9 ms·

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, espec

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.
      - RandallBrown 7y ago
        New Haven isn't the furthest, Poughkeepsie is. I was a little off with my mileage though, since Poughkeepsie is 80 miles north, not 90. There are hundreds (thousands even) of people that drive from further north to get to the Poughkeepsie train station every day. It's bananas.
      - astura 7y ago
        Technically you can transfer to the Shoreline East in New Haven and go all the way to the Connecticut River.
    - RandallBrown 7y ago
      My commute from Poughkeepsie NY to my office in midtown Manhattan was 2:15 door to door. That included the ~10 minute walk to and from the train stations at each end. There are a LOT of people that do that commute and many of them drive from much further away and work much further away from Grand Central Terminal. It was better than the 15-1:30 commute I used to have from Seattle to Bellevue in a car though, just because there was almost no variability and I wasn't driving.
      - 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.

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.
    - RandallBrown 7y ago
      New Haven isn't the furthest, Poughkeepsie is. I was a little off with my mileage though, since Poughkeepsie is 80 miles north, not 90. There are hundreds (thousands even) of people that drive from further north to get to the Poughkeepsie train station every day. It's bananas.
    - astura 7y ago
      Technically you can transfer to the Shoreline East in New Haven and go all the way to the Connecticut River.
  - RandallBrown 7y ago
    My commute from Poughkeepsie NY to my office in midtown Manhattan was 2:15 door to door. That included the ~10 minute walk to and from the train stations at each end. There are a LOT of people that do that commute and many of them drive from much further away and work much further away from Grand Central Terminal. It was better than the 15-1:30 commute I used to have from Seattle to Bellevue in a car though, just because there was almost no variability and I wasn't driving.
    - 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.