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:
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.
> 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.
>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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
<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. :-)
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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. :)
"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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
- 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)
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.
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).
> 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]
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
"How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?"
If you give arbitrary power to those who enforce the rules, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. If you don't value predictability and consistency of enforcement, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. In fact, the rules can fit onto one page. The Ten Commandments are pretty short.
However, if you want to have a predictable body of law administered fairly, it's going to take a lot more than 100 pages. Even the Ten Commandments aren't that simple when it's time for practical application. You can simply decide on a case-by-case basis and not write down what you do, and then it will fit in 100 pages. But if you give notice to others about what your decisions are, and you are bound by previous decisions...well, that sounds a lot like a common-law system. Decisions in such a system are going to exceed 100 pages.
These things aren't as simple as it seems...there are good reasons why the Supreme Court once considered what it meant to "use" a firearm.
I am of the opposite view; if the people do not know and understand the rules, then then they cannot be expected to abide by them. There are so many criminal, civil, and regulatory laws that the people could not possibly be expected to know, that the system is unfair. Lawyers will often say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but that is a manifestly unreasonable doctrine when even the regulators, legislators, and prosecutors have no idea of how many laws there are, and what is illegal.
My view is that there should be two classes in grade 10; one on criminal law, and one on civil, and the laws should never be more complex or more numerous than can be explained to a 15 year-old in those two semesters.
I think most people would agree that using a firearm is shooting it, but that problem would easily be solved by changing the word to "discharging" it.
No, pointing any firearm at a clerk would be assault (with a weapon), whether or not it was loaded. If I told you that I went to a shooting range and used my gun, what would you think? That I'd pointed it at stuff? If I said that I went out onto the street and used my rifle, you would not surmise that I had looked over the iron sights.
What if you take your rifle and use it to beat someone upside the head? Is that using it?
The case in question concerned someone who used the firearm to exchange it for drugs. Is that "use"? The Court said yes, with dissenters.
The point is that these sorts of questions crop up all the time even with well-drafted rules and regulations. So courts have decisions...and they write them down. So legislators make the statutes more detailed...and they write them down. So administrators make regulations and interpretations...and they write them down. The only way to cut it to "100 pages" is to stop writing things down, which leads to law that is arbitrary and inequitable.
Those are mostly cases of the courts trying to interpret laws in creative ways to reach conclusions they like. Cases like Bond and Yates prove that many prosecutors are willing to stretch laws, and get many courts to agree with those broad interpretations of the law.[1][2] My view is that they should read the laws more strictly.
Do you expect the average citizen to have read all the civil and criminal laws of your state and country, in addition to all the opinions by appelate courts? If the answer to that is no, then you should not expect that citizen to abide by a body of law of which they are unaware. You might as well write the laws in secret and hide them from the people, because the current volume of law is equivalent to obfuscation.
Would saying you'd go home, and come back with your firearm still be using it? What about threatening to go buy a firearm? How about saying you once went to a shooting range and shot a firearm? Telling a story about going hunting with a gun? Talking about an episode of "How it's Made" where they made a firearm?
Your comment is ridiculous to the point of lunacy. And it's far too far removed from the subject matter for you to try to claim some argument ad absurdum crap. The fact of the matter is that, in that situation, you still had the gun pointed in someone's face.
I believe that most (all?) laws refer to such behavior as assault 'with a weapon' or 'with a firearm'. Google auto-corrects 'assault using a firearm' to 'assault with a firearm'.
It's complex because there are many, many edge cases in laws. And not all of them are codified, but many are discovered after the fact, and so court rulings become part of the law.
I disagree. If you site the city in the US, you can use the existing governance models. Most of the what YC wants to do can be done with local zoning ordinances (tied together with restricted deeds or community lands trusts/co-ops), with the populace (hypothetically made up of citizens who are conducive to this experiment) voting at the local city government level.
This is not new territory. They're building a master planned community (with what you might consider an HOA on steroids), and based on their requirements, I think they going to do an incredible job compared to your average real estate developer.
Local zoning ordinances don't fit in 100 pages. The huge body of real estate law that is necessary to give force to restricted deeds doesn't fit in 100 pages.
Maybe they mean their 100 pages looks something like "The Law of the City of Newcity is identical to the Law of Dallas, with the following changes:"? Well, the law of Dallas does not fit in 100 pages.
Law is complicated because we have built a complicated society. This cannot be willed away by talking about 100 pages.
I don't disagree, but HN can merely add to existing law with their self-built city; they're not going to be able to negate existing country/state/province law, so why would they need to fit all law within 100 pages?
Find the locality that already meets your needs closest, iterate from there.
I wonder if it would be feasible to train a neural network on a large corpus of test cases where legality/illegality have already been defined, then release this neural network to the public. Sure, the process will be opaque, but it will be consistent between different users, and answers can be sought almost immediately with little to no costs. In many cases, an immediate straight up no is more valuable than a maybe suspended over months or years.
It could be 100 pages if you start from scratch with a permissive development plan... (from a city standpoint).
Issues such as criminal law, state and federal taxation, etc are outside the purvue of this discussion (and of the 100 page limit) since YCR is speaking of a _city_, likely within the US.
The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is because that is where the jobs are.
This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you imagine two or three San Francisco tech companies all uprooting at once to a brand new city, where costs might be half the cost in San Francisco? And at the same time, maybe you could convince a couple other big tech companies to open satellite offices in the new city. To get more economic diversity, perhaps the startup-city could also buy up established, small-scale manufactures and move them to the city. Still -- these kind of moves would be very, very hard, as it would be very difficult and risky to try to uproot enough employees to actually make the move successful.
Any other ideas for how the economy could be bootstrapped?
Build a top-notch research university and convince a dozen of the smartest professors and a few independently-wealthy angel investors to move there, and you'll soon have a city. Because where top professors go, students will go. Where you have smart & ambitious students and adventurous money, you'll have startups. Where you have startups, you'll get jobs. And where you get jobs, you'll get cities.
But it could probably apply to other cities. I've read that Bordeaux was somewhat transformed via university. Other lively and attractive towns are often considered college/uni towns.
They attract nightlife and breakfast spots. And businesses that support those (accountants, cleaners, etc). I think interesting and lively socialising/dining would be a key consideration for me if I were to move to a smaller city.
I thought this wasn't a "libertarian utopia for techies?"
When you look at how ordinary people choose a city to live in, the most important variable is who else gets to live there. Everything else is a rounding error.
Boulder, Colorado is a beautiful little city. Its population is roughly the same as that of West Point, Liberia. Compare a city with the legislation and architecture of West Point, but the population of Boulder, to a city with the legislation and architecture of Boulder, and the population of West Point. Which would you rather live in?
When you treat human beings as generic, interchangeable parts, you're missing the first lesson of Christopher Alexander's approach: design real solutions for real people. You probably wouldn't fund a YC company that assumed the world consisted of 6 billion interchangeable customers.
This is a key insight. So many want to talk about rules and architecture, but habits outweigh everything else. When I lived in Singapore a long time ago, it was impossible to get off the subway during busy times, because of the solid mass of humanity who were trying to get in the door before anyone else got out. When I visited later, it was easy, because in the interim they had passed a law about where you have to stand while waiting. I've lived in lots of other cities with subways, and none of them needed that law, because the people there were not in the habit of being morons on the subway.
Problem with moving startups is that they are more fragile, and need every edge to beat out their peers. So if two startups are competing, and startup A is in the middle of nowhere, and startup B is connected to a pool of talent, advice, potential early customers, early adopters, and investors, then startup B has a huge advantage. That was PG's main reasoning for why YC startups should all move to the valley, right?
That said -- perhaps you guys have the brand and connections now where you could nurture the talent/advice/investment ecosystem in an entirely new location. If so, that could be a really great thing.
I'd be interested to see a large group of remote workers move to a small town and try to build a community. You don't have to move the entire company to these places, only some of the people at each company.
Small towns frequently offer tax incentives for manufacturing / government contracts. The same thing could be provided for those working remotely. It seems absurd but I think it could work. Two examples:
- Local/state tax credits for remote workers that live in a given area for > 2 years
- Subsidized loans for remote workers that decide to buy property
It might be considered unfair by the existing population, but the workers would provide a major jolt to local economies. One would assume that service industries would build up around them, in turn creating jobs.
The point about transit to other big cities is another interesting possibility, and I could imagine that as a path to bootstrap a city's own economy. If this hypothetical new city was ~30 min from somewhere like downtown SF or the Google campus via a high speed rail (admittedly a huge "if", given the poor track record of getting high speed rail or really any new rails built in the US in a reasonable timeframe), I think you could get a lot of people to move there for cheaper housing and commute to work. Then you could (somewhat simultaneously) get restauarants, bars, grocery stores, a hardware store, etc. to open in the new city to serve the new residents.
Once there are a lot of people living there (and, importantly, the area is widely accepted as cool and up-and-coming), startups and other companies would have incentives to move there or open offices there.
This basic process seems to have played out in places like downtown Oakland and in DUMBO and Greenpoint in Brooklyn in recent years. But Brooklyn and Oakland both have their own rich histories and existing neighborhoods and economies, which keeps them from evolving quickly, and big changes can cause big problems like gentrification.
It's definitely a moonshot idea but I can imagine this process being even more successful, and avoiding some of the biggest drawbacks, in a new city.
You build housing and commercial stores at time. Have one major transit line into some major city.
The stores, you get department stores and the like. Lower rent than downtown but relatively easy access. Maybe one parking silo for people who come via car. Make it nice.
The housing will slowly fill because of the transit line, rent could be much cheaper than downtown.
Office developers will at one point just put the offices in the nice area.
This is the strategy used by rail companies in the greater Tokyo area since the beginning of time and it works great. Giant shopping centers with good mass transit connections will get a lot of people on weekends (even if it's at the end of a line). Walkable housing nearby. Etc
If anything I prefer more companies to move to SF and Oakland from SV and create more awareness around solving homelessness and transit first development. I am really happy how Twitter & co transformed Tenderloin. Western Waterfront and Oakland is SF's future, Central Subway (if its extended to F.Warf) is going make it pretty easy to get to Mission Bay/Dogpatch from other parts of the city.. We need a big tech company in Hunters Point and extend the T line all the way down to HP.. More companies need to move to Oakland and push for the second BART tube..
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!)
Perhaps this is just me, but I just don't like cities.
I agree that the things listed in this article need fixing, but I also feel like they're missing the point.
I grew up in a small college town (in a house), but have spent most of my adult life living in cities (in appartments). Somehow, those cities have never felt like home to me. I've always felt like I was missing something. Privacy is not quite the right word. Perhaps solitude.
Growing up, I could easily find space to be alone (and I mean, truly alone) . In my current city, there is literally no way to do that. My appartment is cramped, and low sound isolation means I can hear the neighbors. If I go outside to the park, there is approximately a person per couple thousand square meters (and the noise carries further). If I go to a coffee shop or other public place, it's even more crowded. I can go to the mountains, but it's about an hour by car to get there, and even then there are people around. (Unsurprisingly, the further I have to go, the less likely I am to do it on a regular basis.) This inability to have space has lead to a sort of mild chronic anxiety. Suffice it to say, I don't like cities, but I'm stuck where I am for other reasons.
So I can't exactly say I'm eager for even more population density. Some of the problems above could possibly be mitigated (e.g. better sound isolation), but the broader issues of how much personal space is really necessary just seems like it's not on people's radars. Is this just not an issue for other people? Am I crazy?
I hope that any discussion of better cities includes this as a component.
I grew up in suburbia, as a result I hate commuting as its just such a waste of time. I love the mountains and spent a few year living in fairly small towns. But there are no jobs there (for a techie, and remote working is hard to find), and night life is limited. Now in a dense city and I have tons of options for going out, but like you say no space, and a hassle to do any outdoor sports in comparison.
Think about it this way: in an area with a given population, raising the population density of a subset of that area lowers it somewhere else, and you can live in that somewhere else.
That being said, better sound insulation in walls, windows, ceilings and floors is absolutely necessary in most cities, and that is where regulations should focus on (with limited or no grandfathering), not setbacks and heights.
If you move somewhere up in the mountains and never hear another person, can you still get a job? They're focusing on cities as economically productive spaces, not just nice places to retire to.
Also, the carbon footprint of living by yourself is much higher since you still need to travel to further-away places and get goods delivered.
"So I can't exactly say I'm eager for even more population density. Some of the problems above could possibly be mitigated (e.g. better sound isolation), but the broader issues of how much personal space is really necessary just seems like it's not on people's radars. Is this just not an issue for other people? Am I crazy?"
A village is a different thing than a city. A village solves different problems and provides different things.
You're not crazy for preferring a village.
VIHKAL: Aspen, Colorado ... Coronado Island, California ... Calistoga, California ... Davos, CH ... Salares, Andalucia ...
I like how Y Combinator takes classical sociological questions, and they pretend to look for the solution. They seem to have a "final boss" approach to social science...
Aren't urbanists, sociologists and architects working exactly on the same questions since forever? The idea that a new study can find a new “disruptive” solution is naive at best, or dangerous at worst. But, of course, I welcome more money to social science. Those questions are well worth study...
Yeah, I would think that the first step would be to do a survey of existing literature. Might take a while. It's a worthwhile endeavor, but definitely a difficult one.
1. Free-for-all, mixed zoning. You own the land, build whatever you want as long as it's not a munitions factory (Most of Russia, Kazakhstan)
2. Market driven, privatized public transit (Most of Eastern Europe)
3. Small city blocks that let throught traffic.
4. Market controlled access to distric heating/cooling (Yakutsk an extreme example of privatized district level utilities)
5. Higher standards for building's energy efficiency (adopted across the former Soviet block)
6. Learn how to build decent "serially produced" housing for cheap (Ekaterinburg)
7. More traffic light controlled "turn right on red" signals - an easy way to increase traffic thoughtput by double digits (former Soviet block countries)
Asia:
1. learn how to build cities that are dense, but still livable (Hongkong, Singapore, Macau, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Tokyo)
2. Better construction technology and materials. MgO board, light/cellular concretes, thermal stops in slabs, automated, computerized armature prefabrication, etc (Most of People Republic if China, South Korea, Russian Far East)
3. Bus rapid transit, and how to make cheap public transport really work (Guangzhou)
4. Traffic laws that are two-wheeler friendly (Taipei, whole of Japan)
5. Public daycare and early primary education (Tokyo)
6. "Public housing for regular people" (Hongkong, Singapore)
7. Incentivize people to buy smaller cars, or use transit (Tokyo)
8. Double deck, or multi leve streets (Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chicago)
In the majority of intersections that I've driven (in the midwest) with no right turn on red, there is an obvious obstruction to see fast moving cars passing through the intersection.
Also, in some areas with many one-way streets it is legal to make a left-turn on red from one one-way street to another.
I don't know what item #2 means (armature prefabrication?) but Singapore is an ideal Asian city. Especially #6—Singapore is so proud of their public housing that they included an image of an HDB building on their $10 bill.
When the armature for the building is being prefabricated with a milimetre level precision by a CNC metalworking machine, and than assembled on site like lego. This is to minimize the amount of on-site metalwork
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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It is a mistake to assume that because cities were the most efficient way to organize people in the past, they will continue to be so in the future. Given the trend towards remote work, socialization and shopping, there is a lot less of a need for density.
Instead of asking "how can we make the city of the future" we should instead be asking "how can we create a habitats for humans that promote happiness, health, harmony, and do so in a way that is economically and ecologically sustainable."
I believe that people are happier when they have a sense of connection and belonging in their community. Cities discourage this.
I believe people are happier in environments that feel more natural and alive. Cities discourage this too.
I believe people are happier when they have a sense of personal space and privacy. Another mark against cities.
Cities make efficient use of space, density lets you produce buildings cheaply in terms of living units/dollar, and they are more efficient in terms of distributing goods and services. I believe that alternative building techniques can mitigate much of the cost of reduced density. I also believe that by integrating permaculture based agriculture into the landscape design you can mitigate some of the efficiency losses in terms of distributing the most important good - food. You could further reduce the distributional inefficiency using a system of neighborhood based co-ops - I'm sure people would adapt to quite easily to the reduced selection of snacks and processed food.
> I believe that people are happier when they have a sense of connection and belonging in their community. Cities discourage this.
> I believe people are happier in environments that feel more natural and alive. Cities discourage this too.
> I believe people are happier when they have a sense of personal space and privacy. Another mark against cities.
I strongly disagree. I grew up in a rural area with the nearest neighbor a quarter mile away and there was just no one around. There was no community to speak of (at least that I felt). I felt very disconnected as a teenager and was basically trapped until I turned 16 and got my driver's license.
I now live in a major, walkable city and much prefer it. There are universities, the arts, amazing restaurants, and all of it is accessible via subway/bus/train (we don't have a car, just use the occasional ZipCar when we need it). For green spaces, we live next to a park. We live on a side street that is very quiet, so no noise pollution issues. Our neighborhood is very residential but is close (a few blocks away) to night life.
All of these issues with cities can be addressed. In many cities they aren't being addressed currently...but they can be.
Natural/alive areas -- parks, and greenery on sidewalks.
Space and privacy-- better materials can be used to filter out more sound, which is the usual big complaint.
Community-- Intentionally building public spaces where people are likely to convene and meet, hold events, and even shop is good for both business and allowing people to get to know each other.
Something that I've always wondered in relation to city design is why it isn't standard for high-rise buildings to be 50% office space and 50% living space. It's one of those things where I assume there must be a good reason why it isn't done, but I've never been able to find one. It seems like such a huge waste of human resources to force people to commute for hours each day, spending money, wasting gas, lost productivity etc.
Zoning regulations that separated hazardous or noisy manufacturing from housing make sense, but for office work, I can't see why there is a need to keep it separate.
A few core reasons (im an urban designer and deal with this sort of thing fairly regularly)
Residential and modern office typically have very different floorplate requirements. So often dont sit comforatably over each other.
Mixing residential and commercial tends to make building operation an issue - who pays or chooses what to spend on when there are building wide issues (leaks, structure, lifts, noise complaints, etc)? What happens when the office owner wants a complete refurb? Office owners traditionally have liked to retain ownership to allow demolition and reconstruction in after 40 years or so.
Many high grade offices tend to be picky and not like looking out the window at peoples laundry in the opposite building. Nor have the lobby of low cost apartment housing in the side of the same building.
Adding more levels isnt always an economic thing to do for developers since time in construction (and hence time the developer has borrowed money but not recieved payments) is a key issue.
At a strategic level often true 'office cores' can be constrained and need to be protected from erosion.
Some of this could be alleviated by just eliminating offices where possible. The entire team of software developers I work with is 100% remote, in fact, the vast majority of our production workers (billers and medical coders) is also remote. It's a huge benefit to both the employees and the company, no more commute and the ability to spend time with your family on your breaks, and the company doesn't waste money on office space that isn't even being used 50% of the day.
I understand there are still times where an office is necessary, and in fact we are looking at getting one here in Boise where the majority of our team is located, but it's more of a small space for meetings, holding our lab gear, etc.
I've spent too many hours day dreaming about building a city from scratch in the middle of the country. An ideal spot would be around Wilson Lake in Kansas. It is almost equidistant from Denver, Oklahoma City (with a straight shot to Dallas) and Kansas City right in that sweet spot where high speed rail is more attractive than air travel. Bonus: there isn't an existing city there with existing governance.
I've always thought that if you are building a city from scratch, founding a University would be a great way to start. If you found it with strong programs in any or all of "architecture, ecology, economics, politics, technology, urban planning" then you get a major draw in that people studying these areas would be able to be instrumental in implementing them in a real way. When people are going to University is also one of the major pivot points in people's lives when they are willing to relocate.
Kansas State University isn't far from Wilson Lake, and it hasn't happened there. I'm hoping that rail technology will keep improving until the Great Plains as they actually exist will be in the "sweet spot". It wouldn't have to be as fast as air travel, but if travelling from KC to Denver were 3 hours rather than over 8, we'd live in a different country.
I'm not suggesting that TSA should just get worse and worse until air travel takes as long as train travel.
I want to believe in this, but I can't help feeling cynical--likening the results with that of privatization of prisons in the US.
Red-Light Cameras that infest my city were sold to public by claiming they would increase public safety, but instead are just another way for the city to generate revenue, much of which likely goes back to the camera builders.
It's hard to imagine a very for-profit entity like YC having an impact on city planning without ultimately driving towards a monetary return on investment.
For me cities with great public transportation are key.
New York still has a lot of cars, but the subway system is quite extensive. Portland, OR has one of the best bus systems I have seen. I wish they had more light rails than they do. When I was last there they were just completing the second one.
Paris has a great subway system that is very clean, and their roads are very walk able.
Montreal and Toronto have great systems.
I think a cities climate is always important to consider. If you want to have bike paths, but you get a ton of snow in the winter, how do you deal with that? At my university up in Rochester NY we had tunnels under ground connecting the buildings. This helped a lot with the brutal winters.
IMO Toronto's system is not so great, especially for a city its size. A city that size (especially one with as much congestion!) should have a comprehensive subway system (see Barcelona for a great example), not a measly 2.5 lines.
Sure, downtown the transit is pretty good, but move outside of that, and things aren't all there.
I love streetcars, but since there are too many cars on the road, trying to get around downtown is a joke. That said I take the King which is known for being one of the worst I think. It's faster for me to walk a lot of the time.
I hope we can do better than NYC and Paris for public transportation. Paris's are smelly. NYC haven't been updated in forever.
I'm not trying to be negative, only pointing out there's better. On my short list I'd pick Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Singapore, HK (maybe), even London's is pretty nice compared to Paris. It's clean (at least in my limited experience) and at least for convenience Berlin's is pretty amazing.
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.
Soundproofing. It's a small fraction of building cost, but one that is most often omitted because short term profit is disconnected from long-term utility and benefit.
I've experienced several absolutely miserably loud neighbors. Talk about destroying my potential.
I moved to a house -- way more space than I need -- to get away from it. To end up with neighbors who blasted their car stereos -- think SUB-woofers -- all day long. In an unincorporated community where there was no noise ordinance and the county sheriff left it up to the individuals to sort things out.
Another necessary component: All you "libertarian", laissez faire people need to decide whether you are really, fully behind that idea. In which case, I would have no problem going across the street and putting a slug in each of their heads.
If I'm going to solve a problem, then once and for all.
Otherwise, come up with some effective noise control ordinances -- AND EFFECTIVE, PRO-ACTIVE ENFORCEMENT AND PENALTIES.
So... if you want "new cities" including "denser" living, fix your fucking noise problems.
US houses and apartments seem notoriously poorly insulated when it comes to sound. As you say, its a small extra cost, and it can allow for more people in an area (even having connected townhouses or apartments) without having to deal with neighbor noises. If you can fit 3x the number of houses into a lot and they have good sound insulation, you're producing a lot more revenue from the house sales as well as generating potentially much tax revenue for that area of land (depending on how property taxing is done there)
New development in for example NYC has very strict requirements on how much noise can pass through walls, ceilings and floors. I live in a tower that was just finished in 2015, the floor-to-ceiling windows are double-pane glass (no air gap, looks very thin), rubber mounted rim all around. It's absolutely, completely, silent. I have never heard a single noise from a neighbor either. Open a window, the traffic noise from the street is intense (and messes up the climate control, so no need to do that).
So, it's definitely possible to build densely with great soundproofing, and is now often required by the building code in bigger cities. Of course old stock won't be magically converted, but will also improve with time as they get renovated.
I think the trick to that is to get rid of sprawl. You have a lot of people thinly spread out but still emitting light pollution. Move people in closer to city/town/village centers, out of meandering suburbs, you move the light pollution to centralized locations, and are able to leave more surrounding land for rural uses with little to no light pollution.
Make internet a basic utility, paid through taxes, that requires no activation. I've never had to explicitly pay for water or have it turned on/off when I switch apartments, it would be amazing for internet to be the same.
See Pattern Language/Christopher Alexander for ideas on how to design the physical spaces to work for the people who will be using them, including random passersby.
Put cars lowest on the priority list. To me it feels like you should only need a car to travel between neighborhoods, though there would need to be a solution for elderly/less mobile folks.
Build the city near some beautiful nature, and then put a free public transit line that gets people from the city center to there, fast. I live about a 10 minute drive/30 minute bike ride from a beautiful national park, but I rarely go there because it's not fast and easy to get there.
Subsidize a good amount of small office/storefront space for new businesses. Let people try out ideas for shops and businesses without going into crazy debt just to sign a lease.
Make efficiency/sustainability requirements for building WAY higher than the norm. In many climates, AC/heating isn't actually needed if you invest a bit more in building materials upfront and build intelligently.
Interesting that you mentioned pattern language. My brother is an architecht, I'm into tech. I remember asking him about Alexander / pattern language after reading GoF, et. al. and he hadn't heard of him. He looked into it and was kind of like shrug. Seems Alexander isnt't super mainstream in the architecture community, and his ideas weren't that revolutionary. My read is that he's better know to software engineers than actual architects?
Part of the point of A Pattern Language is that it wasn't revolutionary. The premise is that people have been building buildings for thousands of years, and certain common patterns appear without anyone calling them out specifically. So, Alexander set out to compile a list of all those patterns, and hypothesize about the problems they solve and why that particular solution is preferable to the alternatives.
To someone who is trying to make an artistic statement with their buildings, A Pattern Language might be uninteresting, since his advice is essentially the architectural equivalent of composing music in a major key according to traditional rules of harmony. If that's what you want to do, that's great, but if you want to make something deliberately dissonant or challenge traditional notions, it's not so helpful.
It's also worth noting that Alexander has some very strong opinions about things, and (just like any other area of human endeavor) there are architects who disagree with him.
I've heard of his books being required reading in some architecture courses, and I've heard many architects don't care as you said.
Whether or not his ideas were revolutionary, just going on the way new developments in my city are built, they could really stand to take a page out of his book. Everything is just a big rectangular box plopped down on a rectangular grid with ugly materials. I assume it's all optimized for cost. So right now I don't have much respect for the architecture community.
Oh, and subsidize coffee houses in the Austrian style. Don't expect private businesses to create the kind of places that create a sense of community in cities and facilitate chance interactions between different groups of people.
Understandably, I'm sure there will be a lot of focus on physical and transport infrastructure. I think it would be worth also looking into ways to transform the social infrastructure of a city.
I'm sure most people would agree that cities tend to bring a certain degree of isolation. Once upon a time people would know everyone in their town, but in a large city today it's pretty rare to even know your neighbours.
Of course, in the year 20x6 we have lots of social infrastructure, but mostly it starts with an assumption that you want to choose who you interact with. But what if you shouldn't always choose? In the wake of the Brexit some commentators have rightly asked "how didn't I know anybody voting leave?"
For better or worse, we are stuck in proximity to a certain number of people, maybe people quite different to us. In cities, we tend to ignore that as much as we can, and our social tools follow suit. Could we build new ones that instead embrace this restriction and turn it into a good thing? Could we bring a sense of local community back to our cities? Could we build slightly-out-of-your-comfort-zone-as-a-service and pierce the filter bubble at least a little?
I'm rather dismal on the ability for city planning to positively affect communities - or to even work as planned in the first place. Look at the original grid plan for Philadelphia to see what I mean.
I think the "know your neighbors" problem is a lot bigger than city planning. It has a lot to do with our society itself. For example, it is assumed in America that one must eventually own their own home to achieve the "American Dream." The implication is that if one just has a house, a car, and a job that pays well, that person doesn't even need other people. They can get all their entertainment from the Internet and all of their food and other goods delivered. It is an efficient system, but it lacks heart. A change in city design will only scratch the surface of the isolating world we live in.
Yes, thank you. I moved from Chicagoish midwest to central Kentucky two years ago, and everyday I still experience cultural shock at the overall compassion and friendliness of most people here. True community-based values and socioeconomic success start with human goodness toward one another, not statistical or engineering research.
One thing that really needs to be addressed is how to retrofit the glut of car-centric developments designed in the late 20th century, to better conform with the growing sense of value we have in walkable communities today. Navigating the minefield of local zoning politics to try and convert car-centric stripmall mcmansion suburbs into tighter village-like communities will be an enduring puzzle in America at least.
There's also an interesting question in what happens when we cluster too many people into one city based around talent markets for knowledge work.
The Brexit vote in England may well be partially the result of the fact that the younger workforce in the UK was all stuffed into London due to the high concentration of knowledge work employers there, preventing newer ideas and values from being evenly applied across more of the country. You see the same thing happening in the USA, with near total dominance of one political ideology in the larger coastal cities and dominance of the other in places further afield. We're seeing a reversion to city-states in this regard, and with the distributed nature of knowledge work, you'd expect to see the opposite happening...
With distributed knowledge work and freedom of movement people want to be around their peers and like minded than the opposite. Thus they flood liberal cities.
I don't want to be too negative since it's an admirable goal, but I can't help but feel like Gall's Law applies here. I suspect it's not really possible to design a great city.
Consider Brasília for instance, it was designed from the top down, and it certainly some interesting properties. Being able to walk in a mostly straight line from arbitrary point A to point B is something I enjoyed about living there. And the traffic flow control is pretty interesting and worked pretty well for a long time. However today the congestion is bad, and the design of the major landmarks is pedestrian hostile.
Obviously we can improve on all the shortcomings of a city designed 60 years ago, but in designing a city today I suspect we would just create an entirely new rash of problems that were difficult to solve. Also consider that Brasília had a raison d'etre that can't be matched without political buy-in at the highest level. Again, I don't mean to entirely dismiss the idea, but I suspect that solving problems of existing cities will probably lead to better long-term results than trying to go off to a literal green field.
> but I suspect that solving problems of existing cities will probably lead to better long-term results
Isn't this what local governments are all perpetually trying to do in every city?
The cool thing about this YC initiative is that it is considering such a drastic green-field approach. It may turn out not to work, but it seems worth trying when you look at how poorly the alternative often works (e.g. the gridlock in SF over housing).
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.
I'm sure people have different opinions on this but one thing I like is variety and grunge. I don't really know how to explain it. I want more SF's Valencia between 16th and 18th and less Westfield foodcourt's. I want more Golden Gai in Tokyo and less Roppongi Hills.
I used to want the Jetson's or Disney's Epcot. Now I want 150 tiny bars and restaurants each one holding no more than 20-30 people at best (generally). Less big box stores and less chains (not zero just less) and more boutiques / specialty shops and restaurants
Of course arguably the general public doesn't want that though. If they did the USA wouldn't be 95% big box shopping centers and 95% giant chain restaurants.
I've wondered how to build for that. Tokyo, where I spent most of my time, is having lots of older interesting neighborhoods torn down and replaced by tall glass buildings with at best a generic shopping center at the bottom. The architecture might be ok but the feel is gone and ends up feeling cold and sterile. I get the old places are often fire traps or earthquake hazards but I just wonder if there's a way to design the new places to some how capture the essence of what it was before the change.
In all seriousness, both density, various older styles of architecture, and grime/decay/gunge/whatever make for more salient visually-surroundings. Why have upper-class europians flocked to Venice for hundreds of years[1]?
This is a fantastic idea, I would expect no less from YC.
A couple of thoughts I have off the top of my head:
1. Design with hyper-loop in mind from day one.
2. Easy access right of way for utilities, most cities bury everything which is silly, there should be an easily accessed common right of way so that fiber, water sewer etc. can be easily accessed for upgrades or repair without having to dig up the streets.
3. Consider driverless cars only, and electric only. Include bicycle or non-car personal vehicle pass ways that are safe.
4. Plan for green spaces with point source food production in mind.
5. Design in space for point source energy production, solar etc.
Most of these are pretty obvious. The other thing that I have thought about is the parallels to networks, if you had a high speed low energy use hyper-loop that could function like a ring topology with small low rise communities around the ring. For quality of life a lot of people enjoy the small community feel (think palo alto) I live in Seattle in a small sub-community (Kirkland) that has that walk around the neighborhood to all services feel to it and I feel that it adds a lot to my quality of life.
> Easy access right of way for utilities, most cities bury everything which is silly, there should be an easily accessed common right of way so that fiber, water sewer etc. can be easily accessed for upgrades or repair without having to dig up the streets.
For cable/fiber/telephone/power, overhead was common, though burying is replacing it.
But what's the alternative to burying for water and sewer? I suppose in principle you could go overhead with that, too, but that seems...unappealing in a wide number of reasons.
This is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot idea. First of all, it legitimizes the kind of BS Mormon Utopia plan that [the NewVistas project is trying to accomplish in VT and Provo, UT](http://vtdigger.org/2016/06/19/residents/). It also involves massive reappropriation of the existing value populations have invested in the land. There's also no good metric for land service value other than feedback from existing stakeholders, which can be volatile in changing circumstances. I won't support a project that will have victims.
People have competing value systems. Communities grow around those value systems as they are constantly negotiated and re-negotiated over time. Asserting that one system of values is better than another is nothing short of authoritarianism.
Britain tried this after WWII, building about 20 "new towns".[1] China is doing it in a big way right now. Building isn't the hard part. The usual problem is a lack of jobs.
Check out the US census population projection for the next 50 years.[2] Population is leveling off, and if immigration is restricted, it will decline. Most of the EU countries, and Japan, are already in population decline. Also see Fig. 6, "Dependency ratios". The US is headed for a situation where 75% of the population is either too old or too young to work. Retirees increase from 23% now to 43% in 2060.
We will need more retirement communities to warehouse old people until they die.
This whole thread has been awesome. One of the things I learned is that Massachusetts just changed its laws to allow grandparents houses to be built within your lot. So grand parents get to live with their family, enjoy the grand kids ,etc. A byproduct is that they may free a lot of houses to be used for younger families.
I think that you inadvertently pointed to a piece of the puzzle that is pretty important, but retirement communities are a problem, not a solution.
The ideal city is habitable to people of all ages. I don't know if you can make it happen with a top down approach, because I think that it is cultural, but in some cultures the old people are involved in the lives of the young. They are active, they assist with childcare, they pass down old recipes, they bring multi-generational families together, etc.
Ushering the old off to separate communities to die sounds pretty miserable.
Disclaimer: I'm (hopefully) going to be old some day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Have you considered revitalizing depressed cities rather than building new ones? There are a lot of once thriving cities that became depressed due to lost industries/jobs. Building out a tech hub and bringing in tech jobs/workers into these cities could bring new life to them.
Maybe YC should talk with the founder of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. (They probably have already for all I know.)
He's investing millions into the old Downtown area of Las Vegas in an effort to transform that part of the city's economy. Not sure how it's turning out. Maybe YC should just add themselves to that effort.
First, let's not go the Brasilia route and construct without human scale in mind. Second, learn from the Chinese megacity projects.
My unproven and likely bad idea would be to promote medium sized cities of medium density which are interconnected but have enough wilderness/farmland to feel separate (in many countries the city and country have abrupt demarcations).
Within each satellite you'd have self sustaining public transit to connect all areas within and a great majority of the built up area is within half mile as the crow flies from a metro station. Encourage mixed use, with the exception of heavy industry which should be segregated. Build with a pedestrian first, assisted mobility second and automobiles last --not that cars would be penalized, just make it easy for walking and transit to be people's first consideration. Build high speed links between the satellites (rail and car).
Don't build these things in flood zones or desert areas which require more costs.
I have a feeling these ideas won't be popular but ...
On top of wanting an exciting city with affordable housing and good public transportation. I want to live in a city where I feel safe. Safe from physical harm, safe from theft, safe from bad police, safe from being spied on, safe to participate in "quirky" things.
Tokyo is partly that city. I can go to strange fetish clubs, burlesque, punk rock, cosplay, etc and no one bats an eye. But I'm unlikely to get stabbed, unlikely to be pick pocketed, if I drop my wallet I'm likely to get it back with all my money. If I go to a cafe/coffee-shop I can leave my wallet/computer on a table for 10-15 minutes and expect to to be there when I get back.
Why does it feel like every other city outside Japan except maybe Singapore I can't do that?
I'm in Berlin right now and I love the variety of things going on but I hate that a high percentage of people destroy the commons. Street Art Yay! Tagging Boo! Broken glass everywhere where people threw their beer bottles. Pick pockets all over. People trying to steal your bags right out from under you.
In LA/SF/NYC and Berlin almost all public restrooms for men are some level of destroyed.
How do you get people to care about the commons and stop destroying things just to be dicks?
Please figure out how to design that kind of city.
I understand that Tokyo is like that in large part because of very strict laws against actions like what you describe. Turns out very strict punishment is a good deterrence, but some might argue that the ends do not justify the means. There's no free lunch.
It's possible it's strict laws but I doubt it. It seems cultural. People in the west actually enjoy destroying things and being dicks for fun. Prank calls, ordering pizzas for strangers is practically a rite of passage. Nearly every teen movie has some segment about doing something bad and getting away with it (bad = destruction of someone else's property). Tagging is also seen as a rite of passage. Kicking in bathroom doors. Flushing with your shoes. Clogging toilets with paper is all seen as something that's supposed to be fun to do. Buying dresses, wearing them and taking them back is yet another rite of passage. No one considers that someone has to pay for that stuff. That by doing any of those things you're make the place you live a worse place.
> the ends do not justify the means. There's no free lunch.
Good question. Quite a few people seem to be, actually. Mark Lutter is one at http://freecitiesinitiative.com/. Patri Friedman, perhaps the most famous supporter of idea, attempted to start a charter city in Honduras but the Honduran government changed its mind (https://athousandnations.com/2012/10/31/future-cities-develo...). The Seasteading Institute, cofounded by Friedman, was once backed by Peter Thiel.
With many people having the ability now to work remotely, I've seen a big influx into small to mid-sized cities in the last decade. Anecdotally, I moved to Charleston, SC five years ago and since I've been here, I've seen a huge influx of people moving here for quality of life reasons. Charleston is one of the fastest growing cities in the US for this reason. There are opportunities here as well, with larger companies like Boeing shifting a lot of their operations here as well, but more than anything, I think people want to be here because it's a place that offers an incredible food and beverage scene, access to beaches, and a city bathed in history and architectural significance. It's bikeable, walkable, and practically every address could be copied onto a postcard. Most importantly, in my opinion, the influx of people here are younger, optimistic, entrepreneurial types and it's so easy to get to know others in town and to feed off that energy. Roll in cheap, fast direct flights ($100-200 round trip) to almost any northern city (DC, NYC, Boston) and that really adds to accessibility from other cities. I've been doorstep to doorstep from Charleston to my friend's apartment in Brooklyn Heights in under 3 hours. </advertisement>
That said, I've lived in quite a few cities and the most important aspect of anywhere I've lived is the type of people I'm comfortable surrounding myself with. I think that's fairly true for anyone who has job mobility. After that everyone places different weight on a host of other factors (access to fast/efficient transport, culture, outdoors activities, sustainable utility supplies, weather, food, demographics, proximity to family, local school quality, etc, etc).
"I've been doorstep to doorstep from Charleston to my friend's apartment in Brooklyn Heights in under 3 hours"
How? Flight is 1 hour 50 minutes (according to Google), and a cab from JFK to BK heights is still 30 minutes if you hit zero traffic. Plus there is a security line to get through at the Charleston end of things.
Even if the universe aligns in your favor I'd be surprised if you hit under 3 hours door to door.
I think a lot of these questions posed have already been answered comprehensively by urban planners. Urban planners understand how to make well crafted urban spaces that work well and make people happy.
The larger issue is that many of these known solutions aren't being implemented due to established NIMBY interests that create an intractable political situation that prevents anything but the status quo.
For example I'd point to how NYC has been transformed for the better by the shift of road space usage from exclusive car use to being more inclusive of cyclists and pedestrians. This was incredibly difficult to implement due to extreme push back from just about everyone. Eventually once people realized it was working for the better opposition started to melt away. Even with this positive example to cite, for many cities basic safety improvements such as separated bike lanes remain incredibly hard to implement due to local and business opposition.
Additionally there are funding issues. This isn't the same country by country, but in Canada at least municipalities don't have a lot of tools to raise revenue and are very poor.
Metro Vancouver had a 10 year plan to dramatically expand rapid transit but it didn't have the money to implement it. The vaguely transit-hostile provincial government wasn't about to help out. The province forced Metro Vancouver into a referendum on a new 0.5 cent sales tax to raise revenue but it was defeated.
Here we have an example where the region's planners completely understand that they need to expand rapid transit to the region to better move people around the region and increase housing affordability, but there aren't the funds available to execute on the idea due to political ideology.
Oh man this is such a hard problem. There are many 'smart cities' built in EMEA region e.g. [1] that just haven't lived up to their hype.
It's tough because we don't yet know what to solve for. We don't understand the nature of city creation, what attracts people, how culture gets formed, how businesses and leisure activities pop-up. We don't know if things we perceive as problems are constraints that make the city thrive in unknown ways. We don't know if there's a significant amount of path dependency and sequencing that's appropriate.
To me, cities feel man-made because they're made of concrete, steel, and other metals. But they're a lot like an organism, competing against other cities and only keeping features which make them continue to thrive.
Super cool topic though and great on YC for opening research on the topic rather than proposing solutions. Best of luck to the team.
I think one of the big problems with cities is how static their layouts can be. Many years from now, I like to imagine that cities will be made of movable parts that can be rearranged throughout the day to take match the changing needs of the people.
For instance -- there's no need for me to sleep in an expensive part of town, but there's also no need for me to be awake while my bedroom is shifted out into the outskirts. This would be something like Bruce Willis' character's apartment in The Fifth Element, but I don't think we have to wait until we're building cities in space to start working on this.
Similarly, if there's a diner that closes after 3PM, why should I ever have to walk past its empty storefront later in the day? The popularity of food trucks is evidence that there is value in being able to move supply around to find the demand and that we can reorganize our cities on a short time-scale. We don't even need to wait for the parts to be self-driving, as nice as that would be.
I think the thing to realize is that there are certain advantages to suburban living: The modern suburban home is what many people consider a mansion in other contexts. A lot of people take a lot of pride in their home's interior and exterior work.
Thus, perhaps the city of the future needs to figure out how to give people space and personality in their dwellings. Living in a shoebox apartment where all one gets to do is pick the wall coverings does not appeal to everyone.
Instead, perhaps it might be better to think about how someone can buy property in 3D? Large empty 3D grid-like structures where someone can build and have a high degree of control over their interior and exterior?
Perhaps even elevated walkways and trains, so people can get around without needing to venture down?
Might sound like something out of sci-fi, but cities really need broader appeal. A lot of people just don't want to move into a building where someone chose everything else for them.
Some options for doing this:
1. Bootstrap an existing "small town" with access to lots of resources. This has advantages, such as potentially existing highway connections, water infrastructure, sewage, school districts, etc. The downside here is that the existing community would have to buy-in, and agree to be part of your experiment. This is not a small feat. Additionally, you need to convince a large group of people to move there.
2. Build from scratch. Here, the biggest problem will likely be building out the infrastructure (such as roads, water treatment, schools, etc.), convincing people to move to the "middle of nowhere", and finding an affordable area that has access to enough clean water, that isn't already somewhat built up. I'm from Arizona, and have driven through much of the state: even as a large Western state with lots of available land, I have a pretty hard time thinking of potential areas that aren't already semi-developed, unless you want to constantly fight surrounding municipalities for water rights.
3. "City within a City". Basically, find an under-developed suburb or area of a major city. In Phoenix, this might be the town of Queen Creek, or if you were OK displacing a multi-generation, poor community in the heart of the metro, Guadalupe. Here, you get all the advantages of the small-town takeover, with the added bonus that your community is still close to a central hub of employment and existing options. The disadvantage is that you now have to deal with regional politics, and face backlash (potentially) for displacing existing residents. You also don't get to define your main roads and police system much (due to county-level planning). But, depending on what you mean by "city", you might be able to grab 2-4 square-mile-blocks that are not yet incorporated into a large city, and start developing almost immediately (as there's already water/electricity access nearby, and there is likely latent local demand for the kind of development you want to build).
Assuming that you can avoid the problems of "old" cities by simply starting out with the right "new" city is like assuming that you can avoid scaling a web application by starting from the very beginning building micro-services. The "new" city that plans for being big will never attract enough people to grow much like businesses that start with micro-services will never be agile enough to find market fit and grow to actually need micro-services.
Money and effort would be better spent looking at and solving the plight of cities that have seen hockey-stick growth. Then you could take those lessons and watch for the next city at the start of a population boom and ensure that it grows in the "right" way.
This is hubris, writ large. A small group of people think they can compile the knowledge and wisdom necessary to build a utopian city that will be all things to all of its inhabitants. Traffic congestion is bad, so let's outlaw cars! Unless they're self-driving! Public transit is awesome! Yay, public transit! Yay, bike paths!
Didn't they try something like this in China already?
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned the South Korean city of Songdo yet, but it's a good example of a built-from-scratch "smart city". Last I heard, the Korean govt was having trouble getting people to move in. Here's an NPR story on it from 2015: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/10/01/444749534/a...
Thanks for that. I'd heard of it a while back but that's a nice update.
I love the final lines of that article:
Brent Ryan, who teaches urban design at MIT, says Songdo proves a universal principle. "There have been a lot of utopian cities in history. And the reason we don't know about a lot of them is that a lot of them have vanished entirely."
The Monocle is a cosmopolitan magazine with short features on just this sort of thing.
Their journalists constantly travel around the world and evaluate schools, public services, transportation etc., publish a yearly top lists of cities etc. They've collected some of their features in books: here's their latest, "How to make a nation": https://monocle.com/film/affairs/monocle-preview-how-to-make...
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.
What's important in a generation where technology is everywhere, is to find the ingredient that actually makes humans intellectually satisfied, happy and productive. The economy and politics of this "system" is secondary to building it in such a way that it nurtures humans' actual well being.
I'd like to see out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to building a system for optimal well being. For instance, are we sure that our common model for a city, where people own housing, and are almost always surrounded by strangers apart from their small group of family/friends, is actually an ingredient for optimal quality of life?
Why not experiment with humans living in structures resembling tribes, which is really what our human intellect evolved into for thousands of years?
Again, in a world where we don't have to worry about issues that we had to worry about in the past (food, shelter, security) and instead we're looking for ways of being intellectually stimulated, I envision group sized sections where people actually live together. The model of european hostels really resonates with me, where strangers actually get to live with one another.
Of course current cities have hostels and have ways for us to live in structures resembling tribes, but the important bit is that we make it part of the culture so that newborns consider this way of living the normality - rather than the normality being to own a house just for you and your family.
> "Why not experiment with humans living in structures resembling tribes, which is really what our human intellect evolved into for thousands of years?"
Most of my waking hours are spent at work, my department is the size of a small tribe, full of small tribe politics. Also the middle managers force the tribes to fight each other gladiator style. This does nothing for the customers or investors, but obviously the leaders get a high out of it because practically all middle managers across the country act that way.
My kids live most of the time in a separate tribe called school. That is one screwed up tribe where they're all the same age and ability and demographic, mostly. Unlike every other tribe they'll ever be a member of. There they are instructed in the fine art of being interchangeable cog laborers on the assembly lines that closed back in my grandpas generation, in other words its pretty much useless other than as extremely expensive babysitting. So yeah Prussian style public school is pretty much designed to maximally suck. But its their legally required tribal membership until they're 18.
The question isn't why can't we LARP artificial pretend clubs and fraternal organizations, but why did they decline in the first place and if the root cause hasn't been fixed why would LARPing bootstrap anything? If the root impediment is eliminated shouldn't those social organizations grow organically, in fact at unpreventable rates?
And yet, there's virtually nothing within reasonable walking distance from my house, and there is no commercially-zoned land nearby that would allow someone to open up a coffee shop/corner store/restaurant/pub/whatever. Literally no community-oriented locations anywhere nearby.
In the summer, it's possible to bike to Safeway, but summer doesn't last all that long and then there's a pile of snow on the ground again.
If they want a seat at the table, they've got to get better at what they do.
It's disingenuous to lay that fully at the feet of urban planners though there's only so much they can do via the tools that local governments provide budget and political support are both limited in a lot of cases. Also just because there's the space provided for commercial spaces to open doesn't guarantee you'd have the coffee shop/corner store/restaurant/pub/whatever you're asking for.
That's a political problem, not an urban planning problem. There is a massive gulf between what academics who study cities say should be done and what can actually be done withing the constraints imposed by politics.
> The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part because their cities don't provide the opportunities and living conditions necessary for success.
> A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential by making better cities.
I don't think cities make it even into the top 10 reasons why people don't realize their full potential.
Here's a small list, out the top of my head:
Depending on were you live, corruption is probably in the top 3 reasons why "people don't realize their potential". Most people don't have the "guts" (or low moral standards) to participate in the corruption games that are required to climb the social ladder.
Then there's the thing called "competition". Once a person realizes his full potential (s)he will want to stay at the top as much as possible and that includes fighting others who try to challenge their dominant position.
Racism, xenophobia and other types of discrimination.
Maybe not as evident in the "western" world, but still a very powerful reason in many parts of the world.
Other reasons include things like politics, poor laws and stupid fiscal policies. In general, these go hand in hand with corruption and everything else.
In my view we don't need more large cities, rather I think the solution is de-centralization and de-urbanization.
Many small high-tech independent "village-sized" cities, self contained and self-sufficient, interconnected with high-speed transport services is the way to go.
New cities normally don't work as expected: cities are like a living organism, they need time to mature. Lots of research was already made on these subjects (most people are not aware of it) and even if some ideas are really good, status quo makes any change very difficult.
By the other hand the knowledge fronteer is still near on building cities in different environments/planets, so IMO, YC should go on that direction instead.
Cities need to be optimized for serendipitous social, intellectual, and cultural encounters between people. Maximize these, and you will have the best of cities.
This means public squares and pedestrian-friendly landscapes, as everyone well knows. This also means housing the homeless. The smell of urine and the general feeling of squalor comprises the bulk of the burden of negative feeling for me in SF.
Reluctantly moved away from the city to a rural college town while my wife is going to vet school and I have come to appreciate the benefits from living in a smaller town and teleworking.
It does seem like a lot of thinking about cities is very one sided. People clearly have an axe to grind with car culture, suburbs and endless commutes which I don't blame them for.
I think to fix how live we have to think beyond cities.
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.
It might be instructive to look at past examples of planned cities that haven't worked out. I'm thinking of the original intent of what became the EPCOT theme park [1], and of the less-than-hoped-for success of Alexander's pattern langauge(s) represented by The Oregon Experiment [2] and its long-term lack of impact on Eugene, OR and architecture in general.
This is a great idea and has potential to help with the problem of overcrowded urban centers.
It is impossible to keep adding people to the same space while giving everybody much room for their money. Trying to cram a generation of millennials into the same area as a wealthy cohort of boomers and rich immigrants predictably makes home prices go up.
All the ways of lowering property prices usually imply killing the economy and putting people out of work. Home prices usually end up going down only because people are made not to be able to afford them. This is incredibly destructive and it only allows more people to live in the same space when they are forced to move in with their parents.
Increasing supply or nudging the new generation to go in areas with more potential for spacial growth not only allows the new community to be built to the image of its own people but building and growing the infrastructure of a new neighborhood or revitalizing a dying town creates jobs for the people that go there. These jobs would be filled by people who can actually afford to live where they work and potentially profit from property value growth with less chance of a bubble pop because prices would not be starting from so high
The best thing governments could do to help with this situation would be to encourage some of the institutions and jobs relevant to new generations to move out of overpriced, overcrowded centers. They could foster jobs creation in centers with more low cost space and less chance of spacial overload. They could maybe move some public jobs there to help jump start the migration. This would also put some downward pressure on the prices in overcrowded places until we reach some kind of equilibrium.
I say stop trying to cram everyone in the same volume. Let the older rich generation keep the expensive quarters they've spent their life building and allow new generations to create our own communities, in our own space, from choices guided guided our own tastes.
Any solution that doesn't help spread jobs out to cheaper less overcrowded regions are going to hit the volumetric limits of the laws of physics eventually.
I have long had a vision for building a new city-state in a relatively unpopulated part of the world and just allowing millions of immigrants to move there (the tough part would obviously be getting the government that owns that territory to go along with it).
Hopefully in 15-20 years, when energy (from solar?) is abundant and cheap, making stuff like water desalination and vertical farming cheap, a place like Western Australia would be inhabitable. That way, you could open the floodgates for ten or hundreds of millions of immigrants to escape oppressive and corrupt regimes and start anew within a liberal democracy. All that cheap labor would make it easy to build out extensive subway lines and high rises.
The biggest problem is making the place sustainable AFTER it's constructed and preventing the sheer emptiness that's plagued China's planned and constructed cities.
The most profound thing I know about cities + public policy:
Google hosted a talk in 2014 by MIT Professor Sandy Pentland called "Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread". His research concludes that our connectivity - free and fast flow of data on networks, people on roads, goods and services, etc. - is our greatest economic and social virtue. His models show - "like a law" - that the more connected we are, the wealthier we are as a society.
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.
(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:
I think the main thing that a city needs to be special is to have strong opinions on city related things, like the design of public spaces and what the cultural identity of the place is. Otherwise, things end up as a generic strip mall sprawl. When a city takes an interest in art and design and a community focuses on expressing the cultural identity of its inhabitants, it can gain an identity and become more than just a collection of people who just happen to live there for economic reasons.
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.
- Prioritise streets for walking / light autonomous electric vehicle use
- Build underground streets or lanes that are designed for an autonomous delivery network. Getting rid of trucks and other large vehicles from the ground level road network will greatly easy congestion
- Zone for indoor / vertical farms for delivery to local stores
- Mix residential and commercial zones to allow for short commute times for residents
- Metro to speed up longer trips within the city
Utopian, yes. Impossible, no.
[Edited for formatting]
Few years ago I visited someone in a suburb of Seoul. He lived in a new, massive apartment complex with dozens of 25-story high rise buildings. What really struck me was the parking situation.
The entire complex does not allow any cars on the surface within the complex. All cars are kept in underground parking lot. This allow more efficient use of land, keeps noise away from residents and real useable green space for residents.
I did not feel like I was in stuck in a concrete jungle at all.
I've been thinking about the transportation issue. Self driving cars may or may not be widely available by the time they are finished. But they could bypass it all just by building sensors into the roads, or just tracks.
You could then have a system of self driving busses that people could order with a smartphone, and then find the most efficient route to get everyone where they want to go. And then you have minimally congested streets that are very pedestrian friendly.
In fact you don't need self driving vehicles to accomplish this even. A human pilot following instructions from a computer that calculates the optimal route. The point is you can get public transportation without the downside of fixed routes.
The world would be better served if you studied how to tweak existing cities to make them more pedestrian-friendly and people focused. They are too car focused.
You should start by reading "How buildings learn." Old buildings that work extremely well typically did not start off as superior. They typically gained value over time as residents added improvements that worked well because they lived there and understood the problem space.
Well, if we're going pie-in-the-sky, my perfect city:
1. Scales traffic by distance from downtown, IE:
a. Autobahn type speeds outside of city limits (90+mph)
b. Expressway speeds connecting major sections of the city with dedicated public transport (45-80mph)
c. Bicycle/small car speeds connecting (15-30mph) local districts
d. Walking to specific destinations within an area
2. Automated solutions for each speed (examples)
a. Dedicated city to city rail. Hyperloop.
b. Express vehicles stopping at major sections running on a loop. Subway, Monorail, Taxi Service.
c. Small, single-person vehicles.
d. Walking or people-mover type vehicles
All moving of people/products would be a matter of scaling up and down within your range. Each range would only allow that class of transport (so, no cars/taxis in a walking area, no walking in an expressway area)
I could probably spend days listing the problems this would solve, but some examples:
1. Practically eliminate pedestrain->traffic interactions that lead to accidents and annoyances
2. Eliminate parking problems
3. Improve general health (walking in local areas) and much less (if any) road-rage type issues
4. Improve product delivery times (assuming we could get distribution networks to work together)
5. Improve the appearance of the city (no roads in/by your parks)
6. Improve the appearance of homes (only sidewalks go to homes!)
7. Improve the mobility/freedom of individuals (no need to buy a car/get a license, simply find the right public transport)
8. Instant tourist attraction as everyone will want to come see/experience this new type of living
Again, I could go on. It seems to me that designing transportation is the primary issue, branching out into all others.
Every time I see someone planning for a greater/better city they always forgot to include room for poor, or at least the not-wealthy people. There is never enough room, resulting in the majority of the population having to live outside the planing bubble and commute in (brasilia). Housing is like chopping firewood in winter: Make however much you think you need, then do that again... twice.
Your spot looks really good, but according to Google it's a "Wildlife area", so politically it's not likely to be easy to get approval to turn into a city.
For me, proximity to Silicon Valley is not a priority. My suggestion is to use land in NW Oregon in the coast range. Most of it is very rugged, but there's some sort-of-flat land in the general vicinity of Saddle Mountain that's currently used to grow lumber. It's close to the beach but far enough not to be in the tsunami zone, and close to highway 26. Water is unlikely to be an issue, and it's close enough to Portland that it's not totally isolated, yet far enough away not be be a suburb.
I think one of the downsides of trying to establish a tech-hub city in the middle of nowhere is that tech hubs tend to have a symbiotic relationship with universities, and the latter are hard to create artificially.
Another good option! I've always wondered why NW Pacific US coast is very underutilized. How is the climate like there? Pretty much the same as Portland?
I agree with you that there needs to be a University to create a tech hub, but I think that's the easiest to take care of if YC and big tech companies are behind this plan.. You can easily convince big name universities to start satellite campuses or even better you can start your own! UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay is a perfect example that you can build a world class research center if you pump enough money to it.
Weather is similar to Portland, but as you get closer to the coast you get less temperature extremes. The coastal mountains do get snow in the winter, though, due to elevation. There's probably more rain.
I think in general people don't build there because it's harder/more expensive to build on hilly terrain, there aren't many jobs in the area, roads are relatively sparse, and though the landscape is beautiful in general, the way it's logged means there's little species diversity and the land always looks like it has a bad haircut.
I'm sure there are hundreds of other plausible sites we could find by spending a little time with Google Maps. Most of them will have something wrong with them, otherwise cities would have been built there already. However, some of the problems may be features in the right context. For instance, hilly terrain might deter real-estate developers from trying to build 100-houses-at-a-time developments and encourage the kind of people who are willing to make the effort to use the geography to their advantage.
From: http://timurtatarshaov.me/it-city.html
Some period of my life I’ve been traveling many times between two cities in Russia and was entertaining myself guessing what city my next seat train travelers are from. And 9 out of 10 I was right.
Explanation is simple if in one city, let’s say fountains are on the every corner and in another they are not, you would be able to spot the difference between those two persons from the different cities even though you don’t know the exact reason(fountains, rocks, rivers, etc.). So every city does have an energy.
Another thing about the nature is a rivers. Water passing through has a huge impact on the people living nearby. Water takes and refreshes the energy. I’ve been living for some time in the city with two small rivers and could spot the difference compared to the city with the wider river. Water refreshes the people taking the entry and in ‘small rivers’ city people were more mean keeping negatives for longer.
Recently I had a conversation with one girl working in the european conferences organization company and she named several cities where events are more common. The reason for that was transportation hub, including air transport connection mostly and roads as well.
So contemporary cities even though they are not tied to goods transportation along the river are connected to the air lines hubs a lot.
So I would state 3 things: nature, transport, history.
There is one good example of the city made by the power of will of one man, city is St. Petersburg, it is a really good example for research. Such thing as a soil was imported to make it possible.
I’m not saying it’s not possible, but saying you should mind milling of things and the only possible way to have it is to have perfect internal sense.
Carfree Cities is a book (and website) that I've really enjoyed and explores the concept of how to design car free cities http://carfree.com.
It approaches the problem from several levels. From how you lay out a city to accommodate mass transit, to street layouts that make living more enjoyable.
This is low-tech, but have we considered surveying a large number of people with these two questions:
- Why are you living in this city/metropolitan area, as opposed to some other city?
- Why are you living in this particular dwelling, as opposed to a different dwelling in the same city?
I hypothesize that most people will perceive objectively positive outcomes as a result of their choice, while objectively negative outcomes as a result of necessity ie. factors external to their free choice. This would imply that the most negatively affected population anywhere is also the least mobile to relocate, for factors that are often, but not solely economical. Many of the non-economic ideas behind "New Cities" won't help these people, albeit some of the infrastructure and public transit proposals would enable them to better participate in the local economy.
I am not sure we can make cities that are great to live in beyond a certain size. I don't know about the US, but in Europe smaller cities (less than one million citizen) do not have the systemic problems than larger cities have.
However, economic activity draws people and companies in, which generates more activity. We end up with over-populated cities like Paris, and the issues that come with them: ever-increasing housing prices, large suburbs, long commutes.
So I wonder if the main issue is really cities, or how to find a way to go from large monolithic cities to several reasonably-sized cities that cooperate. The technologies involved being transportation, remote work tools, etc.
Also, when I think about cities I like in Europe, an interesting point is that they are often built on the seashore (Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Nice...).
This research is a waste of resources unless most basic needs of citizens becomes free as in freedom and price. For that to happen, global retail franchises, as well as the major players in countless other service industries are going to have to be rejected by our newly realized cities. They should be rejected unless they are willing to donate extremely large proceeds and services to the city. If they comply, they still arent allowed to come to our city, but we as citizens will purchase from them online. We will purchase the things we want from them and have them delivered. We wont have to purchase basic needs. They will be provided to us by the corporations who want us as customers. One of endless examples: Im definitely ordering my mega awesome television from walmart, best buy, costco, etc. because they pay for our electricity and daycare.
This is what they should provide us in order to do business with our city:
Energy, water, trash, recycling, food centers, construction materials, police, fire, EDUCATION, housing, healthcare, EDUCATION, farm and agriculture equipment, construction equipment, manufacturing equipment, internet and basic mobile phone service, and housing for newer citizens who dont yet own their residence. Note: everyone should own their place, tax free without the lifelong cruft of mortgage and property value flux. Im serious. If you want us to buy from you, you buy from us, or you give to us. The people will own and run such a new city. Not the corporations that are ruining human values, health, and economies for cities all over this earth. The people will have to have the best hand, and the buy-in to our game is extremely high.
In addition to this concept, we wouldnt have a mayor, chief of police, or other forms of a single person running any one show. Even schools shouldnt have a single Principal, but more like 3 to 5 awesome 'lead educators'.
Totally aside, how do you keep out the drug cartels? How do you instill an attitude of giving a shit about your neighbor? How do you create resources that eliminate the need for acts of crime and violence for less privelaged to 'make it'?
Your vision of anti corporatism will be hard to realize in today's developed world, but this is the exact kind of use of resources that humanity needs. Would you rather YC reinvest their profits into making more money like most business do? Or invest their profits into answering questions about humanity and its potential future that are unanswered?
Also, would you really want our education to be sponsored and paid for by Coca Cola?
If we take into account science fiction, humans could establish a colony on another planet. This would be considered a city and the research could answer some interesting questions. Flying out a bunch of humans in a spaceship that takes multiple generations to reach its destination would be considered a traveling space city. This research could answer some interesting questions.
My so called vision is not based on notions of anti corporatism. It is a method to actually fund such a massive undertaking of a new city, without turning it into a huge shopping mall dystopia owned by the top 1%.
Im sure the research will confirm that its a bad idea to put walmart, mcdonalds, and starbucks on a spaceship. The research will also confirm that if xyz company wants a spot on this (spaceship city?) The price will be the same as in my vision.
To conclude, it is a waste of resources if they dont realize the need for distributed power, wealth, and health amongst the people. A huge waste. But its not wasteful if we colonize space one day..youre kidding me.
This sounds like a interesting project. I've often thought that cities and towns have struggled to keep pace with lifestyle changes over the years but that mainly because they are inherently hard things to change. So designing a city that will work well both for the present and hundreds of years into the future is a problem that needs solving.
One of the key things you want to achieve is to keep house prices low but this seems like something which will be very hard to achieve. For example if the first of these "new cities" does meet all of the objectives (e.g creating a happy place for people to achieve their potential) won't that raise house prices as people will want to move there?
I hope that as part of this, some investigation will be done into pluralistic representation and better voting systems (e.g., Condorcet method[1]). If there is a minority viewpoint that can get, say 20% of the vote, but cannot get a majority in any given district, it would be nice if that minority viewpoint could still get some representation on city council, etc., as opposed to "winner take all" type of elections.
(I'd like to see this at the state and national levels too, but that's a big task, so starting at the city level seems best.)
How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)?
Why is measuring a city using "KPIs" a goal of this study? The effectiveness of an entire city cannot be captured by a few numbers. Chasing metrics can easily leave you blind to reality.
If you can get a few hundred people to move with you, there are a bunch of towns with very, very small populations. Can see a list here: http://www.city-data.com/smallTowns.html
not sure how easy it is for outsiders to buy any land in these tiny population cities.
I am not sure why they don't list towns with fewer than 200 people. Anybody know where to get that data ?
Holy crap, I'm so glad YC is thinking about this topic. I have often tried to start a thread here on this topic. I'd love to be part of this in any way possible. Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser should definitely be at the top of the reading list for all those involved.
Anyway, the last major city to be founded in North America was Las Vegas in 1911. I think it's about time we think about starting a new one.
College campuses are pretty good prototypes of what a modern city should look like, in my opinion. You should have lots of public space and minimal private transportation. The only difference would be much more density and vertical construction.
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.
A large part of today's population already resides in big cities around the world. Would it be more plausible to research on how we can improve the situation in the current cities, instead of starting from scratch.
It's like Software, where you come up with a large code base that is ridden with problems, but somehow works most of the times. You can either dive into that and improve it or you start writing your own system from scratch.
I am sure YC would have thought about this. Just want to know why they choose starting from scratch.
To change an existing city you have a lot of baggage in the form of existing structures and landowners who you have to either convince that the change is beneficial to them or force the changes and fight the inevitable legal battles. That's just assuming that your plan can be implemented with the existing structures, if not it's going to require purchasing the existing structures and rebuilding/tearing them down.
That's not to stay starting over is easy. Trying to create a city out of whole cloth with sufficient jobs and infrastructure to attract and retain people isn't an easy problem in the slightest. It does avoid the NIMBY fight of trying to change an existing city though.
One of the things that I'd love to see you studying would be how to build cities that can scale to large numbers of people without causing some of the problems that come with growth. NY had the Grid system which allowed it to grow to its current size.
But how can we build a city that could grow to 100 million people? Can we build such a city while avoiding congestion, a city where you can travel fast and easy from one end of the city to another? How dense should such a city be? How can you make it livable? And so on.
I would take two main points from Berlin as a case study:
* Low car ownership: I know exactly one person who owns a car. And everyone I know (including this person) uses the train/subway/bus system. If you really need a car for a couple days, it is cheap to rent one.
* Rent control: while not perfect, the fight to keep berliners in the city center is an interesting example of which policies are put in use to fight rising rent and gentrification.
(Short answer due to browser crash. Firefox developers, your android browser sucks)
I'd like to live in a city where people assume their neighbors are smart, where it is assumed that everyone has something legitimate and constructive to add, where people give each other the benefit of the doubt, where people are generous with their interpretation of what they say to each other, and where people always try understand each other rather than try to prove each other wrong.
Something else I have thought about on this subject. Look at some of these post apocalyptic movies where you have scattered people living in these former cities of glory.
Which cities do the best? Those will access to natural resources and access to water both fresh and salt. We are always going to need fresh water to drink, and boats have been the best low tech mode of travel for thousands of years.
People who give startup founders advice sometimes say things like "Don't limit yourself. Think big. Try to solve a really hard problem that no one has tackled before." That advice is relevant here.
Don't think about how to create new cities. That problem has been solved many times already.
Instead, think about how to create new planets. If you do a good job, the cities will take care of themselves.
Largely automated delivery infrastructure - pipes between places, or entry hatches in roofs to inside offices/homes (drone delivery) and hatches within buildings to some storage area within the building are required the way other infrastructure is required, so things can move between people within the city very quickly. Maybe this is also used for garbage management city wide.
I see two endeavors that may be completely discrete:
1. Building from-scratch cities that are optimized for quality of life.
2. Evolving current cities into more nearly optimal.
Which direction will this effort go? Is there a risk of from- scratch cities being built so fast that and being so desirable that they cause historic cities to empty out?
And... what if the optimal solution is not cities at all, but, say, small towns?
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.
I'd have loved to see Paolo Soleri's "Arcology" idea take off better than it has - Arcosanti is a cool place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there :-)
We asked this question as a case study in interviews. It's interesting to see what people believe is most important to citizens and how they optimize around it. We found it takes a quality full stack systems engineer who can communicate people's needs and a rational large scale solution in 30 minutes.
Optimize for pedestrian traffic or mass transit for most daily activities; but remember this:
People love cars!
So make sure that something like a zipcar is present when someone feels like taking a drive to the mountains on the weekend. Or, make sure that rental vans are available when someone needs to move something too big to carry on the bus.
This is so exciting! I love that YC is researching this. Personally I hope that this research would help to design better charter cities that are open to all https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
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.
I think we could see YC or a branch of YC start some sort of enclave with living and working opportunities for member businesses and eventually supporting businesses. Could well see a town spring up around it, depending on how it was done.
Sign me up! (Not the research, but I'll probably want to live in one of these new cities.)
I think this research could solve some real problems, and it might even be a good way to experiment with socialism, or basic income.
Burning Man creates a 70000 person city in the middle of the desert from scratch every year. It's exactly what you want to prototype any number of urban design theories.
It's interesting to note that Burning Man started out as a much more freewheeling, libertarian kind of place (shooting guns, driving around wherever you wanted, etc), and that as it grew, it encountered the natural outcomes that require restriction of individual rights for the common good. For example, after a couple in a tent were run over by a car driving around at night, they had to remove the general right to drive around freely. Now you have to go through an extensive process to be licensed, strictly follow the 5 MPH rules, etc.
Instead of paying taxes people should be forced to do mandatory community service. That will help close the wealth-gap and force wealthy people to intermix with the working class.
That's really unworkable. There are some services you could replace with 'volunteer' community services but you still need money for roads, water/sewer/ police, fire services, and most of what a city generally provides that can't just be staffed with people working their community service stints.
Sounds a lot like sending engineers to potato fields to collect potatoes and get to know the country side. I don't know a single instance of where compulsory "mixing" of wealthy and less wealthy yielded a decrease in the wealth gap.
How about this one: should we have cars at all? Is the tech-topia of self driving cars going to actually cut down the parking lot landscape of US cities or increase it?
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.
Why the cheap shot at libertarianism at the end? As if fewer regulations and more personal freedoms are only interesting to "crazy techies?" This throwaway line really damaged the credibility of the post for me because it got me wondering what kind of creepy social engineering project this person may be aspiring towards.
Why did she think that the main criticism she had to get ahead of was that they would make a city where people were too free, as opposed to making an Orwellian surveillance state, or a company town or something?
The biggest failure point of economic productivity in the second half of 21st century will be the production of new people - i.e. babies. Cities are the biggest contributors to this, where people have extremely low fertility rates. Many young families move out of the city, because they find it to be inhospitable (too expensive to have all the resources one needs).
The United States is less aware of this issue due to high rates of migration, and higher birthrates in certain subpopulations.
The nuclear family is a brand new social experiment of the 20th century, and one of the primary causes in the decline of the production of people. Without traditional support networks, women have to choose between 24/7 baby-care and not having children. Daycare is extremely expensive, and in fact not the ideal environment for a 3-month-old. The traditional notions of a trust-based larger family unit (siblings, grandparents, aunts) and community-unit are non-existent in the modern urban environment.
Even without the issue of children, most people struggle for connection and meaning in their lives more-so than before. They enjoy fewer intimate relationships, and spend less time with people they love or trust.
So if you are designing a new city, design it around fostering genuine communities, and is inclusive to all ages and educational backgrounds. My ideal city would be composed of mini-villages, each mini-village centered around communities of a few dozen families, sharing a courtyard "public" to the community+associates.
It would be an environment where I wouldn't have a bitcoin-based smart contract to 'enforce' something that my neighbor would do anyways.
In general, the city would aim to minimize total commute / on-the-road time for as many people as possible.
It would be a city where work is co-located with child-care for young mothers, who can take 30 minute breaks, walk-over, and breast-feed. This means completely different things for zoning. This would mean work would also not happen in a context completely isolated from rest of life: Perhaps the "work day" would last 10 hours, but with 3 hours of interruption for family, food-preparation, etc. This doesn't mean people would "work at home", or the "workplace would be full of kids", there are innovative ways to combine the two -- which was the natural state of things only a century ago.
Perhaps each person would make less money, but we'd need to spend less as well, giving each other the things one is now forced to buy in a city. It would be an environment where one could have 4-day workweek, perhaps taking two afternoons off, so men would be more present in their families.
I think a city needs to optimize for random interactions between diverse groups of people, which often is where that feeling of serendipity or je ne sais quoi feeling in a city comes from. There's no magic to it, you really just need to lay out your infrastructure to help allow for it.
In NYC we have it because of our public transit, mixed use/zoned buildings/neighborhoods, high density, small public parks spread out around the city, walkability, and a diversity of industries. We're losing some of that with the creation of bland spaces in the city [1], but I don't fear that NYC will lose itself anytime soon.
"How should we measure the effectiveness of a city"
It depends on the goal of the city. Are we attempting to make it a cultural capital of the world, like NYC and LA are, or a business capital like NYC and SF/SV are, or both? Or do we just care about providing a great place for people to live and work without much care for the city's perception in the world? Can it be just a nice second tier city like Boston or Seattle?
Personally, I'd aim for an NYC because there really is nothing like it in the states.
The effectiveness measures would also include some vague things, like influence of the exports of its cultural creations (art, music, fashion, tech). International desire to live or visit the city would be another metric. Then of course regular things like employment rates, educational standings, health of citizens, robustness of public transit, retention of citizens, racial/cultural/age diversity, surveyed happiness of citizens, etc.
Start with the art though. If your city doesn't produce a great diversity of culture it'll just stay a second or third tier city.
"How should citizens guide and participate in government?"
If you're building this city from the ground up you have an opportunity to immediately do away with the majority of the bureaucracy that holds most governments back. That'd encourage citizens to actually want to work with or for the government.
I'd avoid having armies of contractors and subcontractors. Create city organizations and workplaces that talented people want to work at, not stifling bureaucracies. Don't pay a consulting firm $600 million to build a payroll system that could be built by a small internal team of talented engineers, designers, and product managers. You probably will still need to pay an outside firm to, say, bore sewers and subway tunnels, but make sure the organization designing and overseeing it is staffed by talented people. That'd mean paying wages that match industry.
Current planning has a "star-topology": urban office core with rings of gradually less dense, gradually more residential development. This creates a natural transportation bottleneck at the center, and creates areas that are "alive" during only one part of the day, which makes it hard for local merchants to thrive (standard Jane Jacobs).
We can define a "balanced area" as having roughly balanced proportions of residential, office, retail, schools, hospitals, (light) industry, etc. The effect of an area being balanced is that the net flow of people across the areas boundary at any given time of day should be roughly zero - if you live there but work elsewhere, then you need to commute out, but someone else needs to commute in to fill the job in the area that you're not occupying. Same for other uses. "Area" could be anything from neighborhood, to part of city, to city, to region, to state - the analysis is roughly the same regardless of geographical zoom level.
Hypothesis: you can create a scalable city by constructing it around balanced areas.
Scalable = can expand indefinitely-ish. While not precisely true, it's probably a lot more true than for the current star topology.
So what about public transit? The reason we have the star is after all (in part) to make it possible to use public transit. Answer: increase density and switch from star to grid.
The star is hopelessly plagued by having everyone going in the same direction at the same time. This means that we're using roughly half (60%?) of our transportation capacity at any given time.
If we build our cities as dense, balanced cells (= 0.25-0.5-1 mile by 0.25-5-1 mile chunks, depending on density and other design criteria), with grid-oriented mass transit (buses, light rail, subways, whichever, all of the above), then we will naturally double our transit capacity (people going in both directions at all times), and shorten the distance people need to travel to get where they're going. The relevant metric isn't so much "miles per hour" as [density of people]*[linear distance per unit time].
Depending on the level of density you're willing to go to, different tiers of public transit will unlock: at lower densities, you can only really rationalize buses. Medium density = light rail, high density = subway.
Some additional points:
- Zero surface parking, but plenty of drop off / pick up spots.
- Organize the balanced cells around center squares, which are pedestrian only. Squares are focused around restaurants / retail / commerce; they're not parks, though they would likely have some trees. Make it the primary public space. Regulate building heights such that there's limited shading of the square.
- Smaller, pedestrian-friendly blocks around the center squares: stop signs for cars, no thoroughfares to other cells.
- Variable height zoning: stop making neighborhoods uniform. Allow vastly different heights within short distances of each other. This will create both views and natural variation in land and housing value = naturally more inclusive, and much more interesting.
- Turn the towers: don't build two 700' towers across the street from each other. Instead, space them out more, and rotate them so the tower doesn't face the street, to create longer corridors of views from the tower windows, and an "airiness" in the city.
- Between cells: focus more on surface traffic, limit pedestrian use. Yes, this will create "islands between traffic corridors". That's ok - zone light industry, gas/recharge stations, parking structures and office towers on these corridors and zero residential.
- If you're willing to up-zone and build as of right, you can start lower density (= buses), then as the city grows, you can up-zone and graduate to light rail, and then if you go truly dense, retrofit a subway. If it's in the city charter from the start you might be able to fight off the inevitable nimbyism.
- A pragmatic sister project to the study of cities would be the study of how to make public transit projects not cost so much. Taboo subject, and perhaps "boring", but super-important. If it cost half as much, would we have four times as much of it?
How does one size fits all fit cultural diversity?
So the parents want schools easily reachable on safe side street sidewalks, the recent grads want those sidewalk accessible zones to be bars and all night dance clubs. Some people go out every night to drink (probably a bad idea) and want the local bar. Other people want an enormous plot of parkland to drop the country fair and other activities on the weekends only for their "going out". Some regions have a tradition of scarcely larger than one room churches, others have a tradition of megachurches. Others have mosques or temples, how do you make the Buddhists, the tiny church Baptists, and the megachurch prosperity gospel people all happy?
How about history? People who lived in high crime area will prefer a police station to a public library. People who lived in the country will prefer a park over a shopping area. People who recreationally shop will want shops for the sake of shops even in a time of Amazon and UPS delivery. Or worse, they'll demand the little shops, then not shop there.
Some cultures don't see education and learning as very important or worth funding... just put a small dumpy school in the giant park reserved for it? Everyone has to say they love the arts, as a rounding error nobody goes, so do you build a concert hall for the symphony that no one listens to, or not?
How about hobbies and social clubs. Do you zone the freemasons temple and the model railroad club like a church? Or force that stuff into the basement of commercial areas so the sidewalks aren't rolled up and put away at 5:30pm every night?
How do you handle social signalling vs real life? Like you need XYZ to be socially acceptable, but real world requires ABC instead. Do you build for XYZ to get funding but no one lives there, or build ABC and be hated but people fight to move in? Hardly the first time in the history of humanity where what people say and what they want diverge.
The midwest has an interesting zoning solution to loud and obnoxious industry of which we have a lot (although more automation and fewer employees every year) and lack of parking, and thats taking advantage of border zones and raised highways. My retired mom lives a block from the border of a shopping mall, sounds awful according to "I hate cars" people, but its actually incredibly walkable, calm, quiet almost all the time, perfect for both pedestrians and car owners.
You can even run into psychological issues. Do you ban introverts by banning residential border fences to force people to interact even when they just want to chill? You could zone mandatory front porch onto residential to encourage porch culture in summer evenings. Or if the locals are the type you don't want associating, maybe ban porches and decks if they're just going to cause trouble and crime and noise and get arrested.
It's frightening how completely disconnected from the real world this is.
The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part
because their cities don't provide the opportunities and living conditions
necessary for success.
No, the world is full of people not realizing their potential largely because most people just don't. Whether it's just that someone is not motivated to do more than is necessary, or the real social problems that affect people all around the world, in both cities and suburban communities.
• The guy serving you your hamburger isn't realizing his full potential because he grew up in a lower-middle class family who didn't encourage him to do well in school or go to college, he grew content with his boring life hanging out with his friends and working paycheck to paycheck, and he honestly has no good reason to try to achieve more.
• The single mother with the two kids and a heroin addiction isn't realizing her potential because when her high-school sweetheart husband left her she had trouble getting a job, so generations of misogyny & patriarchy convinced her she can only turn to stripping to pay the bills, got hooked on drugs and alcohol, and is now locked into a slow circling of the drain.
• The young black man in prison isn't realizing his potential because generations ago the systemic racism of our country pushed his family into a tightly impoverished community with no businesses, no access to transportation, almost no education, no access to family planning, and rampant drug and alcohol abuse, which the country then took advantage of by creating for-profit prisons and mandatory minimum sentences to convert most of the people in his community into a series of bad choices which only result in debt, incarceration, teen pregnancy, drug addiction, and crime as a survival tactic.
--
A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential
by making better cities.
I've lived in cities most of my life. Their problems are not engineering problems, they are social problems. You can't "unleash potential" without first convincing the people who live there to vote for it, work hard for the change, and of course pay more tax money for it.
• Why do we have too much traffic congestion and not enough parking?
○ Because the city - and its residents and taxpayers - refuse to pay for better public transportation.
• Why do cities not have better transportation?
○ Because politicians [and voters] fight over how to spend what little tax revenue they collect.
• Why don't the residents pay more tax money to fix the problems in their city?
○ Because a combination of high unemployment and low wages due to a concentration of wealth and corporate power refusing to raise wages while profits have skyrocketed have left citizens with very little left over money. Food and housing comes before transportation taxes.
• Why do cities not have affordable housing?
○ Because rich white people don't want to live next to poor black people.
• Why isn't there a diverse range of people living and working in cities?
○ Because first you have to create economic and social equality for a diverse range of people and grow an actual population thereof, rather than pockets of socioeconomically disadvantaged minority groups.
• Why aren't cities constantly evolving?
○ Because some are able to successfully resist housing price inflation and gentrification, while others have a stagnant economy, and others are simply consistent in their status quo.
--
If you need to make a better city to realize your potential (which is stupid, since we were still realizing our potential before we had "great" cities), you first need to solve your social and economic problems before the city can be better. But this is a boring, depressing, non-"startupy" answer, so never mind me.
> How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)?
Minimizing disease, mortality, poverty, and crime.
> What values should (or should not) be embedded in a city's culture?
Active lifestyle, minimalism… courtesy, respect, appreciation of fellow citizens. Volunteerism.
> How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential?
People get jealous of each other very easily. Cultures that don’t promote the flaunting of wealth tend to be happier. The two most conspicuous examples of excessive consumption are large homes and expensive cars. As advanced primates we’re most comfortable in moderately forested land with ample water. Above all this, people require a safe place to live so effective means of crime deterrent are critical. Once the base of Maslow’s hierarchy is met, people will actualize on their own.
> How can we encourage a diverse range of people to live and work in the city?
If you build it they will come. It’s really that simple. There’s no magic formula, a diverse range of people is required to run a city.
> How should citizens guide and participate in government?
Citizens should enumerate the authorities of their leadership rather than allowing leadership all authorities not specifically excluded.
> How can we make sure a city is constantly evolving and always open to change?
It’s psychologically easier to move away from a rental than an owned unit. I know there is dogma about the financial security around home ownership, but leasing a residential unit is really not all that different from renting the money to buy a unit. So I think severely restricting or eliminating traditional home “ownership” might keep the population ready for quick changes.
> How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the cost of housing affects everything else in a city.
By restricting/eliminating outright ownership and zoning out excessively large units or charging progressively more per square foot for larger constructions (on a per occupant basis).
> How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a great place to live? Can we figure out better zoning laws?
Priority should be given first to the natural spaces, followed by living spaces, then the sidewalks, and bikeways/waterways. The automobile roads should be relegated to the outskirts of the city in an exterior loop with limited access to the interior for critical functions. Zoning out excessively large homes is critical.
> What is the right role for vehicles in a city? Should we have human-driven cars at all?
Probably shouldn’t have many human-driven cars in the city aside from possibly emergency responders. The vehicles should be utilized to serve human needs rather than display status of the owners.
> How can we have affordable high-speed transit to and from other cities?
The hyperloop sounds most promising right now. Musk is a modern day Midas.
> How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?
Arbitration agreements and waivers for all residents. Not sure about the rules. I suspect that most cities are already subject to enough state/federal rules to require little in the way of local ordinances. We might look for the shortest examples on municode.com for inspiration.
> What effects will the new city have on the surrounding community?
People who are able to relocate are more likely to be young and depending on the success of the city it may attract the most talented. Prosperous cities have a way of draining the brains of surrounding communities. On positive note, former residents tend to benefit the previous communities when they return/visit.
This sounds like an interesting project for YC research. Many of these questions are very open-ended and it will be exciting to see what comes out of it. However, one question in particular upset me as a Bay Area resident:
How can we make and keep housing affordable?
This question is frustrating not only because the problem is particularly acute but also because it is completely self-inflicted and solvable using what we already know.
Why? It's not a coincidence and it is causal. Rent control:
A. Disincentivizes new construction. Simply put, over time, long-term tenants might not be paying enough to make a keep a building profitable.
B. Causes owners to take recently-vacated, perfectly-habitable units off the market to avoid these same long-term un-evictable tenants (30,000 units are empty in SF alone. That’s 8.3% of the housing stock! http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2011/03/30/why-so-many-vac...)
These both result in less housing in total. A smaller supply coupled with the same demand will cause prices to rise as the few apartments that are available go to the highest bidder.
In a 1992 study, 93% of surveyed economists agreed with the statement "a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available." http://www.factcheck.org/2009/02/when-economists-agree/
For comparison, the consensus that global warming is anthropogenic among climate scientists is 97% - just 4% higher.
We rightfully ridicule our elected officials for being skeptical of global warming. Why don’t we also ridicule elected officials who support rent control?
If the problem is keeping housing affordable, the solution is simple. We need to phase out rent control laws and remove regulations around the development of new housing. For now, in the Bay, rent control is not realistically going to be touched for a few years. For the latter, there is evidence that Sacramento is starting to understand that we actually need to build housing to bring down prices http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-brown-afford.... If we are lucky, they might take this new insight and apply it to existing housing for a complete solution to this man-made problem.
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.
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.
May I say: My intuition is that starting totally from the absolute beginning won't work. Relatively recently (in city building terms) a black community that tried to do that, I remember listening to 99% Invisible about it, and it didn't work out.
It is better to be an adjunct to an existing city near a river or a seaport. Look at China and how they have Special Economic Zones, they are connected to existing cities, right?
I know China builds cities from the start but with their scale they're probably a special case and besides it's thought to be more organic the way they do it (e.g. they don't build some infrastructure like footpaths until they see evidence of how real people use the existing environment).
That's a special case though, nobody else apart from India has that kind of scale.
The best cities are pretty old, and mostly in Europe.
They figured it out 100's of years ago.
'Affordability' has nothing to do with cities - it has do to with regional economics. The Valley is a singularity.
Other cities with bubbles like Vancouver and London has to do with unrestricted purchases by foreigners.
Otherwise it's not hard.
Lost in any West Coast discussion of 'cities' will invariably be the most important thing: culture. Cities revolve around people, activities, and things that are hard to measure.
The best 'urban planners' fail because they are focused on wide roads, less traffic etc. - when in reality, cities that form naturally, around people and their communities, with individuals who act responsibly ... are the best.
There are 1000 100K+ cities in Europe that are pretty spectacular: clean, interesting, walkable, cultured, local, great for families, low crime, affordable. Surely there are many in Asia as well, though with differing kinds of economics given political instability lately.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines in a bunch of ways, starting from the "I'm going to get downvoted" cliché.
The rules here don't require you to agree with anyone, but they do require you to be civil, not call names, and avoid gratuitous negativity. The things you're saying about others here ("engineers who are detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people", "Sand Hill Road Gordon Gecko wannabes", and so on) not only break those rules, they're pretty vicious. That's emphatically not what this site is for! If you can't restrain yourself from doing that, please don't comment here until you can.
Please (re)-read the descriptions of what we are looking for on this site:
As it happens, we've been working on the largest changes to the HN guidelines since taking over from pg in 2014, and nearly all the coming changes have to do with reducing further the kind of comment you posted here.
Please note that none of this has to do with the particular view of cities, technology (or whatever the substantive topic at issue is) that you favor. On the contrary, when you express your views this way, you discredit them in the mind the neutral reader. So following the HN rules will not only help the community, it will help your argument as well.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity."
I would absolutely say these things face to face, because I believe them to be true. I'm happy to go into detail on the first comment, and the second is hyperbolic metaphor. You've seen "Wall Street"? I don't think it's so far off from the truth here.
Also, the "downvoted" comment was less a cliche, but more an acknowledgement based on previous experience. I'm happy to engage in deeply rational discussion around issues like basic income, the automation problem, and the issues specific to the Bay Area, but my comments keep getting downvoted far below the fold.
You broke the rules badly and it would be better to simply take responsibility for that.
> I would absolutely say these things face to face
There's no reading of the HN guidelines by which the claim 'no really, I would be that rude to someone's face' makes it ok to post what you posted. I often hear this from people who think they've found a loophole in the civility rule. But obviously there's no such loophole. 'Don't say things you wouldn't say in person' is there as an example of incivility, not as a limit outside which hey it's ok.
Besides, I believe better of you than that you'd really tell someone to their face that they're an "engineer detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people" or the other horrible things you said. Keep in mind that you're talking about real humans here. The anonymous internet makes it easy to feel like you're simply slamming the Man in the service of righteousness. But that's what everyone who's being uncivil always feels, and none of us has the right to indulge it here.
In terms of the empathy and lack of spirit to the community, a cursory search through HN archives for the word "deserve" can summon a mountain of comments by people demanding to know why someone who grew up in neighborhoods like the Mission and has been priced out deserves to live there.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that last link seems like something Robert Moses would have done (and did, many times).
Regarding the Gordon Gecko comment: there seems to be a growing sentiment that greed is good, and making profit at the expense of all else is paramount. I'm speaking of the attitude that lead Mark Pincus to threaten his employees with firing at the expense of their own stock options: http://www.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-st...
Or the fact that Zuckerberg seems to think giving a controlled version of what the rest of the world calls the Internet to developing countries, maintaining control of what they see, while parading around as if he's the savior of the little guy.
On the note about "anonymity": it seems Facebook did not learn anything from the Google nymwars, a topic I could give you hours worth of evidence on. In terms of "real humans", I have no doubt that the people I am criticizing are human and not gods, but I wonder if they remember that. They certainly don't act as if all the people they are displacing are.
I'm not about "slamming the Man" or righteousness, whatever that is. But I do believe the social balance has shifted too far in one direction, and needs brutal, honest, discussion about why that is and whether it can be returned.
If you do not believe this is the correct forum for such a discussion, I'm happy to re-engage with you elsewhere, the more public the better :)
I just wanted to say I liked your comment, in particular the criticism about "blank slate" redesign being historically difficult, the need for study of problems and solutions in existing cities (and study of existing studies of cities), and the dangers of "success", especially given the pernicious reliance on metrics in the tech world today. That said, I can see why it was flagged: the jabs at YC and the tech industry in general are basically flame bait and aren't necessary to make your argument.
That's reasonable. I was pretty upset when I started writing the piece, and feel more rational now.
However, by "aspie" I specifically mean someone detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people. Is there a better word you would suggest I could use?
People with Aspergers often have to turn off emotions because they are too intense, the rationality is a coping mechanism. People perceive a lack of emotion, but really it is just that it is easier to view the world as rational than it is to cope with accepting the irrationality. I say this with three psychiatrist-diagnosed (pre DSM revision) "Aspies" in my immediate family.
Feeling emotions, feeling empathy and having a sense of duty towards others are three different things. Lacking emotions would probably be considered an affective disorder or unipolar depression. Lacking empathy can be antisocial personality disorder or other personality disorders at the most extreme end. And lacking a sense of duty towards others could be anything really.
I have found that Aspies actually want to help the world, and that the hard part is actually doing the interfacing with the world. Phone calls with neutrotypical people, pretending to be extroverted enough to keep a job, trying to explain things and take people's fear response into consideration without just reducing it to a question of binaries and logic. That is the hard part.
> However, by "aspie" I specifically mean someone detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people. Is there a better word you would suggest I could use?
"People detached from emotion and any sense of duty toward other people" -- not every idea has a good single-word term.
Of course, that would still be an improper mass insult in the context in which it was used, but at least it wouldn't be using a slur for people with a particular mental health diagnosis.
I earn the equivalent of a few beers a month from affiliate links, but hey, if you feel that it's better to give that money to Jeff Bezos, that's your prerogative. I'm always happy to buy a beer or two (the entire proceeds of my ill-gotten gains!) at 10 Barrel or Crux or someplace for anyone who happens to visit Bend.
Mostly though, since your account is new, we're ok with capitalism and making a bit of money here on HN, as long as someone isn't an obvious spammer. I think you can verify that I'm not via my comment history.
They feel spammy when attached to spammy comments from new accounts, and the comment/post seems to specifically target a site with decent traffic such as HN. Standing alone, I don't automatically have a problem with an affiliate link.
Not that davidw needs my endorsement, but the dude's got 43K in karma, and I've seen his comments around elsewhere. I'm fine with letting someone like that slide. As he points out himself, one can expect a little beer money from affiliate links unless you really go out of your way to spam the link.
It might be a difficult problem for an AI to solve, but I think most people could look at my comments and replies and determine that it's an issue I care deeply about.
Since people frequently buy off of Amazon, the parent is not banking on people buying the kindle book, he's banking on them clicking his affiliate link and buying a bigger ticket item some time today which will net him more commission. The affiliate link to the $3.99 ebook is just to get them in the door and his affiliate cookie planted.
So regardless of the review content, the fact that the parent felt the need to add an affiliate link to a $3.99 kindle book leads me to believe his choice was not based on the merit of the book, but because he wants to skim a few bucks off the HN crowd.
I really don't see a problem with with him "skimming" a few bucks off me. Its a tiny reward (4%? 8%?) for information, and it doesn't increase the price for me either.
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:
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.)
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.
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."
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:
"Most of the founders in each startup we fund (and always the CEO) are expected to move to the Bay Area for the duration of the three month cycle." ~from about y combinator.
Isn't the reason cities are full the same reason they require this kind of thing?
Why not solve this first. If I can live anywhere and apply, maybe everyone else doesn't have to live in the valley as well.
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...