4 ms·

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 coun

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.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  I'm sure you're right about the smaller and smaller accommodations, but I think the argument I heard before was intended to be a little longer-term than that. Our starting position is that a lot of employment is very centralised in big cities or industrial areas, sometimes for historical reasons that aren't necessarily as relevant today. With better planning of future cities, with an emphasis on keeping everyday services like schools, shops, basic medical care and sports facilities more local to where people live, both the provider and the consumer have less need to make routine long journeys that overlap lots of other people's routine long journeys. There will always be a need to centralise certain key facilities more, say hospitals that need to respond to a diverse range of serious conditions very quickly but also serve a wide area because fortunately there aren't many people with each condition at any given time. However, there is no need for your dentist or optician to be based 10 miles away in the nearest city centre when there are more than enough patients who need that sort of care within a one mile radius anyway. In my country (the UK) we do this much better in some respects than others. Schooling is usually relatively local in the early years, for example. Most kids don't have to travel silly distances to reach secondary school (ages around 11-18) either. Some places have much better routine medical facilities available locally than others. This is definitely an area where we could improve. Shopping in bricks and mortar stores is so bad now that we're increasingly seeing our traditional high streets turning into deserted wastelands, far too expensive and time-consuming to reach for a quick visit when you just want to buy a new shirt for the weekend or toy for your child. Online stores and huge, car-friendly out-of-town shopping centres with almost exactly the same 100 brands as all the others are driving all the traditional, local, interesting shops out of business, sadly. More generally, far too many of our vanilla office jobs are based in city centres entirely unnecessarily. Their staff don't live nearby any more because they can't afford to, so what was once an advantage is now a disadvantage that causes big problems for and because of commuters. So I don't really think living in shoe boxes is the answer. Moving everything else so it's more readily accessible from good quality homes is the answer, according to this argument at least. Just to be clear, this isn't necessarily an argument for moving everything out to the suburbs or smaller, more rural towns. The same principles can also be applied in much larger cities, by better balancing residential, business and leisure facilities in each neighbourhood. The trouble is usually that historically this wasn't so well understood, so existing planning/zoning rules often aren't very effective but you can't just transplant everything overnight to where you'd ideally like it to be. Hence the desire to promote newer and better designed areas as a general trend, and in (lots of) time allow the older and less practical areas to be rearranged.

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.

Silhouette 7y ago
I'm sure you're right about the smaller and smaller accommodations, but I think the argument I heard before was intended to be a little longer-term than that. Our starting position is that a lot of employment is very centralised in big cities or industrial areas, sometimes for historical reasons that aren't necessarily as relevant today. With better planning of future cities, with an emphasis on keeping everyday services like schools, shops, basic medical care and sports facilities more local to where people live, both the provider and the consumer have less need to make routine long journeys that overlap lots of other people's routine long journeys. There will always be a need to centralise certain key facilities more, say hospitals that need to respond to a diverse range of serious conditions very quickly but also serve a wide area because fortunately there aren't many people with each condition at any given time. However, there is no need for your dentist or optician to be based 10 miles away in the nearest city centre when there are more than enough patients who need that sort of care within a one mile radius anyway. In my country (the UK) we do this much better in some respects than others. Schooling is usually relatively local in the early years, for example. Most kids don't have to travel silly distances to reach secondary school (ages around 11-18) either. Some places have much better routine medical facilities available locally than others. This is definitely an area where we could improve. Shopping in bricks and mortar stores is so bad now that we're increasingly seeing our traditional high streets turning into deserted wastelands, far too expensive and time-consuming to reach for a quick visit when you just want to buy a new shirt for the weekend or toy for your child. Online stores and huge, car-friendly out-of-town shopping centres with almost exactly the same 100 brands as all the others are driving all the traditional, local, interesting shops out of business, sadly. More generally, far too many of our vanilla office jobs are based in city centres entirely unnecessarily. Their staff don't live nearby any more because they can't afford to, so what was once an advantage is now a disadvantage that causes big problems for and because of commuters. So I don't really think living in shoe boxes is the answer. Moving everything else so it's more readily accessible from good quality homes is the answer, according to this argument at least. Just to be clear, this isn't necessarily an argument for moving everything out to the suburbs or smaller, more rural towns. The same principles can also be applied in much larger cities, by better balancing residential, business and leisure facilities in each neighbourhood. The trouble is usually that historically this wasn't so well understood, so existing planning/zoning rules often aren't very effective but you can't just transplant everything overnight to where you'd ideally like it to be. Hence the desire to promote newer and better designed areas as a general trend, and in (lots of) time allow the older and less practical areas to be rearranged.