Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Until you deal with the parking problem—which is done by building truly mixed-use places where people can meet their daily needs without hopping in the car—you haven’t created true urbanism.

Daily needs means jobs for both you and your spouse, which won’t be in some random subdivision in Florida. It means schools, which don’t appear to be there either. It means the kids’ after school activities, again, missing from this plan. And if you don’t have kids or a spouse, then you should just live in the city anyway. This is an alternative to the sprawling suburban subdivision, not a downtown block.

Developers create these “drive to urbanism” layouts (like Reston Town Center in Northern Virginia) because thats what’s workable given the planning constraints of the larger system. This happens in “real cities” too. When I lived in a newly-redeveloped area of downtown DC, we still ended up driving a lot. My work was on the other side of town. The grocery store across the street was an awful, over priced Safeway. My daughter’s school was over in Georgetown, a 30 minute drive away. Driving is unavoidable unless these communities are highly self contained.

And even if you do manage to solve all the problems you listed in a single walkable area your problems are only just beginning.

* You have to have commercial and residential delivery infrastructure which means roads that reach individual businesses and enough space to park them, and unload. This doesn't immediately mean vehicle sprawl but if the roads are already there...

* You have to support garbage trucks being able to reach every business and residential building. I love the idea of having pooled shared trash areas but in practice it just means more litter and worse public health because you've just increased the cost of disposing of rotten food.

* There are going to be people that actually want land for their hobbies like gardening, woodworking, smithing. You can push them to the suburbs but they'll still need to come into the town center to buy things and more area to cover means higher public transportation costs and lower ride density.

* You have have a system to deal with the fact that people's lives change. A family whose jobs were both previously local and close are now split and aren't walkable.

* Housing a school districts are 'sticky' to families because people put down roots in a place.

* The town needs to bring in outside money -- really no way around this one which means you need some industry (which if your lucky is walkable and fits in with the small town vibes but probably isn't) and tourism / business travel to support secondary industries who are coming in with ... cars. And since not all industry is office jobs that can be done anywhere/remotely you'll probably need to push them outside the town square and figure out work transportation.

* You'll need a public transportation system which is almost surely going to be vehicle based because buses are cheap and flexible.

* You're also gonna need a way to get people to and from the nearest airport. You could try to get a small airport just outside of the town within range of your public transportation but most likely you'll either need private cars or a greyhound style system.

The dream of self-contained communities is the "movie-set" idealism. It's like we're ignoring all the factors that lead to the current state of things and pretending that they're just not problems anymore.

Are you fellow Restonite? If so, "Hi!"

RTC and the current major development is an interesting case... RTC predates the expansion of the subway system, so drive-to urbanism was, as you suggest, a reasonable option given other constraints.

Now that the Metro is (almost) expanded past Reston to the airport, there is (was?) an opportunity to build a true human-scale urban environment (at least within the designated development area, roughly between Sunrise and Sunset Rds and just east of Whiele to just west of RTC).

However, that's not what we're seeing. Developers are dropping absolutely massive buildings (several blocks square) with little in the way to pedestrian access. The new complex on the north side of Weihle Station is NOT accessible by foot - you have to cross 8 lanes of traffic coming from the east, and if you "win" that game of Frogger, it's not intuitive how to access the new complex - it's a disjointed mess, at least visually.

The new development south of RTC (Halley Rise, where my office is located) isn't any better. The new Wegmans building doesn't align with existing roads and is several blocks wide. Getting from Halley Rise to RTC requires another game of Frogger across the Reston Parkway bridge (at which point, you have to cross the parking lots at Bechtel and Microsoft).

It's really frustrating as a resident and worker in the area. It seems the real problem is the cost of legal/political approval for development is so high that it only makes sense to do giant buildings that don't work at a human scale. There's no mix of building sizes/uses - it's just whatever the developer thinks will be most profitable today, with little regard for future evolution (short of tear down and rebuild the whole thing in 20 years).

I don’t think Metro in Reston actually solves very much. The silver line gets you to the airport, Tyson’s, Arlington, and DC. But many if not most people who work in Reston are going to be working in and around Reston or Loudon county. What is the public transit situation for getting to a school from any of the new Reston developments?

I think you’re also correct that the development around the train stations are dysfunctional. That’s a common WMATA problem. The silver line stations, and the developments around them, are monstrous concrete edifices, not human scale at all.

Agree - the Metro by itself doesn't help, it just served as the trigger to allowing massive redevelopment (with zoning and density changes).

>you have to cross 8 lanes of traffic coming from the east

I remember I was once staying in Tyson's or somewhere around there. I could see a number of restaurants in the shopping center from my hotel but there was literally no way of crossing the 6-8 lane road between me and the restaurants. I had to get into my car to drive the few hundred feet.

Tyson's Corner is a disaster. Whoever through building mini-city in the dead space between 3 highways was a good idea needs a kick in the teeth.

I mean, I suppose it was a good idea, in terms of car access, but it's been at "automobile saturation" for decades. There's literally no way to redevelop it into a liveable/walkable urban space because it's bounded on each side by a major highway (Rt7, Dulles Toll Road, and I-495). And it's bisected by another major artery - Rt123. And every other road within the triangle is, as you noted, nearly impossible to cross on foot.

That doesn't mean that this much parking is necessary, however.

I'm curious if the developer chose this much parking, or if land use requirements mandated it.

>Driving is unavoidable

What about public transport?

Reston has public transport. Most of Florida doesn't. A shiny nickel says that the pictured development has a nod to public transport in the form of a shuttle van that loops around the parking lots and the main street once every hour or so.

1) The US is not structurally capable of building public transit. For suburban areas like this, light rail is workable. But it costs us as much to build light rail as it costs other countries to build fully underground automated subway systems.

2) These are suburbs, so there is no rhyme or reason to where things might be located. It can literally take hours to do a route that you could do in a car in 30 minutes.

I live in one of the major metro areas of Florida, and even here public transport is abysmal. We have a single train line that goes north south about 30-50 miles. And a few buses that basically ferry the homeless around all day while they sleep on it.

That's it.

Look close - that form factor doesn't leave any place for transit to run. Most things would be a long way from any stop/station. The density would support a line every 2000 meters with stops 800 meters apart I(exact numbers can be argued, range is right). That puts almost nothing near the stop/station so there won't be a transit in there.

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