Welcome to City-Data.com Forum!
U.S. CitiesCity-Data Forum Index
Go Back   City-Data Forum > General Forums > Urban Planning
 [Register]
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
View detailed profile (Advanced) or search
site with Google Custom Search

Search Forums  (Advanced)
Reply Start New Thread
 
Old 04-09-2011, 12:04 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,244,119 times
Reputation: 35920

Advertisements

Quote:
Originally Posted by pvande55 View Post
I don't think stop signs are necessary. Without them, drivers would have to slow down as they approached an intersection. Drivers could decide among themselves who goes first. Speeding would be greatly reduced. Accidents that did occur would be less serious.
I think that's been tried. That was the genesis of stop signs.

I honestly don't remember in Europe; I wasn't the one driving.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message

 
Old 04-09-2011, 12:28 PM
 
Location: Austin
758 posts, read 588,766 times
Reputation: 185
Quote:
Originally Posted by pvande55 View Post
I don't think stop signs are necessary. Without them, drivers would have to slow down as they approached an intersection. Drivers could decide among themselves who goes first. Speeding would be greatly reduced. Accidents that did occur would be less serious.
That's why I like roundabouts. They have yield signs where the driver yields to the oncoming traffic from the left. If I had it my way, all streets would be one-way thoroughfares with roundabouts. The only exceptions would be avenues with traffic lights and intersections like I suggested earlier.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-09-2011, 01:02 PM
 
Location: Bellingham, WA
9,726 posts, read 16,679,617 times
Reputation: 14887
It sounds like a nice idea for a city, but the idea of the elderly sliding down fire house poles is pretty hard to imagine. Have you ever worked with elderly people? I don't doubt some could do it, but many couldn't grasp the pole firmly enough to slowly slide down it. Heck, I know plenty of out of shape younger people who couldn't do it. It would basically just be a free fall. Though not the ideal use of space, I think the best option for the elderly and disabled is to just live in single story dwellings.

Quote:
Originally Posted by pvande55 View Post
I don't think stop signs are necessary. Without them, drivers would have to slow down as they approached an intersection. Drivers could decide among themselves who goes first. Speeding would be greatly reduced. Accidents that did occur would be less serious.
This is a nice thought, and if your average American had any common sense whatsoever it might work. But the drivers I see daily wouldn't make it home on the first day without getting into an accident. You would think after one or two horrific crashes at stop-sign-less intersections they would learn to be more cautious, but I'd be willing to bet many would still blow through the intersections without looking. They can barely handle intersections with stop signs, I can't imagine how they'd handle intersections that required them to actually use some sort of judgement.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-09-2011, 01:26 PM
 
Location: Austin
758 posts, read 588,766 times
Reputation: 185
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lamplight View Post
It sounds like a nice idea for a city, but the idea of the elderly sliding down fire house poles is pretty hard to imagine. Have you ever worked with elderly people? I don't doubt some could do it, but many couldn't grasp the pole firmly enough to slowly slide down it. Heck, I know plenty of out of shape younger people who couldn't do it. It would basically just be a free fall. Though not the ideal use of space, I think the best option for the elderly and disabled is to just live in single story dwellings.



This is a nice thought, and if your average American had any common sense whatsoever it might work. But the drivers I see daily wouldn't make it home on the first day without getting into an accident. You would think after one or two horrific crashes at stop-sign-less intersections they would learn to be more cautious, but I'd be willing to bet many would still blow through the intersections without looking. They can barely handle intersections with stop signs, I can't imagine how they'd handle intersections that required them to actually use some sort of judgement.
Well that's why I suggested slides for the elderly people to slide down instead of just poles. I thought they could even have waterslides for when tall buildings are on fire. The catalyst towards that idea was 9/11. I'm sure most people would rather get wet than be trapped inside a burning building and get charred alive. As for the intersections, that's why I suggested roundabouts.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-09-2011, 02:52 PM
 
Location: Bellingham, WA
9,726 posts, read 16,679,617 times
Reputation: 14887
Quote:
Originally Posted by Orpheus528 View Post
Well that's why I suggested slides for the elderly people to slide down instead of just poles. I thought they could even have waterslides for when tall buildings are on fire. The catalyst towards that idea was 9/11. I'm sure most people would rather get wet than be trapped inside a burning building and get charred alive. As for the intersections, that's why I suggested roundabouts.
Ah I see. I misunderstood your post and thought you meant just having the polls next to ramps.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-09-2011, 03:43 PM
 
Location: Austin
758 posts, read 588,766 times
Reputation: 185
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lamplight View Post
Ah I see. I misunderstood your post and thought you meant just having the polls next to ramps.
Well I didn't necessarily mean having them adjacent to the ramps so much as I did balconies. I'd actually prefer the ramps be located on the outer perimeters of the inner walls or along the exteriors of the buildings. There should be enough space for there to be an incline that isn't too steep. Meanwhile, they could be wide enough to have elongated stairs on the sides for people that have knee problems. My question is how are elderly and handicapped people supposed to evacuate a multi-storied building on fire when the elevators are shut off, and they can't go down the stairs?
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-09-2011, 05:37 PM
 
Location: Philaburbia
41,744 posts, read 74,721,167 times
Reputation: 66682
Quote:
Originally Posted by pvande55 View Post
I don't think stop signs are necessary. Without them, drivers would have to slow down as they approached an intersection. Drivers could decide among themselves who goes first. Speeding would be greatly reduced. Accidents that did occur would be less serious.
Bwahahahahahahaha! Are you kidding me? Even with stop signs, drivers can't decide who goes first.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-10-2011, 03:00 PM
 
8,680 posts, read 17,203,538 times
Reputation: 4685
Quote:
Originally Posted by Orpheus528 View Post
In my ideal city, there'd be no cemeteries, landfills, power plants, telephone poles, or power lines. No streets would have any stop signs, either. Traffic lights would be few and far between, and no buildings would have staircases. Instead of cemeteries, I'd have crematoriums, mausoleums, arboretums, and botanical gardens where people were buried in. The nitrogen and phosphorous from their bodies can replenish the soil with something more aesthetically pleasing than tombstones. Rather than stop signs and traffic lights, I'd have nothing but one-way streets with roundabout intersections. Those cut down on traffic, save energy, and decrease wear and tear on one's car from stop-and go driving. Traffic lights would only be near the freeway entrance ramps or at intersections of boulevards which would be every tenth street. The far right lanes be would slip lanes for motorists to make right turns without going to the stoplights, nonetheless.

For the electricity, I'd make all utility poles go underground. Building codes would require solar panels, geothermal heating pumps, wind turbines, and daylighting. Each building would face north/south to ensure they get direct sunlight during all seasons, and they'd have broadleaved trees on the sides facing the equator to provide shade during the summer. They'd all be interconnected to the same grid and power one other through district heating to avoid the possibility of a blackout even during severe weather. That way the load can be balanced when Home A receives excess energy while Home B gets a shortage. One football stadium covered with solar panels and wind turbines could power at least 100 homes. Regarding the houses and buildings on the east/west sides of streets, they'd be A-framed houses perpendicular from the streets while the driveways come in along the south sides.

As for the staircases, I'd replace them with ramps so elderly and handicapped people could go down more easily. The same would be true towards people moving furniture with a dolly. Poles would on each floor next to the ramps for folks to slide down like firefighters do in firehouses. How else are elderly and handicapped people supposed to evacuate burning buildings if the elevators are shut off and they can't go down the stairs? Think of it this way; when was the last time you ever heard of anyone falling down a ramp and breaking one's neck? They make take a lot of room, but I'd improvise them with several turns and have landings in the middle, or they can be corkscrew-shaped. I may even have slides between each stairwell with safety rails so people could slide from one level to the next

For garbage and sanitation, I'd have utility workers sort out everything recyclable or compostable to be reused again. That's about 90-percent of it right there. The rest which is mostly HAZMAT, I'd put in plasma-burning like contraptions that reduce everything to reusable silicate particles. Those machines create more power than they use. Engineers would put some of that other garbage in building walls like they do in Japan. Eggshell cartons and disposable diapers make superlative soundproof walls. The Germans have a fabulous technique, too. They have trash receptacles with blue, green, and brown bins for each type of waste. One is for recyclable; another is for food; and the other is for non-degradable items. All these practices would be included in my ideal city. As sewage, they'd do "biomethanation" which is burning the methane from the human waste into electricity. Through that and the other techniques, I suspect there'd be plentiful energy to provide base load generation. Would you live in this kind of city?
You'd like the work of Le Corbusier. His ideas of city building were aesthetically pleasing, unique, and inspired a generation of architects and urban planners--even though for the most part they were terrible, disastrous and highly impractical ideas.

It doesn't look like pedestrians, cyclists or public transit have any place in your city--this means that every place in this city has to have large parking lots everywhere, to accommodate all of these cars, in addition to the real estate needed by highways, streets and those silly roundabouts. Not having traffic lights means that pedestrians would be unsafe crossing the street at any time! Increasing the "flow" of traffic just encourages more driving and less use of other forms of transportation, which has a horrific energy cost. Expanding lanes, one-way streets and other ways to improve traffic flow don't reduce traffic, they increase it--the demand grows to meet capacity, especially if the alternative to driving a car is functionally equivalent to suicide, as it would be in your dream city.

Ramps between floors are another blindingly silly idea. As mentioned above, a 1:12 ramp is needed for a wheelchair, which means that every house would have to be no narrower than 100-120 feet to get from one floor to the next. Steeper ramps are no safer than stairs.

About the cemeteries: I suppose there are advantages to such "human composting" if you can get people to accept it--but it violates the religious practices of many ideas, and cemeteries were originally intended for the living as much as the dead--they have ceremonial, ritual value. They are also intended as beautiful, serene places for people to visit. It may seem a bit weird now, but many cemeteries were used for picnics and walks. And headstones can be strikingly beautiful pieces of art!

Undergrounding utilities is nice but other than removing a bit of overhead clutter there isn't really much advantage to it--it just makes things more expensive.

Solar panels and wind turbines are cute, but unless this city is located in a place with lots of sunshine and lots of wind they won't return much power--and even if they are, it won't be enough to meet peak loads. There are better ways to reduce overall energy consumption--like building walkable neighborhoods where people don't have to use cars to get to everything, and building compact spaces where heat/cooling loads are shared between buildings. Things like solar panels are sexy and popular because they suggest we don't have to figure out how to use less energy in the first place--they're like "dessert" in the meal of energy conservation options. But no meal should be all dessert--you have to eat your vegetables too! And the "vegetables" in this case are things like sealing a building envelope, and strategies that use less energy in the first place, so you can reduce the need for power generation.

I'm not sure if the OP is aware of this, but municipal recycling is a common practice in much of the United States. Only a few cities do municipal composting, but the idea is catching on. But even recycling is at best a net "neutral" activity--it's marginally better than just throwing stuff out, but not by that much. "Reduce" and "reuse" are the other parts of the green triangle--"recycle" is a distant third.

The urban design sounds pretty dreadful too: due to your priority for identical and regular building, tree and street design, the whole city would be a matching grid, with each block indistinguishable from the next. Because you have "zoned" out many uses, you'll have lots of gridlock no matter how wide the streets, as every use requires a car trip outside the city (presumably to somewhere far away, where most of the city's essential operations take place so everyone must go there quite often.) Walking in this city would be horrible: you wouldn't be able to tell where you are, there would be no place for you to go, and the only other people on the street are those despondent enough to crave the sweet release of death offered by trying to walk across the street and being smashed in the crush of unrestricted traffic.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-11-2011, 01:44 PM
 
Location: Atlanta
217 posts, read 407,630 times
Reputation: 237
You're going to need a lot of those "crematoriums, mausoleums, arboretums, and botanical gardens" to keep up with the number of people who are going to be done in trying to cross those stop sign-less, traffic light-less streets. Instead of trying to move the cars faster, wouldn't you want to make it so people don't have to drive so much?

I'm not crazy about the idea of having municipal workers picking through a whole city's trash by hand to separate this from that, people should have to do that themselves at home. But if we could just get to a point at which everyone, not just people in SFHs, gets their recyclables picked up, we'd be getting somewhere. I let mine pile up for about three months, then walk four blocks to get a Zipcar, drive back to my apartment with it, get the recycling, take it to the car, drive it to the bin at Whole Foods about five miles away, drive the Zipcar back, then walk four blocks back home. Recycling one person's stuff shouldn't require walking two miles and driving 10.

But I agree that there have to be better ways for elderly people and people with disabilities to get out of a building in case of an emergency. I've been in several fire drills that involved walking down 15 to 30 flights of stairs. I can't even imagine having to carry someone that far.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-13-2011, 09:27 AM
 
2,857 posts, read 6,704,439 times
Reputation: 1747
Quote:
Originally Posted by PedestriAnne View Post
You're going to need a lot of those "crematoriums, mausoleums, arboretums, and botanical gardens" to keep up with the number of people who are going to be done in trying to cross those stop sign-less, traffic light-less streets. Instead of trying to move the cars faster, wouldn't you want to make it so people don't have to drive so much?
Just add pedestrian overpasses (with ramps, not stairs) at every intersection. Problem solved.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.

Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.


Reply
Please update this thread with any new information or opinions. This open thread is still read by thousands of people, so we encourage all additional points of view.

Quick Reply
Message:


Over $104,000 in prizes was already given out to active posters on our forum and additional giveaways are planned!

Go Back   City-Data Forum > General Forums > Urban Planning

All times are GMT -6.

© 2005-2024, Advameg, Inc. · Please obey Forum Rules · Terms of Use and Privacy Policy · Bug Bounty

City-Data.com - Contact Us - Archive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 - Top