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Comment by avianlyric | Hacker News Reader

Only true if you ignore the history of American zoning laws, and Americas obsession with the car.

Current zoning laws in most of the US make it pretty much impossible to build anything except suburbs, attached to ginormous parking lots you call cities, by massive highways. It’s not hard to see why building better public infrastructure is so difficult when the current layout of most American cities means it’s difficult to even walk between shops on the same road, so public transport can’t move people between pedestrian hubs.

Changing that fundamental issue with American cities would require people to realise that current approach (which they grew up with, and was touted as the future for most of their lives) is broken and needs to change. As much as it needs to change, I can understand why people have a lot of difficulty accepting that.

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And I think this is one of the reasons we are seeing so many companies racing to create a commercially viable eVTOL (electric - vertical take-off & landing) product. To me, this transport system only seems to be a solution to the problem mentioned above. I can't see them ever being commercially viable (FAA regulation, power density, etc.) And yet there are a lot of companies trying to make them a reality when really the cities they have renders of with their flashy electric vehicle flying over just need better public transport systems.

You could just start redesigning your cities and improving your public transport. America is not unique in it obsession with cars, the Neatherlands used to be the same. Their city centres were mostly parking, and driving a ginormous highway through the centre of a city was once considered good public policy.

For the past 30-40 years, the Dutch have managed to completely transform their urban landscapes into something far more people friendly. Additionally American cities used to be dominated by pedestrians and bike, the car centric city is a relatively new phenomenon. So it quite possible for the US to reverse the damage done by cars, and plenty of case studies to base the work on.

I feel the same way with "drone delivery fleets".

There's a logical place for an autonomous delivery vehicle, but wasting 95% of its energy fighting against gravity to carry a six pack of beer is absurd. Make a ground vehicle the size of a Saint Bernard that travels in bike lanes. Big enough to handle a large array of direct deliveries, and probably had a much longer runtime on a charge.

If you want to be really seamless, build dedicated routes for them in underground tunnels.

Great point and I would actually further emphasize the car aspect of this. Houston for example doesn’t have zoning restrictions like other suburban cities and yet still chose sprawl.

It sucks because we are just sleepwalking through this. Everyone takes it for granted that energy will be cheap and plentiful and that we can always just spread further out or build a bigger highway.

It's much less than the full picture to say Houston doesn't have zoning restrictions. Technically there are no rules called "zoning restrictions" there, but they have complex ordinances that produce very similar effects. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5kl

Sure but even in the absence of such ordinances they would still choose sprawl. The law is certainly not helping across the country (zoning, etc.) but the culprit is cars and infrastructure dollars going to roads and highways. If I were dictator I would stop all new road construction for 50 years and then review after that.

The issue is that we have extraordinarily cheap energy so of course people are going to buy cars. Oh and gotta keep the domestic car manufacturing industry alive in case we need to build tanks. Nobody has been paying the price for global warming either - so cars are subsidized big time in that way too.

I don't see the distinction. Zoning laws are NIMBYism encoded in policy.

That is a pretty broad brush.

Would you be ok with a strip club and liquor store next to a elementary school? I wouldn't, and appreciate zoning laws for that reason.

Simply blaming NIMYism feels like lazy analysis. Every community is different.. how, why, and where things are built is far too complex to explain w/one word.

However 99.9% of communities seem to refuse things necessary things from bus stops to trams to homeless shelters. And frankly, from a homeowner's perspective I fully understand why.

What actual harm would come from a school being next to a liquor store or strip club? It's not like an elementary school kid is going to sneak in to the latter or buy anything from the former on a fake ID. The buses I had in school took me past plenty of places I could have walked to that sold--and advertised in plain view--alcohol and things much more racy than you'd see in a strip club, and that was 1990s Georgia.

In U.K. there’s been some studies on stuff like this.

There is a link between the availability of liquor stores and fast food restaurants near school, and students consuming unhealthy levels of both. (For liquor you just pay some random in the street to buy for you, or you find a store that doesn’t ID). As with many things in life, if you make something convenient, people will use it more.

As a result fast food restaurants and off licences are generally restricted from be built near schools, and for fast food restaurants, also delivering to schools.

Obviously elementary school children are probably to young to be influenced by either, the but the above applies for older age groups.

I don’t think strict zoning is the right approach to solve issues like this, it’s an extremely crude tool for urban planning. But specific, evidence backed (I.e. there’s strong evidence that co-locating these buildings have significant negative impacts on local populations), restrictions on what types of buildings can co-exist seems reasonable.

> Would you be ok with a strip club and liquor store next to a elementary school? I wouldn't, and appreciate zoning laws for that reason.

Not in your backyard indeed. Others don't want multi-family low-income housing in their neighborhood either for presumably similar reasons.

I think this approach kind of has cause and effect backwards. Certainly an element of zoning laws will be driven by NIMBYism, but equally an element of zoning is needed to build functional cities.

You don’t want heavy industry to be co-located with residential areas, for no other reason than heavy industry occasionally have catastrophic accidents that destroy many square miles of buildings. You don’t want residential buildings in that blast radius.

Equally zoning laws that specify the exact type of housing in a residential area strikes me as counterproductive, and clear case of NIMBYism encoded in policy.

I am fan of planning policy that restricts building types in order to mitigate obvious health risks. And provides guidance on where commercial and residential areas are (but doesn’t introduce strict restrictions). After that I think people should be allowed to build where they want. If they want a house in the middle of a commercial district, that’s their choice. Just don’t complain about the noise.

> I think this approach kind of has cause and effect backwards. Certainly an element of zoning laws will be driven by NIMBYism, but equally an element of zoning is needed to build functional cities. > > You don’t want heavy industry to be co-located with residential areas, for no other reason than heavy industry occasionally have catastrophic accidents that destroy many square miles of buildings. You don’t want residential buildings in that blast radius.

It is very much true that you need zoning, but the most egregious elements of american zoning are the outcome of NIMBYism and racism, and yet american zoning will allow schools within the blast radius of chemical plants. Horrifyingly, I was thinking of the 2013 West Fertiliser plant and checking whether my recollection that there had been a school nearby was correct (it was) when I discovered that in 2019 a TPC plant blowing up also damaged a nearby school.

> After that I think people should be allowed to build where they want. If they want a house in the middle of a commercial district, that’s their choice. Just don’t complain about the noise.

IIRC, japanese zoning works in terms of "nuisance levels" (noise, pollution, traffic, …). You could have a house in the middle of a mid-level nuisance commercial district, but not a noisy business in the middle of a (low nuisance) residential district; however low-nuisance businesses would be allowed just fine.

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