Osaka

[-]Annapurna10mo130

Seems the perfect post to link one of the best blog posts I have ever read on the internet: How Japanese zoning works.

https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

[-]cousin_it10mo100

Maybe tangential, but this reminded me of a fun fact about Hong Kong's metro: it's funded by land value. They put a station and get some land development rights near it. Well, building the station obviously makes land around it more valuable. So they end up putting stations where they'd be most useful, and fares can be cheap because the metro company makes plenty of money from land. So the end result is cheap, well-planned public transport which is profitable and doesn't take government money.

[-]cousin_it10mo*60

In Copenhagen every street has wide sidewalks and bike lanes in both directions, and there's lots of public transport too. It's good.

[-]lsusr10mo20

That sounds like it would be interesting to visit.

[-]RationalElf2mo50

Not necessarily a counterpoint to your main point, but Lightcone's headquarters is not in San Francisco. It's in Berkeley, which is a small city of its own with a very different vibe than most of San Francisco (it's greener, less dense, more suburban, fewer tall buildings, fairly walkable and cute in most parts.)

[-]LeahBryant9mo32

Agreed! There’s definitely room for improvement in U.S. urban planning.

[-]R S9mo10

Everyone is more likely to move to cities

I vaguely remember that some physicist calculated that the density of everything you want increases by 15% every time a city doubles in size

So there's essentially a gravitational pull to cities

Not unlike how (unconstrained by gravity) sea creatures continue to grow in mass because it's more heat energy efficient due to the difference in scaling of volume to surface area

[-]samuelshadrach10mo10

Thoughts on bullet trains to expand cities?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mrBZh7YG4nmcjAcof/xpostah-s-shortform?commentId=HudMWqBiavjuYJFxY

[-]lsusr10mo21

Bullet trains are nice, but I feel they make more sense for connecting cities. Generally-speaking, the best direction to expand cities is to build upward and downward.

[-]samuelshadrach9mo10

Can you share why?

If I understand correctly, skyscrapers don't scale as well due to shadow. For every additional floor of skyscraper that's built, there's multiple floors worth of ground area on which building another skyscraper is now a bad idea. So a large region with densely packed 4-storey buildings packs more people than the same region but with some 100-storey skyscrapers.

[-]lsusr9mo20

I think we're in agreement that dense 4-story buildings tend to be usually more efficient than skyscrapers. I'm mostly referring to the cities like Paris which are shorter than free market economics would build—and especially cities (and even more, suburbs) of the USA where land use restrictions are even more restrictive.

[-]samuelshadrach9mo10

Yes I’m assuming political elites ambitious enough to build a intracity network of bullet train will also figure out some solutions for this. Land use restrictions are okay if the city is big enough. Assuming 400 km * 400 km city with 200 km/h train, that’s a lot of land area. Even if some of it is used inefficiently, it may not have large effects. I do think allowing free market-ish building for the city makes sense here though, rather than a slow permitting system for each building. This is for speed alone.

[+][comment deleted]9mo10

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