Kyoto taxi drivers reduce robberies by 50 percent by doing nothing

I think part of it comes down to the fact that a lot of these places were never urban - they may have had big buildings but the people never experienced street life in the way older American cities - and most European cities - have experienced it (see: Boston, NYC). As a result urban planning is too much an exercise in theory and too little based on pragmatic experience.

Another component is that Radiant City-esque designs look better on paper. You have tall, majestic buildings where architects can go wild without the constraint of adjacent buildings, and ample parkland appeals to our intuitive sense of what must be pleasant, but isn't in reality. In areas where urban decay has been especially problematic, these designs afford residents a sense of safety - they are safely ensconced in towers of glass and steel and may enter and exit with their cars. In many American cities avoidance of the street is sadly still a feature, not a bug.

That's honestly something of a silly assumption. You'll find that a lot of entirely qualified and legitimate experts in a given field will not have read well-known books in their field: their expertise is very often the consequence of sheer experience. It's the rest of us, who can't rely on experience for know-how, who turn first to books or are recommended books.

In the case of urban planning, it is a damn shame, because Jacobs' work constructively criticizes a lot of received wisdom that such experts are simply passing down without much modification. But generally speaking, it's not really a huge problem.

My vision would be something akin to mixed use zoning as in Seoul or Tokyo, but I guess the abuse american cities experienced from defacto mixed zoning in the 19th century hasn't dissipated, but one can hope it will but adopt reasonable mixed zoning.

The converted lofts in Fulton River District (warehouse district in chicago, same price point) seem to be increasing foot traffic though, despite it being an area where you need a car to get anywhere. Parking in this neighborhood is on the street. Still very undeveloped commercially though, aside from "restaurant row"

Seattle: downtown is absolutely deserted during non working hours because of a foolish desire to separate residential and commercial areas. Businesses in these zones suffer since they can either only cater to office/daytime traffic or residential/nighttime traffic and never both. Downtown is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as dangerous during off-hours because it is completely deserted.

Even in residential areas this doesn't get much better. Belltown, a highly urban neighborhood full of highrises, has practically empty streets. You can walk down a main thoroughfare in that neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday and see maybe 4-5 people as far as the eyes can see. The design of these buildings are largely monolithic with attached parking, creating a relative dearth of retail and commercial use. There is still no grocery store in the neighborhood since literally none of the many highrises were designed with large enough retail spaces to house one - which might explain the lack of street life - you must use a car to access even basic supplies (or rely on modern workarounds like delivery grocery). There are no hardware stores, no grocery stores, a single run-down pharmacy... it's as if someone heard the word "retail" and thought "bars and restaurants" only.

As compared to another Seattle neighborhood, Fremont, which is also urban, but features high foot traffic, the presence of both housing and offices in the neighborhood, a plethora of businesses supporting everyday needs, and a highly active street life. Or Capitol Hill (arguably a neighborhood in decline) where the neighborhood is anchored by the community college, major grocery stores, and nearby hospital staff, creating high foot traffic (street "watchers") at all hours.

Vancouver (Canada) suffers from the same problems. Yaletown, an upmarket urban neighborhood full of highrises, is nearly deserted except a single street that leads to the transit station. Much of this is because said highrises have zero retail or mixed-use accomodations, creating huge dead zones where the only people traversing it are the ones heading directly toward, or directly away from, home. It's not quite as bad as Belltown in Seattle, but it's not great.

In fact other neighborhoods in Vancouver's urban downtown core suffer even more egregiously. Many of the older (read: 90s) buildings were constructed before any substantial transit coverage as added to downtown, and their residents were car-reliant to the point where the streets surrounding mid- and high-rises don't even have sidewalks (see: the West End), and some of these buildings lack even basic street-facing entrances (street frontage reserved for garage facilities, naturally), forcing pedestrian visitors to come through the side like second-class citizens. Even though transit coverage in these areas is now excellent, the lack of street traffic remains because of the fundamental architecture of the streets and buildings.

I've also lived in Toronto and some of its neighborhoods suffer from this too. Practically the entire waterfront area is a veritable wasteland of highrise condo buildings. Clean-cut glass skyscrapers loom over almost-deserted streets because of insufficient (and sometimes a complete lack of) retail and commercial spaces. Take a car from the garage to access almost everything you need for everyday survival. Their only saving grace (and source of street activity) are the commuters waiting for streetcars or buses.

Anyways, rant aside, here are some commonalities I see between these places:

- A rejection of mixed-use developments. The primary driver of emptiness here is because there is nowhere to go - no grocery stores, no coffee shops, no nothing. Where mixed-use is embraced, everyone wants to host trendy businesses like bars and restaurants (which help improve property value for the building) but not the everyday businesses (pharmacies, grocery stores, barbers) that drive the most street traffic and serve as traffic anchors.

- A large-lot monolithic style of development. These buildings feature large set-backs from the sidewalk, with hedges, fences, or low walls facing the sidewalk. The implicit message here is "keep walking, bud", instead of "come on in and visit [X]". More importantly, because these buildings tend to be whole-block developments, when a single building fails to embrace commercial use or is otherwise poorly designed, it creates a massive dead zone on the street that seems to go on forever. IMO large-lot "complexes" are the worst thing to happen to American urbanism, ever.

- A disproportionate amount of space dedicated to parking. Many of these buildings lack commercial and retail space because it's occupied by parking structures. Many of these buildings lack even proper residential street frontage because that space is for a garage gate.

— [1] http://www.google.com/design/spec/components/progress-activi...

Ah, yes, exploit the well-known fact that homeless people are slaves to fashion. "Attention homeless people, sleeping on benches is so over"

Offering a cop discounted food to hang out at your restaurant means, while taxpayers are flipping the bill, somewhere else isn't being covered as well. Hiring an off duty cop for part time security work, in contrast, doesn't reduce coverage.

Not to enter the argument about whether it's a protection racket (i.e. whether it shares many characteristics with the racket of the 1920s), but I think the problem is apparent. Absent incentives, the police would be present evenly according to their estimate of which places they should be at. If incentives did not increase a policeman's desire to be at a store, then providing the incentive would be pointless (and indeed the GGGP comment implies that the purpose of the incentive is to get a couple of cruisers in the parking lot in order to deter crime).

The only reasonable conclusion is that these incentives are provided in order to skew the locations at which police would be present. So the issue isn't speedier service. It looks like he's implying that they'd get more frequent visits as a consequence of providing preferential treatment.

Oh, they're also dropping handcuffed drunk guys into the lake to drown, and doing a great job in Ferguson. If one actually pays attention, their activities are vastly different from those of police and sheriffs.

In general, everything that isn’t expensive clothing or technology isn’t even tagged at all, you can just walk out the store with it.

Or if you go into the store, buy something, go out, remember you forgot something, go in again, and buy something else (while still carrying the already bought around), most of the time no one will bat an eye.

stealing would be easy, but at least in upper-middle-class districts it’s kinda rare.

These often take the form of "Please don't make our municipality look like an easy score. Lock up everything not bolted down. And also please put locking nuts on your bolts." (paraphrased)

They are a distinct, non-integrating cultural enclave in the US, and seem to subsist largely on exploiting legal loopholes in life insurance policies, and by working trades with inconsistent demand, like asphalt paving.

Either way, both Romany and Travellers seem to have a universally bad reputation for trustworthiness and respect for unattended personal property, which seems to be not entirely unearned.

But despite this, it is inappropriate to refer to an individual by a group identity that person has not specifically invoked, so the non-racist alternative of "gyp" would be "con", "cheat", "reneg", "deceive", or "defraud", depending on the context. Take care to not use "welch", because that could be similarly offensive to Welshmen.