / Gett / Juno / etc liberally. I haven't been in the subway for at least two months because I can't stand it anymore, and it's especially disgusting in summer.
No car ownership is no way to live your whole life. I feel trapped here. No, I do not want to go through the hassle of renting every time I want to get out of town either. As far as daily commuting, underground systems always suck especially for longer trips. I like above ground commuter trains of hiqh quality, and I like cycling when there's investment in infrastructure and shower / lockup facilities everywhere. Unfortunately not the case.
Precisely.
My wife was rabidly anti-car (living in the northeast) until one summer a friend went out of the country and left their car with us. The precise word she used was "free" - we were free to get groceries on the fly, we were free to go out of town. We just had an enormous number of options open up to us, as our travel overhead / travel radius improved so dramatically.
It was freeing.
I never had to argue with her after that; when we had the chance to acquire a car, we did.
I find this sentiment interesting because I have the complete opposite feeling that you have. In my view, NYC is light-years ahead of Atlanta (where I live) when it comes to walkability, bikeability, and public transit. I would love to live in a city like yours.
Given that Atlanta is nowhere near NYC in those regards, it's weird that I feel trapped every time I get in a car here.
I don't own a car because I feel free without a car.
This goes to show me that even though I think NYC, Portland, Minneapolis, et al. would be amazing to live in, there are many other opinions and sentiments. :-)
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 option; that could meaningfully replace driving. Trains and buses alone cannot.
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.
Now, how fast can you get from an arbitrary point in the city to an arbitrary point in the city at an arbitrary time of day?
There's a huge "but" there though. We rode the metro over 30 times in those two cities and never waited for a train for more than 3 minutes. Both cities have trains coming every 4 minutes at all hours of the day (as far as I can tell). That is something we would have to fix in most US cities that have public transportation.
I mean, it must feel like the third world here for a European visitor who comes to DC or SF (the two cities I'm most familiar with) and tries to ride the metro. 12 minutes between rush hour trains in DC and 20 or 24 minutes between trains in DC and SF outside of rush-hour.
When you can pop into a metro that is ~5 minutes from your flat, be on the train in less than 4 minutes, and be within ~5 minutes walk of wherever you want to be...why would you own a car, pay insurance, pay for a parking spot at home, pay for gas, and then pay for parking at a location when public transit is so convenient?
But I think you're glossing over a fair bit with your description:
> When you can pop into a metro that is ~5 minutes from your flat, be on the train in less than 4 minutes, and be within ~5 minutes walk of wherever you want to be
...assuming that where you want to be is within 5 minutes of a metro station on the same line that's near your house and boarding at that particular 4-minute interval. Most trips between two arbitrary points involve at least one line change, which then involves another around of waiting; depending on the nature of the change, it may also involve a walk between stations. That adds up.
I'd like to have a public transit infrastructure that's comparable in latency to getting into a car sitting in your own driveway, going directly to your destination, and parking in the readily available free parking at that destination. I'd love to not have all the wasted space associated with driveways, garages, and other parking infrastructure. But I don't see a path to that even with European-level public transit.
You mentioned Barcelona, so I pulled up Google Maps, and picked a couple of random points roughly 20 minutes apart (by car) within the city, one of them a major landmark / tourist attraction and the other a residential area. Here's the map: https://goo.gl/maps/VCzEJEn3q3k . 24-35 minutes by car, depending on traffic. 67 minutes by public transit, including 20 minutes of walking, one line change, and 40 minutes of transit.
Here's a second example: https://goo.gl/maps/MWGqrSMsFGp . Directions between an event center and a shopping center, both in downtown and near major transit lines. Much better case for public transit: 29 minutes by transit, with no line change. By car: 12-18 minutes depending on traffic.
At least in the longer wait to travel via transit, if you're used to the trip, you get to read or listen to music, and just watch for your stop rather than the constant vigilance of driving. But that doesn't make up for roughly 2x travel time.
But if you are in a rush and you know parking will be easy then yeah, jumping in the car would be fastest.
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.
Efficiency isn't the end-all of life.
Many cities absolutely do prioritize cars over people - huge roads that are unsafe for other users, mandatory parking requirements, and tons and tons of neighborhoods that are predicated on the idea of using a car for pretty much all transportation.
I think this is probably why the question in the original article, "What should a city optimize for?", is really the MOST important one to answer.
If your goal is to keep housing costs low, for example, then presumably you'll want to optimize for space (based on the prevalence of suburbs, this seems to be the presumption reason for high housing costs). Since cars amplify use of space (parking, roads, gas stations, etc), then it follow that despite their other benefits, you would want to minimize vehicular traffic to mitigate this effect.
In other words, I think when people say things like "people should make cities that are for people" what they might be trying to imply is "people should make cities that are not for cars, because there are other things that I think should take priority".
Not really - I didn't say "get rid of all the cars". He's creating a false dichotomy. Cars are fine for many things, but shouldn't be the top priority, but one of many ways of getting around.
For people. What's the point of even building something for human habitation if making it a good place for people isn't put first?
Speaking as someone who has children and bicycles with them I find that other peoples' "very very useful" tool is something that detracts from my quality of life and prevents us from doing things that we value and prioritize.
Obviously there needs to be a balance between these two extremes: On the one hand we have the current situation where you are subsidized to drive your brood of 18 to the Bulk Mall of America and on the other lies my set of preferences which involves the distribution of goods to local outlets by a smaller number of trained drivers/robots.
With a car, in a place designed for cars, I can go from ideation to grocery store or department and back inside of half an hour.
In a place "designed for people" where neither homes nor stores have parking, such an errand consumes an entire afternoon. (Walk to bus stop, wait for bus, take bus to train, wait for train, ride train, walk, etc. Though I suppose it's easier if you can afford to live a short walk from the train itself).
The dramatically slower pace of life, turning any outing into a huge ordeal, is definitely not a good thing. Give me Manhattan-quality public transit or let me use my damn car.
"Park 'n ride" is a seriously underrated idea. A small, urban core where the jobs, businesses, entertainment, etc. is, blanketed in dense and frequent transportation, with trains out to the affordable residential neighborhoods, and plentiful, cheap parking at the neighborhood train stations. Chicago does this nicely.
Because in Chicago I think that describes about 10 blocks (a few hundred staggeringly wealthy people in the most lavish of luxury condo towers). The rest of us have some tiny, price-gouging convenience stores nearby but have to go ~20 blocks for a real supermarket, 4-5 miles to downtown for a Target or Macy's. Taking the train is less of a hassle than parking in the Loop, but it's still a hassle.
- expensive? - few products? Something else?
If pricing is an issue the question becomes,
How do you assist small retailers compete with massive chains?
A problem I have thought about quite a bit as my dad once owned a small corner shop He had to close it as the chains make it impossible to compete on price with bulk buying discounts.
I believe what happens is due to the layout of our cities we end up with large chains, malls and big box retailers. It's a virtuous cycle...
> How do you assist small retailers compete with massive chains?
Is the problem that they can't compete, or that they don't have to? When driving isn't the main method of getting around, but instead walking augmented by potentially high-latency public transit is the main method, the cost to the consumer of small distance differences between notionally "competing" institutions becomes quite high, which means that they have less need to actually compete with one another: they have captive hyper-local markets with effective moats.
Cultural attitudes about apartments and raising children are just that - cultural.
Inner city problems are another kettle of fish.
> A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).
For sure, cars are very useful, particularly for going long distances or carrying lots of stuff or people. But there's other things that they're bad at: most notably, they're far less space efficient for the average case when there's just one or two people in each car. Because of that, as a city gets denser, you have to start moving people over to other, denser forms of transportation.
You're always going to have some cars, if only for business deliveries and emergency vehicles (and maybe the handicapped), but it's possible to cut the number of car trips way, way down.
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.
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 take the car to do larger shopping trips on occasion, or to do things further from town. We'd take the family downtown on public transportation. So it was a 'right tool for the job' situation.
I don't think we really need any fancy, expensive technical solutions like burying cars in tunnels - just making streets a bit slower, and safer for bikes and pedestrians would be a great start.
The other thing worth mentioning is that bikes/pedestrians can go anywhere cars can, but the opposite is not true. If we made streets that were "bike only" cars wouldn't be able to access them. Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator.
There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?
I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food. Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.
Even more so if enough people do so that the store can switch from a storefront laid out for customers (with cashiers, displays, and tags on shelves) to a warehouse.
Safeway has a long-running delivery program, but they sure aren't pushing it very hard.
The system in Shanghai, where you might expect delivery to be popular, is that supermarkets operate their own buses which stop near your home. It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.
You moved the goal post also. In the thread above we are talking about a 10-minute walk.
A cart is not actually responsive to that, because it reintroduces the other problem.
We mostly walked or biked to the local grocery store in Italy. It led to more fresh food, as you buy stuff in smaller quantities and eat it right away. A large backpack is fine for moving stuff. It worked for our family of 4.
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?
Yes, in an urban environment you generally have less stored food. But usually not zero stored food. You also have less space to store it in, which makes shopping every other day more convenient. Trading off time for space and whatever conveniences urban living might provide you.
I honestly don't see how you think this is a reasonable straw man you've constructed.
It's not really an inconvenience.
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 end of the store to another), spend time waiting in line and checking out, drive back, unpack, et cetera. The whole process takes about 2 hours.
Which is the massive inconvenience?
Apart from that, though, almost anything that you can easily plan out and do in bulk is going to out-efficiency something done in smaller iterations involving a lot of repeated steps (going in, walking around, checking out, etc.).
When we go shopping on the weekends, we mostly buy for the entire week. We buy quantities of food that can make plenty of leftovers and buy water/soft drinks by the cases that last several weeks. We try to make the process as efficient as possible and we could stop by the store more often since it's close - but that would waste a lot of efficiency.
That's why we just drink tap water, or water with syrup if you like something sweet (a bottle of syrup lasts a week). It's a lot cheaper, too.
Not always. When I cycle or catch the bus home, I pop into the shops near my house, grab some stuff I need, and then continue on the way. Or I grab stuff at the supermarket near work, and cycle home with it in a bag.
Now I don't need to plan a big trip. I am already traveling to go home.
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.
It happens a lot in New York City, and other dense urban areas in the US.
Hackers are anti-establishment! Hackers are not conformists that defer to government minders!
Try reading Louis Hyman's "Debtor Nation," particularly the bits on FHA and the creation of a national (and heavily subsidized) mortgage market.
The sub/exurbs, the essential symbiotes of car culture, are the dirigiste statist artifacts.
(yes, also a lot of the people who want to have you sell your Nissan Armada are also like that, and it's fair of you to call out statist authoritarian where you see them. But it's lunacy to suggest that suburbs and car culture just represent an organic Choice of the Free Market™)
But for a large fraction of the world, it's more like this:
1. Step off bus you took home from city center job, having decided dinner recipe on the ride.
2. Buy fresh produce from independent grocery store on same block as bus stop.
3. Walk remaining 2.5 blocks home.
https://www.amazon.com/Whitmor-6318-2678-Deluxe-Rolling-Util...
They do make bigger ones, but much bigger and you're better off with a second person.
> Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.
Another perspective, a ten minute walk a few times a week is much better for quality of health (therefore life) than taking a car everywhere.
Of course, I don't have kids and am generally not a very busy person, so it might not work for everyone.
I've carried 30+ kg of groceries on my bike panniers, about 15 to 30 min of ride to the store. Regular city bike with off-the-shelf panniers, not a cargo bike (which would easily take 100+ kg).
But quite honestly, I'd much rather get the groceries delivered to my home. I sometimes do but the websites to order the food are so bad that it takes more time to fill the order form that it's faster to ride to the store.
Bike is my primary means of transport for 8 months of the year because my city is awfully designed traffic-wise (if you need to cross the town east-west). A moderately fast bike ride beats any form of transport (including a car) on my daily commute.
Shopping once every 7 or 10 days obviates the advantage of the freshest produce, meat, etc. but when I'm shopping every couple days it makes a difference, and I've enjoyed cooking and eating more.
A collapsible grocery cart (similar to a collapsible stroller), and insulated reusable grocery bags.
https://www.amazon.com/UTG-Environment-Molle-3-Day-Deploymen...
(Sometimes if I'll buy eggs I'll carry those in a separate bag. How difficult.)
Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this, but they aren't allowed to function any more in most cities in the US because of the amount of rules and regulations about what can be built where.
If someone can make money by building a store, that's great, what's wrong with it?
Zoning should be about keeping truly noxious activities away from residential areas, not about keeping a corner store away from where people could possibly walk to it.
Developers generally aren't the ones pushing for restrictive zoning laws, residents are. For decades Americans have lived under the impression that businesses near homes is somehow a corrupting influence, and that putting businesses far from homes is somehow a feature and not a bug.
The current suburban landscape in America is the result of both overzealous urban planners, too eager to create a magnum opus of central planning, and the residents who eagerly bought into the concept believing that the best life is a carefully manicured, highly restrictive one.
This is also why I'm skeptical of YC's thing here - this smells lot like how these misadventures in central planning have begun in the past. Sam's thought elsewhere about relocating startups to help bootstrap the new city's economy is also a bit disconcerting - these exist, they're called company towns, and they tend to be economically fragile (all non-diverse economies are) and good examples of central planning run amok.
I sincerely hope anyone applying to this is very well versed in urban planning and its history world-wide, because there have been many misadventures in planning, and those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
I think this is one of the most insightful comments here vis a vis YC's plans, and it's one of the reasons I'm in the "markets" camp. I know I'd prefer to see more mixed-use, bike/pedestrian friendly cities, but ultimately I'm wary of even my own "plans" and think the freedom to have people doing different things, and let cities evolve naturally beats even the best of plans.
Very, very economically efficient with huge economic diversity and competition, but nonetheless unpleasant (and unsafe!) in many ways.
Complete freedom is likely not the right answer, but neither is the extremely prescriptive type of planning that has dominated American cities since the 50s, the type that Jane Jacobs rails against in her famous book.
Oddly enough we were really good at this between the late 1800s and early 1900s. The places in America that people continue to enjoy being (and now have become enormously unaffordable) have almost all come of age in that era. I'm still not entirely sure what the x-factor was, but part of it was probably a more "gardener/enabler" philosophy to urban planning than the "prescriptivist/masterpiece" thought that dominates now.
Planning in many places in that era was more about setting the foundations for the market to grow productively, rather than monumental projects designed to micromanage the conditions of every day life. See for example the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 in NYC.
I agree with you completely: I'm not a 'markets' guy because I think they're the answer to all problems all the time, but because I think in this case we could use more of them.
Back then there was no metro, there was a sea of private jitneys and buses fighting each other for bus stops. Traffic safety was utter shit.
The government had minimal involvement in food safety. Private "certifiers" sprung up to plug the gap, but piracy of food safety certification stamps was rampant, and the whole having to check the packaging to see if some product was certified safe by your preferred certification provider was a persistent stressor.
Building codes technically existed but enforcement was non-existent. Partial building collapses were common. The skies were a tangle of wires running overhead from competing TV, phone, and other companies, each of which needed their own set of last-mile infrastructure. A lot of it was poorly installed, accidental electrocutions weren't uncommon. It was all kind of Blade Runner-esque in hindsight.
The way I see it, I lived in the libertarian paradise some HNers dream of creating, and it wasn't really all it was cracked up to be.
Absolutely. I remember way back when there was discussion of what to do with the huge plot of land north of us. Corner store, maybe? The local paper quoted someone in the neighborhood, "who's going to walk to the store in the rain (which a suburban of Seattle gets a bit of)?" Umm, maybe all of the people I see out walking when I'm walking the dogs in the dead of December in the dark and the pouring rain? Back to California with you Mr. NIMBY, the rest of us deal with walking in the rain just fine.
But that's probably the guy that shows up to zoning meetings and I'm...not. Yes, I'm lazy and yes, I should fix that.
There can be plenty of things wrong with it. I don't subscribe to the idea that whatever makes money is instantly the best thing.
And I never said that I want to keep corner stores away from where people could walk to it. I said that leaving everything up to the "free market" doesn't always yield the best solution for everyone. It only yields the most profitable solution for those with the money.
That's currently what we have; nothing at all resembling a free market where you can buy a piece of property and more or less do what you want with it. The rules and regulations in place are absolutely about enshrining the car-centric city.
With a more market-oriented solution, some people could have their "burbs" and others could have other kinds of housing and neighborhoods.
I'm not talking about "libertopia" here, so yeah, I think government has a role. Just that that role in terms of zoning should be radically shrunk.
The net often gets cast too widely though - so that the corners stores can't be built either.
I live in a quiet mostly rural neighborhood. I wouldn't object to a corner store replacing the nearest house. I would object to the house and all of its land getting cleared to drop a home depot in.
Unfortunately, zoning regulations prohibit both - as if there were no difference between them.
No, they're not. I've seen the markets in action, and one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks. As the my sibling comment points out, markets are great for maximizing incoming for the stores leasing space in the malls. One prime example I'm thinking of was 25 years ago, let's go to Google's sat view and see if much has changed...nope, looks like it's just as car-centric as it was when I lived there.
Now one can go all "no true Scotsman" on me, what with regulation and all, but there has been regulation long before either of us were born so one might as well argue that are no true markets because the sky is blue. It also ignores the fact that folks like the Simons (owners of malls across the U. S.) might have a little hand in how those regulations get written. What regulation has brought about in cities like Redmond is that if you're building streets, you're building them for everyone so there will be sidewalks and bike lanes.
You should look up the zoning codes in your city, as well as a zoning map. They are incredibly detailed, and extremely prescriptive. What we have in the US is very far from a market-based solution!
And those rules and regulations absolutely have worsened with time. Look at cities from 100 years ago, how they had nice downtowns where people could walk around (and also drive, but slowly) and they were relatively dense.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...
http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/
Obviously mass transit can help if it is reliable, cheap, and expansively deployed in the city, but that's not a typical case in the US. Otherwise you're going to have to accommodate cars, and lots of them. That means big fast busy roads that are unfriendly to pedestrians.
Also, it's nothing for me to bike 5 miles to go somewhere by myself, but if I have to bring my 3 year old twins along and then haul several kilos of groceries or other heavy/bulky items back that bike ride starts to look rather impractical.
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 busy roads"
You can't build your way out of congestion: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/californias-dot-admit...
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 protest for all kinds of reasons. They will protest because it will raise their land values (and taxes) too much and force them to move. They will protest because it will bring in people and ruin their "quiet" neighborhood. They will protest because it will affect local water prices. 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.
This is an official map of the city where I live: http://i.imgur.com/N0X8HTh.png (Screenshot of http://ims.kiel.de/extern/kielmaps/?view=stpl&coords=3257435... with the layer for zoning enabled and the layers for PoIs disabled)
Purple are the areas for which any zoning restrictions at all exist – in the rest, no zoning regulations exist, as long as you follow normal building law, and get a normal permit, you can build what you want, skyscraper or single family home.
You can visit the specific plans for each area by going to , for example, http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/1008.pdf (this for the area marked as 1008 in above map).
Sometimes they look like this: http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/919a.pdf (Very restrictive new post-2005 development, only terraced housing, single family housing, and some small apartment buildings), or sometimes they look like http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/907.pdf (left half is "mixed use", right half is a shooting area), but sometimes they have no regulation at all except specifying "have around 40% mixed use, mkay?". Or even like this http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/919c-1.pdf where there are some dotted arrows with the label "foot paths", kinda showing where maybe someday foot paths will be made (IRL they were made completely differently, after demand has been evaluated based on where people walk the grass down)
This is probably a far better mix than the overly restrictive situation in the US – regulations are good when they help consumers, small businesses, or to keep the market balanced, but regulations to help developers make profit are often a bad idea.
Generally, the largest difference is that we just zone 90% of what we zone as mixed use, and let the market decide what it’ll be.
That's almost never "the market" in action. For one thing, street design is obviously under the purview of the local (and possibly state and federal) department of transportation, not private developers. Plus, local zoning regulations usually have minimum parking requirements that strongly incentivize those kinds of car-centric shopping malls. It's hard to build a pedestrian-friendly area if the law says you need to use a ton of space (often more space than is used for the actual buildings) for car parking.
> Now one can go all "no true Scotsman" on me
It's not "no true scotsman", it's simply the truth that it's the government pushing car-centric design. Now, in some cases the market might ALSO want car-centric design, but it's hard to tease that out when the rule of law is so strong to begin with.
From a post from davidw further down: You should look up the zoning codes in your city, as well as a zoning map.
I'll take you up on that, as it's been ages since I last did, and I don't recall having done so to any great detail for my adopted city of Redmond. And I get the impression that you might be a little more recently informed than I, so I should get caught up in the conversation. :-)
...assuming perfect knowledge and the absence of externalities, either of cost or benefit, since (assuming perfect knowledge of costs and benefits) markets optimize the net utility of the direct participants in each exchange, but not net social utility (because externalities are ignored.)
In the absence of externalities, this should be obvious. And in the presence of externalities, I did not claim that markets optimize either net social utility or net individual utility. I claimed only that markets work at least as well as any other solution (and that government regulation works worse, on average).
As far as your specific example, modern advertising, is concerned, I'm not clear about whether you think externalities are significant in this case or not.
Your statement is only true for low speed roads. At higher speeds, it is impossible or unsafe for anyone to use the road unless they are also going at an equally high speed.
So in practice, cars do NOT function as a lowest common denominator, but actively drive out other means of transportation because the roads they prefer -- high speed roads -- cannot be safely used by pedestrians or cyclists!
The lowest common denominator? I don't own a car, and I'm sure many other people in my city don't either, so no: it's not the lowest common denominator for us: walking is.
Cars are themselves very expensive and require a massive amount of infrastructure to function. Look around a city and think of all the cars, streets, parking lots, highways, etc, used for cars. Then think how that all impacts any other mode of transportation other than vehicles. Go deeper and imagine a world without those cars - what to do with all this new-found space?
The words you're looking for is, "status quo". Cars are on the, "status quo" pedestal. They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce. Damn the long-trail environmental cost of them, or how they've influenced the design of our modern cities.
Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you.
What would you do with all this time you know have? So many things! I can't even imagine what to do first!
Cars enable convenience, not flexibility. But it comes at a huge price: a financial price, an environmental price, and a huge price on the standard of living in the negative direction - not just for people living in fancy cities: the oil field worker, the car factory worker, the people living in third world countries mining some of those conflict materials you all need. There's no free lunch.
You can argue about a single car, and how much convenient it is for the individual, but we're talking about something we've produced in the hundreds of millions. There's huge effects of this invention.
You know what happens to cars and cities? People live far away from their jobs. Then they talk about their hellish commute. And how much gas costs. And how their neighborhood is boring. And how there's not parking. And how the car needs to go into the shop. And on and on and on. These may all be transparent to you, but without a car, I hear it all the time, and I'm happy - so very happy to be off that spinning wheel.
Having lived in Europe a little while (had to do something with all that free time!), intelligent, forward-thinking people, living in cities without cars, because these cities were designed before cars. Other options are created, like public transportation system (and bike sharing schemes) that don't have whatever stigma they have in the states.
I don't know for this topic if I'm willing to trade "flexibility" for a massive amount of complexity.
You may want to consider that other people may make their choices for reasons they personally find compelling in the context of their individual lives.
What many people are realizing is that cars should not be the be-all and end-all of urban design in the US.
The United States has a population density of 35 people/km2.
San Francisco has a population density of 7,124 people/km^2.
I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, but I don't think anybody really wants to plan the rural areas of the US in the image of Hong Kong.
I own a reliable econo-box that I bought years ago. Maintenance is almost nil, parking is less time than it'd take me to use public transit (which is relatively bad where I live), and underground parking comes with my condo.
I am a huge advocate of public transit, but I'll say that cars are pretty nice.
My annual maintenance costs + insurance + licensing on my 15 year old car are about the same cost as renting a car for two days.
I think you vastly overestimate the cost of owning an older car.
Im also not sure you understand the term flexibility in the way most people do. Right now (as in within 10 minutes), I can be on my way up to Lake Tahoe or off to Yosemite. There is no other form of transportation that can work that quickly. Even with an amazing rail and bus network, you are beholden to the schedule and the overhead of local transit to the long distance station. With public transportation your life is dictated by the schedule of the transit, with a car you just leave whenever you feel like it.
The bigger question is - why is it strictly necessarily to have to use it for ten minutes - just to get milk?
And while most places in the US simply do not have it, the solution to public transportation scheduling is that they run so frequently no one bothers to check the schedule. This is, admittedly, a chicken-or-the-egg problem in most US cities, although some are starting to get it.
Great if you live on a route popular enough that they do that. You are screwed otherwise. Even if you do live on a popular route, it also doesn't solve the problem if you want to go somewhere unpopular.
>I do not find it particularly urgent to make long-distance trips - presumably for leisure - within ten minutes of making the decision.
Good for you, but not that relevant for people that do. Waking up Saturday morning and deciding to drive out to a destination like this, spend the night, and then drive back the next day is not considered unreasonable.
>The bigger question is - why is it strictly necessarily to have to use it for ten minutes - just to get milk?
Because I need milk for a recipe I just found online and I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the next train, ride for 10 minutes, shop for 5 minutes, wait 15 minutes for the return train, and then ride for 10 minutes. And those times even generously assume I live right on a stop and there is a store right on a stop.
I was alluding to the fact that it a circular problem - frequent routes (within reason) become popular routes.
>it also doesn't solve the problem if you want to go somewhere unpopular.
The vast majority of trips are to popular locations, by definition. Everyone can still use cars for unpopular destinations.
>Waking up Saturday morning and deciding to drive out to a destination like this
One can wake up in the morning and decide to take a weekend trip without a car. The difference? It will take probably about an hour to get underway.
Meanwhile, a person in an urban area can have all of these car advantages for infrequent uses such as weekend trips or going somewhere unpopular with far less expense by having a Zipcar account.
Because I need milk for a recipe I just found online and I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the next train
Your perspective is very narrow. I asked why you should have to drive to get milk, your response is because you don't want to take a train to get milk.
There is a far simpler option than either of those.
If you don't live inside a major city, or if you live in a car-friendly area, parking and storing your vehicle is very cheap - often free. Parking and insurance combined may be less than $200/month.
When you have a family, or a business group, traveling by car has the added advantage that the rest of the group is unable to become separated from you along the way. Sorry to sound tautological or pedantic, but it's an often-overlooked point. It's almost like putting your family into a ZIP file - on arrival, everyone will still be in the car, nobody will get lost on the way or take the wrong turn. Like young classmates holding a rope on school outings.
For a long time I did not want a car but when children came, we have bought it and it help our mobility a lot, if you have full car, it is also cheaper travel than paying tickets for everybody. For a travel inside a city I still use public transport wherever I can as it is the fastest and most green way to get around.
I also lived in Paris, where I used public transports exclusively. I hadn't a car.
Honestly, in both cases, there is no free lunch. In Paris, most people don't have a car, but yet they still live far away from their jobs and have hellish commute.
I agree that cars bring a lot of complexity, but stuffing all people in the same area also bring its share of complexity.
#canyousayconflictofinterest?
Linky: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...
In the US, personally owned vehicles are critical for sprawling suburbs and rural life. It is a big country with low density. Cars should not be necessary in the big city. Those that are designed well make it possible to live without a car. In much of America, it is quite challenging to live without a car. This is partly due to choices we have made, not because it had to be that way.
When everyone owns a car, everyone needs one, cars become an instrument of dependence rather than freedom.
That's the most ridiculous justification I've heard for anything. A thousand dollar piece of toilet paper is also massively profitable to produce, but nobody would buy it. People buy cars because they are useful.
If you think most people don't enjoy the freedom they get from owning a car, you are living in a bubble. I work with people that could take the caltrain and get to work faster, but they still choose their car because of the flexibility in schedule and destinations it gives them.
Also, walking is not the lowest common denominator if you have a job far away, have small children, or have a disability.
The entire government apparatus spent decades and untold fortunes making the car the fast and flexible option. We now have the benefit of hindsight that tells us it was a massively inefficient use of public funds.
Currently in Brazil the laws about import cars are extremely draconian, and taxes are overall sky high, crappy local made cars are frequently 2 times the EU or US price of the same, but higher quality model.
People still get in terrible debts, paying sometimes interest that totals several times the principal, to buy cars anyway, not because they are useful, but because frequently they are the only choice. For example in Rio de Janeiro, because of the Olympics, the government deliberately canceled public transportation routes connecting poor areas to the touristic areas, forcing people of poor areas to use cars, specially because parts of the route are impossible to cross on foot (mountains with no hiking trails, with the passage being road tunnels)
Or that for the world cup, the government declined several train proposals in favour of making "light train over road" routes, where you just build gigantic roads on pillars and place buses on them.
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. I could walk to two grocery stores, but each took 30 minutes each way. I also grew up across from both my grade and middle school, a horse ranch, a gym, and a massive park.
I loved my childhood because we could play full field soccer games, rugby, football (American), etc. However, if my parents wanted to get anything you had to drive.
Most people on HN don't appear to realize what it's like growing up or living outside of the west or east coasts of the U.S. or Europe. It's not that it was built for cars, it was built for farms and agriculture, nothing is wrong with that either.
We had a forest behind our house, a soccer field where we also played bandy in the winters, 10 minutes walk to the horse range, a golf course that also was used for cross country skiing in the winters, 5 minutes to the commuter train that took you to the city center in 15 minutes, lakes we swam in the summers and ice-skated in the winters. Markets for food within easy walking distance and a decent mall within easy bicycle distance. I bicycled everywhere when I didn't use public transport. I didn't even bother to get a drivers licence until I was a bit over 30, and the only reason I got it then was because I was planning some long holidays in the US. You don't need to center you society around cars and driving to have a very high and pleasant standard of living.
I'd love Amazon to drop off a bag of rice by drone.
This would be highly inefficient and result in higher costs of goods and reduced options for consumers.
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, evacuation, flooding and general maintenance. In the best-case scenario, tunnels are just very expensive.
Then there are places like Atlanta (sitting on granite) or San Francisco (in a fault zone) where things get a lot more complicated.
That wouldn't remove the need for ventilation and other things you mentioned if that system is underground. But it could be above the ground , on buildings 2nd floors, where the first floor would be retail stores and whatnot
Why not have seats on the pod, that way you don't have to ferry around a 2-tonne car. Indeed if you have solved smart automation, why have rails at all? Presto, you arrive at the idea of self-driving taxis as a public service.
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.
If anything, it is much more valuable to segment the city in ways that you don't need subways or roads. You should have districts that are internally navigable strictly by foot, bikes and tram between adjacent districts, and only have rail / road when going beyond the local microcosm of city.
You want greenery anyway, you might as well put it in the bounding lines between regions of your city and have the roads / rail between those to minimize noise pollution outside of the transit hubs.
Raising the street grade one story has been done before, when flush toilets were introduced in the late 1800's. Notably in Seattle and Chicago but in pockets other low-lying cities as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
And until 2003, there was even an airstrip only 2mi from downtown.
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.
In NYC at least the lower levels are already present. But the only part where we got the pedestrian level correct so far is the High Line... which has been hugely successful. There's really no reason these types of park-like promenades only have to be built on top of existing disused structures however. More could be built, it's just that people need to understand that there is return on investment for building an elevated pedestrian-only street level.
Not an easy thing to develop certainly, but relative to the cost and level of engineering effort needed to build new subway tunnels, I'm surprised that adding transportation improvements at street-grade and then bumping the street up one level, isn't something that ever gets considered. We could run effective BRT through Manhattan, or surface light rail to solve the crosstown transportation problem.
Imagine how much easier getting from Queens and Brooklyn to the Lincoln and Holland tunnels would be by car or bus if say 39th St, Canal St moved the pedestrians to an elevated walkway. What if Times Square's tourist bottleneck could be eliminated by raising Times Square?
Anyhow, unlikely to happen probably ever, but fun thought excercise
This (sort of) already exists in Minneapolis (and to a much smaller extent, St. Paul and Duluth) courtesy of the skyway system.[1]
It's very well done and has created a completely separate urban ecosystem overlaid on top of the existing, street level, downtown.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Skyway_System
Ultimately, you have to realize that not everyone in the world has the appetite for the kind of high-risk, high-return sort of lifestyle and pursuits that YC founders and partners do/did. A large swath of the population is content to earn their 2-3%/year on real estate, which when levered 3:1 or 4:1, gets up to 10-12%/year, which is a pretty good return in the world of non-VC/non-SV investing.
Source: Piketty's Capital in the 21st century
If we rely too strongly on GPS, we eliminate many existing roadways with tunnels, and many convenient constructs like parking decks, or new tunnels where they make sense.
That's not usually the case for public transit.
[Agreed about real estate. Although dense cities are very eco-friendly, it might be hard to motivate dense cities when real estate isn't super expensive. Manhattan grows upward because it's expensive to grow any other direction]
If a fraction of the space that was devoted to car traffic was instead devoted to public transit, public transit would be far more efficient and robust than cars.
But that needs to be balanced with the desires of some to have fewer connections, but perhaps more yard. And some people honestly desire to have fewer connections and live further away from others.
However, what if the suburban area was more varied in locations: smaller businesses and corner markets mixed in with residential areas? Right now most suburban development consists square miles of nothing but residential cul-de-sacs peppered with massive clusters of big box stores that require huge parking lots and must serve large numbers of people to survive. People want the big box stores because they think they save money, but the same savings are possible with lots of small stores as long as there's a real market and clever people running small businesses. With that type of sparse use of land, greater distances between things on average but with the speed of cars, would that allow more interconnections than density?
I think that over the past few decades, that those that desire the yard, and those that desire fewer interconnections have been able to prevent those that want density from building it. There's a clear undersupply of dense locations and a clear oversupply of sparse locations.
I think the key is to have lots of diversity so that many experiments can be tried. Right now there have been few styles that have been tried with cars, and though I personally consider it a failure in that I don't want to live like that, there are plenty of people that consider density to be a failure and would never want to live like that. Any solution(s) to cities should be able to meet everybody's desires.
This is a development from 2005, started as pure residential suburb: https://maps.here.com/?map=54.3557,10.07057,17,satellite
Look at the street planning, look at how the foot paths exist, and look at that one odd park on the one side.
Over the next decades and centuries, the houses will be replaced with denser ones again and again, and it will slowly develop to something like https://maps.here.com/?map=54.33864,10.14098,17,satellite and then something like https://maps.here.com/?map=54.31908,10.12497,17,satellite
You notice how they get more and more pedestrian friendly over time – but the first one is already bikable, walkable, has a bus line cutting through it, and is still usable by car.
This is what the initial stage looks like: http://i.imgur.com/P0T2DaG.jpg http://i.imgur.com/DHhjSQ8.jpg
This is a typical residential suburb – but, as you might have noticed on bing maps, at several points, stores and services and small businesses already popped up. A dentist, two physiotherapy and a logotherapy practice, a small bakery and shop.
Currently there are discussions about a small supermarket coming into the area.
Maybe later some more stores, and some buildings might be replaced with new ones that have on the lowest floor businesses instead.
Such a drive is likely not stable. 9 mile 10 minute drives, in rural areas, are stable. But unless your economy is moribund, once that's up to 20 minutes, chances are good that ten years from now that same drive will be 45 minutes.
It was far worse at my old apartment 5 miles in 11 minutes became 50 minutes if I took the bus.
I'm in RTP which is far from moribund but Durham where I live is getting the least new residents it seems.
In the U.S., we've collectively done a lot, culturally and legally, to make real estate a principal savings vehicle for many if not most people, and this has had a lot of negative consequences. Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation (http://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulation...) by is a good introduction to some of them. Chapters 7 – 9 in particular explain how the 1970s saw the growth of zoning restrictions that have driven housing costs in urban areas relentlessly up.
I'd be curious about alternate land-ownership structures or incentives that make people view housing more as a service than as a good store of value. I don't know what that might mean in practice, but the idea itself seems important to me.
Look no further than the BLM and leasing on public lands. Grazing, etc.
1. tax write off on interest. But with interest rates low, that is not as usefull as it has been in the past.
2. A few states such as texas, have some additional asset protection on your primary residence in case of bankrupcy
3. homstead exemption on property tax (approximately first $100,000 property value), varies by county.
4. property tax freeze above age 65.
5. some capital gains exemptions for primary residence.
but a store of value is a store of value. Would you be ok with people buying treasury bonds as a store of value ? Or would you incentivise higher risk investments, how ?
Also, private schools, golf and tennis clubs also price out a lot of people. Not too different from zoning restrictions.
Land as a store of value is related, but different than housing as a store of value, especially in cities.
Their thought process is well-illustrated by a recent exchange I had with some children from a background of poverty:
Me: Maybe you should save that money instead of spending it.
Them: Good point, then I can buy something more expensive next week!
---
Children they may be, but I know their parents and that mindset did not appear ex nihilo.
I don't think this is a good view to take as a fully general statement. People invest capital in real estate because they get benefits from it. If the benefits they get are worth more to them than the benefits they would get from any alternative uses of the same capital, then putting that capital into real estate is optimal for them.
> it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.
If spending more money on real estate increases its value to the people who use it, then it is a productive asset. I think you are taking too narrow a view of what "productive" means. Instead of seeing it as "make housing/office space cheap", I think you should be thinking of it as "make housing/office space give more value for a given investment". In other words, don't make it cheap; make something people want. Making it as cheap as possible might not always be the best way to do that.
I see housing prices have been growing enormously in the last few years, but the appartements are exactly the same as they were twenty years ago.
I don't see how I can get more 'value' out of an appartement that is older, not renovated, and costs twice as much.
I mean that people get more benefit from it. What specifically counts as a benefit depends on the person.
> the appartements are exactly the same as they were twenty years ago.
This is going to depend a lot on what area you are in. In my area, much of the housing is fairly new, because either old housing was torn down and replaced, or housing was expanded into land that used to be something else (mostly farms or woods).
> I don't see how I can get more 'value' out of an appartement that is older, not renovated, and costs twice as much.
Any capital investment depreciates, and eventually you will need to reinvest in it in order to continue getting value from it. But suppose the average dwelling lasted 50 years before needing to be renovated or replaced, instead of 20. That would be an obvious benefit, even if the original purchase price of the dwelling was higher; in fact many people might be willing to pay the higher price in order to get a dwelling that would last so much longer.
Of course I understand that this is not what we currently see in most housing markets. But I think it is highly relevant to the question of whether "make housing cheaper" is always the right goal if you're trying to reinvent housing.
I think part of the problem is how to grow trees in that environment. We have pretty good data on how important greenery is to happiness.
I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day, looking across at a store front that has had a high rate of turnover. It's on the wrong side of a busy, complicated intersection, but the back half of the building is still in a high pedestrian traffic area.
It occurred to me that if they tore out the building and replaced it with an arcade, they'd solve several problems. They'd get more modest square footage store fronts on the edge of an existing retail area, and they'd break the psychological barrier that keeps people from going around the block.
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.
Saying you'll make "cheap housing" where people will nonetheless want to be is complete nonsense. If people want to live there the rent will go up; the only way to make the rent low is to make the place utterly undesirable.
Talks include subjects such as walkability, city design, urban data visualisation, crowd modelling, new transportation systems, etc.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626431-against-the-smar...
If SF was rows and rows of 6-8 story buildings instead of being %50+ SFH, it would have a lot more capacity than it has today.
But in terms of the US, I'm talking more about stuff from around 100 years ago.
Amsterdam is an old, concentric, beautiful and imo quite user friendly city (as long as you don't drive a car). Commuting is very easy either by bike, tram, metro, or train.
For me the ideal city is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to get around (among many other things I'm omitting here). Make it beautiful and make it efficient. That's a challenge - but feasible.
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 spend some time in "old" countries, if not to learn the good things, at least to learn their mistakes.
And another compulsory thing should be listening to James Howard Kunstler talking about Suburbia: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
The only old American city that I think stands a chance is Philadelphia, which has a great number of single-lane one-way streets, which allow emergency services to get to where they need quickly enough while providing a decent amount of walkability. But then again, the original plan for Philadelphia is a hilarious testament to the utter failures of centralized city planning.
" Penn planned a city on the Delaware River to serve as a port and place for government. Hoping that Philadelphia would become more like an English rural town instead of a city, Penn laid out roads on a grid plan to keep houses and businesses spread far apart, with areas for gardens and orchards. The city's inhabitants did not follow Penn's plans, as they crowded by the Delaware River, the port, and subdivided and resold their lots" -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia
Wouldn't wider streets be better in every case?
Larger streets also hurt street side commerce. Nothing chokes off wakability and storefront business vitality like multi-lane one-way streets.
EDIT: I feel compelled to mention from my experience that in Rome, the most active streets with the most vibrant businesses were not the arterial roadways - those seemed to mainly serve large businesses, government buildings, and tourist traps - but rather the tiny twisted streets in place for many centuries.
Huh? If you limit supply, demand goes down?
Your logic would say that the solution to Los Angles traffic problems is to close half the lanes and wait for people to sell off their cars?
In the case of transportation, price is measured in time and convenience as well as dollars.
The idea of shrinking our roadways to discourage use of vehicles is challenging in a practical sense and it just cleaves off another aspect of life for business and the wealthy to enjoy without plebs interfering with the roadways they paid & still pay for.
It works for cars, since there are acceptable alternatives (biking, walking, carpooling, Uber, etc). It works less well for housing, as leftist NIMBYs often advocate, since one alternative (homelessness) is very unappealing, and the other (living somewhere else) just exports the problem.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_destruction
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_traffic
If you widen streets and add more lanes, then more people drive, until they've filled up that street's capacity. But they don't really stop driving.
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!)
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
Or more generally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community#United_State...
I believe I've seen it off in the distance from Highway 395. Always wondered what it was.
Geographically, it's the third largest city in the state. At 200 square miles, it's four times as big as San Francisco. I bet most people in California don't even know it exists.
Here's a different attempt at building a community in the California desert, from decades earlier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llano_del_Rio
Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"
Ray Oldenburg "great good place"
Booker T Washington: Up from Slavery
I'd skip figuring out cities. Start with how to create neighborhoods that work? Where citizens can be educated, participate in their local government, and find work at the neighborhood level.
- 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 streets, which lead to collectors, which lead to arterials - you're bottlenecking a huge population through a very small, fast, and unsafe road system. Instead, make the streets highly connected, and narrower to encourage slower but steadier car traffic, and blocks shorter. Porous streets networks can route around bottlenecks and can have many more concurrent cars than even crazy-huge Texas-style freeways.
- no big street setback requirements: encourage density by removing crazy suburban-style setbacks.
Edit: I wanted to make a plug for form-based zoning, which is zoning where the form (building type) is zoned, not its use. This doesn't necessarily refer to its style (Neoclassical, Modernist, etc) but how it interacts with the surrounding buildings on the street. E.g. buildings above a certain size might not be allowed in an area, and not be allowed to take more than N number of yards of street frontage. Setbacks of a certain size might be prohibited, or allowed. This allows of a reasonable number of mixed uses like restaurants, shops, and other day to day commercial uses to coexist with residential. This does not mean that heavy/noxious industry can be built up there. This was the error the Euclid v. Ambler decision made 100 years ago: they threw the baby out with the bathwater by restricting zoning by type; there is not a small amount of racism that came with Euclidean/exclusive zoning, e.g. removing a formerly viable way for immigrants to start a business with a house above (a la Bob's Burgers) and thereby increasing the barrier for success.
Alternatively, you COULD use dead-end streets...that are only dead ends to cars, but have pass-throughs for walking and biking. For an extreme example, see Houten, NL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.03...
http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/06/a-case-study-in-bik...
E.g. this slice of suburban Tokyo: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7368825,139.5634333,3a,75y,2... Note the speed limit is 30kph, or around 18mph.
This seems to be the default building style in much of Japan. You will still find larger streets which are arterial in nature, but they're usually still very bikeable and walkable, and still porous to smaller streets like the one linked above.
Japan is designed with public transport in mind. Most everywhere in Japan is within train/bus/bike/walk distance. You don't need 4 lane high ways when there are maybe a few dozen cards on any particular stretch of the high way at any given time. I drove from Nara, Nara to Naruto, Tokushima via highway and saw maybe ten other cars on the highway. That's a distance of 174.5km; roughly a 2 and 1/2 hour drive. If I drove for 2 and 1/2 hours on any stretch of highway in California, I'd see ten cars every few minutes.
Less cars in the road, in general, means roads can be more narrow.
Cars drive through slowly, of course.
It's worth playing some Cities:Skylines (which has a fairly accurate traffic simulator, particularly with the Traffic++ mod) to understand how the road hierarchy came into being. Or, for that matter, trying to drive through a grid-based city like Manhattan or SF.
You get very large traffic jams. The problem is intersections, and particularly intersections where traffic backs up to the previous intersection. When this happens, a traffic jam tends to spread across the whole city; incoming traffic can't clear the bottleneck fast enough, so the bottleneck just grows like a cancer until it envelopes a whole neighborhood.
Oftentimes, the solution to a traffic problem is simply to bulldoze a few intersections. By doing this, you give cars a buffer. It increases the median trip length but it also increases vehicle speed and road throughput by more. It turns out that the major contributor to traffic jams is the acceleration of having to start/stop at traffic lights and when turning.
Self-driving cars (or just ubiquitous turn-by-turn navigation) could change this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding the neighborhood entirely, but as long as drivers have imperfect information about traffic conditions and tend to take the shortest route to their destination, this will remain a problem.
(I've had great success with using pedestrian paths to provide cut-throughs between dead-ends and nearby intersections, though. And with providing pedestrian paths under or over those intersections so that people don't have to wait for stoplights to cross the street and don't stop traffic with their jaywalking. The game unfortunately has pretty terrible pathfinding for pedestrians and won't let you build compact staircases, so this limits their usefulness to real problem intersections, but in real life I think many suburban cities could drastically improve their walkability/bikeability just by building raised pedestrian footbridges over their major arterials.)
But here's some advice if you're having trouble with traffic jams in your grid systems: use more one-way streets. If you've converted your city over to a 100% one-way grid and still have backups, you probably need to work on your mass transit and freight rail systems. I've made functional cities where every single road was open only to pedestrians, cyclists, and service vehicles. No cars.
It makes intuitive sense. When a street is two way cars pass by both directions each day increasing the likelihood of stopping at a store on that street. When streets are one way, then stores only get people driving by once a day, and so they lose revenue.
> Self-driving cars (or just ubiquitous turn-by-turn navigation) could change this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding the neighborhood entirely, but as long as drivers have imperfect information about traffic conditions and tend to take the shortest route to their destination, this will remain a problem.
Self-driving cars or drivers with good mapping are still limited where they can go when they have a street hierarchy to deal with, forcing all cars onto the same few arterials.
> Oftentimes, the solution to a traffic problem is simply to bulldoze a few intersections. By doing this, you give cars a buffer. It increases the median trip length but it also increases vehicle speed and road throughput by more.
This is all well and fine in a game, but increasing street speeds kills the street life (figuratively, and sometimes literally). Slower but more constant speeds are better for everyone involved. For walkers, bikers, and even drivers. Ask yourself this: would drivers flip their shit more often when going slow but steady down 15-20 mph hour streets with stop signs (or roundabouts), or when they're stuck at long traffic lights regardless of how many lanes they have?
The same effect plays out locally, on each individual stretch of road. When integral(# of incoming cars - # of outgoing cars, time) > carrying capacity of road, the road backs up, which increases the time required to traverse it, which further exacerbates the backup. This is why multi-lane arterials can reduce congestion; they can move a lot of cars off a given stretch in a short period of time, and provide a linear buffer where momentary oversupplies can collect without backing up the previous intersection.
You can also see this effect by looking at traffic maps of say, SF (grid layout) vs. Sunnyvale (arterial/collector):
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7811106,-122.4106957,16z/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3724565,-122.0375532,15z/dat...
Both of them have shitty traffic, but in SF the traffic spills away from Market street onto many of the side streets, such that no matter where you go it'll be gridlock. In Sunnyvale, much of the traffic is confined to major arterials like El Camino or Matilda, which are slow but still move, and side-streets that parallel them are often relatively clear.
Yes but that isn't actually what happens because the use of a street or road isn't by one car from A to B but by the continuous use over time across a section of the street.
Say you had a single 1 mile arterial in a city, and it's the only way of getting from one half of the city to the other half. There are few points when a cars are "off" of it (except maybe late at night) - the rest of the time it is a near constant high speed flow.
You're not wrong to say that it gets any given car off the road quicker, but that is if you're focusing on the one driver's trip, as opposed to focusing on the use of and experience of being at that section of road. If it was an old town which had its main street become a high speed arterial, you now have an experience for any pedestrians who might want to use the (probably few remaining) stores along that road be not unlike walking along side a freeway - unfun and dangerous.
By focusing on any one driver's trip experience, and not the street experience, you're essentially damning the street experience for the potential sake of some extra time saved (if its across a city, perhaps on the order of 10 or so minutes).
Of course when you have nothing on the street worth being around (like most of El Camino Real), you want to get passed it ASAP. (SF problems are a whole other hairball of outside commuters plus residents who insist on using cars.)
Self-driving cars can do even better than that - they can eliminate the "stopping" nature of the intersection entirely. If the self-driving cars are able to determine the position and speed of other cars approaching the intersection, you can just have the traffic streams pass right through each other. [1]
[1] Autonomous Intersection Management: Traffic Control for the Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pbAI40dK0A
That said Tokyo has plenty of traffic.
Roundabouts would also drastically help many US cities currently relying on all-way stops.
I always thought that was why I saw posted fines for blocking the box in NYC but never saw such signs elsewhere (although I've never driven in California).
When I lived in Rome briefly I was astounded at how livable it was. Throw a dart at a map of Rome and as long as you don't hit a major park, ruin, government building or the Vatican, you can reasonably assume that within a walkable radius, you will find grocers, restaurants, convenience stores, bars, hairdressers, gelato shops (there is a LOT of gelato in Rome), and everything else you need in your daily life. The tiny twisted streets barely offer enough room for a single car at a time - and my hat is off to the brave individuals who choose to drive through them - but because everything is so dense, you really don't need a car. You barely need public transit either, unless your place of work is too far to walk most days. It is also worth noting the majority of buildings in Rome are within 3-6 stories high, much unlike the American expectation that city centers feature enormous skyscrapers that pack people like sardines. Ultra-dense Manhattanized city centers may be efficient, but they lack the ancient and livable simplicity of old European cities.
Exception: Australia manages brilliantly to merge dense city centers with far-flung suburbs with an excellent mix of trains, light rail, and busses, which allow residents of large cities to get around easily without needing a car at all.
[1] http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample
Actually it was planned to have a lot more green space (the blocks were only supposed to have housing on two sides so as to leave the other sides unimpeded), but market forces prevailed, and all the green space is now walled off. Shame.
The district is still a lot more liveable than basically any place I've seen in North America, however.
> unlike the American expectation that city centers feature enormous skyscrapers that pack people like sardines
Most skyscrapers in Manhattan at least are either for commercial use or feature large apartments/luxury condos (designed to solicit foreign investment). Average urban joe working a nebulous media job does not live in a skyscraper, although they may work in one.
People in NYC are "packed like sardines" into similar 3-6 story low-rise row houses just like in many European cities. This is because NYC was built up prior to many now-standard zoning regulations, so it follows a more similar pattern to older European cities.
The issue is affordability -- apartments near my office would cost 3x or more per month than where I currently live. How does Rome handle this?
If all offices are spread around the city , then there's nothing special about the apartment next to the office. Of course the area could just generally be nicer...
could you have a city that is a mix of private / public and be a public company listed on a stock exchange.
Would be interesting if one could buy stock in the nyc or San Francisco or even a Singapore of the future.
The company I work at in SV does not allow remote work, but I've heard from a few of my teammates that if it did, they would seriously consider moving away from the area to someplace with a much lower cost of living. I would too.
What I'd like to avoid are the large financial costs associated with living in a large city. I'd also like to avoid other issues caused by large population density, like the fact that traffic is always backed up getting to the ocean on the weekends here. Also, people like me leaving cities would mean that there would be less demand for housing, less traffic, etc for the people that want to stay. Everyone wins.
Upstate New York in general is a great place for the kind of living you describe. For not much money you could buy - or even better build - a home in the middle of nowhere with a 30 minute drive into town with very light traffic most times of the day. Like you say, everything you need is relatively close, and Amazon Prime still delivers in 2 days.
You just have to put up with the weather.
I'm really fascinated by the way that Dubai is designed in terms of industry-specific districts, it gives you scalability but also network effects and serendipity. They also have overground driverless trains. Masdar city nearby has an underground driverless car system and sustainable architecture, a very attractive model.
Importance of network effect is increasing faster than advantage of tech allowing distributed work. I wonder if this trend will be permanent or will shift at some point.
Or wealth is consolidating, and the network effects are about money and wealth, not about communication and cooperation per se.
I think a very effective way to design cities is to have the following:
1. A densely developed urban core that sets quotas on what % of apartments must fall within whatever's considered middle class pricing, as well as a quota for a minimum % of apartments that must be for purchase rather than rent. The former prevents cities from being turned into ghost town banks for the wealthy to park their money, and the latter gives citizens an opportunity to build equity if they desire/have the means to.
Also, there should only he height restrictions on buildings if there's a structural reason for it, not because "it'll ruin the character of the area" or "my views of Central Park will be blocked".
2. Suburbs should be a healthy middle ground between densely developed and suburban sprawl. Living in houses the size of a box isn't appealing, but neither are mcmansions that are 15-20 minutes to the nearest retail center. The concept of strip malls and office parks should be completely scrapped in favor of walkable town centers with multi level parking garages on the perimeters. These town centers should be mixed use, so that people have plenty of options to work, shop, entertain themselves, dine, etc within a reasonable distance from their homes. The town center layout promotes a sense of community and socializing. Suburban towns should have a size limit, and each town should have a light rail station that runs alongside the main road/highway so citizens can easily commute between towns and to the city center without traffic congestion.
When a town becomes fully developed, rather than progressively building smaller and smaller houses to increase density, a new town should be built at the adjacent free land with its own town center. This results in the hub and spoke model of suburb towns that are mini cities surrounding the main urban core, rather than sprawled bedroom communities that have no economy of their own.
3. Between each city should be a low cost and high speed transit option like a maglev or Hyperloop, so that citizens have the option to live in neighboring cities and commute to work in a reasonable amount of time.
4. Zoning should be designed to quickly and easily adapt to growing cities, so that what is zoned as suburban can change to urban as a city grows, and the perimeter of suburbs would grow to account for that. This would occur to a certain limit, and when a city reaches a max size where sprawl is a problem, a new planned city must be built in an optimal place in the state to start the cycle all over again.
In addition to underground subway systems for urban cores and light rail for suburbs, there should be uber style shared car/bus services to fill in the gaps.
As for energy, there should be a heavy emphasis on wind, solar, and nuclear.
The role of regulations should be quality of life protection, not special interests. That means a reasonable minimum square footage for apartments and houses depending on the number of bedrooms, but not a limit on tower heights.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...
Sure, there might be a few -- a very small few -- bona-fide brown zones here and there that are virtually depopulated and where one can more or less from scratch. But by and large, and realistically speaking, the real question is how to redesign and rethinking existing cities. Which conceptually speaking is a much harder question.
The other elephant in the room is the inevitability of massive forced dislocations of existing populations in these "failed" urban areas (or so they will be declared) -- perhaps on a scale never seen before (that is, outside of modern China or the early decades of the Soviet Union). And BTW, there's no getting around the term "forced" here -- no matter how you try to incentivize it, some people just aren't gonna want to uproot themselves (and destroy the organic connections they have made with others in their "failed" or "poorly optimized" communities) for the sake your grand vision, slide decks and TED talks.
It's either that -- or build out in the jungle somewhere. But of course (with the earnest suport of a certain very famous YC board member) we've been down that route already:
Consider Astana (Kazakhstan), Ordos (China), Shenzhen (China).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astana
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City
Not to mention the... ironic outcomes of some of these spectacular initiatives:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-18646243
Aside from the environmental issues, and the fact that not too many people would be crazy about living there -- what about the generations-old farm families who just... don't want to sell? At any price?
Which is what I meant about there being few places of significant scale (aside from protected wilderness areas that ought to remain as such) that are genuinely "empty."
I suppose if Silicon Valley types like YCombinator who invest the money, and Google (Larry Page regularly talks about Google building a city) who is a large industry were to go forth on one of these model city type projects, the initial draw would be those exact things. If Google wanted a model city to work, Google should ensure that Google is the first business to move a large portion of it's workforce there with major incentives for people to do so. People serving that initial seed workforce other services would follow.
A new city would be founded much the way they did in the old days: Company towns.
Which aren't ringed by (and hence, downwind from) mega-ranches? Or correctional facilities? Which have access to adequate water resources (already heavily constrained in many of these areas) to support massive human settlements? And close enough to lakes, parks, and other attractions so that people would actually... want to live there?
Not so many.
And the genuinely fallow areas which do exist should probably be protected as such, and/or restored further to their pre-cultivation state.
(And the amount of farmland we're talking about, both for new cities and for sprawl, is small as a fraction of total farmland.)
This idea of building a brand new city is just stupid.