
A Commuting Principle That Shaped Urban History - motiw
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-city-size-transportation-urban-planning-history/597055/
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brlewis
Overall I liked this article. It describes an interesting though simple core
principle. I have three criticisms:

1\. The article is scientific enough that using "grew exponentially" in the
colloquial sense of just "grew a lot" is grating.

2\. The article gives the impression that Boston is an American city on a grid
where elevated trains preceded subways and dominated the transportation
system. In reality the core of the city was not at all a grid, subways came
first, and subways have been more prevalent than elevated trains.

3\. "the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear
fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity" This ignores
the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking, including
space that is already part of roadways.

~~~
blauditore
> This ignores the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking

How so? If you mean because of more car sharing, I don't think that's going to
happen. Most people would still want their own car. If you mean because of
being able to let the car park itself outside the city, or even drive home:
That would drive up cost for the owner and reduce convenience (having to
"order" it 30 minutes ahead of time). In addition, it would worsen congestion
on streets due to cars moving more.

~~~
cryptonector
I can imagine NYC with 1/10th the private cars and 4x the shared/rental/taxi
cars, and traffic flowing much better than today owing to the additional
bandwidth freed up by the 70-80% reduction in street-side parking space need.

NYC residents just might accept the trade-off.

~~~
kiliantics
As an NYC resident, I would much prefer to just have 1/10th the private cars,
twice the number of trains (or whatever is necessary), and a massive reduction
in the number of cars sitting around unused, with the resulting extra space
being converted to green space, pedestrian-only areas, and bike lanes. Self-
driving cars and the infrastructure they necessitate would make NYC more
hostile to people, not less.

~~~
cryptonector
Train infrastructure is simply not economical by comparison to buses. You
could have a bus system as good as, say, Buenos Aires, if you were willing to
let it be run by the private sector. Cars are not entirely replaceable by
trains and buses. But if you replace N privately-owned, mostly unused cars
with N/10 privately-owned _shared_/rental/taxi cars whose utilization is much
more than 10x that of the average privately-owned non-shared/rental/taxi car
in the city, then you win big even if you also improve buses and even trains.

~~~
kiliantics
I would be happy with more buses or trams or any other kind of mass transit
option. As long as the space taken up by private cars is drastically reduced
and the resulting space repurposed for actual public use. Public space is
currently completely wasted by being disproportionately allocated for cars,
many of them completely unused and taking up space for free.

Buses and trains may not completely serve all the needs which cars can, but
almost all of the remaining transit needs can be easily taken care of by
bicycles, which should also be a much higher priority in the city. Either way,
it really is a no-brainer that we must de-prioritise cars.

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spodek
> _The best option is to densify our cities. This is hard, too_

Leveling off or lowering the human population through lower birth rates works
better. I'm not saying it's simple or even possible since so many people jump
to conclusions about eugenics etc, but reducing overpopulation makes a lot of
problems easier. If we don't figure out how on our own, nature will do it for
us so we might as well figure out how in a peaceful, fair way.

~~~
geogra4
Whether we like it or not, it's already happening.
[https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-%E2...](https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-%E2%80%93-World-
Population-Growth-1700-2100.png)

But this doesn't really solve the city/urban problem as the vast majority of
economic growth occurs in cities and the continual migration of rural to urban
happens even when total population is shrinking.

~~~
spodek
That chart shows a positive growth rate beyond 2100, which means continued
exponential growth, not a decreasing population.

Lowering population _alone_ doesn't solve every problem, but without it, many
problems are unsolvable.

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tompccs
Except that people didn't used to "commute" in the modern sense: many
craftsmen worked from home, and large numbers were domestic servants.

There is probably some other principle at work, of which modern commuting is a
special case.

~~~
tremon
While that may be true, I think it doesn't change the traffic factor much:
"home office" users still need to sell their wares (their clientele must be
able their house) or they need access to a local market. Similarly, people
need market access to buy groceries and such.

The typical "commuters" in those days were probably farmers, who traveled from
outside to the city markets. But that wasn't a daily commute, probably once or
twice a week.

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afarrell
> the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear
> fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity

I'm not so sure about this. I've generally been someone with a lower tolerance
for a long commute than the average person. Usually I've lived within a 20
minutes walk from my job. My wife and I have had flatmates for 4 out of our 5
years or marriage. I decided 2½ months ago that it was worth moving farther
out in order for my wife and I to get more privacy. A big reason for this was
that a friend who lived in the area told me that he usually got a seat on the
line into central London. Indeed, having figured out an ethical way to
_always_ get a seat, my commute is significantly improved by my newfound
ability to get into a writing habit.

If driverless cars or driverless double-decker busses become widely available
and many people have the ability to get one-shot commutes, then I suspect that
more people will ride them.

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Mordisquitos
This agrees with my experience. I grew up in the centre of Madrid and I would
always estimate around 30 minutes to get to any other part of the city by
public transport.

~~~
elyobo
30 minutes from the centre of Melbourne doesn't get you all very far by public
transport (or by car most of the time either). It's pretty sprawling.

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logfromblammo
For a while, I have occasionally considered the idea of turning the shopping
mall inside-out. Rather than one building in the center, with a vast expanse
of parking lot all around the perimeter, put the parking structure (and auto-
service businesses) in the center, and place the shopping, offices, and
restaurants around the edges. Then use elevators and horizontal transport
systems to move people around quickly without needing their cars. Access from
the outside would be by pickup/dropoff cars, public transport, and
pedestrians, and building facades would be immediately adjacent to the street.

I don't think you can go straight from an everyone-in-a-car culture to a
walkable+public transit culture in one step. So first you get people to put
their cars in places that are less in the way, by driving _past_ their
destination and parking _on the other side of it_ from the main transit
network connections. This allows things to be closer together for pedestrians
and the vehicles that do not park.

Imagine the degenerate case, where a worker in an office park wants to visit a
store in the mall next door. When the office is surrounded by parking, and the
mall is surrounded by parking, a direct walk requires traversal of two large
parking lots, and the worker has an incentive to drive, from a parking space
near their entrance to the office building, to a parking space near the mall
entrance nearest their store. Turning the shops and offices inside-out, in the
best case, puts the office and the shop directly across the street from one
another, and the worker can cross on a pedestrian overpass faster than they
can reach their car. In the worst case, the worker rides two ring-avators and
two elevators, once to get to an office-mall adjacency point, down to street
level, walk across, back up, and then ringwise again to get to the shop. To
drive, the worker would have to walk into parking to reach their car, drive
out to the exit, drive in to the mall parking, and walk out again to the shop.
That's not entirely eliminated, and would likely occur when the offic and mall
are further separated, but it does make walking directly slightly more
attractive.

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cr0sh
I liked the article, but I did wonder if the author understood what self-
driving vehicles would allow for, providing that they had maybe 7-8 nines in
reliability and safety (if that is even possible).

People have already mentioned the idea of "sending the car back home to park"
and "being able to do something else in the car while commuting". But there
are other things the cars could do:

1\. Trains of cars - convoys - drafting each other, reducing energy use, while
also increasing road density (bumper-to-bumper traffic - but at highway
speeds).

2\. No more "traffic waves" on the freeway, nor "rubber necking" at accidents,
both of which likely contribute to the congestion issue.

3\. No-stop intersections - again at high-speeds - because cars could
coordinate/negotiate their speeds and lanes to allow for "collision-free"
operation (unfortunately, there will still probably be collisions - and they
wouldn't be pretty).

All of these options - and possibly others I haven't thought of - rely on
things that self-driving vehicles don't yet have - mainly car-to-car
communication - so all cars know where other cars are (even if they aren't
within sight-lines of the sensors) and how fast they are moving. Basically a
form of swarm robotics, with constraints on motion vectors.

Of course, #3 (and maybe the other two) might not come about unless the chance
of an accident drops to infinitesimally small values - perhaps it may not even
be possible. Better safety systems for the occupants would likely need to be
developed as well (for that "impossible" chance it would be needed). Such cars
might also need to be "trained" on "how to crash to protect occupants" and/or
how to coordinate a collision with another vehicle(s) in real-time as the
collision unfolds, to minimize occupant danger - this again, would require a
standardized mesh network and coding to be able to take advantage of all the
sensor data that would flood in (and out - as sensors and actuators become
disabled by the accident unfolding - maybe the other cars involved - or not
involved - could share their information "from the outside" to allow the
disabled car to take better actions or whatnot). It's actually a fascinating
problem when I think about it - extremely complex, lots of parameters and
such; I wonder if anyone is working on it? If not - they should...

~~~
wolco
The answer is to park 20 feet in the air. When self driving is ready so will
anti-gravity enhanced cars/trucks.

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carapace
I'd love to build a large subdivision with the streets laid out in a fractal
curve:

    
    
        _ _
        _|_
    
    
        |__ __|
        |  |  |
           +----------
        |__|__|
        |     |
    
    
        _ _     _ _
         |___ ___|
        _|_  |  _|_
             |
             +--------------
        _ _  |  _ _
         |___|___|
        _|_     _|_
    
    
    
         __ __       __ __
        |_ | _|     |_ | _| 
           |_____ _____|
         _ | _   |   _ | _
        |__|__|  |  |__|__|
                 |
                 +================
         __ __   |   __ __
        |_ | _|  |  |_ | _| 
           |_____|_____|
         _ | _       _ | _
        |__|__|     |__|__| 
    
    
    

It would likely suck to live there, but the traffic patterns would be cool...

~~~
microcolonel
Sounds like a good game of Cities: Skylines, call it Hilbertville.

------
peterwwillis
> We must make do mostly with building up and densifying the urban areas we
> already have. As transportation goes, so go our cities.

If we make transportation better, our cities can be less dense. So can't we
make transportation better?

What causes congestion? Car traffic. Why does car traffic cause congestion?
It's an inefficient use of roads. What are some alternatives?

1) Build more roads. Sure, except it's expensive, time consuming, and you
quickly run out of land, and would have to build them one on top of another.

2) Fit more people into existing roads. How? Buses, trolleys, trains, subways,
vans. Build out the mass transit to the suburban enclaves.

But all this supposes an urban center is also the only answer. What do people
need to congregate in one place for? Usually to work in one place. But why
work in one place?

Due to division of labor, most of us don't do things with multiple completely
different people on multiple completely different subjects; we're just not
that collaborative. But you may need to transport _your work_ to another group
in a company. At a bank, all this is paper; in a car manufacturing plant, this
is car parts. The former is done digitally now, and the latter could be done,
again, by increased transportation efficiency.

All the other things we use are already decentralized outside the city;
schools, churches, supermarkets, health care, water, power, recreation. It's
really just business, and the ability to work decentralized, that constricts
where and how we live. Transportation will make it easier to decentralize. And
we can start by giving up our cars.

The other aspect of work decentralization I've already seen at a rental car
facility. A computerized kiosk displayed a remote worker on screen, who
processed my driver's license, credit card and rental information and directed
me to my rental car. It was surprisingly trouble-free and pleasant, and only
one of us needed to be there.

~~~
DangitBobby
There are many classes of jobs that you must be physically present for. You
must be physically there to make food, to build, to repair, to be security, to
treat patients, to drive a bus, to build a boat. Things walk off of shelves if
you don't have employees manning checkout stations. These all legitimately
require your physical presence.

~~~
peterwwillis
A lot of those things are already automated. Machines that create pizzas,
burgers, cocktails, robots that weld, security robots, remote medical care,
driverless transportation.

The rental car place had people there... two to move cars and clean them, and
one to sit in an exit booth to check IDs against contracts and lower the tire-
ripping thing. But they didn't need three people idling behind desks waiting
to process people's policies.

~~~
DangitBobby
They are very rarely automated. And the jobs you don't need physical presence
are outweighed by those you do, IMO.

