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Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

I hope the winner of this call get all sent to live for 2 years in small (and not so small) unknown towns in Europe that have been growing organically for thousands of years and offer a great quality of life.

Places where rich and poor, kids, young adults, adults and elderly all live happily together (modulo the usual father-and-son generational problems).

Seriously, planners in "new" countries should be forced to spend some time in "old" countries, if not to learn the good things, at least to learn their mistakes.

And another compulsory thing should be listening to James Howard Kunstler talking about Suburbia: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...

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Sometimes I wonder if Americans fucked themselves by creating cities with roads and cars in mind, thereby ruining the organic walkability of naturally sense cities which were historically limited by the distance one could reasonably walk in a given day for their regular necessities.

The only old American city that I think stands a chance is Philadelphia, which has a great number of single-lane one-way streets, which allow emergency services to get to where they need quickly enough while providing a decent amount of walkability. But then again, the original plan for Philadelphia is a hilarious testament to the utter failures of centralized city planning.

" Penn planned a city on the Delaware River to serve as a port and place for government. Hoping that Philadelphia would become more like an English rural town instead of a city, Penn laid out roads on a grid plan to keep houses and businesses spread far apart, with areas for gardens and orchards. The city's inhabitants did not follow Penn's plans, as they crowded by the Delaware River, the port, and subdivided and resold their lots" -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia

The other thing I think Philadelphia has going for it is that rising water levels from global warming won't affect it as much as they will affect cities right on the ocean, or islands like Manhattan. The Delaware and Schuylkill rivers will rise, but the city won't be hit as hard as the coastal cities.

If you have single lane streets, what does an emergency vehicle do when the lane is blocked by vehicles, people, or debris?

Wouldn't wider streets be better in every case?

Wider streets are good for getting a lot of stuff through - up to a limit. Los Angeles and Atlanta are full of massive highways of cars that barely move.

Larger streets also hurt street side commerce. Nothing chokes off wakability and storefront business vitality like multi-lane one-way streets.

EDIT: I feel compelled to mention from my experience that in Rome, the most active streets with the most vibrant businesses were not the arterial roadways - those seemed to mainly serve large businesses, government buildings, and tourist traps - but rather the tiny twisted streets in place for many centuries.

I think open straight streets don't fire up our spacial memory in the same way, and as a result aren't really "places" in our minds in the same way as more intricate and varied environments.

Recent Philadelphian transplant here: They move or take a different street. It's interesting that people here have accepting that if they're driving and a taxi stops to drop someone off, they just wait 30 seconds to proceed, or backup and take a side street over a few blocks to proceed around the blockage.

If you have a narrow street, less people drive, and thus there is no issue getting an ambulance through. I see ambulances stuck in traffic on Manhattan avenues all the time (we should put grade-separated bus lanes on all of them, IMO, partially so that ambulances can always get through).

>If you have a narrow street, less people drive, and thus there is no issue getting an ambulance through.

Huh? If you limit supply, demand goes down?

Your logic would say that the solution to Los Angles traffic problems is to close half the lanes and wait for people to sell off their cars?

Relevant reading:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_destruction

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_traffic

> Huh? If you limit supply, demand goes down?

It works for cars, since there are acceptable alternatives (biking, walking, carpooling, Uber, etc). It works less well for housing, as leftist NIMBYs often advocate, since one alternative (homelessness) is very unappealing, and the other (living somewhere else) just exports the problem.

Yes. To decrease demand, you limit supply so that the price goes up. This can work dramatically if you increase price high enough that alternatives are cheaper.

In the case of transportation, price is measured in time and convenience as well as dollars.

So we want to shrink our road infrastructure to drive the cost up in terms of pollution, fuel costs, time and convenience? This way less people will drive. I would propose that you are forgetting that you are going to price transport into the hands of the wealthy and business who will effectively rent-seek to loan cars or taxi people who cant afford a car around.

The idea of shrinking our roadways to discourage use of vehicles is challenging in a practical sense and it just cleaves off another aspect of life for business and the wealthy to enjoy without plebs interfering with the roadways they paid & still pay for.

Kinda, yeah. Keep in mind, this is traffic, not selling goods. "Supply and demand" economics doesn't really apply in the same fashion.

If you widen streets and add more lanes, then more people drive, until they've filled up that street's capacity. But they don't really stop driving.

Hear, hear. American cities have a lot of upsides to be sure, but I've never found more contentment vis-a-vis my everyday life than when I was living in cities and towns all over Europe (over the course of about a year and a half). Everything was within arm's reach, especially in regards to fresh and interesting food: you could stop by a dozen bakeries, butchers, and groceries on the way home, to say nothing of the weekly street markets. People hung out by the riverbanks, plazas, and parks to have lunch. The crooked streets, hidden stairs, and mysterious detours of an everyday walk always brought a sense discovery. And in the major cities, getting around was super simple with the efficient and reasonably inexpensive public transit. (Props to Paris!)

Whether the city was tiny or enormous, these factors seemed to somehow scale along with it. In contrast, practically every US city I've visited has felt inorganic and pre-planned. The only places in North America I've felt the European vibe in were Quebec, sort-of Montreal, and perhaps Boston. I imagine this largely has to do with the central focus on cars versus people. Quite a shame; I miss the sheer excitement of simply being a pedestrian. (The kind that isn't caused by almost being run over!)

You don't need thousands of years. Most European cities are much, much younger.

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