5 ms·

Look to how Tokyo does things. A few takeaways: - mixed use zoning: reduce requirement for long trips by mixing many compatible types of commercial with reside

by zephjc 10y ago

Look to how Tokyo does things. A few takeaways: - 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.

TulliusCicero 10y ago
> - 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. Alternatively, you COULD use dead-end streets...that are only dead ends to cars, but have pass-throughs for walking and biking. For an extreme example, see Houten, NL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.0334659,5.154189,16z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x47c666e7c006f4bb:0x87d8ebe7bead1a3d!8m2!3d52.0278426!4d5.1630019 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.03... http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/06/a-case-study-in-bike-friendly-suburban-planning/396107/ http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/06/a-case-study-in-bik...
- zephjc 10y ago
  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)
kbenson 10y ago
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.
acgourley 10y ago
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.
- zephjc 10y ago
  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. E.g. this slice of suburban Tokyo: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7368825,139.5634333,3a,75y,259.56h,86.83t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s3x5PpYIL_Rlp4aT6zzXXIg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7368825,139.5634333,3a,75y,2... Note the speed limit is 30kph, or around 18mph. 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.
Nadya 10y ago
Re: Street Design 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.
- zephjc 10y ago
  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.
  - vincvinc 10y ago
    This. You cannot consider Tokyo as an example of (successful) urban planning without understanding the role of the railway companies.
- toast2toast 10y ago
  I definitely agree!
verg 10y ago
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.
- fudged71 10y ago
  Narrower streets, wider sidewalks, more trees.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    German suburb showing the example: http://i.imgur.com/DHhjSQ8.jpg http://i.imgur.com/DHhjSQ8.jpg
  - rtpg 10y ago
    Actually most minor streets in Tokyo have no sidewalk. You can just walk on the street. Cars drive through slowly, of course.
nostrademons 10y ago
> No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. 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.)
- thescriptkiddie 10y ago
  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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
whamlastxmas 10y ago
Does the perfect city really need to focus on higher population density? It seems like less density is ultimately what most people would want.
- sova 10y ago
  yes. nature hybridized with human living. future forest primitive

by zephjc 10y ago

TulliusCicero 10y ago

> - 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. Alternatively, you COULD use dead-end streets...that are only dead ends to cars, but have pass-throughs for walking and biking. For an extreme example, see Houten, NL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.0334659,5.154189,16z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x47c666e7c006f4bb:0x87d8ebe7bead1a3d!8m2!3d52.0278426!4d5.1630019 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.03... http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/06/a-case-study-in-bike-friendly-suburban-planning/396107/ http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/06/a-case-study-in-bik...

zephjc 10y ago
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)

kbenson 10y ago

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.

acgourley 10y ago

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.

zephjc 10y ago
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. E.g. this slice of suburban Tokyo: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7368825,139.5634333,3a,75y,259.56h,86.83t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s3x5PpYIL_Rlp4aT6zzXXIg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7368825,139.5634333,3a,75y,2... Note the speed limit is 30kph, or around 18mph. 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.

Nadya 10y ago

Re: Street Design 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.

zephjc 10y ago
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.
- vincvinc 10y ago
  This. You cannot consider Tokyo as an example of (successful) urban planning without understanding the role of the railway companies.
toast2toast 10y ago
I definitely agree!

verg 10y ago

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.

fudged71 10y ago
Narrower streets, wider sidewalks, more trees.
- kuschku 10y ago
  German suburb showing the example: http://i.imgur.com/DHhjSQ8.jpg http://i.imgur.com/DHhjSQ8.jpg
- rtpg 10y ago
  Actually most minor streets in Tokyo have no sidewalk. You can just walk on the street. Cars drive through slowly, of course.

nostrademons 10y ago

> No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. 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.)

thescriptkiddie 10y ago
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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

whamlastxmas 10y ago

Does the perfect city really need to focus on higher population density? It seems like less density is ultimately what most people would want.

sova 10y ago
yes. nature hybridized with human living. future forest primitive