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I wonder how Tokyo functions? I guess people just die waiting for an ambulance or in a fire. See this part of the comment you’re replying to - > Yes we need s

by dymk 2y ago

I wonder how Tokyo functions? I guess people just die waiting for an ambulance or in a fire. See this part of the comment you’re replying to - > Yes we need some roads, but cars driving in the heart of downtown as normal transit?

fooker 2y ago
Tokyo barely makes it into the top hundred by population density. Also yes, for most large cities you can find news articles about people dying in fires or because of an ambulance getting delayed.
- wat10000 2y ago
  Funny how you don’t see articles about people dying in fires because they live on a suburb that’s 10% as dense as it should be and so the fire station is 3x farther away than it should be. No real surprise, though. People love stories where you can point to a few people and say, they’re the ones who did this. It’s much less fun when it’s systemic and no one person or group can be blamed.
  - fooker 2y ago
    As a rule of thumb, you can't design anything trying to account for black swan events. Optimizing for the regular, daily use case is hard enough. It would help to think of this as a smart but random person reading about a security issue like spectre and offering you software design advice. Common sense arguments are only useful to an extent, the devil is in the details.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      I’m not sure how to apply this here. What does optimizing for regular daily use and not black swan events look like when it comes to fire and ambulance services? It seems to me that black swans are a major purpose for them. That’s why the local fire station tends to have a lot of time where the firefighters are sitting around, and why simple calls often get 3x more response than they need. The services are greatly overprovisioned for daily needs because they also exist for the times when an entire apartment building burns down, or some maniac bombs the subway.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Police response times in my "10% as dense as it should be" suburb (a place that would be the poster child for everything urbanists hate) are 3x faster than they are in NYC. That is largely due to having high mobility through the town. In pure distance terms, I live about 20x further from the police station, though. The average door-to-door time between my house and the nearest level 1 trauma center is 10 minutes shorter than it would be when I lived in Manhattan. It turns out that having the paramedics wait for an elevator really cuts into their response time. A level 3 trauma center is 25 minutes closer (there are no level 3 trauma centers in Manhattan). https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nypds-slow-response-times-keep-growing-longer-data-shows https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nypds-slow-response... Cities are built for average-case living, and that is fine until you need it not to be.
- dymk 2y ago
  Who cares about news articles? If you're worried that dense cities are dangerous, then back it up with some statistics about deaths per capita due to EMS delays.

by dymk 2y ago

fooker 2y ago

Tokyo barely makes it into the top hundred by population density. Also yes, for most large cities you can find news articles about people dying in fires or because of an ambulance getting delayed.

wat10000 2y ago
Funny how you don’t see articles about people dying in fires because they live on a suburb that’s 10% as dense as it should be and so the fire station is 3x farther away than it should be. No real surprise, though. People love stories where you can point to a few people and say, they’re the ones who did this. It’s much less fun when it’s systemic and no one person or group can be blamed.
- fooker 2y ago
  As a rule of thumb, you can't design anything trying to account for black swan events. Optimizing for the regular, daily use case is hard enough. It would help to think of this as a smart but random person reading about a security issue like spectre and offering you software design advice. Common sense arguments are only useful to an extent, the devil is in the details.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    I’m not sure how to apply this here. What does optimizing for regular daily use and not black swan events look like when it comes to fire and ambulance services? It seems to me that black swans are a major purpose for them. That’s why the local fire station tends to have a lot of time where the firefighters are sitting around, and why simple calls often get 3x more response than they need. The services are greatly overprovisioned for daily needs because they also exist for the times when an entire apartment building burns down, or some maniac bombs the subway.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  Police response times in my "10% as dense as it should be" suburb (a place that would be the poster child for everything urbanists hate) are 3x faster than they are in NYC. That is largely due to having high mobility through the town. In pure distance terms, I live about 20x further from the police station, though. The average door-to-door time between my house and the nearest level 1 trauma center is 10 minutes shorter than it would be when I lived in Manhattan. It turns out that having the paramedics wait for an elevator really cuts into their response time. A level 3 trauma center is 25 minutes closer (there are no level 3 trauma centers in Manhattan). https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nypds-slow-response-times-keep-growing-longer-data-shows https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nypds-slow-response... Cities are built for average-case living, and that is fine until you need it not to be.
dymk 2y ago
Who cares about news articles? If you're worried that dense cities are dangerous, then back it up with some statistics about deaths per capita due to EMS delays.