Ask HN: How would you fix cities? If you could significantly change them to run more efficiently, what would you do to change them? |
Ask HN: How would you fix cities? If you could significantly change them to run more efficiently, what would you do to change them? |
1. Dig up the street and sidewalks, going down 60-100 feet.
2. At the bottom of this pit, drive in piles if you haven't yet hit bedrock.
3. Build a box, about twenty feet high, to run plumbing, power internet, and other utilities
4. On top of that box, build another one for a train.
5. On top of that box, build another one for vehicles to pass through. Because we're aiming for the future, we can assume that the vehicles in this box will be purely electric, and won't need the kind of ventilation that most of today's vehicles do.
6. On top of that box, build a basement, perhaps with alleyway access on both sides (these should be narrow - no wider than approximately 15 feet.)
7. Now we're on the street level, above ground - a building should rise up minimally two to four stories from here. On both sides, narrow streets should be constructed, reserved only for foot traffic. Shops, bars and restaurants of varying sizes should line both sides of the street.
8. Install vibration and light sensors inside each partition wall in the new buildings, as well as in the existing buildings that line the street. Establish a legal framework allows anyone to use the spaces inside each building for any purpose, so long as both parties on either side of each wall and floor agree to specified limits (with the existing owner's terms taking precedence over that of the newcomer - note that there is give and take here, as a space in which you can't make any noise or let any light leak out isn't worth much compared to one in which you can.) With this in place, inflexible one-size-fits-all zoning restrictions are no longer needed.
This arrangement can be implemented slowly, on a block-by-block basis, to transform any any every pedestrian-unfriendly American city into a vibrant urban paradise for people like me that seek this.
You also have to take into account that you will need a place to store the 97500 cubic meters of soil you just excavated, which now have swollen up to 126800 cubic meters, the average dump truck can hold around 10 cubic meters, it would take you more than 10000 trips to move the soil.
This is just one street, never mind the fact that in order for this to be useful you will need to have at least a few kilometers of tunnel at a time.
Also, even if there are no internal combustion engines running in the tunnel, you still need ventilation shafts, subterranean metros have them for a myriad of reasons, even though there are no dinosaur squeezings being burned in the tunnels, for example, what happens if one of those very powerful batteries that run your Tesla happen to catch fire? People might suffocate if you can't force air into the tunnel.
Its a nice idea, but there is a reason why tunnel boring machines and vertical shaft sinking machines are so widely used on built-up areas.
What US cities need is a chaotic process of applying improvements, then making more permanent and high quality iterations as the initial fixes take hold. If your town has wide roads and cars that drive too fast, the logical step isn't installing curbs for protected bike lanes; it's paint to artificially narrow the road.
It won't give a perfectly clean implementation for every project, but it will prevent cities from making enormous bets that end up failing.
This isn't really a "freedom" oriented line of thinking and I get a lot of hate from people with certain political bents when I mention this idea, but there's no social value in total gridlock. Cities are a special situation where the streets are a public resource that needs to be allocated properly. The streets are nowhere near being allocated properly in most of the cities I have lived in.
Plus, employers would eventually just provide transit options to their labor pool. It would be similar to the bus services that the large companies in Silicon Valley use to bus in employees from neighboring cities and towns. The market and transportation systems would realign to fix problems.
Take public transit, for instance. Arguably, that would be a good thing to change - supply fast, frequent, convenient public transit. But how would you do it?
US cities (with few exceptions) have reached a stable equilibrium where cars are necessary because there's no convenient transit, there's no transit because the city doesn't have the density to make it worthwhile, and it can't have the density because there has to be parking for everybody's cars. How do you change that? You have to change all three pieces at once (plus peoples' attitudes). You almost have to start over with a new city.
If the citizens do want it, you can just gradually make private car ownership more expensive and less convenient vs public transit.
Anecdotally many anti-public transit opinions from US folks seem to be around having the less well-to-do present in buses, complaints about hygiene and/or safety. So maybe improve the social safety net at the same time, or go full classist and have separate 1st class & 2nd class compartments.
The solution I'd love to see is giving these cities more competition. Let's try to revitalize old cities like Baltimore and Cleveland to give people more affordable options. I've heard Pittsburg is having some success with this kind of thing.
https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/ for more reading.
Just focusing on space efficiency: very dense cities could build an underground transportation system connecting people's homes directly to space-efficient, centralized facilities. Instead of having a kitchen, you would order food or freshly-prepared ingredients to combine yourself. Instead of doing laundry by hand, you would send it to a centralized laundry facility, which would clean it for you and send it back. Trash would be disposed of using the same system. You could also use this system to store and retrieve things you use infrequently, so they don't have to take up space in your home.
A system like this would enable higher density by reducing the number of facilities you need in and adjacent to your home. It would free up road space by focusing commercial traffic on these centralized facilities instead of distributing it throughout the city. And it would free up road-side space by lowering the demand for laundromats, supermarkets, and so on.
A lot of people might think 'socialist' and I may have said the same a few years ago but having seen issues up front, lives (within some cities) are being completely ruined with the hoarding and speculation.
1. Drive and park close enough to the closed-off street, and fight with other drivers for parking (very common experience around, say, farmer's markets in the San Francisco peninsula).
2. Don't go there; drive to the mall instead.
3. Walk/bike there anyway, putting up with the shitty/dangerous experience of doing so.
I.e., to apply this in the United States would basically amount to "redesign entire cities to be more walkable".
Ideal (for me) but completely impractical: the interstate exits end in giant parking garages. Everyone walks, bikes, or takes light-rail/buses to get around the city. Only vehicles allowed in the city are deliver vehicles between 11pm-7am. This would probably only work in very small cities, sadly.
More realistic:
Las Vegas has the right idea on the Strip, though it definitely needs improvement. Cars and pedestrians should never have to compete for street-crossing opportunities. Pedestrian bridges to cross major avenues. Ground-level entrances should lead to parking garages or elevators.
All customer-centric stuff should be on the "second" level where the pedestrians walk. Imagine just taking every sidewalk and jacking it up 12 feet. You aren't walking on the street, you're walking on a raised sidewalk that goes from building to building. This completely eliminates the need for pedestrians to stop and wait to cross the street, while still allowing cars free reign below. You could turn entire intersections into courtyards, freeing up more real estate for street vendors.
This also frees up real estate for larger building footprints -- you don't need as many street-level parking spaces if every building's ground-floor is a giant parking lot!
I'm sure all of the above is totally impractical and that you'll all shoot it down with pesky facts... but a man can dream... :)
Schools, I would like full control be at the parent level or city level and not at the state of federal level.
I would like to see more of the mundane jobs at the city level automated so property taxes could be lowered. In the state I live some property taxes approach 5 percent of the assessed value. High property taxes make it prohibitive for elderly people to retire in the place they grew up in. You lose some of the community.
Obviously little buildings are not going to be adequate for everything like an orchestra or opera performance. So that isn't meant to apply to every single building.
But as far as practicing those things, generally there is sound proofing in those types of music practice rooms, and also I have suggested airtight construction with SIPs and HRV. This means most of the sound is insulated between outside and inside anyway without any sound proofing.
Also, this is partly an alternative to apartments or townhomes, where walls and/or floors/ceilings are shared. So obviously an advantage there even without the advanced construction and ventilation.
... cut up the boring machine for scrap!
It's like setting up a giant printing press to print a newspaper, and then printing 10 copies.
Examples? I sing opera and live in a big house on an acre, and it still reaches the neighbors.