Left Urbanism

Not exactly urbanism but transport is important

Drink once every time they say or imply "innovation"

Amsterdam Just Closed their Busiest Road - Not Just Bikes

(Speaking from a USA perspective) How do we start to convince people that building and maintaining housing should be funded through public funds and the decisions should be made by the public? It's hard to educate the well-meaning general public to be skeptical of the developers that roll into town and claim to be able to build affordable housing. The programs our cities often rely on aren't meeting the reality of what our communities need in terms of long-term pricing, quality of housing, and related resources. What do we do?

Alternative youtube link if not working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYjBaiczDkM

Despite being one of the poorest, this province is full of breathtaking nature wonders. In Guiyang city alone, there are lakes, waterfalls, caves, canyons, and mountains and over 500 parks. This video only shows a small corner of the city. People living here have easy access to nature more than most viewers can imagine. They have the best of two worlds!

I live in Vancouver, and the SeaBus ferry across the bay is incredibly successful. Crosses Vancouver Harbour between Downtown Vancouver and North Vancouver in less than 15 minutes with service frequencies less than 10 minutes apart, with really low boarding and deboarding times too. There are numerous other systems like it in the world, too. And according to this Infographic:

And this one:

It seems that ferries have really low carbon emissions per passenger per unit distance, beating out busses and even most regional trains, so I assume they're really energy efficient in general.

So for costal cities or cities bisected by or bordering a river (which, most major cities fall into one or both categories) should we be investing in more ship based rapid and regional transport? I imagine it could be cheaper and faster to build from scratch than a brand new train line, since you only need to build out the docks and no track infrastructure since the water is already there. Imagine a rapid ferry zigzagging between the two coasts of a river, connecting the transit networks of either side without needing to use bridges (which are both expensive and tend to be choke points and bottlenecks for the transportation network). Or a bunch of ferries going up and down a row of coastal districts, or a star-shaped network across a bay or lake, when you would normally need to go around the perimeter?

Also, for systems like these that do exist, what are some well-running ones that could be used as examples? What about poorly running ones as examples of what not to do?

(Not a fan of Adam Something's politics, but I think he still has some good takes on infrastructure.)

that's pretty cool, some German cities have 10% and that works well I think.

There are a lot of ways to build a dense city. You can go the old European city route and have a bunch of low and mid-rise buildings very close together, resulting in a fairly liw city skyline with small gaps between buildings. Or, you can have mostly skyscrapers with large clearances between them to get a similar density as the European city but with more empty space on the ground for trees or amenities, at the cost of being more expensive to build since economies of scales don't really apply to buildings, and tall buildings cost exponentially more per area of floor space than shorter buildings. But, many people prefer having more space on the ground, while others prefer street level shops being close together so you can easily get between them.

Or, you can have a city centre that has both really tall buildings and narrow building clearances to get extreme densities. Hong Kong, Singapore, and other large Asian are examples of this, as well as Manhattan. But I know many people say they hate

Or, you can interleave tall and short buildings such that you get good density of street level shops, while still having more vertical space.

What do you think? For walkable and low car use city development, how would you personally like it to be built? Why? Also, if you have a picture to show as an example of what you mean, I'd love to see it!

Here are some pictures that I have for reference:

Old European city:

High rises further apart:

High rises close together:

High and low interleaved:

A lot of different terms for the same or similar thing, but I'm basically talking about any housing setup where you have a bunch of small houses that share the side walls with their left and right neighbours, as opposed to regular houses that are completely separate buildings. Typically they are multi-floor with a private entrance door and a small yard each, but are pretty narrow, often with total floor area per house that isn't much bigger than a standard two or three bedroom apartment.

Apparently they can be less expensive and faster to build per square meter of floor space than a low- or mid-rise apartment, and a lot less expensive per square meter than a high rise, but they're obviously also not as dense as a mid-rise apartment block and a lot less dense than high rise.

But, I've also heard a lot of arguments that their density is still sufficient for walkability and a non car-centric city, and combine a lot of the benefits of both an apartment and a single family house. Obviously, if you plan your district with cars in mind, you'll have trash walkability no matter what you build, case in point, the new townhouses popping up in the US and Canada might as well be regular crappy suburbs with detached houses. But, many European cities and elsewhere seem to do a really good job of both being really walkable or non car-centric and also having a lot of townhouses, especially the old townhouse blocks that were built before cars became popularised. You can also interleave them with higher density apartments.

What do you think? Townhouses in walkable, non car-centric cities, yay or nay? Any other thoughts or relevant experiences living in them you want to share?