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Comment by sergiosgc | Hacker News Reader

> (...) as any individual cars have no place in a city.

That's one view. The other is that cities are too dense. There is no reason, in the era of fast digital communications, to pack humans so densely that we are discussing the right to use an 8m² space in the city for personal use. It's an attack on the symptom rather than an attack on the cause.

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That's assuming everyone can telecommute or has a non-physical job. We have already tried suburban sprawl in many cities, and I'm not sure it worked. It's also assuming that people only live in cities because of work. A lot of people live in cities because they don't want to own a car, and like what they have to offer for community, lifestyle and culture.

Suburban sprawl, office parks and shopping malls don't offer much in the way of cultural and community development and they are very heavily focused around those who own an automobile and get everywhere by driving. Riding a bike or walking in a busy CBD is usually much more productive and practical than riding or walking around a sprawling suburbia. Getting any meaningful distance takes far longer in a suburban sprawl and often your destination is in the center of a completely different suburb, with it's own gigantic sprawl to cover before you get to the businesses.

I am interested in what your solutions to the symptoms would be, I think I'm probably doing you a disservice by assuming your solution is more suburbia.

I'll refer you to my explanation on another thread. I'm in no way advocating urban sprawl:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868072

I think I actually live in a city like you speak of. 1.5m people. Our car commutes are between 20-40 minutes long from the majority of suburbs, and our CBD is small with lots of shopping precincts dotted around the suburbs but most of the action taking place in the CBD. Few restaurants in the Suburbs for example, and most residential is in the suburbs.

You are 20 minutes from hills, rural towns, or world class beaches from the CBD. We have dozens of national parks and outdoor activity areas (lots of Mountain Biking for example). I enjoy good cycling once nearer the city, although I am definitely at that limit I was talking about where it's too far to cycle practically to stuff in the suburbs. Cycling to the CBD is fine, because once you're there everything you need is in the same place.

I suppose I'm inclined to agree with you, with a modifier that it would be nice to have medium residential density in the suburbs as well so that it was more affordable to live a saner cycling distance from the city. The issue is that while it's fine to cycle to one destination in the suburbs, if you need to be in two different locations in one day plus work you can't really achieve it. That's where a strong CBD helps a lot.

There's plenty of non-dense places for people to live in, yet for some reason more and more people move to cities. Maybe it's because of the density and its benefits, not despite it?

It's because cities are where the jobs are, not necessarily because people want to live in cities. But cities have more jobs precisely because of that density.

Lots of people do explicitly want to live in dense cities. And it's very freeing not having to own, maintain, and pay for a car. That's a huge benefit of living in a dense enough city that has had viable mass transit.

There are plenty of reasons. Infrastructure is much cheaper per citizen in denser cities. Schools, doctors, supermarkets are all more efficient in denser neighborhoods. Public transportation makes much more sense in denser urban areas.

That's true, but that effect follows a Pareto curve. Medium sized cities (1M to 3M inhabitants) reap most, if not all, benefits of density, without incurring the worst of the downsides.

In other words, I'm not advocating large sprawling cities, nor am I advocating a return to rural population distribution, but rather saner sized cities.

> Medium sized cities (1M to 3M inhabitants)

That's medium?!

What do those cities have which a city of 100k inhabitants does not have?

Culture, diversity, variety?

Not to say that a city of 100k lacks any of these things, but a place far larger can have much more.

Jobs for software engineers for example.

Nowadays, that's medium. Large is 10M.

I've lived in a 100k city for a few years. It was a fun time, I liked it a lot, and you have access to most amenities, but you do notice it is a small city. Fewer different restaurants, very limited selection of bars and night clubs [1], much limited selection of cultural events.

[1] This has an unexpected upside: you can go out on a whim and expect to find your friends at the usual places, in a Cheers like fashion.

I guess, size-wise, those are USA definitions.

Not in Germany [1] (which is the topic here), nor in The Netherlands (where I'm from). Amsterdam doesn't have 1M, yet it is very culturally diverse. Zaanstad (containing Zaandam) is 'only' ~150k, and has the most cultures of The Netherlands (a total of 135 different nationalities).

[1] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-biggest-cities-in-ge...

EDIT: Ah, now it makes sense. Thanks for clearing it up! :)

Sorry, there's a bit of misunderstanding here, my fault. I'm referring to metropolitan area population, not the specific city population. My city, Porto, for example, has less than 300k inhabitants. The metro area is, however, about 1.5M. In the context of auto traffic, or city services, the relevant number is the metro population, not the city proper.

That's....silly. By that definition most EU countries don't even have a "large" city. Warsaw and Krakow are both huge cities and they have 2M and 1M people respectively.

Tokyo does work quite well for a city of 37.5 million (metro area).

That's 12 million more people than live in all of the continent Australia. It always boggles my mind.

What's the maximum density? I live in Montreal, which is a medium-sized city, not particularly dense, but cars don't scale as well as humans. The city has become gridlocked, noisy and dangerous, with roads full of potholes no matter how much money we throw at the problem.

I'm not a city planning expert, so I have no idea. It's a fun problem, though:

From Wikipedia, Montreal seems to have a lower density than my home city (Porto), at 4k/km² vs 7k/km², but higher total urban population (3.5M vs 1.5M). Porto has very decent traffic (rush hour lasts 2h, entry/exit times peak at 30min).

It's either the total population that is causing stress in Montreal, or traffic planning. Porto did a very thorough change in traffic in the 90s, to great effect. Outer rings to avoid passing traffic going into the city, an inner traffic distribution ring, channels to have traffic avoid the old city center (centuries old, poor fit for auto traffic).

I had misread your initial comment. As a north-american, I often hear people arguing in favour of more sprawl. A detached house and minimum two cars for a family.

I think we agree that we can have nice 'small' but dense cities. We don't all need to be New York, but we also don't want to clutter the planet with suburbs.

> Outer rings to avoid passing traffic going into the city, an inner traffic distribution ring, channels to have traffic avoid the old city center

It's funny how it look like a quick description on how traffic is organized around Paris, which is heavily gridlocked. Of course, that's two different metro area and I'm not a specialist on why we have traffic issues here in Paris.

Scale destroys all planning. Paris is ten times the size of Porto...

I guessed it was something like this.

Not a matter of taking 8m2 for personal use but rather of eliminating 8m2 for green, parks, pavements. Adding friction for pedestrians with unnecessary traffic lights etc.

In a city bikes and public transport should be all you need. Cars do not belong in the city.

Of course the question is painted as competition for space use. It does not change my original reasoning.

>In a city bikes and public transport should be all you need

Agreed! And what better time to get rid of those diesel-belching, noisy buses and bring back trolleybuses? The problem is in the UK (IMO) is that politicians generally can't think beyond the next election, so anything like this gets ignored.

Good God, I can't imagine having this view. The good part is that if you do, the more sparse places to live than dense.

As for myself, I found Taipei to be the perfect density.

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