I'd personally make that road narrower and replace the outer lanes with rows of trees and a separated bike path, but overall I think this is the minimum level of density and development for major transit stations.

In a walkable city, density is one of the most important factors. And high rise buildings are a great way to build a dense, compact urban core, as opposed to endless sprawl that imevetably becomes car dependent. You see this in practice even in North American cities, because the urban core is often still walkable with good public transport, and not only are cars often not needed, they likely are even slower than walking or transit (only problem is that downtown housing in the US/Canada is obscenely expensive ans the average worker can't actually live in it).

But, wvenever this is mentioned, even in urbanism communities that explicitly favour density and walkability, people still dislike the idea of dense high rises and complain that "you can't see anything out your window except the skyscraper across from you!" Even more so when a picture of urbanism in a place they already don't like, like the USSR or China, crops up.

For this reason, a lot of new developments with high rises place them well away from each other, which lowers the average density and frankly makes walking between multiple skyscrapers tiring, especially in Canadian cities where it snows a lot. There are even posts where people have done the calculations to find that an many high rise districts can barely even beat old European city centres that have buildings not more than 5 or 10 floors, but packed extremely closely together with narrow, pre-car streets. At which point, why not just build low rises closer together instead of the more expensive and resource intensive high rises then?

Which is another thing. You know what is packed together a lot? Houses and low-rises. If you think a 20 meter margin is way too narrow for high rises, wait till you find out about townhouse complexes that have 2 meter margins between the front doors of houses on either side. Guess what? You can't see past the other side of houses in that case either! And you still have to strain your neck to see the sky through your window! Speaking from experience because I live in a townhouse complex (mine is older so the gap between mine and the other side is larger, but I've definitely seen new developments that place the entry doors on either side so close you can basically tough shoulders with the person living across from you, and even with the one I'm in, no you can't see past the other side). Same with those old European cities everyone likes so much, if you're on the second floor of an all five story district with a one lane street separating you and the building across from you, your view is just as blocked as being on the 20th floor of a 50 floor high rise district! I've also lives in low rise apartments, which actually has pretty wide clearances from the buildings around it, and I honestly don't find looking at the street that much more exciting than looking at another high rise. Not that I thought it was a bad thing, I don't spend a lot of time staring out my window to begin with, and honestly don't know anyone that do in that way characters in old school cartoons are depicted as doing.

Another thing I hear talked about is that having high rises so close blocks out the sun in your unit. But, do people actually want the sun directly through their windows? I always find it annoying because if it's in my room, it's almost always directly in my eyeline, and it turns your room into a sauna in the summer. Isn't the brightness of the mere presence of the sun enough during the day? It's not like you're in total darkness if you're under the shadow of another building.

What do you think? Should high rises be far apart? Or close together? How important are views through the window and does it outweigh things like density and proximity? I'm I totally wrong and an idiot for thinking packing skyscrapers close together is a good thing? I've never actually lived in a high rise (wish I could, but they're all so fucking expensive in my city because they're marketed as "luxury" apartments), so if anyone who actually lives in one where your view is blocked by the next high rise, please share what your actual experience and thoughts are on that!

A classic mixed use development is retail stores on the first floor, and apartments on higher floors. But some buildings are also adding in office spaces, as in cubicle and computer desk office spaces, between the retail and residential sections. So you have, for example, first floor is retail, floors 2 to 10 are offices, and 11 to 30 are residential. Which, I don't know, those buildings always look weird to me, but obviously if it's more functional and more liveable, looks hardly matter. But, is it better?

The other way of doing it is to simply have dedicated apartments and office buildings, but placed close together. You still get the result of residential and office within walking distance, but in separate buildings.

I've heard arguments that homes and offices in the same building can mean that you don't need to leave the building at all for work, completely eliminating your commute as opposed to merely shortening it, but how applicable is this? What are the chances that where you work and where you live are actually in the same building? And what if you change jobs? Do you then move homes to where your new office is?

What do you think? Are we better served by an "all in one" building, or discrete buildings all placed close together?

What I mean is, light rail systems that use a linear induction motor pulling on a center "reaction rail". See this Wikipedia page for what I'm talking about. So we have the Innovia Metro, now owned by Bombardier (the tech behind the Vancouver SkyTrain), and Japan also has their own very similar linear metro system, which are deployed in a few of their cities, notably Osaka, and was also exported to Guangzhou, China.

The tech originates in the 60s and 70s, and it's not that complicated: an aluminum center rail couples with a linear induction motor on the train, which generates the movement along the tracks. It's used for both accelerating and braking the trains, with the mechanical brakes only used in an emergency. It's something you can fairly easily build a small scale of at home as a DIY project, and many people have.

According to TransLink in Vancouver, the motor components almost never breaks down, they've claimed in one video that they've never had to rebuild or replace a linear induction motor, with no gearbox or transmission to break down either. And the center rail is completely passive, literally just a sheet of metal, and since the motor never touches it, there's really no reason for it to experience much wear. Therefore, I imagine the trains need way less maintenance compared to trains with rotary motors. I live in Vancouver, and we still have tons of the first generation trainsets from the 70s that have lasted until now and show no sign of giving up the ghost anytime soon, and the system isn't even bothered when a section of center rail is completely missing, there's been a two meter long gap in the center rail for months, and only got fixed recently, with none of the trains having any problems with it. I couldn't find much info about the Japanese system, namely because I can't read Japanese, but I imagine it's similarly reliable.

There are also a lot of benefits, namely, acceleration and traction (or, disregard for the lack of it). I ride both the Canada Line in Vancouver and the rest of the Skytrain system a lot, and you can really tell the difference in acceleration. The Canada Line, which uses regular motors and disk brakes, definitely takes a lot longer to get up to speed, and seems to take even longer to stop while entering a station. You can actually feel a pretty significant difference in acceleration and especially braking just based on how much you're shifted forward and backward. Also, since the contact area with the running rails isn't really relevant to making the train move or stop, it can handle low traction without losing performance (or more importantly, braking power). And I've read accounts that Vancouver chose the linear induction system specifically because it's mountainous, and they were worried about trains losing traction on hills when the tracks are wet or iced over, and the Skytrain does have some pretty steep gradients, despite being mostly elevated.

I feel like those benefits would make it really good for urban rail, where you have frequent starts and stops so getting up to track speed faster can actually save on travel time, and you have less options for going around steep hills while still connecting important locations.

Actually, I can see this being even more useful as surface level light rail or trams/streetcars than elevated rail, because in that case you really do have to go along the slope of hills, and better acceleration and especially braking is even more important when you have to deal with cars, bikes, and pedestrians. Third rail wouldn't work in that case, but there's no reason this tech can't work with overhead lines or batteries. Hell, even diesel-electric. You can even run regular trains on the same tracks or upgrade existing tracks while keeping old rolling stock because the center rail doesn't stick out above the running rails.

I'm not sure what the energy efficiencies are in terms of both driving the train and regenerative braking, but I imagine it's less than a regular motor simply because the magnetic fields are less confined, (so some of that magnetic energy dissipates). Maybe that's actually a massive drawback and it's, like, a quarter of the efficiency or something? Any electrical engineers able to enlighten me?

So, why aren't linear induction based light rail more common? I find it kind of weird that this kind of tech hasn't received that much adoption, and especially that there aren't any other companies trying to make a similar system, or making competing trains that can run on the Innovia or Japanese tracks. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/272505

So, I live in Vancouver, Canada, we have a pretty famous automated metro system called the Skytrain. I don't drive and do not own a car, so I use public transit for absolutely everything. And after the automated train I'm on unexpectedly stopped at a station for an extra five minutes longer, causing me to miss my connecting bus by two minutes, and in turn missing my second connection, I'm standing in a deserted transit exchange in the dead of night while needing to pee really bad (there are no public bathrooms anywhere in the Vancouver transit network) as I type this for all of you, expecting to be home by at the earliest 1:30 AM instead of right now, at 12:30 AM. Because of a five minute delay. Yeah.

Ignoring the question of how the hell does a completely automated train system get delayed at night, when every train is less than a quarter full and barely anyone gets on or off, I'm left pondering what makes a good public transit system that is capable of supporting the daily schedules of everyone in the city, and actually stands to entice people to forgo cars for transit. And in my opinion, contrary to popular belief and transit company marketing, the most important part is punctuality, not raw speed, or even service frequency.

The thing about public transit is that only a minority of trips require no transfers. For all the other times, you'll need to make at least one connection, with the average being potentially two or three depending on the exact system. And this is when the lack of punctuality can really screw you over, with severity increasing exponentially the more connections you have. If your transit system is a little slow, that's okay because people can easily plan for it. If your transit system isn't as frequent as you'd like, you can plan for that too, and an expected wait is always better than an unexpected wait. The key is planning. Planning is easy nowadays, with tons of apps that do an excellent job of laying out the best route for you, complete with telling you the expected time you should leave, when you'll arrive, and how long a wait at each connection. Even with a not so fast and not so frequent transit syatem, just tell the app when you need to be at your destination, and it will still be serviceable. There are even excellent open source apps for this if you hate Google and co, like I do.

But, if there's a delay, even by a few minutes on an hour long trip, it can and will throw a monkey wrench into this whole thing. If you miss one connection, you will miss every other one afteraward, and could end up very late even in a fast and frequent transit system. That's when you potentially start losing opportunities, like missing a big job interview, date, etc, and you can bet that the one time you're catastrophically late is the one time you absolutely can't be, and the one time everything runs smoothly is the time you don't give a crap when you arrive. This is far more harmful to the passengers, and the reputation of public transit as a viable means of getting around the city, than if the system is a little slow or not that frequent, because, again, the difference is whether you can easily plan ahead to compenaate for it.

Take Japan for example, where even though both their intra- and intercity transit are both crazy fast and crazy frequent, the thing that locals there are by far the most proud of in their transit network is its punctuality, and in the rare cases where there is a delay, people have been documented getting extremely angry with the transit staff as if they personally injured them.

Anyway, these are just my pissed off, sleep deprived, full bladder thoughts while waiting to go home. What do you think? Do you agree or disagree, and why or why not?