12 ms·

Narrowing a residential street – McAllister

119 points by waffle_ss 11y ago

dvh 11y ago
But where will park the cars?
- jedmeyers 11y ago
  "Nobody wants" cars. Haven't you read the article?
- Marazan 11y ago
  You can put communal garages every so often if you really need the car parking.
  - rmk2 11y ago
    This is the correct answer. The article already shows a bunch of pictures from Freiburg, and this something they also do, especially in its relatively new "eco quarter" Vauban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban,_Freiburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban,_Freiburg Essentially, you have a big shared car park at one of the "entrances", and lots of narrow streets otherwise. It works pretty well, really. edit: Some bigger blocks also have their own underground car park.
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  Do as they do in Japan. Dig deep, and have an entrance that looks like a single car garage, with an underground robotic silo that'll hold as many cars as you've allowed it to. They're pretty ubiquitous in Tokyo and dense areas of other cities. A better solution is not to have cars in the first place.
- brixon 11y ago
  They could do like Singapore and tax cars out of existence. http://www.expatsingapore.com/content/view/1152 http://www.expatsingapore.com/content/view/1152
  - JshWright 11y ago
    Ok, where will they park ambulances and fire trucks?
abalone 11y ago
On the other hand, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Par... Moreover the simpler solution would be to build up. The article just dismisses that in one sentence saying "nobody wants" it, but do people want entire new microblocks built in the middle of streets? Plus, narrowing streets would come at a significant cost to the city to reconfigure the roads and infrastructure. Not only tearing up sidewalks and paving new roads, but also burying all the wires on those telephone poles and lord knows whether the gas and sewer lines under the street could support construction on top of them (and how would you service them after?). We'd also lose/downsize trees. On the other hand, building taller is entirely privately funded and quite economical in comparison.
- pouetpouet 11y ago
  Hausmann widened some streets because all of them were small. When most streets are wide, narrowing some is the thing to do.
  - mauricemir 11y ago
    I thought the wide streets where to allow better firing lanes for the artillery vs the mob :-)
- CaptainDecisive 11y ago
  I'm also not convinced on the OP's idea, although I found it very interesting how the street cross section diagrams highlighted just how much space is consumed by streets. By it's also very interesting to see how public opinion goes in circles by comparing the 1850 Paris example. Some of the examples of slums that were demolished (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris#/media/File:Charles_Marville,_Rue_du_Jardinet,_ca._1853%E2%80%9370.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Par...) were obviously very run down, but are precisely the sort of places that have been gentrified and are now worth crazy money and considered very desirable places to live.
- reedlaw 11y ago
  Wouldn't the sale of the property by the city offset the cost of reconfiguring the infrastructure? It seems even likely to make a profit considering property values.
Lorento 11y ago
50% more houses will need 50% more parking spaces and 50% more traffic on that now-one-way pedestrian/car lane. Perhaps what San Fransiscans want is actually no increase in the number of residents because of these problems they bring?
- techsupporter 11y ago
  > will need 50% more parking spaces And that is the problem that is choking US cities. All of the pictures in the article show cities built around the concept of walking, cycling, and bus/train-ing to where people need and want to go. Private car ownership is lower and is far less useful. It does not (and, IMO, should not) follow that building more residences requires more legally-mandated turning over of public right-of-way to store private automobiles. Even forcing parking minimums on private lots drives the cost of housing ever skyward because those spaces take up space that could be used for housing or are located underground and, thus, even more expensive to build.
  - Lorento 11y ago
    Judging by the occupied parking spaces in his photo, I think residents want cars. Whether parking is private or public, it'll still need to be there in some form for people to be happy living in that street. For people to walk/bus to work, shops, friends, they'll need much higher density housing, with workplaces mixed in and new public transport. So this single change won't help that.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      As a SF resident, former car owner, and roommate of a current car owner, I can say that we never use our car unless we either 1) Have to go somewhere that's both out of the city and out of public transit range 2) Have to get something heavy and/or bulky that can't be easily shipped to the apartment The car gets pulled out of the nearby parking garage once a month, on average. If parking wasn't such a nightmare, the car would probably get used more often. The only way to improve the parking situation is to either level housing for more parking lots (ha!), or to install more parking garages. The only palatable way to make more garages is to make the garages underground. I don't see that happening anytime soon. :) So very, very many people in SF walk, bike, bus, or Lyft/Uber to work. Very few residents drive to work if their place of work is actually in the city.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
20kleagues 11y ago
Car ownership in US cities is high for a reason: lack of good public transport (compared to the European cities in the article) and the sprawl of cities in the US. Narrowing the streets would require a fundamental change in the rate of automobile ownership, which would not happen unless public transport is improved.
- RyanMcGreal 11y ago
  Car ownership in the US is actually lower than most other industrialized countries. [1] Sprawl is a policy, not a law of nature, and it can change with a change in policy. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its-official-western-europeans-have-more-cars-per-person-than-americans/261108/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its...
  - mauricemir 11y ago
    But the USA is much bigger and spread out than the average EU country - You cannot ignore Geography
    - ska 11y ago
      That's relevant when discussing how to travel between cities, but really doesn't seem to have much to do with the tendency towards suburban sprawl. I believe the structure of modern American cities has largely be determined by policies, not geography.
EliRivers 11y ago
Given the very predictable grid layout of many US cities, SF included, an awful lot of space could be reclaimed if many streets were made single lane traffic, one-way only.
- lucaspiller 11y ago
  The streets of the US seem very wide too compared to European cities, even when cars are involved. Here is the UK equivalent of a residential street: https://letzterkunstgriff.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/harrowgate.jpg https://letzterkunstgriff.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/harrow... The section for cars to drive down looks to be about 15' vs 24'. Even that is fairly big, in a lot of cases there is only room for one car to drive at a time or only one side is parking. The pavement is a lot narrower too, around 6' vs 15'.
bandrami 11y ago
Meh. Just build up. The elevator is the most effective mass-transit device in human history.
eCa 11y ago
The primer[1] has some more arguments. [1] http://narrowstreetssf.com/primer/ http://narrowstreetssf.com/primer/
madaxe_again 11y ago
This is a nice model, generally, for the currently drearily car-centric US - however I would have reservations about it specifically in SF, as wide streets are desirable there as fire-breaks and places for buildings to fall into, rather than each other, in the case of quake. You'd also need public transit, which is something cities built prior to the car have generally invested in, but is virtually absent in the US, as part of the equation is getting people out of their cars. You could always have the new buildings over the street comprise a mix of commercial and residential, so that people don't have to drive to the nearest WalMart to buy everything, instead they can nip across the street to the butcher, the baker, and even the chandler. I've not owned a car in over a decade (with the exception of the odd banger I buy to drive take on a rally), as I simply don't need one here. Every service I need, including my place of work, is in walking distance. Oh, one last benefit of this that the OP missed - Urban Heat Island removal. City temperatures are usually higher than the surrounding countryside as black asphalt absorbs and radiates heat like nobody's business, and narrower streets tend to be better shaded, and even on a hot summer's day, hold nothing fiercer than a cool breeze. The upshot here being both a nicer environment in which to live and work, and lower energy requirements, as without a noisy street outside, and with cool air outside... shock, horror, one could open a window rather than running the AC!
- makeitsuckless 11y ago
  My personal anecdotal experience contradicts the latter. On a hot day in Amsterdam, the narrow streets hold the heat reflected off the buildings and no wind gets there to remove it. In a densely built up city, the heat isn't going anywhere.
VLM 11y ago
"explains why Traditional Cities generally feel more pleasant than American cities." Fine, I'll call them out. Is there a culturally significant rate of immigration from American Sprawl Cities to ancient Euro Cities, or for that matter a culturally significant immigration from american sprawl cities to non-sprawl cities? Culturally significant means property values are imploding in emptying sprawl areas, not five guys on HN echo chamber each other's love for that style.
- pouetpouet 11y ago
  Markets do not operate in a vacuum. There are fiscal, regulatory and financial incentives for sprawl. A new equilibrium with less sprawl and more walkable places is possible.
- _delirium 11y ago
  Property values in the U.S. do seem to be appreciating the fastest in denser urban areas. I'm not sure it's precisely a sea change in favor of urbanism, but it's certainly a different trend than, say, the '70s, when urban property was losing value relative to suburban property in many cities. This extends even to cities that aren't traditionally very urbanized, like Houston: in the past 15 years, inside-610 property has been a much hotter market than outside-610 property.
KaiserPro 11y ago
The reason why the streets are car centric is because public transport is lacking. London has narrow and wide streets, but you can get to anywhere by public transport, at a reasonable cost, within 1 hour more or less. Holland has segregated roads for cycles and cars, and brilliant public transport
- jobigoud 11y ago
  Isn't SF public transport decent though ? I only went there once and I felt it was rather comparable to my European home town.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Like most cities, whether American or European, with "decent" public transportation it's easier and faster to travel between some locations than others partly because of the hills. Certainly it's faster to take a car on many routes than it is to take public transportation. There's something of a stereotype of public transportation being almost universally absent in US cities and being some sort of nirvana that rapidly whisks you anywhere in western Europe. In general, European public transit does tend to be better than in the US--especially compared to newer and more spread out US cities away from the coasts--but the contrast can also be exaggerated.
    - KaiserPro 11y ago
      Oh indeed, SF has excellent public transport, for the US. Manhattan has a great metro, but buses for the last mile are non existent. However they are not as critical as say in london.
      - marssaxman 11y ago
        Having a great metro means buses for the last mile are unnecessary. If they were necessary, it wouldn't count as a "great metro".
  - _delirium 11y ago
petercooper 11y ago
Great ideas for major, youthful cities full of young, fit childless bike riders heading home in the sunny and dry environs of California with a convenience store on every corner and without sacks of shopping to carry and toddlers running around. But living in an English market town myself and being heavily involved in community life and discussion, I know the cramped confines of many older English towns and villages are a total nut-ache for a sizeable share of residents and people are endlessly campaigning for more parking, better traffic management, and more spacious estates.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Let me offer the perspective of a not so young, not so childless resident of the not so sunny eastern US: dense, walkable cities are awesome for people with young children. Weekends in the city with our toddler are awesome. We have brunch at one of the dozen restaurants we can get to within a few blocks' walk. We can walk to the park, walk to the drugstore to get the diaper cream we forgot to buy. We can have impromptu, unscheduled social events just by running in to the 3-4 other couples with kids our age who live in our apartment building. And narrow little pedestrian-oriented streets, which we don't have where we live but would love to, are a whole lot more toddler friendly than ones primarily designed for cars. If anything, the advantages of city living are magnified for people with kids. When I was single, I thought nothing of driving 15-20 minutes on a weeknight to meet some friends for dinner. That's a non-starter with kids. These days, 70-80% of our social interaction is hanging out with people from our building.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    > Safeway charges $10 to bring groceries right to your door the next day. Other supermarkets do this a lot cheaper. Or free.
    - logiczero 11y ago
      Has anyone else noticed that safeway.com doesn't sell their in-store brand of sandwich bread, which usually costs $1.99? You can only buy loaves of bread that are $4.00 or more. Their entire online store is stocked only with crappy, expensive, name-brand items. So, yeah, in theory you can get your groceries delivered to you, but none of those services are intended for cash-strapped families and/or conscientious shoppers. The prospect of lugging 4 bags of groceries plus 3 kids on a late, crowded MUNI bus is just sooooo inviting...
jguimont 11y ago
You have to change all trucks to accomodate such a street. Firefighters, paramedics, even some cops have cars/trucks that are too wide to fit those streets. There is a huge difference in size between european and american fire trucks. Paramedics and some firefighters in europe use something like a Sprinter or Transit, both of which are narrower and smaller than their american counter part.
- athenot 11y ago
  The more modern ambulances are already switching to those vehicles, and this is in Atlanta suburbia where space is not exactly a problem.
bvrlt 11y ago
This is very interesting. It would certainly helps with housing costs if the city was more dense. Denser cities can also be more ecological (less travel needed, less cost for heating etc.) and it's not sustainable to have everyone live in suburbs. However, I think it makes two subjective assumptions: - Empty space is useless. "Useless greenery (not a park, but landscaping where nobody goes), Areas around buildings which are not “destinations,” and often have no real purpose". As in web design, I think that empty space is important. It allows a city and its inhabitant to breathe. It gives buffer space to avoid living with your neighbors (eg. seeing, hearing everything that happens in their apartment). It reduces noise reverberation. - Narrower streets are nicer. Granted, the pictures there look good. I have lived in the US for a while and I'm now in Paris, France. I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded. Also I don't think that SF is a good example of a city that doesn't look good. A lot of Europeans would want to live there because it looks amazing.
- restalis 11y ago
  "It gives buffer space to avoid living with your neighbors (eg. seeing, hearing everything that happens in their apartment). It reduces noise reverberation." This can be solved by technical means (employing the needed construction materials). "I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded." If by "crowded" you're not referring to the actual amount of people on the streets but rather to the ambient feeling, then this is solved by requirements on the building architecture level. On narrow streets each floor higher then the 2nd should take a little bit less space than the one underneath it. This allows more light and gives a spacious feeling on the street level, even if the space there stays the same.
- wahsd 11y ago
  It would absolutely not help with housing costs. What do you think will happen, all the sudden because some new building can be jammed into the space where a street used to be the prices will somehow come down? That never happens. In the bubbles that were insulated from the recession all kinds of condos and apartment building were built, none of which were ever cheaper or pushed the price down. That's simply not how it works. Until you can somehow trigger a massive spurt of apartment and condo construction that creates a glut for a sustained period, you will NEVER have anything that is even remotely close to "help with housing costs". Any new building will always ask at the very least a little more than a comparable older building. Am I wrong? I don't know, look at the dense cities. Paris, NYC, London, etc. are any of those the expected cheap meccas you would have predicted? Look at Austin, TX the more is built the more people are attracted and the more people drive into town and drive every single price up up up. Humans are kind of stupid and make nothing even remotely close to rational decisions that economics would like you to believe we make, otherwise the market would function and companies would not be starting in cities, people would not be moving to cities. Hell, we wouldn't really be co-locating in offices in specific cities and limiting our talent pool by geographic location.
CodeWriter23 11y ago
Maybe there's a reason, a really good reason why streets in the U.S., built hundreds of years after the streets in Europe, are wider. Could it be that people already learned that vehicle traffic needs width? Think about this. Your ability to venture out to the Big Box store in the suburbs is what keeps pressure on local prices. Once lack of mobility isolates you, guess who will raise prices.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  Well, you're assuming that streets need vehicle traffic. If zoning were relaxed on the narrow streets so that people could run shops and small businesses then you wouldn't really need to drive to buy stuff. Regarding pricing, much of the good pricing is due to manufacturing scale, which you would still have with a distributor or a cartel consolidating orders. I don't see how big box stores are the only way to have low prices.
  - DickingAround 11y ago
    In terms of traffic, any faster traffic needs space. Could be electric bikes going 30mph, you can't ride that speed on a side-walk like street and in Europe I never get going that fast unless it's by a river (tend to be wider paths). On pricing, manufacturing does help a lot. But retail is part of the cost (always >10% of it) and the restriction of movement will apply to people going out or goods coming in. Unless there's raised or multi-level paths. That's honestly the real solution here; building up. An interesting question is why we build up without interconnection? Purely ownership reasons? Structural stability reasons?
    - mark-r 11y ago
      If you're talking about interconnecting separate buildings at other than ground level, it can be done. In downtown Minneapolis most buildings are connected by second-level walkways called the Skyway in aggregate. This is done to accommodate foot traffic off the street, especially during the winter when the climate control is welcome. I suspect the reason it isn't universal is simply the cost.
jerf 11y ago
"When we multiply the width of the lanes (38′ 9″) by the length of the block (425′), the result is more than 15,000 square feet of space for cars, just on a single block of McAllister Street." Wow! That's amazing. Add that to the 425 x 425 square feet of the block, which is 180,625 square feet and you'd really have some more square footage! Why, it's... 8% more. I don't think you're going to solve SF's housing crisis by raising the amount of square footage on a few select streets where this works by 8%. The math on this doesn't work when put in proper context. 15,000 square feet isn't anywhere near as much as it sounds. You need to solve the core problem, which is probably something more like politically-mandated stasis because everybody's really excited about somebody else solving the problem but doesn't want anything they interact with to change moreso than "the streets are just too darned big".
- DickingAround 11y ago
  Why don't they just build up if land prices support the construction costs? Seems to work in a lot of places. Also, does anyone know why we don't have more- interconnected skyscrapers or underground connections? I see that on rare occasion. I know there are some city regulations which ban it in order to generate street travel but those must be rare. Is it a structural-stability and hard-to-long-term-plan-several-buildings thing?
  - hydrogen18 11y ago
    You can't just "build up" in SF. The city prohibits it through a variety of means.
    - bsimpson 11y ago
      Because the same people who bitch about the cost of living going up in the city where their family has lived for n generations will also flip their shit if you try to build anything that doesn't look like the 3 story Victorians they have giant fetishes for. Of course, that's a bit exaggerated (there are skyscrapers going up downtown and some neighborhoods have the occasional modern-looking condo). Still, the problem is fairly untractable in the current climate. There's an endless stream of people ready to wait in line to bitch at every one of the multi-year stretch of town hall meetings needed to do anything that meanders away from the well-established status quo. (For reference, see all the FUD spread about Polk Street that led to the eventual neutering of that project).
awjr 11y ago
I think the approach is slightly wrong in that what you seem to be doing is removing road space, rather than re-allocating it. Though you might think a 15ft wide street is great it imposes big issues on the interaction between different types of users. You should segregate people walking, cycling and people driving. Sharing space is not a "good thing" even though it seems to be the the thing that architects seem to be advocating at the moment. I'm still not convinced that a blind person and a bus can share space. Just like the tower blocks of the 1960's, I see shared space becoming the architectural white elephant of the 2010's. What you should be considering is creating great living spaces where the road design "slows" down the speed at which cars travel through the space. Where priority is given to walking and cycling. Where each mode of transport is segregated from each other. You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car.
- toyg 11y ago
  As soon as you segregate traffic by type, you create the feeling of exclusivity that automatically entitles drivers to carelessness and higher speeds. This happens for any type of traffic: some bike lanes in London are incredibly dangerous for passers-by. In this sense, shared spaces force drivers to actually slow down and think about what they are doing. This is what even most motorists advocate, btw: less obstacles forcing cars to slow down, and more publicity of what a driver could expect from the area they are passing through. > You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car. You can easily do that by removing all parking space at hotspot destinations. Job done. Businesses will scream blue murder though, so you need a plan for that.
  - awjr 11y ago
    I just think that mixing different modes of transport create unnecessary conflicts. Yes a person cycling can mix with people walking, but at walking pace. That isn't the desire of the person cycling and the people walking have to deal with "inconsiderate" people cycling. The blame is never placed on the urban designers who live in this idealised world where different modes of transport can mix harmoniously.
- 11y ago
markbnj 11y ago
Hmm, seems to me that comparing the ratio of "place" to "non-place" in newer vs. older cities is misleading. Those ratios are all about transportation. Many U.S. cities were founded and designed around wheeled transportation from the beginning, whereas many, if not most, European cities were founded at a time when foot and horse traffic was the norm. If the way that people get around changes then the cities will follow along over time. Personally I think that the conversion to autonomous vehicles will have a tremendous impact on vehicle size, road density, road layout, etc. It will enable cities to be very different from the way they are now.
keypusher 11y ago
> We need space for a lot more units than we have, and no one wants to build up. I don't understand this phobia against building up. The only city in the US that seems to have actually embraced building higher is New York, and they seem to be doing alright. With a bit of planning you can build mixed use Shops / Restaurant / Office / Residential and make far better use of the space. A big part of the reason cities like SF and Boston are suffering a housing crisis is because of the zoning committees and entrenched residents, and their misguided belief that medium-density semi-cities are somehow nicer than real cities. I would prefer if we let the cities be cities, and let those who want to live in a big house move to the suburbs.
- ska 11y ago
  San Francisco, particularly, is adverse to building up ever since it was mostly flattened in an earthquake. Policy probably hasn't quite caught up with modern architectural realities, but it isn't just based on desire for medium density. This isn't unique to North America, look at the downtown core of Lisbon, for example.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- selectodude 11y ago
  New York has made it very difficult to build up in the last many years. Chicago is really the only city in the US that seems to have embraced building up recently. And it's no surprise that it's one of the easier large cities to find housing at a reasonable cost.
  - phdp 11y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong, but what do you mean by that? There are those new super tall high rises going on up 57th street. Are there other instances where developers have been prevented from building up?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
topkai22 11y ago
I'm not a bay area resident, but one thing I find amusing about the HN posts about the SF affordability crisis is that they all focus on the supply side rather than the demand side. Making communities in South Bay or East Bay more attractive to the same sorts that want to live in SF will relieve some of the pressure on the SF market while improving the lot of even more people. Its a longer term solution (bringing in quality public transport, denser development, and changing perceptions takes time) but it is ultimately more feasible than creating enough housing in SF for everyone who wants to live there.
javajosh 11y ago
Love the idea of "place" versus "not place". We should really be optimizing for "place" everywhere, not just SF, and street-narrowing is a good place to begin. That, to me, is the main point of this, not "increasing housing supply" or anything like that. It's increasing place supply.

119 points by waffle_ss 11y ago

dvh 11y ago

But where will park the cars?

jedmeyers 11y ago
"Nobody wants" cars. Haven't you read the article?
Marazan 11y ago
You can put communal garages every so often if you really need the car parking.
- rmk2 11y ago
  This is the correct answer. The article already shows a bunch of pictures from Freiburg, and this something they also do, especially in its relatively new "eco quarter" Vauban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban,_Freiburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban,_Freiburg Essentially, you have a big shared car park at one of the "entrances", and lots of narrow streets otherwise. It works pretty well, really. edit: Some bigger blocks also have their own underground car park.
madaxe_again 11y ago
Do as they do in Japan. Dig deep, and have an entrance that looks like a single car garage, with an underground robotic silo that'll hold as many cars as you've allowed it to. They're pretty ubiquitous in Tokyo and dense areas of other cities. A better solution is not to have cars in the first place.
brixon 11y ago
They could do like Singapore and tax cars out of existence. http://www.expatsingapore.com/content/view/1152 http://www.expatsingapore.com/content/view/1152
- JshWright 11y ago
  Ok, where will they park ambulances and fire trucks?

abalone 11y ago

On the other hand, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Par... Moreover the simpler solution would be to build up. The article just dismisses that in one sentence saying "nobody wants" it, but do people want entire new microblocks built in the middle of streets? Plus, narrowing streets would come at a significant cost to the city to reconfigure the roads and infrastructure. Not only tearing up sidewalks and paving new roads, but also burying all the wires on those telephone poles and lord knows whether the gas and sewer lines under the street could support construction on top of them (and how would you service them after?). We'd also lose/downsize trees. On the other hand, building taller is entirely privately funded and quite economical in comparison.

pouetpouet 11y ago
Hausmann widened some streets because all of them were small. When most streets are wide, narrowing some is the thing to do.
- mauricemir 11y ago
  I thought the wide streets where to allow better firing lanes for the artillery vs the mob :-)
CaptainDecisive 11y ago
I'm also not convinced on the OP's idea, although I found it very interesting how the street cross section diagrams highlighted just how much space is consumed by streets. By it's also very interesting to see how public opinion goes in circles by comparing the 1850 Paris example. Some of the examples of slums that were demolished (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris#/media/File:Charles_Marville,_Rue_du_Jardinet,_ca._1853%E2%80%9370.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Par...) were obviously very run down, but are precisely the sort of places that have been gentrified and are now worth crazy money and considered very desirable places to live.
reedlaw 11y ago
Wouldn't the sale of the property by the city offset the cost of reconfiguring the infrastructure? It seems even likely to make a profit considering property values.

Lorento 11y ago

50% more houses will need 50% more parking spaces and 50% more traffic on that now-one-way pedestrian/car lane. Perhaps what San Fransiscans want is actually no increase in the number of residents because of these problems they bring?

techsupporter 11y ago
> will need 50% more parking spaces And that is the problem that is choking US cities. All of the pictures in the article show cities built around the concept of walking, cycling, and bus/train-ing to where people need and want to go. Private car ownership is lower and is far less useful. It does not (and, IMO, should not) follow that building more residences requires more legally-mandated turning over of public right-of-way to store private automobiles. Even forcing parking minimums on private lots drives the cost of housing ever skyward because those spaces take up space that could be used for housing or are located underground and, thus, even more expensive to build.
- Lorento 11y ago
  Judging by the occupied parking spaces in his photo, I think residents want cars. Whether parking is private or public, it'll still need to be there in some form for people to be happy living in that street. For people to walk/bus to work, shops, friends, they'll need much higher density housing, with workplaces mixed in and new public transport. So this single change won't help that.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    As a SF resident, former car owner, and roommate of a current car owner, I can say that we never use our car unless we either 1) Have to go somewhere that's both out of the city and out of public transit range 2) Have to get something heavy and/or bulky that can't be easily shipped to the apartment The car gets pulled out of the nearby parking garage once a month, on average. If parking wasn't such a nightmare, the car would probably get used more often. The only way to improve the parking situation is to either level housing for more parking lots (ha!), or to install more parking garages. The only palatable way to make more garages is to make the garages underground. I don't see that happening anytime soon. :) So very, very many people in SF walk, bike, bus, or Lyft/Uber to work. Very few residents drive to work if their place of work is actually in the city.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

20kleagues 11y ago

Car ownership in US cities is high for a reason: lack of good public transport (compared to the European cities in the article) and the sprawl of cities in the US. Narrowing the streets would require a fundamental change in the rate of automobile ownership, which would not happen unless public transport is improved.

RyanMcGreal 11y ago
Car ownership in the US is actually lower than most other industrialized countries. [1] Sprawl is a policy, not a law of nature, and it can change with a change in policy. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its-official-western-europeans-have-more-cars-per-person-than-americans/261108/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its...
- mauricemir 11y ago
  But the USA is much bigger and spread out than the average EU country - You cannot ignore Geography
  - ska 11y ago
    That's relevant when discussing how to travel between cities, but really doesn't seem to have much to do with the tendency towards suburban sprawl. I believe the structure of modern American cities has largely be determined by policies, not geography.

EliRivers 11y ago

Given the very predictable grid layout of many US cities, SF included, an awful lot of space could be reclaimed if many streets were made single lane traffic, one-way only.

lucaspiller 11y ago
The streets of the US seem very wide too compared to European cities, even when cars are involved. Here is the UK equivalent of a residential street: https://letzterkunstgriff.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/harrowgate.jpg https://letzterkunstgriff.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/harrow... The section for cars to drive down looks to be about 15' vs 24'. Even that is fairly big, in a lot of cases there is only room for one car to drive at a time or only one side is parking. The pavement is a lot narrower too, around 6' vs 15'.

bandrami 11y ago

Meh. Just build up. The elevator is the most effective mass-transit device in human history.

eCa 11y ago

The primer[1] has some more arguments. [1] http://narrowstreetssf.com/primer/ http://narrowstreetssf.com/primer/

madaxe_again 11y ago

This is a nice model, generally, for the currently drearily car-centric US - however I would have reservations about it specifically in SF, as wide streets are desirable there as fire-breaks and places for buildings to fall into, rather than each other, in the case of quake. You'd also need public transit, which is something cities built prior to the car have generally invested in, but is virtually absent in the US, as part of the equation is getting people out of their cars. You could always have the new buildings over the street comprise a mix of commercial and residential, so that people don't have to drive to the nearest WalMart to buy everything, instead they can nip across the street to the butcher, the baker, and even the chandler. I've not owned a car in over a decade (with the exception of the odd banger I buy to drive take on a rally), as I simply don't need one here. Every service I need, including my place of work, is in walking distance. Oh, one last benefit of this that the OP missed - Urban Heat Island removal. City temperatures are usually higher than the surrounding countryside as black asphalt absorbs and radiates heat like nobody's business, and narrower streets tend to be better shaded, and even on a hot summer's day, hold nothing fiercer than a cool breeze. The upshot here being both a nicer environment in which to live and work, and lower energy requirements, as without a noisy street outside, and with cool air outside... shock, horror, one could open a window rather than running the AC!

makeitsuckless 11y ago
My personal anecdotal experience contradicts the latter. On a hot day in Amsterdam, the narrow streets hold the heat reflected off the buildings and no wind gets there to remove it. In a densely built up city, the heat isn't going anywhere.

VLM 11y ago

"explains why Traditional Cities generally feel more pleasant than American cities." Fine, I'll call them out. Is there a culturally significant rate of immigration from American Sprawl Cities to ancient Euro Cities, or for that matter a culturally significant immigration from american sprawl cities to non-sprawl cities? Culturally significant means property values are imploding in emptying sprawl areas, not five guys on HN echo chamber each other's love for that style.

pouetpouet 11y ago
Markets do not operate in a vacuum. There are fiscal, regulatory and financial incentives for sprawl. A new equilibrium with less sprawl and more walkable places is possible.
_delirium 11y ago
Property values in the U.S. do seem to be appreciating the fastest in denser urban areas. I'm not sure it's precisely a sea change in favor of urbanism, but it's certainly a different trend than, say, the '70s, when urban property was losing value relative to suburban property in many cities. This extends even to cities that aren't traditionally very urbanized, like Houston: in the past 15 years, inside-610 property has been a much hotter market than outside-610 property.

KaiserPro 11y ago

The reason why the streets are car centric is because public transport is lacking. London has narrow and wide streets, but you can get to anywhere by public transport, at a reasonable cost, within 1 hour more or less. Holland has segregated roads for cycles and cars, and brilliant public transport

jobigoud 11y ago
Isn't SF public transport decent though ? I only went there once and I felt it was rather comparable to my European home town.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Like most cities, whether American or European, with "decent" public transportation it's easier and faster to travel between some locations than others partly because of the hills. Certainly it's faster to take a car on many routes than it is to take public transportation. There's something of a stereotype of public transportation being almost universally absent in US cities and being some sort of nirvana that rapidly whisks you anywhere in western Europe. In general, European public transit does tend to be better than in the US--especially compared to newer and more spread out US cities away from the coasts--but the contrast can also be exaggerated.
  - KaiserPro 11y ago
    Oh indeed, SF has excellent public transport, for the US. Manhattan has a great metro, but buses for the last mile are non existent. However they are not as critical as say in london.
    - marssaxman 11y ago
      Having a great metro means buses for the last mile are unnecessary. If they were necessary, it wouldn't count as a "great metro".
- _delirium 11y ago

petercooper 11y ago

Great ideas for major, youthful cities full of young, fit childless bike riders heading home in the sunny and dry environs of California with a convenience store on every corner and without sacks of shopping to carry and toddlers running around. But living in an English market town myself and being heavily involved in community life and discussion, I know the cramped confines of many older English towns and villages are a total nut-ache for a sizeable share of residents and people are endlessly campaigning for more parking, better traffic management, and more spacious estates.

rayiner 11y ago
Let me offer the perspective of a not so young, not so childless resident of the not so sunny eastern US: dense, walkable cities are awesome for people with young children. Weekends in the city with our toddler are awesome. We have brunch at one of the dozen restaurants we can get to within a few blocks' walk. We can walk to the park, walk to the drugstore to get the diaper cream we forgot to buy. We can have impromptu, unscheduled social events just by running in to the 3-4 other couples with kids our age who live in our apartment building. And narrow little pedestrian-oriented streets, which we don't have where we live but would love to, are a whole lot more toddler friendly than ones primarily designed for cars. If anything, the advantages of city living are magnified for people with kids. When I was single, I thought nothing of driving 15-20 minutes on a weeknight to meet some friends for dinner. That's a non-starter with kids. These days, 70-80% of our social interaction is hanging out with people from our building.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  > Safeway charges $10 to bring groceries right to your door the next day. Other supermarkets do this a lot cheaper. Or free.
  - logiczero 11y ago
    Has anyone else noticed that safeway.com doesn't sell their in-store brand of sandwich bread, which usually costs $1.99? You can only buy loaves of bread that are $4.00 or more. Their entire online store is stocked only with crappy, expensive, name-brand items. So, yeah, in theory you can get your groceries delivered to you, but none of those services are intended for cash-strapped families and/or conscientious shoppers. The prospect of lugging 4 bags of groceries plus 3 kids on a late, crowded MUNI bus is just sooooo inviting...

jguimont 11y ago

You have to change all trucks to accomodate such a street. Firefighters, paramedics, even some cops have cars/trucks that are too wide to fit those streets. There is a huge difference in size between european and american fire trucks. Paramedics and some firefighters in europe use something like a Sprinter or Transit, both of which are narrower and smaller than their american counter part.

athenot 11y ago
The more modern ambulances are already switching to those vehicles, and this is in Atlanta suburbia where space is not exactly a problem.

bvrlt 11y ago

This is very interesting. It would certainly helps with housing costs if the city was more dense. Denser cities can also be more ecological (less travel needed, less cost for heating etc.) and it's not sustainable to have everyone live in suburbs. However, I think it makes two subjective assumptions: - Empty space is useless. "Useless greenery (not a park, but landscaping where nobody goes), Areas around buildings which are not “destinations,” and often have no real purpose". As in web design, I think that empty space is important. It allows a city and its inhabitant to breathe. It gives buffer space to avoid living with your neighbors (eg. seeing, hearing everything that happens in their apartment). It reduces noise reverberation. - Narrower streets are nicer. Granted, the pictures there look good. I have lived in the US for a while and I'm now in Paris, France. I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded. Also I don't think that SF is a good example of a city that doesn't look good. A lot of Europeans would want to live there because it looks amazing.

restalis 11y ago
"It gives buffer space to avoid living with your neighbors (eg. seeing, hearing everything that happens in their apartment). It reduces noise reverberation." This can be solved by technical means (employing the needed construction materials). "I can tell you that if narrower streets can be cute, they also let less light go in the building, and can be stressful when too crowded." If by "crowded" you're not referring to the actual amount of people on the streets but rather to the ambient feeling, then this is solved by requirements on the building architecture level. On narrow streets each floor higher then the 2nd should take a little bit less space than the one underneath it. This allows more light and gives a spacious feeling on the street level, even if the space there stays the same.
wahsd 11y ago
It would absolutely not help with housing costs. What do you think will happen, all the sudden because some new building can be jammed into the space where a street used to be the prices will somehow come down? That never happens. In the bubbles that were insulated from the recession all kinds of condos and apartment building were built, none of which were ever cheaper or pushed the price down. That's simply not how it works. Until you can somehow trigger a massive spurt of apartment and condo construction that creates a glut for a sustained period, you will NEVER have anything that is even remotely close to "help with housing costs". Any new building will always ask at the very least a little more than a comparable older building. Am I wrong? I don't know, look at the dense cities. Paris, NYC, London, etc. are any of those the expected cheap meccas you would have predicted? Look at Austin, TX the more is built the more people are attracted and the more people drive into town and drive every single price up up up. Humans are kind of stupid and make nothing even remotely close to rational decisions that economics would like you to believe we make, otherwise the market would function and companies would not be starting in cities, people would not be moving to cities. Hell, we wouldn't really be co-locating in offices in specific cities and limiting our talent pool by geographic location.

CodeWriter23 11y ago

Maybe there's a reason, a really good reason why streets in the U.S., built hundreds of years after the streets in Europe, are wider. Could it be that people already learned that vehicle traffic needs width? Think about this. Your ability to venture out to the Big Box store in the suburbs is what keeps pressure on local prices. Once lack of mobility isolates you, guess who will raise prices.

jschwartzi 11y ago
Well, you're assuming that streets need vehicle traffic. If zoning were relaxed on the narrow streets so that people could run shops and small businesses then you wouldn't really need to drive to buy stuff. Regarding pricing, much of the good pricing is due to manufacturing scale, which you would still have with a distributor or a cartel consolidating orders. I don't see how big box stores are the only way to have low prices.
- DickingAround 11y ago
  In terms of traffic, any faster traffic needs space. Could be electric bikes going 30mph, you can't ride that speed on a side-walk like street and in Europe I never get going that fast unless it's by a river (tend to be wider paths). On pricing, manufacturing does help a lot. But retail is part of the cost (always >10% of it) and the restriction of movement will apply to people going out or goods coming in. Unless there's raised or multi-level paths. That's honestly the real solution here; building up. An interesting question is why we build up without interconnection? Purely ownership reasons? Structural stability reasons?
  - mark-r 11y ago
    If you're talking about interconnecting separate buildings at other than ground level, it can be done. In downtown Minneapolis most buildings are connected by second-level walkways called the Skyway in aggregate. This is done to accommodate foot traffic off the street, especially during the winter when the climate control is welcome. I suspect the reason it isn't universal is simply the cost.

jerf 11y ago

"When we multiply the width of the lanes (38′ 9″) by the length of the block (425′), the result is more than 15,000 square feet of space for cars, just on a single block of McAllister Street." Wow! That's amazing. Add that to the 425 x 425 square feet of the block, which is 180,625 square feet and you'd really have some more square footage! Why, it's... 8% more. I don't think you're going to solve SF's housing crisis by raising the amount of square footage on a few select streets where this works by 8%. The math on this doesn't work when put in proper context. 15,000 square feet isn't anywhere near as much as it sounds. You need to solve the core problem, which is probably something more like politically-mandated stasis because everybody's really excited about somebody else solving the problem but doesn't want anything they interact with to change moreso than "the streets are just too darned big".

DickingAround 11y ago
Why don't they just build up if land prices support the construction costs? Seems to work in a lot of places. Also, does anyone know why we don't have more- interconnected skyscrapers or underground connections? I see that on rare occasion. I know there are some city regulations which ban it in order to generate street travel but those must be rare. Is it a structural-stability and hard-to-long-term-plan-several-buildings thing?
- hydrogen18 11y ago
  You can't just "build up" in SF. The city prohibits it through a variety of means.
  - bsimpson 11y ago
    Because the same people who bitch about the cost of living going up in the city where their family has lived for n generations will also flip their shit if you try to build anything that doesn't look like the 3 story Victorians they have giant fetishes for. Of course, that's a bit exaggerated (there are skyscrapers going up downtown and some neighborhoods have the occasional modern-looking condo). Still, the problem is fairly untractable in the current climate. There's an endless stream of people ready to wait in line to bitch at every one of the multi-year stretch of town hall meetings needed to do anything that meanders away from the well-established status quo. (For reference, see all the FUD spread about Polk Street that led to the eventual neutering of that project).

awjr 11y ago

I think the approach is slightly wrong in that what you seem to be doing is removing road space, rather than re-allocating it. Though you might think a 15ft wide street is great it imposes big issues on the interaction between different types of users. You should segregate people walking, cycling and people driving. Sharing space is not a "good thing" even though it seems to be the the thing that architects seem to be advocating at the moment. I'm still not convinced that a blind person and a bus can share space. Just like the tower blocks of the 1960's, I see shared space becoming the architectural white elephant of the 2010's. What you should be considering is creating great living spaces where the road design "slows" down the speed at which cars travel through the space. Where priority is given to walking and cycling. Where each mode of transport is segregated from each other. You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car.

toyg 11y ago
As soon as you segregate traffic by type, you create the feeling of exclusivity that automatically entitles drivers to carelessness and higher speeds. This happens for any type of traffic: some bike lanes in London are incredibly dangerous for passers-by. In this sense, shared spaces force drivers to actually slow down and think about what they are doing. This is what even most motorists advocate, btw: less obstacles forcing cars to slow down, and more publicity of what a driver could expect from the area they are passing through. > You transform a city by persuading people that the easiest way to get around the city is not by car. You can easily do that by removing all parking space at hotspot destinations. Job done. Businesses will scream blue murder though, so you need a plan for that.
- awjr 11y ago
  I just think that mixing different modes of transport create unnecessary conflicts. Yes a person cycling can mix with people walking, but at walking pace. That isn't the desire of the person cycling and the people walking have to deal with "inconsiderate" people cycling. The blame is never placed on the urban designers who live in this idealised world where different modes of transport can mix harmoniously.
11y ago

markbnj 11y ago

Hmm, seems to me that comparing the ratio of "place" to "non-place" in newer vs. older cities is misleading. Those ratios are all about transportation. Many U.S. cities were founded and designed around wheeled transportation from the beginning, whereas many, if not most, European cities were founded at a time when foot and horse traffic was the norm. If the way that people get around changes then the cities will follow along over time. Personally I think that the conversion to autonomous vehicles will have a tremendous impact on vehicle size, road density, road layout, etc. It will enable cities to be very different from the way they are now.

keypusher 11y ago

> We need space for a lot more units than we have, and no one wants to build up. I don't understand this phobia against building up. The only city in the US that seems to have actually embraced building higher is New York, and they seem to be doing alright. With a bit of planning you can build mixed use Shops / Restaurant / Office / Residential and make far better use of the space. A big part of the reason cities like SF and Boston are suffering a housing crisis is because of the zoning committees and entrenched residents, and their misguided belief that medium-density semi-cities are somehow nicer than real cities. I would prefer if we let the cities be cities, and let those who want to live in a big house move to the suburbs.

ska 11y ago
San Francisco, particularly, is adverse to building up ever since it was mostly flattened in an earthquake. Policy probably hasn't quite caught up with modern architectural realities, but it isn't just based on desire for medium density. This isn't unique to North America, look at the downtown core of Lisbon, for example.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
selectodude 11y ago
New York has made it very difficult to build up in the last many years. Chicago is really the only city in the US that seems to have embraced building up recently. And it's no surprise that it's one of the easier large cities to find housing at a reasonable cost.
- phdp 11y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong, but what do you mean by that? There are those new super tall high rises going on up 57th street. Are there other instances where developers have been prevented from building up?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

topkai22 11y ago

I'm not a bay area resident, but one thing I find amusing about the HN posts about the SF affordability crisis is that they all focus on the supply side rather than the demand side. Making communities in South Bay or East Bay more attractive to the same sorts that want to live in SF will relieve some of the pressure on the SF market while improving the lot of even more people. Its a longer term solution (bringing in quality public transport, denser development, and changing perceptions takes time) but it is ultimately more feasible than creating enough housing in SF for everyone who wants to live there.

javajosh 11y ago

Love the idea of "place" versus "not place". We should really be optimizing for "place" everywhere, not just SF, and street-narrowing is a good place to begin. That, to me, is the main point of this, not "increasing housing supply" or anything like that. It's increasing place supply.