6 ms·

Right. Some people want to live on top of each other in dense urban areas. That's fine and this should be an allowed pattern of development. "Enable them to l

Right. Some people want to live on top of each other in dense urban areas. That's fine and this should be an allowed pattern of development. "Enable them to live and work farther away from each other" is, simplified, pretty much the entire reason I wake up in the morning. I opt out of dense urban living. If the towns want to opt out of having people like me working there, so be it.

cmurphycode 7y ago
Well, right. But, I think that a lot of people are frustrated because living in dense urban areas is NOT an allowed pattern of development in most cities, especially the Bay Area.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Right. It doesn't work for anyone. I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted. Zone the ring road to kill sprawl. Ban cars inside the ring road other than trucks for deliveries, workmen etc. Best of both worlds. It's not gonna happen in a pre-existing city though, the winners will block it (and rightly so).
  - hnal943 7y ago
    I think I remember Doug Crockford talk in which he laid out the original design of EPCOT. It was very similar to what you described. Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvoCIPKWobs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvoCIPKWobs
  - RandallBrown 7y ago
    Manhattan is basically this taken to the extreme. With different levels of commuter rings. First level is the subway from New Jersey or Brooklyn/Queens. Next level is a commuter line like NJ Transit or Metro North. You can live as far as 90 miles away and have a somewhat reasonable commute, while living in a fairly rural area. I personally would much rather live in the dense urban core and have easy access to the outskirts, but commuting to Manhattan works for some people.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      Totally. There are actual people who take Amtrak from Albany at 5AM every day to Manhattan as a commute. Not many, but they exist!
      - kiliantics 7y ago
        It's amazing/depressing what patterns of living these megarich metropolises end up creating. There are people who live in Ireland and commute by boat and train to London for half the week in order to work.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        The seat of state government is Albany and the seat of commerce/finance is in Manhattan. A couple where one worked in each place would naturally have something like that arise (and I'd think it wouldn't even be particularly rare). I suspect for the majority of those couples, living in/near Albany would be vastly preferable to NYC, even before you consider the after-hours of political work is probably benefited more by locality.
    - Stronico 7y ago
      How long would a 90 mile commute take, in a best case scenario?
      - vilhelm_s 7y ago
        I don't know how you'd get 90 miles with Metro North or NJ Transit. The furthest you can go on Metro North is NYC<->New Haven, which is 70 miles and takes 2 hours 7 minutes, one way.
        walshemj 7y ago
        That is interesting I regularly used to do a 65 mile commute to London which can take just over an hour on the slower train and 35 min on the intercity. (Bedford to St Pancras) Not sure id have done one at double the time.
        7y ago
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted. The UK often does something similar with "park and ride" bus schemes. To reduce congestion in inner cities, there are large car parks on key roads coming to the city, and usually you can park very cheaply or free and get a relatively cheap bus ticket into the centre. Often the buses also have privileged access so they can bypass queues where people chose to drive their cars all the way in instead. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it certainly does reduce congestion and all its negative consequences locally and in the short term, which is obviously a good thing. On the other hand, it sustains a culture where we drive longer distances in vehicles much larger and less efficient than we actually need in order to get to work, which is a significant cause of negative consequences over a wider area and a longer term. I heard a suggestion long ago that the best thing to do about congestion in our cities might be nothing at all. The argument was loosely related to the points in the article here: the underlying problems are the need to make so many journeys in the first place and the inefficient modes of transport we use to make them. By allowing journeys into crowded cities to become ever more expensive, financially and otherwise, we would force better solutions in terms of how we plan our residential, business and recreational spaces. We could encourage areas with relatively dense populations where good public transport both within and between them is practical and efficient, where currently many of our cities here haven't really got critical mass to run a good 24/7 public transport system but are too big and often badly designed for historical reasons to support the volume of traffic that now wants to move at peak times. We could encourage the use of smaller, more efficient personal vehicles where public transport isn't sufficient. We could encourage the use of remote working for those whose jobs allow it. And in general, newer and more efficiently designed places to live would become relatively attractive compared to those with historical baggage that don't work as well practically. I haven't seen anything like enough evidence and analysis to know whether that's really a good general solution, but it has always struck me as a reasonable enough proposition to be worth exploring.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      > By allowing journeys into crowded cities to become ever more expensive, financially and otherwise, we would force better solutions in terms of how we plan our residential, business and recreational spaces. Perhaps. I mean, it certainly seems to be working so far - anecdotally people are stuffing themselves into smaller and smaller apartments, flat shares, etc, naturally. I'm biased so it's difficult for me to really conceptualise it. In that scenario, I would (and in fact have) just nope out entirely and move to the country because I can afford it. It seems unfair to tell everyone who can't to just suck it up and live in a shoebox.
- someguydave 7y ago
  I think both groups of people would benefit from less regulation in land use. Get rid of zoning and let the free market decide land use issues.
kemiller 7y ago
I'm all for letting people live how they want, but suburban planning tends not to account for the true lifetime cost of that mode of living. If we can fix that, then knock yourself out.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Suburban living is essentially what I'm describing here as being the 'bad' middle state that causes the issues. You have congestion because there are just houses dotted everywhere clustered around the city, making the 'last few miles' hellish. Later, those suburbs become 'urbs'. I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc. The problem with this design is that cities commonly grow over time. If you have a core which is full of 30 story buildings, it makes much more sense to allow the radius of the core to expand from 10 miles to 20 by bulldozing some car parks and replacing them with more 20 and 30 story buildings than to have to bulldoze the existing 30 story buildings and replace them all with 95 story ones. The sharp divide is what we already have and is one half of the causes of the existing problem. You have a core which is zoned for higher density surrounded by suburbs that aren't, which prevents the dense core from expanding outward as necessary. The other half is that even the core doesn't allow very high densities, so you generally don't get 50+ story buildings even there, you just get outrageously high rents instead because it can neither expand upwards nor outwards. You're essentially suggesting that it expand only upwards, but that's still a lot more expensive than expanding in both directions, and there comes a point that it becomes impractical. We don't really have a lot of experience constructing large numbers of 200 story buildings and even if we could figure it out it probably wouldn't be cost effective and result in affordable rents. Meanwhile there is a threshold density above which you can have things like effective mass transit, at which point expanding outward at the same density allows you to maintain those advantages over a larger area without paying the high cost of constructing buildings at the limits of our engineering talents (and also paying to destroy existing tall buildings in order to do it). Which is basically what naturally happens without zoning density restrictions. In theory someone could then build a 30 story building in the middle of the suburbs, but that doesn't make a lot of sense when it's more profitable to put that building closer to the core, until the core is already full of those, and then the most profitable place for that building is right next to the core. Which is how the core expands as needed. You don't really need to prohibit people from building at inappropriate densities when appropriateness is already closely aligned with profitability.

cmurphycode 7y ago

Well, right. But, I think that a lot of people are frustrated because living in dense urban areas is NOT an allowed pattern of development in most cities, especially the Bay Area.

esotericn 7y ago
Right. It doesn't work for anyone. I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted. Zone the ring road to kill sprawl. Ban cars inside the ring road other than trucks for deliveries, workmen etc. Best of both worlds. It's not gonna happen in a pre-existing city though, the winners will block it (and rightly so).
- hnal943 7y ago
  I think I remember Doug Crockford talk in which he laid out the original design of EPCOT. It was very similar to what you described. Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvoCIPKWobs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvoCIPKWobs
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  Manhattan is basically this taken to the extreme. With different levels of commuter rings. First level is the subway from New Jersey or Brooklyn/Queens. Next level is a commuter line like NJ Transit or Metro North. You can live as far as 90 miles away and have a somewhat reasonable commute, while living in a fairly rural area. I personally would much rather live in the dense urban core and have easy access to the outskirts, but commuting to Manhattan works for some people.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Totally. There are actual people who take Amtrak from Albany at 5AM every day to Manhattan as a commute. Not many, but they exist!
    - kiliantics 7y ago
      It's amazing/depressing what patterns of living these megarich metropolises end up creating. There are people who live in Ireland and commute by boat and train to London for half the week in order to work.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      The seat of state government is Albany and the seat of commerce/finance is in Manhattan. A couple where one worked in each place would naturally have something like that arise (and I'd think it wouldn't even be particularly rare). I suspect for the majority of those couples, living in/near Albany would be vastly preferable to NYC, even before you consider the after-hours of political work is probably benefited more by locality.
  - Stronico 7y ago
    How long would a 90 mile commute take, in a best case scenario?
    - vilhelm_s 7y ago
      I don't know how you'd get 90 miles with Metro North or NJ Transit. The furthest you can go on Metro North is NYC<->New Haven, which is 70 miles and takes 2 hours 7 minutes, one way.
      - walshemj 7y ago
        That is interesting I regularly used to do a 65 mile commute to London which can take just over an hour on the slower train and 35 min on the intercity. (Bedford to St Pancras) Not sure id have done one at double the time.
      - 7y ago
- Silhouette 7y ago
  I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted. The UK often does something similar with "park and ride" bus schemes. To reduce congestion in inner cities, there are large car parks on key roads coming to the city, and usually you can park very cheaply or free and get a relatively cheap bus ticket into the centre. Often the buses also have privileged access so they can bypass queues where people chose to drive their cars all the way in instead. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it certainly does reduce congestion and all its negative consequences locally and in the short term, which is obviously a good thing. On the other hand, it sustains a culture where we drive longer distances in vehicles much larger and less efficient than we actually need in order to get to work, which is a significant cause of negative consequences over a wider area and a longer term. I heard a suggestion long ago that the best thing to do about congestion in our cities might be nothing at all. The argument was loosely related to the points in the article here: the underlying problems are the need to make so many journeys in the first place and the inefficient modes of transport we use to make them. By allowing journeys into crowded cities to become ever more expensive, financially and otherwise, we would force better solutions in terms of how we plan our residential, business and recreational spaces. We could encourage areas with relatively dense populations where good public transport both within and between them is practical and efficient, where currently many of our cities here haven't really got critical mass to run a good 24/7 public transport system but are too big and often badly designed for historical reasons to support the volume of traffic that now wants to move at peak times. We could encourage the use of smaller, more efficient personal vehicles where public transport isn't sufficient. We could encourage the use of remote working for those whose jobs allow it. And in general, newer and more efficiently designed places to live would become relatively attractive compared to those with historical baggage that don't work as well practically. I haven't seen anything like enough evidence and analysis to know whether that's really a good general solution, but it has always struck me as a reasonable enough proposition to be worth exploring.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    > By allowing journeys into crowded cities to become ever more expensive, financially and otherwise, we would force better solutions in terms of how we plan our residential, business and recreational spaces. Perhaps. I mean, it certainly seems to be working so far - anecdotally people are stuffing themselves into smaller and smaller apartments, flat shares, etc, naturally. I'm biased so it's difficult for me to really conceptualise it. In that scenario, I would (and in fact have) just nope out entirely and move to the country because I can afford it. It seems unfair to tell everyone who can't to just suck it up and live in a shoebox.
someguydave 7y ago
I think both groups of people would benefit from less regulation in land use. Get rid of zoning and let the free market decide land use issues.

kemiller 7y ago

I'm all for letting people live how they want, but suburban planning tends not to account for the true lifetime cost of that mode of living. If we can fix that, then knock yourself out.

esotericn 7y ago
Suburban living is essentially what I'm describing here as being the 'bad' middle state that causes the issues. You have congestion because there are just houses dotted everywhere clustered around the city, making the 'last few miles' hellish. Later, those suburbs become 'urbs'. I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc. The problem with this design is that cities commonly grow over time. If you have a core which is full of 30 story buildings, it makes much more sense to allow the radius of the core to expand from 10 miles to 20 by bulldozing some car parks and replacing them with more 20 and 30 story buildings than to have to bulldoze the existing 30 story buildings and replace them all with 95 story ones. The sharp divide is what we already have and is one half of the causes of the existing problem. You have a core which is zoned for higher density surrounded by suburbs that aren't, which prevents the dense core from expanding outward as necessary. The other half is that even the core doesn't allow very high densities, so you generally don't get 50+ story buildings even there, you just get outrageously high rents instead because it can neither expand upwards nor outwards. You're essentially suggesting that it expand only upwards, but that's still a lot more expensive than expanding in both directions, and there comes a point that it becomes impractical. We don't really have a lot of experience constructing large numbers of 200 story buildings and even if we could figure it out it probably wouldn't be cost effective and result in affordable rents. Meanwhile there is a threshold density above which you can have things like effective mass transit, at which point expanding outward at the same density allows you to maintain those advantages over a larger area without paying the high cost of constructing buildings at the limits of our engineering talents (and also paying to destroy existing tall buildings in order to do it). Which is basically what naturally happens without zoning density restrictions. In theory someone could then build a 30 story building in the middle of the suburbs, but that doesn't make a lot of sense when it's more profitable to put that building closer to the core, until the core is already full of those, and then the most profitable place for that building is right next to the core. Which is how the core expands as needed. You don't really need to prohibit people from building at inappropriate densities when appropriateness is already closely aligned with profitability.