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This is inspired by claims that lakefront neighborhoods on Chicago's north side, are somehow less urban than Brooklyn because they're less densely populated. I think there's a point where peak urbanity is met, and higher levels of density simply create congestion.
Maybe, but that's kind of different, you can have localized crowding in all sorts of places, they don't have to be especially dense. Ex busy shopping days in suburban malls.
I think in theory you could have a city as dense as civil engineering and basic natural light requirements allow and still not be that congested.
Lets say during the busiest time of day, 10-20% of the population are walking around on the street.
The neighbourhood has a balanced mix of jobs, residents, stores, etc, with a density of about 500,000 per square mile, that's about the most you could achieve with tightly packed skyscrapers like Hong Kong. That means about 100 people per acre walking around during the busiest time. Lets say 2/3 of the land is build up leaving the remaining 1/3 for walking. You'd still have about 150 square feet of space per person, about the size of a room.
Thing is in many of the ultra high density cities, even though <10% of trips are by car, >50% of the unbuilt land is dedicated to cars leaving relatively little to pedestrians, which is why sidewalks still end up feeling crowded.
At those kinds of densities, you would probably need a lot of subways. Those sorts of places often have tunnels, skyways, multi-level malls, etc too, which can help prevent sidewalks from being too crowded.
Going back to how much space is given to cars vs pedestrians... IMO if you have an area that's so dense but people need to commute to/from there by car, you're doing something wrong. You still need space for certain vehicles - delivery trucks, emergency vehicles, maybe surface transit, and maybe a certain level of car use for non-commute trips like people driving out of the city. But during the busiest commuting times, I think you could increase the amount of space for pedestrians by temporarily closing off certain areas to cars, and then have deliveries mostly take place during less busy times.
I'm mainly thinking of the downtown rush in Toronto. Bay Street that goes through the heart of the Financial District can get a bit crowded during those times as people walk to/from the main train station. However, while it can get quite busy, it's never so crowded that you get jostled much. There's many alternate routes for pedestrians though which helps, including cutting across office plazas instead of going along sidewalks, or taking the extensive underground pathways. And if at some point, that became insufficient, you could cut down Bay Street from 4 lanes to 2 and use the freed up space to double the width of the sidewalks, and continue to improve underground and ground level mid-block connections (ie cutting across plazas).
^^^^^
Actually ancient cities when you think about it were denser than modern cities with next to zero high rises. You could have some ancient cities that covered maybe 3 square miles and nearly 100,000 people and the poorest areas of that city would be hitting ridiculous densities that you start measuring people by hectare.
This is inspired by claims that lakefront neighborhoods on Chicago's north side, are somehow less urban than Brooklyn because they're less densely populated. I think there's a point where peak urbanity is met, and higher levels of density simply create congestion.
Could be. More likely it's just personal preference. And even that depends on how the neighborhood is structured. Paris neighborhoods tend to be Manhattan dense, but because the density is fairly evenly spread out over the entire city, it never really feels crowded outside a few areas. Well it feels more crowded than Brooklyn for the most part, but not midtown Manhattan.
Sometimes density is a RESPONSE to congestion. Why does Vancouver have hundreds of highrise apartment buildings in its core? Because there are no freeways in town. That's an oversimplification but it's related.
Likewise it's a big driver in people living near work in other cities including Seattle where I live.
And I have to tell you...walking seven minutes from home after work is AWESOME. Or 10 including a stop at the corner store. No stress, several hours of free time per evening...
Having a lot of people in a snake space has nothing to do with congestion? Gotcha.
Absolutely true. Irrelevant to the thread topic (which was supposedly talking about residential density) but also true. It's infrastructure, not density, that determines congestion.
Parts of suburban NJ are much more congested than parts of Brooklyn, even though density (both residential and employment) is much lower. This is because congestion is related to infrastructure, not density. In the suburbs you'll sometimes have one outlet road, leading to horrible traffic and overstrained services. Rare with an urban grid.
Or Mexico provides a perfect example. Road networks almost never have redundancy. They'll build a suburb of 100,000 with one two-lane outlet road. So obviously congestion is horrific.
The densest area in the U.S., the Upper East Side, is one of the least congested parts of core NYC, BTW. It may be the quietest NYC core neighborhood.
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