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Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something. I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal p

• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• athenot 10y ago
  Cars in tunnels is a great idea, just like the subway: burry it so as to not impact life on the surface. Unfortunately, it is very expensive to operate that way. The easiest tunnels to build are the ones Paris did for their subway a century ago: dig up the soft limestone under the street, lay tracks, close it up. But you still need to deal with ventilation (especially for non-electric cars), fire suppressant, evacuation, flooding and general maintenance. In the best-case scenario, tunnels are just very expensive. Then there are places like Atlanta (sitting on granite) or San Francisco (in a fault zone) where things get a lot more complicated.
  • cbr 10y ago
    When building a city from scratch you can cut-and-cover everything, and you can choose somewhere with good soil conditions for what you want to build.
  • vmarsy 10y ago
    To avoid accidents and other dangers, I'd see a mechanism where you park your car in a pod, and the pod is on rails, and it is getting routed automatically to your destination, that way even "dumb cars" could use it. There's already a system in France where you can park your car on a train, but loading/unloading isn't optimized at all, it's like loading/unloading a ferry : some batch processing. A steaming process would be more efficient That wouldn't remove the need for ventilation and other things you mentioned if that system is underground. But it could be above the ground , on buildings 2nd floors, where the first floor would be retail stores and whatnot
    • MagnumOpus 10y ago
      > you park your car in a pod, and the pod is on rails Why not have seats on the pod, that way you don't have to ferry around a 2-tonne car. Indeed if you have solved smart automation, why have rails at all? Presto, you arrive at the idea of self-driving taxis as a public service.
    • derefr 10y ago
      For the autonomous cars, it'd be interesting if they could do the equivalent of what computers do by "binding to a domain", letting things like these loaders connect to them and "drive" them onboard. Really, the car would (should!) still be driving itself—it's the thing that gets certified on how to handle safety issues, after all; the car would just be given a dead-reckoning location target by the zone controller, which the car would get to as best it knows how, with the zone controller scanning to "see" when it had successfully boarded, just like with a human-driven car. If there were few-enough human-driven cars, you could have a team of valet staff accompanying the train, acting as glue for the few human-driven cars in the pack.
  • zanny 10y ago
    Would you build rail transit underground in a new city? A large part of why subways are even things to begin with was because they were added late in the development of most cities that justify building them. Newer cities like Dallas have above ground commuter rail exactly because the city still had room to build it above ground. If anything, it is much more valuable to segment the city in ways that you don't need subways or roads. You should have districts that are internally navigable strictly by foot, bikes and tram between adjacent districts, and only have rail / road when going beyond the local microcosm of city. You want greenery anyway, you might as well put it in the bounding lines between regions of your city and have the roads / rail between those to minimize noise pollution outside of the transit hubs.
  • rwhitman 10y ago
    I've thought about this. My thought has been, bump the street level up one story to create a pedestrian / bicycle promenade and move building entrances to the second floor. Keep the existing street below intact, with parallel parking etc. Essentially build a boardwalk above a commercial street, so that traffic can flow below. (Though for ventilation purposes, it would be best if most cars at street level were electric.) Raising the street grade one story has been done before, when flush toilets were introduced in the late 1800's. Notably in Seattle and Chicago but in pockets other low-lying cities as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
    • dhd415 10y ago
      That reminds me of a 1920s drawing of the "city of the future" that had several levels of roadway with a promenade or pedestrian level on the third or fourth story: https://worldstreets.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/future-city-popular-science-1925.jpg https://worldstreets.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/future-city...
      • hammock 10y ago
        Downtown Chicago comes pretty close with subway on the lowest level, trucks and commuter rail above that, and cars/pedestrians on the surface. There is also a large network of pedestrian tunnels which is useful in winter (and when coming from aforementioned commuter trains). And until 2003, there was even an airstrip only 2mi from downtown.
        • rwhitman 10y ago
          Montreal's Underground City is a pretty great example of how to give public pedestrian connectivity underground in winter. Well worth checking out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal
        • rspeer 10y ago
• davidw 10y ago
  Of course cars have a place too. Having two smallish children, cars are a great way for my family to get around for many things. But it's nice when they are one option among many, and not set on a pedestal as the only one. For instance, when we lived in Padova: we'd ride bikes around the neighborhood when the weather was good. I'd walk to get groceries. My wife and I often rode bikes downtown for 'date night'. We'd take the car to do larger shopping trips on occasion, or to do things further from town. We'd take the family downtown on public transportation. So it was a 'right tool for the job' situation. I don't think we really need any fancy, expensive technical solutions like burying cars in tunnels - just making streets a bit slower, and safer for bikes and pedestrians would be a great start.
  • curryst 10y ago
    Changing the way cars function inside the city is only part of what would need to change. Near me things just aren't laid out well for pedestrians. It would take me about an hour to walk to the nearest grocery store (not counting corner stores, because all they sell is junk food). Biking should be much shorter, though I can't say I've ever tried. We would need to stop the trend of having a small number of large stores and move back towards having a large number of smaller stores. That comes with it's own trade offs in planning an efficient city. The other thing worth mentioning is that bikes/pedestrians can go anywhere cars can, but the opposite is not true. If we made streets that were "bike only" cars wouldn't be able to access them. Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator.
    • thaumasiotes 10y ago
      > It would take me about an hour to walk to the nearest grocery store (not counting corner stores, because all they sell is junk food). There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house? I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food. Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.
• eldavido 10y ago
  Don't get too depressed; the value of real estate has been falling for 100 years relative to business equity and other productive assets, and most real estate assets are hugely leveraged today. I somewhat doubt a lot of the debt capital, which is optimized for relatively predictable payouts over long timeframes (with good reason -- this stuff funds pensions and universities) would shift to funding higher-productivity assets if given the chance. Ultimately, you have to realize that not everyone in the world has the appetite for the kind of high-risk, high-return sort of lifestyle and pursuits that YC founders and partners do/did. A large swath of the population is content to earn their 2-3%/year on real estate, which when levered 3:1 or 4:1, gets up to 10-12%/year, which is a pretty good return in the world of non-VC/non-SV investing. Source: Piketty's Capital in the 21st century
  • xapata 10y ago
    How do you calculate that return? Does that include the cost of capital?
    • cylinder 10y ago
      I also highly doubt it factors in the returns from tax incentives / rebates / deductions / exemptions.
      • eanzenberg 10y ago
        Gross returns is good to compare when everyone has different tax liabilities.
  • hx87 10y ago
    Productive assets aren't necessarily high-risk, high-return though: that's what blue chips like IBM and GE are for, and they're far more predictable than, say, the Florida real estate market.
• matthoiland 10y ago
  Reminds me of Walt Disney's original plan for Epcot, with pedestrian-only on the surface, and trains and supply trucks underground. You can find his presentation (very Howard Stark-like) on Youtube (v=sLCHg9mUBag).
• simonswords82 10y ago
  Cars underground is a great idea but you'd need to find a way to make GPS work, especially since GPS is necessary for autonomous cars which are obviously a thing of the future.
  • collyw 10y ago
    Cars and tunnels existed for a lot longer than GPS.
    • freehunter 10y ago
      Yes, and no one wants to go back to the pre-GPS days.
      • collyw 10y ago
        I got the map out the last time I was in the car. Far quicker than waiting for my phone to get a GPS lock.
        • freehunter 10y ago
          I don't even want to know what kind of phone you have if unfolding a map, tracing and memorizing your route, and folding it back up is quicker than a GPS lock. On any phone I've had since 2009, GPS lock has been instant.
          • collyw 10y ago
            All I needed to do was look up the number of a junction. The rest of the route was pretty straightforward. And it was not a foldable map, just a big book. Way less faff than getting the phone out of my pocket, unlocking the screen farting about looking for a map app, waiting for it to load then get a GPS lock.
  • hx87 10y ago
    GPS repeaters have existed for at least a decade.
• wrsh07 10y ago
  Cars or bikes are great because vehicle + roads = a fairly robust network [if done well, no single points of failure]. That's not usually the case for public transit. [Agreed about real estate. Although dense cities are very eco-friendly, it might be hard to motivate dense cities when real estate isn't super expensive. Manhattan grows upward because it's expensive to grow any other direction]
  • epistasis 10y ago
    Bikes may be great but cars are terrible for cities. They take a ton of space and require massive amounts of restrictions on non-car traffic. Space is the biggest premium in a city. If a fraction of the space that was devoted to car traffic was instead devoted to public transit, public transit would be far more efficient and robust than cars.
    • rtkwe 10y ago
      Maybe in denser cities or downtown but where I live and work if I wanted to take a bus my easy 9 mile 20 minute drive becomes 60 to 90 minutes with 3 bus changes. That's a lot of ground to make up.
      • zanny 10y ago
        I hope the aspiration for new cities would start with the presumption of density. An experiment like this should be trying to solve a problem, not just add more urban sprawl, and you don't get a city culture off preplanned road infrastructure and zoning laws.
        • epistasis 10y ago
          It's an interesting question: how does one maximize the potential interconnections between people and places? I know that when I'm in a dense city, it definitely feels like there are a lot more places and things I can visit than when I'm in a suburban area with a car. But that needs to be balanced with the desires of some to have fewer connections, but perhaps more yard. And some people honestly desire to have fewer connections and live further away from others. However, what if the suburban area was more varied in locations: smaller businesses and corner markets mixed in with residential areas? Right now most suburban development consists square miles of nothing but residential cul-de-sacs peppered with massive clusters of big box stores that require huge parking lots and must serve large numbers of people to survive. People want the big box stores because they think they save money, but the same savings are possible with lots of small stores as long as there's a real market and clever people running small businesses. With that type of sparse use of land, greater distances between things on average but with the speed of cars, would that allow more interconnections than density? I think that over the past few decades, that those that desire the yard, and those that desire fewer interconnections have been able to prevent those that want density from building it. There's a clear undersupply of dense locations and a clear oversupply of sparse locations. I think the key is to have lots of diversity so that many experiments can be tried. Right now there have been few styles that have been tried with cars, and though I personally consider it a failure in that I don't want to live like that, there are plenty of people that consider density to be a failure and would never want to live like that. Any solution(s) to cities should be able to meet everybody's desires.
• jseliger 10y ago
  Paul Romer has done a lot of interesting, adjacent work on charter cities; this Econtalk episode is a decent introduction to his work: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/04/romer_on_charte.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/04/romer_on_charte.htm.... In the U.S., we've collectively done a lot, culturally and legally, to make real estate a principal savings vehicle for many if not most people, and this has had a lot of negative consequences. Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation (http://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulation/dp/155844288X?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulation...) by is a good introduction to some of them. Chapters 7 – 9 in particular explain how the 1970s saw the growth of zoning restrictions that have driven housing costs in urban areas relentlessly up. I'd be curious about alternate land-ownership structures or incentives that make people view housing more as a service than as a good store of value. I don't know what that might mean in practice, but the idea itself seems important to me.
  • hammock 10y ago
    >I'd be curious about alternate land-ownership structures or incentives that make people view housing more as a service than as a good store of value. I don't know what that might mean in practice, but the idea itself seems important to me. Look no further than the BLM and leasing on public lands. Grazing, etc.
  • naveen99 10y ago
    To list a few of the advantages of home ownership: 1. tax write off on interest. But with interest rates low, that is not as usefull as it has been in the past. 2. A few states such as texas, have some additional asset protection on your primary residence in case of bankrupcy 3. homstead exemption on property tax (approximately first $100,000 property value), varies by county. 4. property tax freeze above age 65. 5. some capital gains exemptions for primary residence. but a store of value is a store of value. Would you be ok with people buying treasury bonds as a store of value ? Or would you incentivise higher risk investments, how ? Also, private schools, golf and tennis clubs also price out a lot of people. Not too different from zoning restrictions.
  • lr4444lr 10y ago
• aerovistae 10y ago
  But people wouldn't invest their money in productive assets. Given more spare money, they buy bigger televisions and shinier cars. Financial ignorance and materialism are some of the most basic woes underpinning society. Their thought process is well-illustrated by a recent exchange I had with some children from a background of poverty: Me: Maybe you should save that money instead of spending it. Them: Good point, then I can buy something more expensive next week! --- Children they may be, but I know their parents and that mindset did not appear ex nihilo.
  • gammarator 10y ago
    Here's an article which might expand your empathy for the "irrational" purchasing decisions of the poor: https://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/ https://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-pe...
    • aerovistae 10y ago
      I got four paragraphs in and the author still hadn't said anything interesting, informative, or useful, so I dropped it. Thanks though.
• pdonis 10y ago
  > I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. I don't think this is a good view to take as a fully general statement. People invest capital in real estate because they get benefits from it. If the benefits they get are worth more to them than the benefits they would get from any alternative uses of the same capital, then putting that capital into real estate is optimal for them. > it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets. If spending more money on real estate increases its value to the people who use it, then it is a productive asset. I think you are taking too narrow a view of what "productive" means. Instead of seeing it as "make housing/office space cheap", I think you should be thinking of it as "make housing/office space give more value for a given investment". In other words, don't make it cheap; make something people want. Making it as cheap as possible might not always be the best way to do that.
  • jakobegger 10y ago
    Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean by more value from an investment? I see housing prices have been growing enormously in the last few years, but the appartements are exactly the same as they were twenty years ago. I don't see how I can get more 'value' out of an appartement that is older, not renovated, and costs twice as much.
    • pdonis 10y ago
      > I'm not sure what you mean by more value from an investment? I mean that people get more benefit from it. What specifically counts as a benefit depends on the person. > the appartements are exactly the same as they were twenty years ago. This is going to depend a lot on what area you are in. In my area, much of the housing is fairly new, because either old housing was torn down and replaced, or housing was expanded into land that used to be something else (mostly farms or woods). > I don't see how I can get more 'value' out of an appartement that is older, not renovated, and costs twice as much. Any capital investment depreciates, and eventually you will need to reinvest in it in order to continue getting value from it. But suppose the average dwelling lasted 50 years before needing to be renovated or replaced, instead of 20. That would be an obvious benefit, even if the original purchase price of the dwelling was higher; in fact many people might be willing to pay the higher price in order to get a dwelling that would last so much longer. Of course I understand that this is not what we currently see in most housing markets. But I think it is highly relevant to the question of whether "make housing cheaper" is always the right goal if you're trying to reinvent housing.
• hinkley 10y ago
  I've seen a few city designs with an elevated pedestrian walkway on the third floor. I think part of the problem is how to grow trees in that environment. We have pretty good data on how important greenery is to happiness. I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day, looking across at a store front that has had a high rate of turnover. It's on the wrong side of a busy, complicated intersection, but the back half of the building is still in a high pedestrian traffic area. It occurred to me that if they tore out the building and replaced it with an arcade, they'd solve several problems. They'd get more modest square footage store fronts on the edge of an existing retail area, and they'd break the psychological barrier that keeps people from going around the block.
• eternalban 10y ago
  How "bold" are you prepared to accept?
• SeoxyS 10y ago
  I think simply banning private car ownership in cities might be a good idea. It'd change the entire incentive system to focus more on building strong public transportation. We'd still have taxis / Uber / on-demand self-driving cars for when that's the most convenient option, of course.
  • Steltek 10y ago
    That's... an unrealistic step. You can't wish a functioning transit system into existence overnight. Even if a metro region was comfortable throwing its entire weight behind transit, it would still take many years to develop. A good first step is introducing a congestion charge or a peak hour toll. That shifts the fungible traffic patterns and would ease up rush hour jams. The revenue is then applied towards transit development, which eventually produces a desirable rush hour balance between people interested in paying more for car service and people who use the more economical transit system.
• flamedoge 10y ago
  You mean like a subway?
• bambax 10y ago
  Rent is the measure of the success of a city; rent is high where people want to be. Saying you'll make "cheap housing" where people will nonetheless want to be is complete nonsense. If people want to live there the rent will go up; the only way to make the rent low is to make the place utterly undesirable.
  • dimitar 10y ago
    You've mentioned demand for housing as a determinant of rents - but there is also supply of houses and apartments. You can make rents lower by building more, and quality of life can stay the same or improve provided that your infrastructure and regulations are well thought out.