We Should Design Cities For Shorter Distances, Not Faster Speeds

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Perhaps, but that's different from saying that Manhattan was developed to be car centric. It was not. Very little of Manhattan's layout was altered to accommodate cars.

Nice straw man.

Manhattan's wide avenues are a car-centric design element because they enable movement of vehicular traffic and never evolved once the trolleys and horse-drawn carriages were gone. It's not like doubling the width of the sidewalks and taking away two traffic lanes isn't an option.

Here's an example of what could be done:

https://goo.gl/maps/gNsjks9Zie8WoV7g8

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Quixote

Nice straw man.

Manhattan's wide avenues are a car-centric design element because they enable movement of vehicular traffic and never evolved once the trolleys and horse-drawn carriages were gone. It's not like doubling the width of the sidewalks and taking away two traffic lanes isn't an option.

Here's an example of what could be done:

https://goo.gl/maps/gNsjks9Zie8WoV7g8

I don't know what you're talking about. I can show you thousands of examples of streetscapes in Manhattan where vehicular traffic lanes have been removed. Broadway through Times Square is a pedestrian only plaza now.

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I seriously doubt that transient parking spaces are more plentiful in core NYC relative to core London, especially considering the significant differences in relative density. NYC could probably have 3x the parking space and still not have more parking relative to built form.

I also don't understand the relevance of transient parking, as residents typically aren't going to park in temporary spaces. Those London townhouses often have deeded parking; Manhattan luxury buildings rarely have parking (and pre-1960 or post 1980 basically never, unless the latter were built on a parking lot)

Manhattan has considerable parking, but no net new parking. So you can build a new tower with parking, but it just can exceed what it replaces. The Time Warner Center replaced the late 1950's-era NY Coliseum complex, and it was likely allowed the exact same parking space count as with its predecessor. If it replaced, say, a warehouse, with no parking, there would be no parking allowed in the new structure. New towers in Hudson Yards and West Chelsea often have parking, because those developments replaced parking lots.

The abundance of transient parking garages and the exorbitant rates they charge obviously demonstrate both a market and relative high demand for places to park private automobiles, otherwise they wouldn't exist to the degree they do. It also signals that accessibility to and movability within Manhattan by car is easy (that's not to say it isn't a headache) and perhaps a reflection of the quality of the alternative options.

[nito]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Central London's roads aren't narrow compared to Manhattan.

There are odd Central London roads that are quite wide like Park Lane and Euston Road, but they are far and few (and typically on the periphery); there simply aren’t the quantity of high-capacity avenues and streets found in Manhattan present in Central London.

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Muppet, this Millenial Arena is not an actual shot, right? There was nothing there.

Development in the foreground is either u/c or proposed.

Originally Posted by Crawford

Manhattan has considerable parking, but no net new parking. So you can build a new tower with parking, but it just can exceed what it replaces. The Time Warner Center replaced the late 1950's-era NY Coliseum complex, and it was likely allowed the exact same parking space count as with its predecessor. If it replaced, say, a warehouse, with no parking, there would be no parking allowed in the new structure. New towers in Hudson Yards and West Chelsea often have parking, because those developments replaced parking lots.

Between 2000-2005 there was a 24% reduction of available parking throughout Central London. I suspect this decline has persisted as it is far more lucrative to build residential and commercial units than car parking spaces. Planners are also keen on reducing or eliminating spaces for cars, even when redeveloping car parking sites (e.g. Welbeck Street). The modern developments in Manhattan that you mention which retained parking would not be tolerated.

Petrol stations are also rapidly vanishing; just five in Central London (of which three are south of the river), because the land they sit on is just far too valuable.

Originally Posted by Crawford

For example, the redesigned Fifth Ave. through Midtown will have no lanes for private cars. It will increase bus lanes from two to three, add a pick-up/drop-off lane, add a bike lane and expand sidewalks. So Fifth Ave. will remain wide, with many lanes, but none for private vehicles.

This sounds like the existing Oxford Street, although Oxford St is far narrower.

Current thinking in London is to return one-way streets to two-way operation (e.g. Baker St, Tottenham Court Road, etc…), and eliminate gyratory setups, so that vehicle speeds are reduced, in turn making environments more pleasant for pedestrians and cyclists. More plans are being developed to make roads completely traffic-free or heavily reduce access. The latest announcement was the approval last month to redevelop the road network around Aldwych/Strand.


Image sourced from: IanVisits: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/202...pedestrianised

[muppet]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Muppet, this Millenial Arena is not an actual shot, right? There was nothing there.

nope, that's a render of the grand plan. The O2 Arena did actually have lots of parking but they're all being built over at the mo.

This is the updated plan with the new transport terminus in white (the stuff facing the river and by the dome has already been built).


https://www.ronenbekerman.com/wp-con...0127_Ronen.jpg

[edale]

Without actually measuring the street widths in London and NYC, I would say that I fully expect NYC to largely have wider streets and sidewalks than London. I don't think that translates to a worse pedestrian experience, though. The scale of the buildings demands a wider public ROW. If Manhattans avenues were small two lane roads, very little sunlight would be able to reach the street level. The wide avenues provide much needed breathing room and sunlight to the city. And as others have said, NYC has done a pretty good job of removing vehicular lanes, adding bike lanes, widening sidewalks, creating pedestrian plazas...things to help give people more space and prioritization over vehicles in the public ROW. Janette Sadik-Kahn really kicked these efforts up about 10-15 years ago, and it seems like the city has now largely embraced them, even if new projects remain 'controversial'.

[llamaorama]

After seeing how COVID sent a lot of workers to a remote schedule, I just don't think that a coercive effort to force people back into dense cities by raising the costs of transportation to access the region's core will work. In fact I think it will backfire terribly.

If an American city without the transport infrastructure of a place like London tried to toll all highways leading to Downtown and raised parking fees, workers would not tolerate this and switch to overcrowded or threadbare mass transit or move to hyper-expensive neighborhoods adjacent to the CBD. Instead, more businesses would shift to work-from-home. Workers might leave to the outer suburbs or leave the region entirely. This in turn would do a lot of harm to all the jobs and activities in the city that rely on the office worker population. Service industry workers, which include tradespeople who must drive their trucks/vans to jobs around the region, could not afford these higher transportation tolls/limits on their mobility and would respond by also leaving the city. They would in turn have to follow their customers to outer suburbs or semi-rural areas. This would in turn have a negative impact on the economy because workers would have fewer jobs or customers or opportunities within their maximum tolerable daily travel distance watershed, if that makes sense. Something we see with various new economy things, like Amazon's rapid delivery services, is that these things function better in areas with higher population densities.

I was thinking, urbanists in the US and Europe give way too much weight to the importance of white-collar downtown office jobs and downtown commuters and traditional retail. Now that these things are struggling they don't know what to do except stack more and more chips on ever more rarefied, gentrified forms of retail like fancy shared kitchen food halls for startup restaurants or Amazon branded stores or cool office space. It's like the people who moved to big cities in the 2010s are universally a bunch of weird introverts who work from home, order everything online, and never go anywhere. Why do they even live in a city?

All great cities, even the post-war, post-industrial American Sunbelt ones grew because they combined a true diversity of people and forms of economic activity including trades, services, and industry. The great cities in emerging economies or recently developed economies, like those in Asia, are less detached from this economic diversity. But at some point we gave up on this and decided that cities can only be downtown office buildings and malls. We decided that business parks and cheap retail space and cheap housing was outmoded and incompatible with the new post-industrial reality.

We need a paradigm shift. Cities need to recognize that their real value proposition has always been timely, quick access to a huge range of services and the ability for people whose occupation isn't remote by nature to find economic opportunity. So we need to figure out why they are so inhospitable(taxes, rules, etc) to small businesses and change that. And cities need to be more about the whole of society, to be more affordable, functional places for the middle class and working class. Let's be honest, cities like SF, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, etc made a bad choice 50 years ago by giving up on trying to reform or otherwise not being debt-burdened, bureaucratic disasters because they thought they could paper over it by exploiting all the highly paid office workers who they knew would be tied down into also living in the city where they'd pay high taxes, etc. Well that's not going to work anymore.

I don't know what the solution is, but I think that we could start by shifting spending priorities to making outlying neighborhoods and struggling middle-ring suburbs healthier places instead of spending so much on gentrified core neighborhoods. A mass transit system that makes sense in the future might be a grid-topology network linking nodes around the city like hospitals, colleges, etc, rather than a hub-and-spoke rail network serving downtown commuters who no longer exist.

[iheartthed]

^Longer commutes from the suburbs are a feature, not a flaw.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

After seeing how COVID sent a lot of workers to a remote schedule, I just don't think that a coercive effort to force people back into dense cities by raising the costs of transportation to access the region's core will work. In fact I think it will backfire terribly.

You have it reversed. People have been coerced into preferring sprawl for 70 years now, but cities are far more desirable. Bed Stuy is more expensive than New Canaan these days.

I'm still amazed that non-urbanites think that urbanites prefer cities because of their jobs, and that more generous WFH policies will somehow translate to greater preference for sprawl. Like anyone lives in Park Slope because of the commute to Midtown, and the only thing keeping them from a McMansion was WFH.

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I don't know what you're talking about. I can show you thousands of examples of streetscapes in Manhattan where vehicular traffic lanes have been removed. Broadway through Times Square is a pedestrian only plaza now.

Yes, and more of that is needed.

The fringe avenues though feel more accommodating of cars than pedestrians, but the saving grace is that there are traffic lights every 250 feet, making them feel less highway-like.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Crawford

You have it reversed. People have been coerced into preferring sprawl for 70 years now,

But one could argue that people were coerced into moving into crowded city cores as the industrial revolution concentrated new jobs there. But once motorized ground transport became available, they migrated away from the over-dense cores.

but cities are far more desirable

Throughout history, the really rich and powerful lived in both, in the city when they needed to for political, economic or cultural reasons but also had great country estates when they didn't have to be in the city.

[llamaorama]

Originally Posted by Crawford

You have it reversed. People have been coerced into preferring sprawl for 70 years now, but cities are far more desirable. Bed Stuy is more expensive than New Canaan these days.

I'm still amazed that non-urbanites think that urbanites prefer cities because of their jobs, and that more generous WFH policies will somehow translate to greater preference for sprawl. Like anyone lives in Park Slope because of the commute to Midtown, and the only thing keeping them from a McMansion was WFH.

My point is all about push and pull factors.

Cities still have, and will always have, pull factors like cultural amenities and access to a variety of services. However the pull factor of employment has been weakened somewhat by the possibility of remote work for certain occupations. So the sum of all pulls is less than what it was.

Increasing road tolls, parking fees, and banning cars can make life inconvenient if transit both local and regional isn't at the top of its game, and thus raises the city's push value.

This isn't really a problem for London or Paris or New York because they have both strong pull factors even in a remote work future, and because they have abundant non-car transportation options and walkability the push from reducing driving doesn't really affect the average person. A Londoner with no car can still go basically anywhere at any time to do or get just about anything on local transit, and if they want to enjoy a short vacation you can take the national railway network just about anywhere.

But if you proposed this for a second or third -tier city in the USA, like say, Austin or Nashville, then the sum of all push and pull values would go negative for the city center. The pull values for the city are just too weak to overcome how profoundly inconvenient it would be to live there without a car. Even if you lived in the core and could commute via transit you would miss out on so many different leisure activities not to mention the hassle that you'd incur if you needed to go to a dentist on a Saturday afternoon. It would also totally screw people whose job means they drive a white van around town full of tools or plumbing parts or tile or whatever, and so small businesses would be chased out of town. That would have a snowball effect on the local economy.

There was a time maybe 30 years ago when it might have been possible for such a city in the USA to take a more progressive tack on growth management. Because in the past you could expect people to tolerate push factors because we all had to go to work in person to get paid and make a living, right? And back then the ability to buy things online was limited at best. This is how a city like Portland was able to reject freeway expansion, go with light rail and urban growth boundaries, promote downtown employment and shopping, etc. And because they started doing this in the 1970s it was successful.

The problem is that now that model won't work anymore. To encourage people to use public transportation and encourage density in cities and regions where it's not the norm because such places had been built around the car, there needs to be a new approach. I don't know what that approach is but to me what it looks like is, transit is appealing to use and dense infill development goes beyond just office space and traditional mall-style retail.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

My point is all about push and pull factors.

Cities still have, and will always have, pull factors like cultural amenities and access to a variety of services. However the pull factor of employment has been weakened somewhat by the possibility of remote work for certain occupations. So the sum of all pulls is less than what it was.

Increasing road tolls, parking fees, and banning cars can make life inconvenient or expensive and harms business, and raises the city's push value.

This isn't really a problem for London or Paris because they have both strong pull factors even in a remote work future, and because they have abundant non-car transportation options and walkability the push from reducing driving doesn't really affect the average person.

But if you proposed this for a second or third -tier city in the USA, like say, Austin or Nashville, then the sum of all push and pull values would go negative for the city center. The pull values for the city are just too weak to overcome how profoundly inconvenient it would be to live there without a car.

The problem isn't tolls or parking fees then. The problem is that a lot of cities have weak fundamentals, and are just designed to be playgrounds for suburbanites.

[llamaorama]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

The problem isn't tolls or parking fees then. The problem is that a lot of cities have weak fundamentals, and are just designed to be playgrounds for suburbanites.

Right, and these days to boost a city's fundamentals, we probably need more carrot than stick. Because nowadays a stick-only approach would kill such a city.

American cities have always dealt with this chicken and egg problem. Where for the urban core to work better it needs more people and stuff happening, but how do you get the first batch of people and stuff to come in when the place is dead? There's always been different ways to overcome this, to seed growth and revitalization and vibrancy in the city. I'm just saying that in 2020 those ways of doing it are going to be different from what they were back in 2000 or 1980.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

My point is all about push and pull factors.

Cities still have, and will always have, pull factors like cultural amenities and access to a variety of services. However the pull factor of employment has been weakened somewhat by the possibility of remote work for certain occupations. So the sum of all pulls is less than what it was.

Increasing road tolls, parking fees, and banning cars can make life inconvenient if transit both local and regional isn't at the top of its game, and thus raises the city's push value.

This isn't really a problem for London or Paris or New York because they have both strong pull factors even in a remote work future, and because they have abundant non-car transportation options and walkability the push from reducing driving doesn't really affect the average person. A Londoner with no car can still go basically anywhere at any time to do or get just about anything on local transit, and if they want to enjoy a short vacation you can take the national railway network just about anywhere.

But if you proposed this for a second or third -tier city in the USA, like say, Austin or Nashville, then the sum of all push and pull values would go negative for the city center. The pull values for the city are just too weak to overcome how profoundly inconvenient it would be to live there without a car. Even if you lived in the core and could commute via transit you would miss out on so many different leisure activities not to mention the hassle that you'd incur if you needed to go to a dentist on a Saturday afternoon. It would also totally screw people whose job means they drive a white van around town full of tools or plumbing parts or tile or whatever, and so small businesses would be chased out of town. That would have a snowball effect on the local economy.

There was a time maybe 30 years ago when it might have been possible for such a city in the USA to take a more progressive tack on growth management. Because in the past you could expect people to tolerate push factors because we all had to go to work in person to get paid and make a living, right? And back then the ability to buy things online was limited at best. This is how a city like Portland was able to reject freeway expansion, go with light rail and urban growth boundaries, promote downtown employment and shopping, etc. And because they started doing this in the 1970s it was successful.

The problem is that now that model won't work anymore. To encourage people to use public transportation and encourage density in cities and regions where it's not the norm because such places had been built around the car, there needs to be a new approach. I don't know what that approach is but to me what it looks like is, transit is appealing to use and dense infill development goes beyond just office space and traditional mall-style retail.

Remote work is a push factor as well. If you're an urbanist who has a job in Naperville, Mountain View or Frisco but can work remotely you can now take your pick of cities to live in instead of living at a convenient distance.

This is especially salient for single young people who live in...less desirable... dating locales.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

This is especially salient for single young people who live in...less desirable... dating locales.

The social aspects of cities are arguably the biggest draws for young people, much moreso than urbanist appeal. Women tend to love urban centers, and men want to get laid (women too, just not as overtly), and so urban centers serve as social centers for coupling up, whether or not people value urbanism.

And beyond coupling, a huge share of post-college folks just go whererever their friends go. If your Sigma Nu bros mostly ended up in Austin or Atlanta, it's a logical destination.

Then when these couples (often) move to the burbs in their child-rearing years, people are surprised and say that the cities failed in retaining them. But they weren't urbanites in the first place.

[llamaorama]

Outside of places with weird demographics, like oil drilling towns(male:female ratio) or sunbelt retirement villages or dying small towns in the rust belt(everyone is old), wouldn't the dating pool mostly just correlate with overall population?

I mean sure, desirable urban neighborhoods are likely to contain more young early 20s singles who are recent college grads, attractive, have good jobs, aren't living with their parents, have money, etc. While nicer(or maybe just newer) more upper middle class suburbs is going to skew much older and stable, monogamous married couples with teenage kids at home. But both these are actually just a sliver of the overall population of most major US metros if I had to guess. New York, Chicago, etc, are going to be different. Looking at a place like Denver, downtown and central areas IIRC(from reading threads here) have about 100,000 and presumably being trendy and young is what drives that, but the rest of the 2+ million metro area is all sprawl.

Most single people in their early 20s live at home(it's over 50% now) or even their 30s are broke, not particularly hot, don't go out a lot, and live in random suburban apartment complexes or rental housing/townhouses/duplexes in cheaper areas. Most areas that are suburban in character are not exclusively families living in single-family owner occupied dwellings anymore. If you are talking about a metro area like Dallas or Phoenix then overall I'm willing to bet you find people of all different ages and relationship statuses just everywhere.

That isn't to say there isn't a pull factor where someone in their 20s wouldn't like to live in the city and wouldn't choose it over the suburbs nearly 100% of the time. But it's no match for real world economics where the average 22 year old is making $12/hour and living with mom and dad. A city is only going to get so much mileage out of being young and hip.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

Outside of places with weird demographics, like oil drilling towns(male:female ratio) or sunbelt retirement villages or dying small towns in the rust belt(everyone is old), wouldn't the dating pool mostly just correlate with overall population?

Not really. Manhattan south of 23rd street, to take an example, is very female skewed, at least in the 20- and 30-something cohort. Sex and the City, fashion industry, lots of branding/PR firms, the Fitness District (Flatiron) etc. And a very high % of males are gay. So it's pretty incredible for straight males.

And I believe some of the West Coast cities are really bad for straight guys. SD is called "Man Diego" (military, defense, research), the Bay Area and Seattle are infamous for bad prospects for straight guys (obviously tech).

And, as you mentioned, it isn't just the gender/sex orientation ratio, but the lifestyle/lifestage ratio. A random exurb will be mostly married couples with kids, so really crappy for singles of either gender.

[dubu]

the west coast seems like we are all about cars and not cities. but if you live over here you see both kinds of people, wanting the best cars and the people that ride ebikes or any bike all the time except if the weather is bad. if the weather is bad then eugene oregon is making 3 wheel electric cars or motorcycles more like it. i havent seen them here in bend oregon yet but soon i bet. we have a weird thing going on the west coast i guess. its not like tokyo where everyone is similar unless you live in the suburbs then its like the us where people are into cars more.

[JManc]

You guys aren't taking age into account. I am seeing comments about 20's and 30's but I think as people hit their mid to late 40's, cities become a little less appealing. New Canaan will probably seem like better option than Bed Stuy. With WFH becoming more a thing, I think there will be a transition somewhat of where people really want to live.