andys627

It's crazy how much SimCity cities look like the cities we've built for the last 75 years. Our cities really can be simplified to a game "fun" for someone to dive in right away. My thesis is that cities are oversimplified and stratified into easily separable blocks because they're easier to "industrialize" that way. This is causing crazy transportation requirements and isolation. If we mixed uses up a bit we could save on transportation overhead and be exposed to more things. The driver of this SimCity pattern of development is undoubtedly the single occupancy automobile. Sprawl works best for the car and the car works best for sprawl. Denser, mixed up uses work best with walking, biking, and transit. Conspiracy theorist in me says the auto industry influenced city planning from the ground up because they could profit off of it. Who profits when you walk more? Well, everyone... healthier bodies, healthier minds, more efficient transportation, etc. etc. etc.

Some cities are having success lately with implementing large networks of cycle tracks, all at once, rather than one or two at a time.

Calgary: http://www.calgary.ca/Transportation/TP/Pages/Cycling/Cyclin...

Seville: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/28/seville-cycli...

These cycle tracks need to be part of a network to work.

I am bad at math... could you help me understand. A 80,000 truck and 5,000 car drive down the road... how much more damage does the 80,000 truck do? Thank you.

Butter and milk that don't have to travel as far by road would be cheaper. So much of our national Walmartification is possible because of roads are subsidized.

For real estate, your state’s realtor organization will have standard purchase forms available with a quick google search. With these, a title insurance company, and home inspector, you can easily do a private party real estate deal where everybody has reasonable insurance.

Agree. We've really put all our eggs in one basket in the USA... you NEED a car to reasonably participate in most parts of society. Sure public transit or biking are options, but they are much less efficient than driving. This is the problem. We've spent 75 years building this way, now when we want to take small steps towards reversing that, the steps are widely misunderstood. In a sense we've been extremely car oriented for 75 years, so that when anything except ultimate car domination is presented, it appears extreme.

I think woonerfs would work well in SF and elsewhere. Cars are allowed, but they have the share the space with pedestrians and bikes. Speed limit is super slow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonerf

Would be sweet to see signs that say "woonerf" all over the US too.

Yes - the argument is against the primacy and dominance of cars, not their existence in reasonable circumstances.

Why is it seen negatively?

I would like to preemptively suggest that the author is focusing on dense areas of the country. He is suggesting high speed rail between Portland-Seattle, Dallas-Houston, NYC-DC, etc. Not Los Angeles-Chicago or DC-Seattle.

Did I read right that a $66m investment netted $40m this year?

> solar panels are these big heavy lumbersome things

Not really, compared to other systems in your house. Take HVAC... big metal furnaces burning gas within the conditioned space with tubes/duscts strung through the walls, attics, and crawl spaces. This system is way more cumbersome. Bolting some panels on the roof is probably one of the easiest retrofits you can do. Source - I redo houses.

> They're unsightly to look at and devalues the leafy suburb view

To me the leafy suburb view gets a lot uglier if you think about the massive consumption it requires compared to only slightly denser options (eg streetcar suburbs). It only works because of massive gov't subsidy (basically by not putting a price on carbon emissions). We Americans need to get over single occupancy car dependency. It is an environmental disaster. It is also a health (drive everywhere, don't walk/get implicit exercise) and social disaster (socio-economic stratification).

> They belong in the bike lane (which should exist in the first place)

A bike lane really isn't safe enough to get people on bikes and scooters into it. It needs to be a separated cycle track like what is common in Copenhagen. This takes more space, but increases capacity of the whole road (the cycle track has more capacity than the driving lane it takes away).

There are a zillion other benefits too - more active/healthier population, higher retail spending along the cycle track (https://its.ucdavis.edu/inthenews/the-complete-business-case...), higher property values, only taking 30lbs of metal with you on every trip instead of 2000lbs, potentially local fuel source (food from nearby rather than oil or electricity from afar), etc etc etc.

We would be healthier, happier, less harmful to environment, richer, have more friends, be better connected to our communities, etc. if we built mobility around walking, biking, transit, AND cars... not ONLY cars.

Cheesy aviation idiom: "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing, any landing you can use the plane again is a great landing."

I think he did. No one reads press releases...

I am not a fan of Trump but I think it's cool (terrifying?) that we can get his stream of consciousness through Twitter.

> He was trying to bankrupt the short-sellers, and he was doing it by lying

I'm out of the loop - can you point me to some proof of this?

Latin America absolutely destroys the US in urbanism

Good compromise considering where we’re at in the us.

Change will happen faster if the decision makers realize induced demand - building car capacity (supply) induces more demand of drivers... building safe bike infrastructure induces more people to ride.

So many of our problems with regard to urbanism are rooted in making things efficient for cars over other users.

> Americans need to change their underlying notions of what it means to be a society.

We want it (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/62-percent-u-s-want-fede...)... Our politicians just aren't doing it.

Don't they have to have several years of experience as well?

Yes they require _someone_ to have a general contractor's license and insurance.

I have not seen a lender that will give an "owner-builder" a construction loan without being a licensed general contractor. There are various common ways to structure a deal with a general contractor - fixed price, "cost-plus", or construction manager (where you convince them to "use" their license and they check your work).

This is a good thing. You want any home you may buy to have been built under the supervision of a licensed general contractor.

Give subsidies to the businesses that are affected...

Developers build cities. Developers maximize profit. In the USA, the gov't defines where incentives are. That is why we have urban sprawl everywhere (including the bay area).

I always thought this project, S. Lake Union (Amazon), Toronto Waterfront (Google), Diridon Station San Jose (Google) was these large companies' response to no private developer or gov't entity building a city they thought was needed... in other words it's just a normal city built by a large company. It's not too different than one of these crappy master planned communities where I live like http://stonegatereno.com/ or http://damonteranch.com/ .

Barcelona's are shorter, include a variety of buildings per block, and are generally ringed by retail. Example: http://www.densityatlas.org/user-images/139-1.jpg

Le Corbusier was building single taller buildings, surrounded by empty lawns. Example: http://scd.france24.com/en/files/imagecache/france24_ct_api_...

This is cool tech, but more cars/miles travelled is bad, not good. We would be healthier, happier, less harmful to environment, richer, have more friends, be better connected to our communities, etc. if we built mobility around walking, biking, transit, AND cars... not ONLY cars.