
Poor Man's Teleporter - mblakele
http://ideas.4brad.com/poor-mans-teleporter
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aphyr
I'm not that excited about it. Intelligent Transportation (the Google vans
with wifi) is a great way to make the commute more productive for people--but
to the extent that this technology _encourages_ urban sprawl, I'm against it.
Commuting still carries a high energy cost; much higher than the (amortized)
cost of designing livable neighborhoods near jobs in the first place.

And children never leaving their cars or garages? What the hell kind of world
is this? Whatever happened to just riding your bike down the street to the
library or friend's house?

~~~
randallsquared
_much higher than the (amortized) cost of designing livable neighborhoods near
jobs in the first place._

Do you expect to change homes as much as you change jobs? If not, the fact
that your home is walking distance from your _old_ job just doesn't seem like
a bonus.

 _And children never leaving their cars or garages? What the hell kind of
world is this? Whatever happened to just riding your bike down the street to
the library or friend's house?_

That's still possible; the world we live in is just one where people are
effectively wealthier, so it's no big deal to go to a better library that's 10
miles away, or to be able to stay in touch with friends who've moved across
town. It's hard for me to see the expanded possibilities as a bad thing. The
kind of world we live in now is _better_ than the world in which kids were
limited to whatever was nearby.

~~~
aphyr
"Do you expect to change homes as much as you change jobs? If not, the fact
that your home is walking distance from your old job just doesn't seem like a
bonus."

Good point, but I don't think it invalidates my argument. Most people relocate
to within 50 miles when switching jobs. They also don't need extensive
commutes when they live within 4 miles. The only time when a segregated work-
home plan is as efficient as a mixed-use plan is when someone switches jobs,
is over 4 miles away, less than 50 miles away, and chooses not to relocate
locally. I suspect (without evidence) that it is still more efficient to plan
for livable distributed cities instead of commuting an hour and a half per
day.

(I'm making a lot of approximations and estimates here with the absence of
quantitative data... hope it sounds reasonable still.)

I live in SF, and the number of people who live here because San Jose or Palo
Alto suck, but still commute eighty miles per day, is staggering.

"That's still possible; the world we live in is just one where people are
effectively wealthier, so it's no big deal to go to a better library that's 10
miles away, or to be able to stay in touch with friends who've moved across
town. It's hard for me to see the expanded possibilities as a bad thing. The
kind of world we live in now is better than the world in which kids were
limited to whatever was nearby."

Agreed. Expanded possibilities are great! What concerns me is that kids (and
adults, perhaps) lead increasingly isolated lives. I view walking around,
biking, public spaces, parks, and woodlands as good experiences that cost very
little. That's purely a moral stance; nobody has to agree.

P.S. How do you do quotes? I'm totally stymied!

~~~
randallsquared
What I was doing was just using asterisks around things, like _this_. I don't
know of a separate quoting markup for HN, like reddit has, though I sometimes
still slip and put > in front of quoted lines.

 _I suspect (without evidence) that it is still more efficient to plan for
livable distributed cities instead of commuting an hour and a half per day._

Oh, I don't disagree that it's more efficient, in terms of energy. I think
that people mostly value other things more than efficiency, though. People
don't seem to like living next to factories or office parks, unless those
spaces are themselves transformed into beautiful areas like parks, but doing
that raises the cost of construction considerably, negating much of the
efficiency advantage, I'd expect. Basically, the only (non-forceful) way to
make a lasting change in a situation is to improve people's lives in their own
estimation, and if they currently would rather spend an hour commuting than
live near offices or factories, you'll need to spend some time seeing what
could be changed about living near offices or factories to make that happen.
Good luck! :)

~~~
aphyr
You're right; nobody likes living next to a factory or power plant. But that
doesn't mean you have to live twenty miles away. I lived in Madison, WI for
two years; being on an isthmus, they've had to cram city government,
utilities, shopping, the biggest university in the state, and residential
housing all into an _eight block wide_ strip.

The city is extremely livable! Walking and biking around the city is fantastic
and the culture is vibrant. In fact, given that its an isthmus I thought I'd
have to bike _farther_ to get to anything, but it turned out that sports
leagues, parks, and city events were always within 4 miles.

There was a coal-fired power plant a few blocks from my house, and a nuclear
reactor a couple miles down the coast near Middleton--supposedly one of the
US's nicest suburbs to live in--and people really want to live in both cities.

Maybe it's just a problem of experience. I've lived my whole life in Portland
OR, small-town Minnesota, Madison WI, and now San Francisco. Maybe I just got
lucky by living in places where an urban growth boundary happened to work, or
a city with insane geographic constraints. It's obviously not a representative
sample, which makes me think I need more quantitative evidence to support the
model. Still, I think these examples suggest that in certain cases it _is_
possible to constrain sprawl.

~~~
bradtem
The issue brought up though, is that robocars might make the sprawled and
unconstrained city appear almost as "livable" as the one that had the density
due to constraints (or history.)

People moved to the burbs not for love of sprawl, but for love of larger lots,
larger fully detached homes, quieter streets and also (though not as
inherently) lower crime and better schools. They largely do it for their kids.
The car didn't make them move to the burbs so they could live a car lifestyle.
The car allowed them to move to the burbs.

But a world where transportation time is always productive, and you always get
dropped very close to where you are going with no parking hassle will be
different. (Like a taxi filled city such as Manhattan, but much better and
probably cheaper.)

What if there are still cool, walkable pedestrian blocks of shops and
restaurants and active life, but you can live 3 miles from them and still
enjoy them the way that the people who live 4 blocks from them enjoy them
today?

One fear you might have is that these things may already have a name -- malls.
Except malls are covered, and privately owned and thus somewhat sterile, but
people also seem to love them. But what if any suburbanite could be delivered
to the car-free mall to wander at any time for $1, delivered right inside (not
to the parking lot, which it doesn't even need any more) and while able to
make full use of that 10 minutes reading books or watching videos or working?

How does the "livable city" compete with that in most people's minds?

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noonespecial
In the real world, they'd be more like taxis and less like cozy little
recliner-bearing offices. Smelly, worn out, and filthy. Not something you'd
want to spend a lot of time in.

The problem they'd really be solving is parking, allowing downtowns to be more
dense without huge expenditures in public transport. I think a more reasonable
approach would be to admit we have just about completely failed (in the US)
when it comes to public transport, put aside our pork for a year or two and
build some.

~~~
bradtem
They would be what you paid for. Cheap ones might be dirty, more expensive
ones fancier. Unlike taxis, where your choices are "take the first one you
see" or "wait a long time for a called one to come" the rule would be "the
closest one to you that meets the standards of the company you asked to send
one" comes. Or if you are in a real hurry and did not plan ahead even a few
minutes, you take the first one that might be dirty.

------
seasoup
Why is a keyboard problematic?

~~~
bradtem
Today, we let any input device (such as a keyboard, or any USB device
actually) take full control of our computer. If it's a hacked device (even
something just inserted into the USB) it can type anything to our computer,
issue commands, make it download stuff, sniff passwords, etc. It takes a lot
of work to make a computer secure enough that you can plug a non-trusted
keyboard into it. It may not even be truly doable if you consider the habits
of computer users.

