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Comment by danny_codes | Hacker News Reader

Wow this really exemplifies American urban planning.

If only Americans could fathom infill density and public transit as the solution to scaling population centers.

While it's tempting to blame NIMBYism for this, I think it's a more general reflection of America's backwards relationship with urban development.

Hopefully we'll see a cultural reversion back to sanity with respect to urban planning in my lifetime. It would be so lovely to achieve the same convenience and economic potential properly designed cities have enjoyed for decades.

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I mean it's not just America. I do however always wonder if it is American urban planning across the world though. Taichung looks like an American city, mostly designed around cars.Taipei highways have so many twists and turns that I know it's not German, but wonder if it's American or French. German urban planning has been "modernized" and somehow it seems worse for anything but cars.

But then look at Tokyo and compare that to Tehran. Both of them with an Urban commuting population upwards of 20 million. Both similar in scale, but one of them an absolute nightmare in pollution(partly due to it being located in a basin, but part of it to the constant traffic and patchwork urban planning) and compare that to the other, where even though it's hilly, a lot of people commute by ebike, there is an extremely fast and efficient public transit system, and driving at high speeds is mostly limited to certain paths/streets.

The problem is what do you with the places who's urban planning was terrible? You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there. And due to its design, very often the just replace it by ebikes simply isn't a viable option.

So, what can we realistically do besides just complaining how shitty it was designed?

Retrofitting is always possible. It’s just not satisfying to know that it takes decades. But as an example Amsterdam started its journey in the ‘70s.

Did Amsterdam destroy low density (say, two floors) housing? I thought they just changed how they used the existing road space.

> You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there.

Use cable cars for public transit. This technology is very adaptable and can be retrofitted relatively easily into existing urban structures.

> You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there

You absolutely can. Of course you don't need to tear down all the housing. Just enough to retrofit a transport corridor. America already did this to build highways. Or you can replace road infrastructure with transit infrastructure.

I suspect the first step might by to make (parts of) residential neighbourhoods mixed use. This wouldn't need to be done in one fell swoop. It could be as simple as allowing a single house to be converted to a commercial properties (say a grocery store).

It's harder to cut up a dense and mixed use neighborhood because the real estate is worth more and there will be more people and money to vote against it.

Boston tried that. They were able to get the project rolling in the poorer parts of town but when they got to the slightly richer ones moneyed interests rallied the Karens and killed it (racism deserves a little credit too, rich white people hate it when you build a highway between them and poor dark people). That was half a century ago. Eventually they salvaged what they could and put a light rail line in the parts of the project that had already been done but still....

Isn't the problem precisely that most of the neighbourhoods aren't dense or mixed use?

The problem is that people won't let them densify without the underlying infrastructure but won't speculatively build infrastructure and won't build it after the fact. We've reached an impasse.

> You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there.

It's what was done to build highways in(to) cities. At least doing it for public transit wouldn't create as large barriers between neighbourhoods, and would provide local mobility for locals.

You don't need to tear lots of stuff down to build public transit: you just have to dig tunnels. It's not that hard. The only place where you need to really tear stuff down is at the stations, and even here much of it can be done under existing structures. This has been done in America before: DC's subway system was built mostly in the 1970s.

I would argue it is less about urban planning and more about local politics. Outsiders of the Bay Area may decry the blatant economic elitism, homelessness, and dystopian reality of San Francisco -- but the local politicians keep getting re-elected.

At some point, the State of California will have had enough. Or a Federal Judge will have had enough. They will essentially say that the State of California needs to wrest power away from local authorities and put power into the hands of appointed outsiders who will re-zone/authorize high density development next door to million dollar neighborhoods. e.g. Peter Thiel and his wife may find themselves next door to high density apartments.

NIMBY is exactly the word.

It's MY backyard. I've paid dearly for it. Please keep off.

If you want high density development - pick some unoccupied land and build there whatever you want. It will take some effort to attract tax-paying population there, but it's doable: see Canary Wharf, London as an example.

This is an affront to property rights. Your neighbors should be free to build damn near whatever they want on their property.

Surely there is some middle ground here. It’s ingenuous to suggest that nothing someone does on their property has impact on others: - A neighbor who installs a billboard in their back yard is constantly bombarding you with unwanted advertisements. - Your neighbor could be running a loud, unsightly business on their property, diminishing your quality of life and property value. - A hair contrived, but your neighbors could decide they’re unhappy with how lax you are regarding what others do on their property, so to teach you a lesson, they conspire to build incredibly high walls around your home so you can hardly ever see the sun.

I’m sympathetic to the people who want to improve urban planning to make our cities more livable. I don’t think it is correct or fair that they are quick to tell “NIMBYs” no, while they enforce “YIMBY” policies. It’s not symmetric to tell one group of people they have no say in what goes on in their neighborhood simply because it involves stopping something you want, while telling another that they have a say. The only thing differentiating these two camps is that people on each side of the argument are only sympathetic with those on their side.

We've been down that well paved road to hell and the bay area is what it gets us. Mostly unfettered development is the far less evil. If you really don't like it that much then either pay in time (commute) or money (rich neighborhood) to live somewhere else.

Single family homes are a terrible development model. I see no reason to encourage or protect it.

We should replace as many SFH as we can with more practical developments.

What does the adoption of public transportation look like in non-homogenous vs homogenous populations?

What variables are you consideting for homogeneity? Wealth?

You can basically tell which neighborhoods were historically filled with "the wrong kind of people" by comparing the relative quality of Boston's light rail lines...

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