Reimagining cities in a few simple questions
seths.blog
seths.blog
You can't centrally plan organic growth. The brush is too broad for that kind of work.
- most SMALL projects succeed while most large fail, small projects can evolve, larger have bigger issues, small fails cost far less in absolute terms than larger one so are easy to "try and see if it works";
- we are in a climate change scenario, so building complex infra on land is a stupid idea, we do not really know enough area-per-area where living in the next 100+ years and FOR the next 100+ would be good/doable or inopportune;
- ALL theory to lower prices of public infra have regularly failed;
- we, rightly, foresee and push short-range mobility by air, concerned more about people receptions than technical issues: https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... such mobility is called "urban" but anyone with a trace of smartness understand that that's no room for such model in cities, while there is in spread rivieras;
- the biggest point of modern cities was the vast amount of SMEs and few large in a close area to keep prices down, innovation up, specialization to create new jobs etc. This point is gone in the mega-corp present era.
Long story short for what I see cities will be the receptacle of poverty and desperation while the wealthy will be outside in nature. Thanks to modern tech the "right density" is the Riviera model, not anymore the city model.
Of course all who are soldiers of mainstream PR will deny such claim, not even trying to reasoning about it. EVEN if many articles here and there prove it, without explicitly telling.
I don't believe in limiting congestion via pricing - it's only popular because it's the easiest to implement.
Personally I would rather see a point system where cars moving through the zone during rush hour would spend the most points so as to encourage spreading the peak. You would be allowed to buy more points at discouraging prices.
Or to make things simpler: price congestion, but reimburse residents to an extent. Otherwise you're just fleecing those who can afford it the least.
Pretty much nothing, for instance in Prague it's already essentialy free for less than a 42 eurocents per day for unlimited travelling, yet people use car because they don't want to travel in crowded public transport with stinky homeless people or be stuck under such conditions in traffic jam or when bus/tram breaks or doesn't operate for whatever reason and I didn't mention the biggest reason - faster direct travel without transfers, some people just value their own time and convenience more than few saved euros and would not travel by public transport even if you paid them to use it (for the record, I don't own car and travel by public transport, but I am not blind to its inconvenience, which is imposing its own limits on my behavior).
> What if public toilets were safe, beautiful, well-appointed and consistently maintained?
Not sure what is supposed to be answer, what does it have to do with living in city, finding toilet is really not a problem. People drinking and pissing in streets can urinate in pubs where they drink. If you have problem with people pissing in streets it seems more likely you have problem with alcohol prices so people drink outdoors. And I really doubt you will have toilets every 50m, because you can't be serious extremely drunk person will walk half a km and try to find toilet instead urinating wherever they want.
> What if there were a tax on empty storefronts, payable after three months of vacancy?
So essentialy communism forcing landlords to lower their rent to the level so people who will destroy their property will move there essentially making owning property worthless. This guy sounds like WEF member with 2030 agenda - "you will own nothing and you will be happy".
This blog sounds pretty stupid and lazy without providing any answers, very lazy writing, sounds more like some cheap alcohol rant.
Sounds like it would work if homelessness was solved, which isn't a bad objective for its own sake anyway.
My city (Nantes) offer free public transport on the W-E. It has an obvious cost, but one I am more than willing to pay. The thing is, you get the best return on that kind of choice when you completely get rid of ticketing and all the associated costs (sale of tickets, composting, roving 'ticket patrols'), and few cities are ready to make that jump when the ticketing infrastructure is already paid for.
>> So essentialy communism forcing landlords to lower their rent to the level so people who will destroy their property will move there essentially making owning property worthless.
There is a cost for space in a city. There are maintenance needs wherever an office is occupied or not, wherever it subscribe to utilities or not. A company in a building pay taxes, and those are used to maintain road, water and electricity networks, among plenty of other things. If you want to wait until you have the best possible tenant, that's fine but you shouldn't expect the rest of the community to subsidize your tenant-shopping.
>> This blog sounds pretty stupid and lazy without providing any answers, very lazy writing, sounds more like some cheap alcohol rant.
Mirror advised.
Or driver you actually enforce the travel policy, but then you should have huge delays.
So IRL it can't be solved and free public transport would be actually used as free shelter by homeless people even more, because now they can kick them off at least simply when not presenting ticket, if public transport were free it would get even worse when people would not be visibly paying for the transport, they would treat it even worse as something which is free (you appreciate more things you have to pay for).
As for ticketing cost and ticket inspectors, they make negligible part of expenses, it would not really make justifiable reason to make public transport free, since it is heavily subsidized from city taxes anyway.
> There is a cost for space in a city. There are maintenance needs wherever an office is occupied or not, wherever it subscribe to utilities or not. A company in a building pay taxes, and those are used to maintain road, water and electricity networks, among plenty of other things. If you want to wait until you have the best possible tenant, that's fine but you shouldn't expect the rest of the community to subsidize your tenant-shopping.
I would argue you paid those cost when you bought property and when you pay property taxes, unused building is not really using any infrastructure benefiting from the roads or other networks especially if you are disconnected from them and they can make up for the expenses on connection fees. People with these ideas are usually poor ones who can't afford to own anything so they wanna punish successful people for their success to lower them to their low standards, we had that for few decades with communism with everyone living equally bad life and didn't provide much motivation for progress, since whether you was good or bad at your work you still had crappy life. People who never experienced communism have naive ideas like these, it's especially popular in (west) Germany, France and Spain especially from naive young people.
> Mirror advised.
I provided counterarguments for his lazy questions without ranting, the original author didn't provide any solutions just raised pseudointelectual questions which should somehow imply some solutions. Also I'd prefer if you would stop attacking other HN users.
Crowded probably means it's popular.
And the presence of stinky homeless people and people who might avoid them means people from multiple walks of life.
It sounds like public transit in Prague works!
Or just badly managed. Public transport in my city is also crowded, but that's because even key lines do an average of four courses an hour.
Also streetcars around here are still plagued by derailments.
I mean it's popular of course (since there is really no alternative), but it doesn't mean it's good.