Ask HN: How would you fix cities? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you fix cities?

29 pointstimfrietas46 comments

If you could significantly change them to run more efficiently, what would you do to change them?

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On a heavily-used block with tall buildings on both sides, here's a recipe that will work well:

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.

It also leaves you a one-block-long tunnel for a train, and another for a road, for years until you get the blocks around it done - probably for decades until you get a system that goes anywhere.

Sure, but you have to start somewhere. Why waste money digging up the same street over and over, as most cities do? It seems more efficient to do it once and be done for a long time thereafter.

Here in Seattle, we spend $$$$ buying a tunnel boring machine, bore a transportation tunnel for a section, and then ...

... 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.

At least you're getting something back. When the channel between Dover and Calais was bored, one of the boring machines was simply left underground, because it would have been to expensive to retrieve it.

Also, you could easily imagine doing this to a part of the block that's up on a hill - Seattle and SF have a lot of areas like this. It would make piping existing traffic into and out of those transit sections easy.

Has anything resembling that ever been implemented on a wide scale?

Alas, not yet, no. (But that alone isn't a good reason not to try.)

Remember to leave room for alleys. NYC has no alleys, which is kind of a pain. Also buildings should be able to be built up to 20 stories, not 4. Your city will be popular and you want housing to be cheaper than SF to compete.

If you were to assume the soil you are excavating is very forgiving and your street is wide enough, you might be able to dig a trench that is 10 meters wide and 30 meters deep (you cannot dig straight down or the walls might cave in, unless you plan on using shotcrete, which you may or may not have to remove when you start backfilling the area). Now, we are talking about removing 975 cubic meters per meter of trench, if your street is 100 meters long, that is 97500 cubic meters you will need to excavate, at a rate of 33.1 cubic meters per hour, you would need to work around the clock for more than 122 days in order to excavate the trench.

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.

This is precisely the type of thing that US cities need to stop doing. Building to a top level of service from the outset is a terrible plan.

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.

I would restrict traffic to very specific use cases, like Uber, taxis, public transit, and charge high tolls for everyone else. Then, I'd encourage e-bike or bike rebates/tax credits. The traffic situation in cities is really out of hand. The fact that this country has an obesity epidemic just makes this solution even more appealing to me.

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.

this may work well for smaller cities that are highly dense, but for a lot of North American cities, where a large population live in the suburbs and commute into city center for work, public transit are often unreliable and there's not big enough of a population overall support long hour, frequent services. I don't think it's fair or realistic to ask them to bike multiple hours to get to work everyday. Not to say hate, but I do find this type of proposal or thinking somewhat elitist and completely ignorant to the fact that there are others who do not live in cities yet depend on them for a living. Many people already choose to live in the suburb in order to lower their living cost compared to living in city centers, is it fair that they will be charged high tolls compare to whoever that's able to afford city center living?

Is it fair? No. However, people who don't live within a city really aren't in a position to dictate how that city should be run if they don't actually live and vote there.

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.

That's not easy.

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.

Of course the U.S. has the chicken-and-egg problem, but public transit is my vote if I could wave a magic wand. I am tired of car cities: more pollution, obesity, rage, and sprawl.

I agree, and it seems like many people share our feelings, which makes sense when you look at how the most desirable cities according to our views are getting more and more expensive. Of course there aren't many of these cities in the US.

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.

I'd say the logical place to start in the US is by finding the streets that have negative cash flow just from maintaining the infrastructure, and start handing those streets back over to the home- and business-owners located on them, in whatever way seems the least politically suicidal. If you live in a cheap SFH on a whole acre,or own storage units, there's no reason you should expect urban-quality roads, water, sewage, and emergency services.

If the citizens don't want it, then of course it's game over.

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.

In the US? Less zoning.

https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/ for more reading.

That link seems to cover a lot of scattered topics. Care to explain more?

If you read those, there's a common thread.

What do you mean by "run more efficiently"?

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.

I was amazed when I heard that Copenhagen had a government department focused on Quality of Life. And that the bike culture of Denmark was created when they decided that cars were harming their quality of life (it was a 30 year project.) And Finland decided to focus their University on improving life - rather than just generic research. Considering those examples, I would say that cities need to reflect the needs and desires of their citizens - as opposed to the business leaders, the rich, and their politicians.

Put a limit (e.g. 1) on the number of residential properties any individual person can own within city limits and make them (residential properties only within city limits) illegal to buy for a corporation.

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.

So no-one can move to this city unless they can afford a mortgage there with it's associated closing costs?

Presumably people could still rent out their own property, as long as the owner is an individual who either lives on the premises, rents (but doesn't own) another place in the city, or lives outside the city entirely.

Do anything recommended by http://www.strongtowns.org

I'd make them much more walkable, by blocking off certain short sections of streets from car traffic during certain hours. Many european cities do this, and it works well.

Adelaide has been building up walkable laneways that span the whole city to move in that direction. They are permenantly foot traffic only and they are hands down the best places to wander in the city. To eat outside is so nice when there are no cars shooting past, you don't notice how much noise they add until they are gone entirely.

What about the underground city option, as Toronto and Montreal have done, where there's about 30km of pedestrian walkways connecting malls.

I suspect that only works because those cities are already relatively walkable/bikable. Unless you live within walking/biking distance of the closed-off street, and the route between you and the street is pleasantly walkable/bikable, you are faced with the choice of:

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".

Most of my ideas revolve around the need for better transportation.

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... :)

I think Jacque Fresco's idea with the Venus Project is worth pondering: https://www.thevenusproject.com/. I wish the philosophy makes it in new cities being built now. Whatever it may be, we need to live alongside nature and make sure the city produces waste that can be broken down by nature readily, and at the same time it must be a symbiotic relationship.

I didn't "get" the Venus project, but I am wary of "designed" cities, they aren't very liveable (see: Brazilia or Astana).

I would make them more walking and bike friendly.

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.

If obvious inefficiencies are not being fixed, nobody's incentives are aligned with fixing them. A sustainable solution must address the wrong or weak incentives, not try to fix the inefficiencies one at a time. Business owners are uniquely empowered and incentivized to address inefficiencies in their businesses and to compete for the customer. They lose money if they provide a product that isn't good enough. Making cities businesses would allow you to leverage that.

I would teach every citizen how society and politics works and that there is no magic solution to social problems.

I came up with some ideas a year or two ago : http://tinyvillages.org

Fun! But what if I want to learn tuba or practice opera singing? (Not trolling you, I really mean this.)

I think what you are implying is that since the buildings are close together there will be a noise pollution issue.

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.

The homes look too small for practice rooms, and I practice a lot--this couldn't be in a shared community room. It would have to be at home (I think). Asking b/c it applies to other noisy activities such as running a saw for DIY projects or even just neighbors who scream at each other.

There's plenty of sound dampening low tech solutions and social norms that work just fine. Hopefully there's a whole population of the orchestra to create specialized architecture.

> sound dampening low tech solutions and social norms that work just fine

Examples? I sing opera and live in a big house on an acre, and it still reaches the neighbors.

Oh, you know, like just being a good neighbor. Not after 9 on weekdays and not too early on the weekends. Golden rule, you know that stuff.

Make private passenger vehicles illegal and replace them with buses. Most issues will resolve themselves.

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