How one Indian city cracked the problem of urban spread | Hacker News Reader

How one Indian city cracked the problem of urban spread

economist.com

85 pointsgodelmachine37 comments

But the Atlas of Urban Expansion, a project based in New York University, estimates that roads built in Ahmedabad after 2000 are 8.5m wide, on average, compared with 7.2m for roads built earlier. Roads also take up more of the land area in the newly developed suburbs. Because wide roads can carry more cars and buses, future suburbanites in Ahmedabad ought to be spared the awful traffic jams that frustrate large Indian cities such as Delhi and Mumbai.

I grew up next to a three lane street(roughly 18m in total width) that lead to the suburbs which in turn experienced rapid growth during the nineties, continuing a few years into the 21st century.

The additional few tens of thousands of new inhabitants commuting each day to work were enough to turn this place into congestion hell.

I don't think 8.5m - even each way is going to cut it in a city of well over 5 million.

Thankfully, if there's enough room, you can repurpose roads into light / heavy rail when density increases enough.

Especially if the roads were laid out with foresight instead of organically tangling.

Good luck with that when everyone already has a car...

Actually motorcycle are popular in India. Most people use motorcycles in India. It wosen the traffic as bikes can cut between cars.

Motorcycle aren't as safe as cars.

My impression of India isn't a population that prioritizes safety. Just look up footage of trains in India, there are as many people clinging from the outside as there are inside.

I've travelled on a few different trains in India. More than a few actually, though not close to a hundred. Without seeing a single person clinging to the outside.

I've seen those in films and on photos, yes, just not in person. So maybe it's not that common, really? Except when a million people need to flee from the latest flood in Bihar.

Given average speeds in India this isn't as much of a problem in practice as you might think.

This, in effect, is already happening in the city. The centre lanes / dividers of some of the major roads are now being used to construct an elevated metro system.

This article has it backwards. Long, straight, wide roads are great for speeding cars but terrible for humans. It's the different between walkable places like and suburban American car sewers. But confidently wrong is completely on brand for this magazine, so thumbs up for them.

Pedestrians will also have a shorter walk if roads are straight, won't they? And, unlike cars, which can easily drive a kilometer or two further with no strain, pedestrians and cyclists are sensitive to this.

You have to walk a lot farther when the roads are bigger. All that road space has a cost.

Straight roads make people drive faster, which makes not driving worse for everyone else.

In the limit, you build roads too small for cars, like in the old walled medieval cities in europe. They are in general great places to walk and terrible places to drive.

In the other limit, you build like e.g. Detroit suburbs, where it's essentially impossible to do anything on foot, ever.

If you have to choose which one to be more like, curvy narrow roads are the way to go if you care about pedestrians.

Add to this the fact that, if you provide space for cars, they will take it up: adding lanes / width / parking increases car usage to a greater extent than the space added, such that you end up drawing more congestion to the area than before it was improved.

We can control polluting vehicles by imposing a pollution charge, or even banning them from some roads. Or by limiting them to only one lane.

I was trying to think in an idealistic or "from first principles" way as opposed to the practical / realistic approach you took. From that point of view, I'd want all roads to be straight lines to minimise travel distance.

> But confidently wrong is completely on brand for this magazine, so thumbs up for them

I don't think that's fair. Yes, I disagree with this particular article, but The Economist makes more effort than most to offer non-partisan, fact-based and insightful analysis. And yes, they have a particular worldview, which they wear on their sleeve. In general I don't have many bad, and have a lot of good, things to say about them.

If you have a better recommendation to fill their niche I'd be interested to hear it.

> The Economist makes more effort than most to offer non-partisan, fact-based and insightful analysis

The Economist is basically the Gell-Mann effect in written form. They are also definitely partisan when it suits them (they were formed to argue against the Corn Laws!)

For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

The Economist is basically that happens when you stick your finger in the air and want to write down what the "consensus" opinion is. It's neither insightful, nor surprising. In a way, it is the most boring magazine there is.

Wow, what sort of person dismisses an opinion just for being the “consensus” and appreciates an opinion for being “surprising” rather than correct.

What sort of person assumes the “consensus” opinion is correct?

Did I say it was? Could you point out where I did? I merely said that it it is wrong to _dismiss_ it for that reason. Whether it is the consensus or not has no bearing on how correct it is. The person I was replying to obviously felt differently.

The Economist has been consistent i advocating in for (among other things) legalizing drugs, same-sex marriage, more public transport, carbon trading, nuclear energy, less regulation, freer immigration and many other things that were not and are not the "consensus opinion".

What?

Advocating these things is the very definition of the neoliberal consensus view - for which this magazine explicitly advocates. With the exception of same-sex marriage (maybe ... this was a liberal policy goal for a long time), all of that is the boilerplate position of any pol from that camp.

I find they do a pretty sound job on topics I know, even when I happen to disagree with them. Gell-Mann applies less frequently there than much of the rest of the media.

"partisan when it suits them"

They spell out their worldview, far more plainly and thoroughly than most, and explicitly non-partisan on their about us page. So is their ownership. They're consistent enough that I generally know on what topics we will differ. They've never supported a particular party but come election time and big issues they endorse one way or the other, with reasoning. Beats the single party (whichever party) come what may stance of most titles. What more could you want?

Like the FT, I find them far less partisan than younger-me once expected.

You might have misunderstood what the Gell-Mann effect is.

1. you find an article published on a topic that you know well.

2. You find that the publication is egregiously wrong about it.

3. You laugh about it, turn the page and believe everything they write about other topics.

I know technology reasonably well, and I’ve noticed every single publication I’ve read, the NYT onwards, make mistakes. In 12 years of reading the Economist (especially their fantastically informative Technology Quarterly issues) I have yet to notice them making mistakes. For this, and other reasons, I trust them.

The way you’ve phrased your comment “... in written form” makes me think you don’t know what you’re talking about. But who knows, I could probably read another comment by you and think “wow that’s insightful”.

Evidence I have contradicts your assertions. Pleasant roads in the Netherlands can be 70 ft wide. The ones described here are under 35 ft. I would speculate that you are forming your conclusions based on American notions of "wide".

Indian suburban regions frequently are as dense as American urban areas, which may throw off your intuitions a bit if you're unfamiliar.

As a counter argument i propose you read the book “Seeing like a state” by James Scott.

It clearly lays out the flawed thinking as done in the article and why this systematic kind of urban planning/engineering almost always fails.

Having been a resident of ahmedabad for a decade and having several friends here let me point out that the residents here have seen commute times increase despite all the planning and expansion of roads here.

Happy/sad here. European cities are shifting to bikes to cut pollution (noise, brake dust, emission ...) amongst other things so that they are "livable" again. They are definitely putting in kinks in straight roads to prevent speeding and other rash driving. Unfortunate; Looks like Ahmedabad is aping the west (or US more precisely) by prioritizing cars and might end up with problems plaguing these cities now.

The biggest problem seems to be preemptively cutting out speculators.

It'd be nice to see some kind of eminent domain clawback for someone who bought land solely for speculative zoning change.

Whether financial (e.g. compensating landowners on a multiplier scale according to how long they've owned the property) or legal (e.g. land recently sold is more easily seized via eminent domain, weakening the new owner's bargaining position).

Land development in a coherent, socially productive manner is the ultimate tragedy of the commons -- the individually optimal move is always to be enough of a dick so that the social utilities get built on your neighbors' lands, then reap the benefits.

It may seem unfair that speculators exist, but the losers there are the previous owners and not the rest of society. For those who buy flats in a residential building, the price will be the same regardless of who gets to pocket the land appreciation, a farmer or a real estate investor.

The best way to protect the owners is to make the development process as transparent and impartial as possible, so that everybody can act on that information not just those with privileged access. For example, the local government could mandate that infrastructure development proceeds in concentric circles radiating from a virtual center point of the city, and layout a plan for a decade or two, with a number of stages. After this, money is awarded according to the plan, as the city needs to grow.

So the information about a future urban development is known a decade in advance and the true owners can enjoy a steady growth in value as the events unfold. Speculators can still invest, but they need to do so well in advance, driving the whole land appreciation by providing liquidity.

The problem isn't that speculators make money per se, its when speculation becomes a feeding frenzy that jacks up the market to insane numbers. See places like Vancouver where rich foreign investors dump millions into the market to have a safe haven for their money, and don't even bother to rent it out. Why would you bother when you get double digit returns YoY by just sitting on it.

I do believe it's unfair, but my point is more about it being inefficient.

A measured and transparent expansion system would be one way to help that, although complexity would vary widely with locale (plains vs river cities).

The problem with (independent) speculators is that the city is trading a largely rational actor (agricultural land owner) with capital / a solely profit-driven actor (speculator).

My point is the latter is less inclined to compromise than the former, to the detriment of urban development.

One could make the point that aggregating speculators serve a necessary role, but I don't see much value delivered by "smaller than a planned community" types.

Furthermore, I have seen them hold up urban progress. It only takes one landowner to prevent a contiguous utility from being constructed...

Rational, in this context, means profit maximizing - both kinds of landowners should act in a similar way. If the owners compromise to less than the value of the land, sure, that's a way to redistribute the savings back to society, but it's still unfair to them. It also opens a major conflict of interest for those controlling the negotiation to get involved and grab some of that money on the table.

I much rather empower all owners to maximize the value of the land, but at the same time, have sane eminent domain regulation that prevent them for getting rich at the taxpayer's expense. So any inefficiency is the result of legislation that allows speculators to abuse the process.

Rational only means strictly profit maximizing under simple economic treatments. In this case, we're talking about improvements that boost land value, but must be agreed to / enforced on all.

Consequently, you deal with local optima, when everyone is perfectly individually greedy, no improvements can be constructed, and everything is less "good" than it could be (for the individuals and society).

It does happen here and there that city only zones land that it owns, and does forced eminent domain land purchases with a low-ish predetermined "raw land" price. It's obviously hugely unpopular among land owners, and is prone to lead to court cases.

But frankly, I fully support it and hope it'd be more widespread. Keeps a level playing ground and city finances healthy (after zoning, city can resell for a hefty premium). After all, city will have to pay for all the municipal infrastructure that brings a windfall for the owner. If it's used consistently without exceptions, it should be clear for all parties that urban development isn't open to private speculation.

The solution looks good. But the remaining problem is density. The higher the density the easier is to provide services for the population. New York, Tokyo, Paris, etc, have several store tall buildings with people living in apartments. For what I see these new cities are more similar to Los Angeles or Mexico City than anything else. Single-family homes spread all over the place without access to trains or subways.

I have lived all my life in apartments. So, for me, it feels normal and it is very practical. I guess that if you are used to single-family homes that is a difficult step to make.

It's a shame that Indian cities aren't designing themselves around public transport. Road projects ensure a continuous under the table paycheck, unlike public transport....so roads are easier to fund. But, they really aren't the answer.

India is perfectly structured for public transport. High density, massive village -> city migration, a primarily lower-middle class population and some of the worst pollution on Earth .

Mumbai and Delhi are 2 cities that are now entirely dependent on public transport. Many rich people in Mumbai take the local train, because of it being faster and more reliable than roads during peak times.

Despite the public demand for it, it is very hard to now retroactively construct public transportation infrastructure in Mumbai.

I don't think there is any much "innovativity" in that approach, just urban development done right.

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