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Comment by elvinyung | Hacker News Reader

Jane Jacobs talks about how cities generally fall into one of two different kinds of equilibria: a public transit equilibrium, and a car equilibrium. In each one, the preferred kind of mobility further shapes land use to make that kind of mobility even more preferable.

Most of North America is so stuck in the car equilibrium that it seems hopeless. There's not even a handful of cities that would be nice to get around or live in without a car. This seems like it would take decades to correct, even if most North Americans actually wanted to. As an semi-extremist urbanite I'm incredibly pessimistic about this.

I'm somewhat hopeful about new mobility methods like bikeshare or even rideshare, but none of them seem to be actively driving land use changes.

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You don’t need a huge public transit system to make the jump. You need high density + mixed use over a relatively small area with good public transit in that area. Which lets two car families drop to one car family’s. This reduces the need for public parking pushing up density and property values. It also makes links to that core of good public transit more valuable.

The main problem in the US is you don’t get both high density and mixed use.

PS: His harping on Vienna Fairfax completely misses the point, it’s the last stop on the orange line, the parking allows a vast area to commute via the subway including many people just visiting DC. The Pentagon City and Crystal City stops for example directly connect to shopping next to huge residential sections and have minimal parking.

Well, that does fit into what I meant -- Outside North America, it seems to be generally (more) taken for granted that public transit and density/mixed-use feed into each other (such that either can be a prerequsite for the other), whereas in North America, because we're in such a car equilibrium, public transit mostly just spends most of its time apologizing for the poor land use.

Although it is probably worth noting that e.g. Los Angeles has some places (kind of) like what you're talking about [1], but it's basically a drop in the bucket.

[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/11/11/meme-weeding-l...

I’m amused by the Fairfax bit. I used to live within walking distance of that station. Almost all of the green space in the article’s image is now designated for commercial use (the remainder has housing), has plans ready to go, and is just waiting for the developer to start putting shovels into the ground. But the developer apparently doesn’t think it would be worth the cost of construction, so it just sits there.

I’m not sure what else you could do there, unless you want to have the government heavily subsidize commercial development, which seems like a recipe for empty, decaying buildings in a decade or two.

The American fascination with single use zoning is so counterproductive. If commercial doesn't work, just put housing next to it! Or build the housing first, or something. Pair with a tax designed to disincentivize land squatting.

And it doesn't need to be eight story apartments with elevator, garbage, the whole shebang; a four-family house like this would still be a massive improvement over most American suburbs. https://activerain-store.s3.amazonaws.com/image_store/upload... Plus with how expensive DC is, you could do worse than selling houses.

This one is the opposite. The developers would be happy to build nothing but housing, but the government wants offices and retail too. The developers built as much housing as they were allowed to without doing the rest (my house was one of them) and then basically bailed out.

In Seattle there are lots of buildings going up that are residential with commercial space on the ground floor. Residential is so profitable that the commercial space can sit empty for quite awhile and still make a profit. They then cover the vacant storefronts with colorful graphics.

And eventually businesses do move into those vacant storefronts. Even places that are deserts are starting to develop a little character. South Lake Union isn't exactly where I'd like to spend my time, but it's getting more and more interesting as all those vacancies fill in with little businesses.

But what the government wants isn't necessarily what the market will support. Fairfax has a very high office vacancy rate, particularly in newer buildings, so I'm not surprised that developers don't want to build buildings that will stay vacant. [1]

When I say single use, I'm not talking about the neighborhood, I'm talking about the land itself; it sounds like the developer is restricted from building anything other than commercial or retail on that particular portion of the neighborhood. Even in the overheated property markets of New York, the new all-office World Trade Center is struggling with vacancy, and Hudson Yards had to be revamped from all-office to mixed-use because there's simply too much office space on the market. And even after they did that, the city had to offer tax breaks so that companies would populate the new district.

[1] - https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2018/04/23/in-fa...

That portion is supposed to be a mix of all three. It’s possbible that some modification of the mix would be profitable, but supposedly the retail is non-viable without a population of office workers to provide steady traffic.

Oddly, the massive success of mixed-use development at the nearby Dunn Loring station is being used as an excuse to sit on this project, because they say it’s too close and couldn’t compete. (Meanwhile, a massive new mixed use development is going up just half a mile down the road.)

Any urban change takes decades, especially if you have to build things. For example it takes years from proposal to completion of a single bike lane. Digging subway tunnels is much slower. Here in Berlin we're still debating plans that were originally drafted in the seventies.

I think the most effective tool cities have is zoning regulations. Getting them right enables the city to harvest organic change as opposed to having to plan every single project. Reducing free parking and allowing mixed commercial and residential use seems to me like the easiest way towards a public transit centric city. In Tokyo for example there is basically no curbside parking and shops are always within walking distance.

Totally, but in the North America it seems like we are culturally nowhere near aligned on changing this for the better. The cultural opinion seems to be slowly improving, but it still seems like most of North America has very agrarian/suburban tendencies.

P.S. Japanese zoning is fascinating [1], but not without its faults. For example, the relatively laissez-faire zoning policies can be seen as to blame for the lack of bike lane infrastructure in most of Japan [2]. That said, 東京がとてもすきです :)

[1] http://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zonin...

[2] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Making_of_Urban_Jap...

The other problem with zoning is that it is not a decision made in isolation.

When governments are under financial pressure (aren't they all?), why not zone for what makes the most short-term or long term cash? The environmental benefits of mass transit or even the idea of high density living doesn't necessarily appeal much financially.

How do gigantic parking lots make most cash in the short term?

Daniel Herriges wrote some great articles about the "activation energy" of walkability, and what significance that has for suburban America:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/14/the-activation...

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/17/the-catch-22-o...

> There's not even a handful of cities that would be nice to get around or live in without a car. > As an semi-extremist urbanite

Don't call yourself an extremist. There's plenty of people that live without a car in big cities (outside of the US).

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