I was gonna say something along that this would be cool to use to imagine streets built differently. Like with less traffic, cycle lanes, street vendors etc., and then they link to a Dutch website already doing something similar. Very cool.
Things like these could be useful in helping to push decision makers and the public to see new opportunities. Right now when something is being built, it's always a optimistic 3d render on a sunny day with people laughing being shown to sway the public in favor of the project. Letting us "normal people" fight back against certain projects or suggest our own without needing to have professional architects draw a concept could be nice.
Required inclusion like this in publicly accessible Google Streetview interface would be ideal as well - otherwise there are some tricks that are used sometimes to make mammoth buildings look much smaller in perspective due to the angles (etc) they use and print on their promotional material in order to get less resistance from the public.
Architectural rendering are all about tricks. Look closely and you will see the silliness. The human figures used in indoor areas are tiny, to make the interior of a building look large and spacious. The the people on the sidewalks of exterior renderings are huge, to make the building look small and innocuous.
There was an airline ad a couple years ago (Singapore??) that made a great joke of this. Airline ads are always full of tiny women in order to make the seats and windows look bigger than reality. The last shot of the commercial was of a stewardess reclining literally inside the window sill, a person who would have been maybe 18" tall, or a window that was 5' tall.
> beauty of a car free environment. ... you can see how your street might look without that noisy road and those dirty cars.
Beautiful. But I see that picture-perfect pathway, and wonder the cost and time to maintain the vegetation.
Bicycling through California suburbia, I see mostly dead lawns, ever since the droughts began. Few people (or cities) have time/money/motivation to create beautiful gardens. So I'm imagining a dusty gravel pathway instead.
While nothing is truly maintenance free, methods like hardscaping, xeriscaping and even permaculture planting methods like STUN (okay a harder sell but still) are easily doable.
In the longer term, the emergent benefit is that bicycle friendly infrastructure incentivizes density which saves on money and maintenance.
We took out our front lawn and replaced it with a drought tolerant garden with redwood chips, succulents and other drought tolerant plants. It looks much better than it used to look, and we got part of it paid for by money from the Santa Clara County water district (though we paid most of the cost).
It's considerably less work than maintaining the grass lawn that it replaced, which needed to be mowed and weeded. Also, you use quotes here, but I'm not sure who you're quoting, it wasn't me.
Seems reasonable to me. I cut the simple bushes in front of my house back from the path much much more often than the township does anything with the road.
Manpower wise, the bushes along the path probably take as much average labor as the road.
Maybe material/gas to resurface the road every 10 years would make the road cost more per year.
There is a bike trail near our house, and the plowing and mowing and tree clearing along it takes way more man-hours than the once-a-decade resurfacing.
Not sure what the comparative costs are, and a road would have similar maintenance if it was that close to trees (a bike path is just a narrow road).
Soon: "Enhance and beautify your commute with Vision Pro, now with automatic urban blight removal - gone are the days of seeing strip malls, now strip parks. Homeless encampments? Adult recreation areas! Litter? Flowers!"
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But in serious, this will be amazing once Civil Engineers, Urban Planners, Landscape architects etc - can use this, but have it also calc "cost of options" for each - and have it do Environmental Impact analysis based on the plan, AND Title 24 implications... which are always fun to deal with especially in cities such as San Francisco.
(Title 24 are the codes for efficiency, safety etc for new builds basically - but they can be a pain in the ass to navigate when planning in urban areas in California.. Environmental Impact studies cost a boatload and are usually lamented about for things like "Protect the Frogs of Marin" (which affected a lot of building aspirations especially in wealthy areas, such as Marin - but ARE very important when determining if a new development on top of some natural habit is going to F-up the surrounding ecosystem over the next N years)
Lawns are incredibly stupid in California. There are so many more appropriate ways to cover ground. There are definitely choices better than a dusty gravel pathway.
what you probably need is just more vegetation, and vegetation that is naturally suitable for the climate/microclimate, that will grow... naturally and without the need for upkeep.
Like, if nature itself needs upkeep, something other than lack of upkeep is the issue.
It still needs manual upkeep. Nature has a way of planting things that don't even necessarily belong on the same continent in spaces where they are undesirable.
See, for example: Kudzu. We introduced it intentionally, and nature's own mechanisms have it literally growing beyond control -- blanketing (and typically killing) anything in its path in the US South, including mature trees.
Little feedback on the site; the site is very hard to use on my current laptop at 1920x1080 - overflow is hidden so I can't scroll to the button to perform the generation (and after disabling overflow hidden in dev tools I can see that's because the page is designed to be a very static height).
Could you make it a bit more verbose? You really should provide some kind of feedback about what's going on. Am I waiting for something? Or is it broken? No information there.
Definitely part of the problem but also definitely not the full story. E.g. in Britain plenty of people cycle despite the terrible infrastructure and hills.
Besides, now we have electric bikes and e-scooters so hills shouldn't really be a barrier.
> E.g. in Britain plenty of people cycle despite the terrible infrastructure and hills.
Of course it's not the full story! I'm not claiming that zero cycling happens here in Britain.
> Besides, now we have electric bikes and e-scooters so hills shouldn't really be a barrier.
Now, yes. But cultural development takes a while, and those options are just much more expensive anyway. The Netherlands has about the ideal case for cycling, and - awesomely - they took advantage of that 50 years ago, so if it works anywhere it should work there today, after 50 years of planning and development and culture. Suddenly introducing e-bikes in 2024 isn't going to do much compared to flat country and 50 years of development.
Idk, high density housing is perfectly fine and healthy for people to socialize feel a sense of community.
These days humans blame their environment too much, and themselves too little.
Maybe a lot of americans have forgotten what it means to be a community and being neighbours.
Its pretty fun and bustling to live in a place full of life and people, provided all members respect each other, do not make too much noise, are polite, etc.
Its not high density that is the problem, its the norm in China, India, South East Asia, etc, they live perfectly happy lives, rank higher in community bonding, socialising, etc.
It used to be true in America too (level of socialisation), maybe that needs to brought back again, instead of complaining about high density housing.
I'm not just talking about the GP comment but the dozens of other comments you've posted to HN so far with this account, many of which have been low-quality.
The parent comment that you're replying to reads as a bit... mean in tone? So, to balance it out: your moderation work and also patience is appreciated.
Not really, I wouldn't endorse the disposition on anyone's part.
I'm glad that for the most part HN is moderated in a way that encourages civil discourse, even in disagreement. Not making fun of each other, not ad hominems, not swearing or even trying to make people bad, like other sites on the Internet sometimes do.
I've said plenty of immature or "cringe" things in my past and probably will in the future, so for what it's worth, I appreciate gentle nudges in the direction of being better and nicer to those around me.
> not sure why it is such a mystery feature from people on this site
What would be substantive would be to teach us that this can be done, rather than point out (based on dubious evidence, AFAICT) that we don't know yet as a means of one-upmanship. I don't believe you're trying to be mean, but I suspect that a vast majority of people would feel otherwise which is worth avoiding if you're able.
BTW, lack of "reply" option is probably due to the delay feature (the duration varies based on certain criteria) and can be bypassed by clicking the timestamp, which loads the comment in its own page, on which there is no such delay.
Things like these could be useful in helping to push decision makers and the public to see new opportunities. Right now when something is being built, it's always a optimistic 3d render on a sunny day with people laughing being shown to sway the public in favor of the project. Letting us "normal people" fight back against certain projects or suggest our own without needing to have professional architects draw a concept could be nice.