
Let's Build a Traditional City and Make a Profit - Mz
http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php#.U9l1i53n_cs
======
rdtsc
This might sound very un-enlightening, offensive or jarring to many in this
forum, but I actually like my suburban living. I'll be first to admit it is
selfish, wasteful to environment (I am watering my plants and grass and mowing
it). But when I wanted to buy a home I wanted a home in the suburbs with trees
and wide roads and cul-de-sacs and playgrounds and pool and close to work
(10min, by car, 30 by bicycle). It is one of those elements that when it came
time to put the money on the table I made the decision I would have probably
"preached" against in a group of peers. That probably happens often (people
say they want green but end up buying an SUV instead of a Prius).

This is probably sounding very wrong and boring to many people here who extol
city living, enjoy the energy and vitality of the bustling city center. Public
transportation, walk-able streets, stores, clubs, coffee shops, restaurants.
But I would like that on vacation only for about a week or so. Then I want to
go back to my boring suburban home with grass, trees an flowers around.

See, I grew up in a city and experienced that. And it was ok. But I like this
better. I wonder if there is an element of that -- rejecting the places we
grew up and deciding the opposite environment is better for it. I imagine a
lot of people in US grew up in the suburbs and many now feel attracted to the
city.

~~~
bane
This is a romantic fantasy. One I sometimes share, but I recognize it as
fantasy.

I understand the aim of what's being advocated here, and I really enjoy
visiting cities like this (it saves on car rentals). But there's significant
reasons people have spent a century or so trying like hell to escape these
kinds of cities. Sprawl is a problem, but modeling cities after 15th century
Italian towns is a mistake as well. I'd love to live in a place like this I
suppose if we're all boutique shop owners and grocers this might work. But
most people aren't these days. We actually have to get places that aren't
necessarily right in our town.

One of the significant reasons we started moving away from this kind of
development, even _before_ cars became common, is that it traps people inside
of them and prevents people from getting into and out of them. He uses
Barcelona as an example, but he uses the Medieval part of Barcelona, not the
19th century bits.

So now we have to build extensive mass-transit. I'm thrilled as peaches to do
that, but it's unbelievably expensive to finance. One of the reasons so many
roads get built and expanded is that local governments can finance road
development by forcing developers to build the roads or they won't get the
zoning for their new mall or suburb (and the increased tax revenue is intended
to cover long-term maintenance).

Brand new, above ground, subway/metro runs around $250 million per mile [1] in
the United States (built on existing right-of-way). No developer can finance
that. A brand new rural/suburban road runs $4-6 million per mile, and $8-10
million in urban areas [2].

I wish that humans had managed to develop a way of life and an advanced
economy that made this possible. But we didn't. It sucks, but even if the car
had never been invented, cities would no longer look like this.

1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Line_(Washington_Metro)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Line_\(Washington_Metro\))

2 - [http://www.artba.org/about/transportation-
faqs/#20](http://www.artba.org/about/transportation-faqs/#20)

~~~
pessimizer
>people have spent a century or so trying like hell to escape these kinds of
cities.

I'm not aware of any evidence of this being true. If it were, I would assume
that living in one of those places would be cheaper than living in other
places (because it's less desirable to people), but the opposite seems to be
true.

~~~
canvia
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight)

~~~
ef4
... the net flow of which reversed several decades ago. For the past 30 years,
many American cities (the nice ones with living economies, think NYC, SF,
Boston, Portland, Austin, etc) have been experiencing a steady influx of
affluent white people, replacing the ones who fled a generation before.

Hence all the hand-wringing over "gentrification".

Really, this is just a return to the long-term normal of cities. Cities are
centers of power and wealth. It was a weird American aberration that, for a
time, "inner city" was associated with poverty and decay.

------
cjoh
I live in a community called Serenbe.
([http://serenbe.com](http://serenbe.com)) which has taken a much different
approach to suburban new urbanist development. It's built around an organic
farm rather than a golf course, it's got miles of green space and trails, and
a fantastic commitment to ecology and the environment -- for example the
outdoor irrigation system is built from gray water from the homes in the
community.

Also: it's got some great restaurants and about 80% of my diet comes from food
that's made within 25 miles of where I live now. To get to a restaurant, we
take a brief stroll through the woods.

Smartest thing I ever did was move here. I've spent my whole life trying to
work with governments (mostly federal) to use technology to improve service
delivery and if I'm honest with myself, it's been mostly discouraging. But
since I've moved here, I've met with the mayor and we're beginning to do
amazing things.

What makes an amazing place to live, though isn't the lack of automobiles (as
the author of this post seems to believe), or great architecture -- but rather
an attitude of community. That you all have a shared role in the success of
each other's life environment. Human beings are wired for that, and both urban
and suburban environments tend to separate us from that.

~~~
rwhitman
Wow that is fascinating. Your community has a pretty excellent website. Slick
design, lots of high end photography. Which means someone spent a lot of money
on it. Meaning someone is raking in big bucks by promoting the town.

Took a look at real estate prices relative to the area, confirmed - wow 4x
higher prices than anything else in the area. Pretty amazing feat of real
estate marketing to turn a chunk of rural Georgia into the equivalent of
California home prices by leveraging sustainable growth. If developers can
build a community like that and turn a profit at the same time that's a pretty
promising future

~~~
cylinder
Developers need to get a clue and copy this model or else they are going to be
unable to sell suburbs to Millennials. The only reason it's so expensive there
is because this is such a rare type of place to live.

~~~
rwhitman
Yea exactly. There are a bunch of news stories floating around about how
developers are in crisis struggling to sell homes to younger homebuyers, and
as someone in the demographic of who they're struggling with, its such an
obvious reason as to why.

A large portion of the generation who grew up in cookie cutter 90's exurbs
have absolutely no desire to live their adult life in areas with those types
of development patterns. Developers and city planners need to get with the
program or the american suburbs are going to go through serious decline soon

------
austinz
I wish someone would make a serious successor to SimCity - an actual simulator
that modeled theories from the field of urban planning and allowed people to
experiment with different layouts, policies, etc. This would be a very
different piece of software from the vanity building placing games on the
market today, and something much more in line with Will Wright's original
vision.

~~~
bokonist
I've thought about the same idea. But I do not know how to actually make the
simulation a sandbox for interesting experiments, rather than just having the
results depend on whatever assumptions the game designer made.

~~~
saeranv
There is a lot of research into the computational modelling of urban dynamics.
A good place to start would be Michael Batty's seminal book on the subject:
[http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cities-and-
complexity](http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cities-and-complexity)

------
femto
If you want to found a city, here's a suggestion for its location. It's a
crazy pipe dream but here goes: build a city next door to Sydney, Australia,
on the other side of the Great Dividing Range.

Background: Sydney is a well developed city with a population of 4.5 million.
It is built on a coastal basin, bounded by the Pacific ocean on the east, a
mountain range (Great Dividing Range) on the west, a river/green belt on the
north and national parks on the south, with expansion happening in a south-
west direction. Real estate prices are high compared most other cities. To the
west of the Great Dividing Range is the beginning of the flat interior of
Australia. The first significant town to the west of the Great Dividing Range
is Lithgow.

Running east to west, the Great Dividing range is delineated by a steep climb
at the suburb of Glenbrook, and a steep descent at Mount Victoria. There is a
winding highway and railway connecting these two points, so the trip from
Lithgow to Sydney is slow. As the crow flies, the distance between Glenbrook
and Mount Victoria is about 45km.

The plan would be to build a tunnel under the Great Dividing Range, install a
high speed train in it, and cut the travel time between Sydney and the west of
the range to minutes. Tunnels longer than 45km exist today, so it should be
doable from a technical standpoint. The project could be paid for by the
increase in land value to the west of the range.

As an aside, there are ongoing proposals for a high speed train (HST) along
the eastern seaboard of Australia, linking Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and
Brisbane, all major cities. The seaboard is rugged and heavily populated, so
some proposals have the HST to the west of the Dividing Range. A new city, to
the west of the divide, could act as a junction between a north-south HST and
a connection to Sydney, providing a ready made economy.

~~~
brc
Australian HSR will never, ever happen.

~~~
grecy
I wouldn't be so sure. I believe the Melbourne->Sydney route is one of the
busiest in the world for planes.

Even if the train follow the existing highway it would do pretty well - it's
almost entirely straight and flat.

~~~
brc
I am sure.

Sydney is getting a 2nd airport. Air travel is easier to build, easier to
expand and requires no private property resumption, wildlife corridors,
bridges or tunnels.

There is also zero population density between the two cities.

It won't happen.

------
atroyn
The most jarring thing about visiting the United States for me was the car-
centric design of the cities.

We lived in an apartment in Palo Alto, and doing the most basic things was
impossible without a car - grocery shopping, going to the office, going out
for dinner or to a meeting. Even bikes weren't really enough. Eventually we
caved and had to pay the extra expense of renting a car through a car sharing
site.

San Francisco was really not much better - to get there, the only viable
option was either to drive or to take the CalTrain - always extraordinarily
crowded in the busiest hours, not to mention slow and with long waits in
between trains. Getting around in the city on foot also presented an ordeal,
but at least MUNI and BART helped somewhat.

This added a huge expense for our company that would have been completely
unnecessary in other cities - including the rental price and fuel, the car
ended up burning about $800/mo on its own. Not to mention the amount of time
wasted driving around to get basic things done like visiting the bank or the
supermarket.

It became clear to me why companies like Uber were making a killing in the U.S
- public infrastructure was so badly supported that there is just no way to
live without access to a vehicle. I can't imagine what it must be like for the
working poor, who must pay for the expense of a vehicle just to subsist.

~~~
epaladin
And many people accept this as if it's the only way to live- it doesn't really
get challenged, since a lot of people don't know anything else. After living
in Japan I find it crazy. At least I live in an area that has some decent bike
paths so I can do stuff that most Americans would consider impossible, like
walk 7 miles to the airport...

------
dm2
Walt Disney wanted to do it 50 years ago, it might be good to take some
lessons learned from his planning.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Prototype_Communit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Prototype_Community_of_Tomorrow_\(concept\))

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLCHg9mUBag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLCHg9mUBag)

[https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/](https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/)
Beautiful renderings: [https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/high-
density-...](https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/high-density-
housing)

Also, use thumbnails or a CDN FFS.

Other planned city resources:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_city](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_city)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities)

[http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/44132.wss](http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/44132.wss)

------
MBlume
The article's unreadable without the photos and we seem to have DOSed
whatever's serving the photos. Is there a mirror?

~~~
Avshalom
I suspect it's just as unreadable having to scroll 3-600 pixels between
sentence fragments.

~~~
azernik
No, the bits I got to before catching up with the image loading were quite
pleasant. It works because the images are actually illustrating and adding
content; unlike e.g. the pictures embedded in most news stories, which are
really a whole separate piece of content that forces you to jump out of the
flow of the story if you want to consume them, these are part of the flow of
reading the post.

Except when they fail to load, unfortunately. Content this size should really
be hosted on S3 or equivalent, but the author probably didn't expect this
scale of traffic.

------
carsongross
Amen. But good luck getting it past planning.

We don't build even mediocre cities anymore because, for the most part, we've
made them illegal.

~~~
jamespitts
Well how about we get in front of city council and advocate for some changes?
I've done it in Ann Arbor for a city park and people really do like it when
local geeks and other folks not usually going to these meetings stand up and
have something to say.

------
tbatchelli
Christopher Alexander wrote extensively about humanistic cities in "A Timeless
Way of Building", "A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction" and
many other books. His focus was in studying how people have built villages and
cities over centuries, how patterns have emerged and how these patterns affect
the daily life of the inhabitants.

~~~
schiffern
Came here to recommend "A Pattern Language" \-- truly a transformative book.
The article touches on a few of the patterns it lists, but I think this
nascent project would benefit greatly from the author reading it through.

For instance, just building narrow streets is not "all we need to do" as the
author states.

Full text available on Archive.org (but it's worth buying a copy for the
illustrations alone):
[https://archive.org/stream/APatternLanguage/A_Pattern_Langua...](https://archive.org/stream/APatternLanguage/A_Pattern_Language_djvu.txt)

------
zephjc
It's interesting that a second article from this site has made it to the HN
front page. I've been digging into this concept a lot since the first article
was linked from here.

I think traditional, walkable cities are a great idea whose time is more than
overdue in North America. Places like Quebec City are a good example, but what
really fascinates me is Tokyo, a behemoth of a city with _so much_ that is
walkable with one-way streets and wide sidewalk areas, and you can get to
anywhere easily via buses and rail links. All these simple one-way streets,
connecting to arterial roads with 1 lane in each direction, connecting to
highways, create an absolutely massively distributed road system.

If you think i'm exaggerating, pull up Tokyo in Google Maps and pick a spot at
random in the surrounding metro area and go to Street View, you will always
always land on a one-way road, often with people walking on it.

~~~
tempestn
I did as you suggested with Tokyo and that is indeed impressive. People
walking everywhere. One-way streets really do make a ton of sense for cities.

------
bokonist
I love the idea of building a city as a startup, and competing with other
cities by being a superior product.

However, my vision for the perfect city is quite different than OP's.

My ideal city:

* Density is between 5k-8k per square mile (twice as dense as Palo Alto, half as dense as Cambridge, MA)

* The density and layout should support a high walkability index. There should be a grocery store, barber, coffeeshop, pharmacy, etc, within a half-mile to a mile of most housing.

* Housing arranged in blocks, with a shared yard for all people on the block. So each house would have a small patio owned by the home owner. Behind that would be a collective yard/green area shared by all the neighbors on the block. This shared area might have a basketball hoop, swimming pool, jungle-gym, soccer nets, BBQ pit or whatever the residents wanted. It would be behind all the housing, and thus insulated from the city. The block should be small enough that pretty much any parent can look out their window and see their kids playing. Basically, any parent should feel perfectly safe just letting their five-year old kid play outside in the common backyard with other kids.

* The road system should be optimized around bicycles, scooters, and microcars (like the Carver or Automoto, because bicycles are not so good for older people in the winter). Roads would have two narrow lanes in each direction, a left-hand lane for 25MPH scooters and roadbikes, and a right-hand lane for slower bicycles and roller bladers. Cars would only be allowed on main arterials, driving a car on the bike roads would require a $10 per day special pass. Optimizing around bikes and mini-vehicles allows for getting between point A & B very quickly, but limits congestion, pollution, and the expense of a full-sized car.

Things I don't like about OP's dream:

* it feels to claustrophobic. I like green space.

* walking is just much slower than biking, so I prefer biking.

* it is really not pleasant to have both bikes and mopeds using the same narrow streets. One of the least pleasant aspects of traveling in a a classical city core is having the mopeds buzz by you at 20MPH.

* row housing looks nice from the outside, but severely limits the amount of sunlight coming inside. I greatly prefer standalone units that have windows on all four-sides.

* In general, I think that very dense, old school cities can be more pleasant to visit for a little while, than to actually live in long term. There is a reason why most people in those countries do not wish to live in such housing or build more housing like it.

The biggest problem in general with doing a city-as-a-startup is jobs. Due to
the winner-takes-all nature of the economy, the highest paying jobs are
concentrated in a few metro areas where the big winning companies reside. I'm
not sure how you bootstrap the economy of the new city.

~~~
eru
> [...] driving a car on the bike roads would require a $10 per day special
> pass [...]

Or just determine the maximum number of cars you can support, and auction off
the permits. (That's what they do in Singapore.)

~~~
JetSpiegel
This being a for-profit endeavour, they would just sell extra permits to
anyone who asked.

~~~
Bartweiss
Not necessarily - if gridlock is too bad then owning a car isn't worthwhile.
In theory, an auction system and good planning ought to keep permit levels at
the point where selling another permit would push down the value of all the
permits to a a net loss.

In practice, it's going to be a lot clumsier than that (say, take last year's
number and add 3%), but auctions and long-term planning can still rein in
sales.

------
andrewfong
I've always imagined that a "human-centric" city of the future would simply
move most of its automobiles one level up or down. Many dense cities already
have subways. It'd be expensive but not inconceivable to move all car-width
roads into an underground level or onto dedicated skyways, although the latter
seems more likely to create issues with lighting and whatnot.

~~~
MartinCron
In Seattle, we're tearing down a horrible ugly elevated viaduct on the
waterfront and replacing it with a deep-bore underground tunnel. It's turning
out to be a difficult and expensive mess, but the promise is a much more
appealing human-centric waterfront/downtown core.

------
azernik
Most of the examples of "good" architecture seem to come from Japan, so let me
chime in that from my little experience of walking through these kind of
Japanese streets that they are very pleasant and inviting for traveling in by
foot, and mix very well with car and public transit thoroughfares used to
separate small neighborhoods/precincts.

~~~
genwin
Japan's low-crime culture helps a lot to keep such density pleasant.

------
agersant
If you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend this long series of
articles:
[http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/tradcityarchive.ht...](http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/tradcityarchive.html)

------
tempestn
If we wanted to build the ideal city and cost weren't a concern, we could
really expand on the use of underground for transportation. The best cities
for humans tend to have great subway systems, but in theory we could do a lot
more. Basically all parking and most arterial roads could be underground,
leaving above-ground an almost-entirely pedestrian paradise. Sure, driving in
an endless tunnel doesn't sound terribly pleasant, but the idea is to get
people from A to B efficiently, then out of the car. Unfortunately building
this kind of infrastructure under existing cities would be prohibitively
expensive.

Under a new town you might be able to do it much more cheaply (which isn't to
say cheaply in an absolute sense), but of course the economic incentive isn't
there at that point.

That said, with services like Uber, and much more so, driverless vehicles,
hopefully the desire to bring a car along wherever we go will begin to ebb in
the near future, making the narrow street vision described here much less of a
compromise. I imagine those times when you need a car to get somewhere,
spending some of the time weaving around through carts and pedestrians would
be much less frustrating if you can kick back and read a book while it's
happening. Even more though, there would be less concern of servicing parking
for these sorts of regions, so you could still have a few arterial roads to
get in and out, far less wasted parking space, and no need to build
underground mazes to accomplish it.

~~~
scoofy
Unfortunately, putting fuel driven cars underground is incredibly dangerous.
One major fire could asphyxiate many people. Even in reasonably small tunnels
there have been major disasters:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel)

~~~
tempestn
Good point (although you would hope better ventilation could help with that?)
Regardless, we should be (finally) seeing more electric cars in the near
future (not that they can't catch fire). Anyway, I don't think underground
road situations are actually practical, just that it would be nice to use that
third dimension more in an ideal world.

~~~
scoofy
Yea, current electric cars don't really solve the problem as batteries are
prone to fire. If we want underground vehicles, we need wire connected
electric.

~~~
tempestn
AKA subways, really. And cities with excellent subway systems really do come
close to this ideal. It makes it feel like anywhere in town is walkable.

------
restalis
I feel a little bit of cargo-cult in the article. The fact that someone spends
money to go in some crammed place depends on a number of factors like the
touristic quality of that place (which is mostly related to its history), on
how's it being promoted outside, on how different it is from other places
(with a zillion of details that makes the given place it special compared to
other ones), and many other factors. The fact that it is crammed may even not
be important at all!

------
alexmayyasi
This article on an urban planner's objection to suburbs on financial grounds
(most succinctly put as suburbs are a ponzi scheme) is relevant for thinking
about why this project is -- relative to a more suburban/sprawl alternative --
less costly than it seems:

[http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-
sprawl/](http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-sprawl/)

------
stefs
small city in austria, pretty much like described by OP. then a strip mall was
built outside the city, cafés, bars and a cinema included. the inner city died
out in a matter of months - only the elderly stayed.

small mom&pop shops in the city you can reach by foot? sounds nice in theory,
but this also means running to 10 different shops, lugging your purchases
around for the whole trip. honestly - driving to a strip mall where you can
buy everything and store the shopping in your trunk is just a lot more
convenient. i mean, as soon as you have to get in the car to do the shopping,
the strip mall always wins. i live in a big city and do the grocery shopping
_per pedes_ almost every day - but i don't need much (don't have to shop for a
3-4 hungry mouths).

it might work as an alternative - for people that are fed up with the car
centrist society and actively seek out a place where the community takes its
place. i'm just not sure that small, village friendly businesses would be
competitive when strip malls are around.

------
siliconc0w
I really like the original idea of epcot - create a city as a rolling 'city of
tomorrow' with rapid iteration on design - the way we approach at lot of
things we're unlikely to get right the first time.

Say what you want about Walt Disney - epcot as originally envisioned would
have been amazing.

------
cjbarber
On a serious note, what would the requirements/steps to move towards this be?

My guess is some combination of:

\- Money

\- Initial pre-committed residents

\- Habitable land

\- Management

And then the main thing left, is, I believe, approval?

Which leads to my questions:

\- What is the legality? Where is it legal? Where is it illegal? Or if _legal_
, what are the chances/what is needed for approval?

~~~
bane
You need a few hundred acres of property and you need to get it zoned
appropriately. Then you need to get either investment money, or court groups
of developers to build this.

Establish a development committee and some staff to bringing commercial
businesses and people looking for office space (so the people living there
have some place to work). Local county/city transport authorities to build
transit links into the development. Ensure they can get into and out of the
area cleanly, it won't work if it's an island. Most of your population will be
commuting into and out of it no matter what you do.

Build it in phases and sell it as you go. You'll need to build the residential
sections first (businesses can't survive without customers).

Hire an advertising team to draw people in and blanket the region with
adverts. Work with local real-estate brokers to hi-light this as a destination
they should show all clients during a house hunt -- even people not looking
for a place like this.

------
jamespitts
His ideas are great!

There must be a way to finance the planning and construction of a neighborhood
along these lines, or finance the political effort it would take to designate
a zone "traditional".

In an immediate sense, we can encourage trad neighborhoods by asking city
councils to slightly change laws that allow smallness and interestingness to
take hold. Let vendors set up stands. Open up alleyways. Close off a few
streets to traffic.

Another way is to go big and get mega developers to build post-shopping
shopping malls that are actually traditional cities. But the big approach has
not worked so well in the past!

------
zkar
In India, the population density around many streets in the city is very high.
As a result, all streets appear traditional human scale though they are not
designed for that.
[http://im.rediff.com/money/2009/apr/28city5.jpg](http://im.rediff.com/money/2009/apr/28city5.jpg)
[http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/09/06/R...](http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/09/06/RTXMZWE.jpg)

------
aperrien
Why not make a housing sandwich? (of sorts)

Like this:

Road/Parking___Housing/Shops___Greenway/Park___Housing/Shops___Road/Parking

It costs a bit of land, but the area would be much nicer.

~~~
enf
Mostly because if you're trying to do this kind of thing, you're trying to
maximize activity per frontage so that there are enough people on the street
to enliven it. If you have public right-of-way on both the front and back of
the buildings, you've doubled the frontage without increasing the activity, so
the place is only half as alive. In the very center, you might be able to do
it; as it gets toward the edges, you need all the activity you can get.

------
Shivetya
Well I have two suggestions, go aboard a mega cruise ship to see how you can
make an enclosed area look inviting and varied at that. I would aim for an
enclosed space even with separation of buildings and such simply because it
will allow you to heat and cool it efficiently and have open areas pretty much
immune to weather.

There are some amazing resorts constructed this way and no reason a whole town
cannot be as well.

------
forrestthewoods
Fun exploration. I'd love to see something similar but for a city design built
around shared self driving cars. I don't put much fundamental value in
walkability. I put value in being able to get to a variety of types of things
quickly and easily. Keeping those things within walking range of each other is
one way. Autonomous vehicles is another.

~~~
zephjc
The term "over-engineering" comes to mind when arguing self-driving cars vs
walking. Also, cars keep us lazy and fat.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Over engineering? How so? Self driving cars would be amazing for improving our
lives. Simply eliminating wasted time in my commute would be killer. I could
spend that time doing whatever I wanted. Napping, reading, or by simply
spending 90 minutes of my 8 hour work day on a laptop in an autonomous vehicle
with LTE.

Blaming cars for people being lazy and fat is itself incredibly lazy.

~~~
arjie
It just seems out of place in this conversation. This is about discoverability
while you're talking versatility. It's about having people around, being a
living, breathing city.

While having a network of isolated silos with 45 hour commutes in autonomous
vehicles is an interesting idea, it is in direct conflict with the vision
espoused here. It'll be hard to reconcile the two.

------
Aardwolf
> Founding our own town is tempting - rural land is cheap

You guys in the US are so lucky! Large areas of land all for the taking.

In my country, most of the land is built full. Cities and towns do not end,
they just touch other towns and the residences continue. What land remains is
either designated forest land, or for agriculture. You are not allowed to
build residences on those.

~~~
felideon
Out of curiosity, what country are you talking about?

~~~
Aardwolf
A small European one :)

------
elif
LOL his plan is to find buyers of land for $348,000/acre ... That is, the
first half of his buyers will make that investment knowing that the
neighboring parcels will be mostly undeveloped until a critical mass of them
are sold.

There is no way to get that off the ground. It is like if nitcoin started at
$1000

------
sandstrom
Interesting article, I agree with most of the authors ideas. Converting
double-lane streets to uni-directional, and planting trees on the other half +
larger sidewalk, would brighten up many streets as well.

I suggest using a CDN for the images. It took me ~10 min to load them. E.g.
fastly or CloudFront.

------
alecco
Funny how everybody here doesn't care who their neighbours are. That's at the
top of my concerns when moving. I've visited american suburbs and it impressed
me as antisocial, selfish and lacking culture. Like a small town filled with
nouveau riche.

------
sylvinus
Really sounds like the author just needs to move to Europe or Asia...

------
slosh
I want a walking city with no cars. maybe golf carts. If we could just remove
all the cars from san francisco I would be happy

------
polarix
Would this even be legal, given fire codes?

~~~
zephjc
It works fine in a bunch of the rest of the world.

------
stuaxo
OK, but not so close to the highway, nobody should have to live there it will
be loud and highly polluted.

------
logfromblammo
Public transit is good. Definitely include it in your city.

But what you really need to kill automobile dependence is a way to transport
goods throughout your city without a human to shepherd it along. You need to
have train cars that can automatically load and unload palletized goods, and a
package routing network for smaller items. Your pizza delivery will consist of
the restaurant putting your food into a standardized container and pushing the
"send" button. When you shop, you send your purchases directly home from the
store instead of carrying them with you for the rest of the evening.

Cars aren't just for getting to distant places fast. They are also for moving
stuff around too heavy for you to carry around everywhere you go. I once
bought an air conditioner window unit in downtown Chicago and took it home on
the El. That was such a hassle that I became much less reticent about giving
up my parking spot afterward. It wasn't long after that when I stopped walking
the six blocks to Jewel to buy as much food as I could carry home in my arms
and started driving across the state border to buy as much as I could store in
my home without spoilage.

City simulators that track the movement of people are fine, but they are
incomplete if you can't also track the non-people items that also move around
and transform within residences and businesses. Food, water, power, clothing,
necessities, luxuries, raw materials, sewage, and trash all move around semi-
independently, and in most cities, a lot of that moves around in a human-
piloted vehicle.

Power moves through conductive cables. Drinking water does through pipes. Data
goes through glass fibers or conductive wires. Fuel gas moves through pipes.
Sewage moves through pipes. But then we have garbage trucks, delivery trucks,
and cars moving everything else. Where are the pipes for that stuff?

Intermodal containerized shipping changed the world. But you can't exactly
manage your household deliveries with a metal box 20m long. But thanks to
them, most everything that makes it to your house once fit on a pallet or
inside a shopping cart. Construct a container standard around those sizes and
make your transportation infrastructure handle the containers, and your city
no longer needs postal workers, delivery drivers, solid waste collectors, or
anyone else whose entire job is to take things and move them to other places.

But something like that is going to be more expensive, and it has to be
99.99999% reliable. You'll need to be a lot more dense than suburban housing
to afford that, especially when you have to invent and bootstrap all the tech
yourself.

Edit: I bet you could probably get bootstrap funding from the logistics
command of a national army and trial the system on a military base. What you
would likely end up with is a rugged plastic cube-shaped crate with 4-way
entry for forklifts and handtrucks, and attachment points for parachutes,
chains, ropes, or tie-down straps. That would be your large container. Your
small container would probably be a little less than 1/8 the size.

