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There is an absolute ton of open land on Manhattan island, waiting to be built on. It's the hilariously-too-wide streets and especially our Avenues. We should i

by avn2109 10y ago

There is an absolute ton of open land on Manhattan island, waiting to be built on. It's the hilariously-too-wide streets and especially our Avenues. We should infill these like crazy, leaving little ten-foot wide streets basically where the current sidewalks are. This would have the effect of 1) reducing rents, 2) giving us Really Narrow Streets (tm), an excellent idea I stole from [0], and 3) sending property tax revenue through the roof while reducing road-maintenance expenditures so we can spend more money on subways. Density doesn't have to mean expensive vertical construction. Instead we could just make better use of our existing land by not wasting so much of it on low-bandwidth automobile transit infrastructure. (Side rant: Have you ever counted how many humans in cars get through a crosstown intersection in one traffic light cycle? It's literally ones or tens of people, a pathetically low number). [0] http://newworldeconomics.com/the-eco-metropolis/ http://newworldeconomics.com/the-eco-metropolis/

Eridrus 10y ago
NYC just built the most expensive few miles of subway in the upper east side, the next mile or two will be even more expensive. I'm sort of hoping that we get on-demand self-driving buses at some point and add a toll on vehicles driving into lower Manhattan, but I don't know if that will be enough. Bus tunnels also seem interesting, particularly when the buses are self-driving, but I don't know if they'd be any cheaper to build for us. As much as I do think that streets are too wide and we should almost certainly get rid of on-street parking, and the front yard in front of most Brooklyn brownstones being a huge waste of space; I'm not sure you can really plonk down a new building in the space we could reclaim from roads (on most streets), which means the way you make use of that space is by knocking down old buildings and building further into the street, which is again expensive. I wonder a little about delivery and construction in these scenarios; if the streets are that small, can you even get a crane in there? How do you do deliveries to businesses if you only have a single lane and you need to stop a truck for 15+ mins to unload? Supposedly people in Barcelona use hand carts for the last few hundred meters to get into the old town/super blocks, but that seems horribly inefficient. I don't know what the answer is, especially with the legacy infrastructure, but nothing in this space seems super simple even if you're not a fan of cars.

by avn2109 10y ago

Eridrus 10y ago

NYC just built the most expensive few miles of subway in the upper east side, the next mile or two will be even more expensive. I'm sort of hoping that we get on-demand self-driving buses at some point and add a toll on vehicles driving into lower Manhattan, but I don't know if that will be enough. Bus tunnels also seem interesting, particularly when the buses are self-driving, but I don't know if they'd be any cheaper to build for us. As much as I do think that streets are too wide and we should almost certainly get rid of on-street parking, and the front yard in front of most Brooklyn brownstones being a huge waste of space; I'm not sure you can really plonk down a new building in the space we could reclaim from roads (on most streets), which means the way you make use of that space is by knocking down old buildings and building further into the street, which is again expensive. I wonder a little about delivery and construction in these scenarios; if the streets are that small, can you even get a crane in there? How do you do deliveries to businesses if you only have a single lane and you need to stop a truck for 15+ mins to unload? Supposedly people in Barcelona use hand carts for the last few hundred meters to get into the old town/super blocks, but that seems horribly inefficient. I don't know what the answer is, especially with the legacy infrastructure, but nothing in this space seems super simple even if you're not a fan of cars.