Autonomous vehicles work. They are already replacing full-time service drivers in Uber, Lyft, and taxis.https://twitter.com/aarmlovi/status/1857439087843516481Delivery vehicles might come soon. Corporate fleet vehicles. And the big jump, of course, will be when they're available as … [Read more...]
Culture of Congestion by Sandy Ikeda
Congestion Pricing: Traffic Solver or Sin Tax?
The goal of congestion pricing is not to penalize car trips but to smooth demand over a more extended time to reduce congestion. Unfortunately, many new congestion pricing schemes seem designed to ban cars rather than manage demand for car trips.This article appeared originally in Caos … [Read more...]
The “outer boroughs” myth
One argument against bus lanes, bicycle lanes, congestion pricing, elimination of minimum parking requirements, or indeed almost any transportation improvement that gets in the way of high-speed automobile traffic is that such changes to the status quo might make sense in the Upper West Side, but … [Read more...]
An interesting complementarity in a city: rich & poor
Here's something I hadn't thought of in quite this way (but many others probably have): In a living city, space is cheap enough so that people with wacky (often "terrible") new ideas can test them out, while wealthier people in that city search for wacky new things to try out (because they've … [Read more...]
Ch. 1 What is a City?: Concluding thoughts & works cited
Viewing cities as spontaneous orders and not as works of art helps to explain the tradeoff between scale and order, as well as the role of time in softening the severity of that tradeoff. Complexity and creativity are at odds with scale and the comprehensiveness of design because increasing scale … [Read more...]
Ch. 1 What is a City?: Cities cannot be efficient
Before we can correct what we think is wrong with a city, we need an appropriate standard of what is right. That standard of rightness in turn depends on our understanding how the thing we are trying to fix is supposed to work.In this regard I’m afraid neither standard macroeconomics nor … [Read more...]
Ch. 1 What is a City?: Complexity and radical ignorance
First of all, Jacobs observed that the artist abstracts from life, with all its “inclusiveness” and “literally endless intricacy.” Many architects, especially those with great ambition, seem to treat urban environments as merely a canvas for their works of genius, which if not already blank needs to … [Read more...]
Ch. 1 What is a City?: What a city is not (and is)
As Jacobs explains in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist…the essence of the process is disciplined, highly … [Read more...]