Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting Queensland to get called out in this post.
Neither, but I found it fitting to be called out alongside Florida.
Oh yeah, it’s 100% fair. Just not what I expected from what seems to be an American author.
He was originally Australian:
Andrew grew up in Australia and now lives in the Hoboken, New Jersey with his wife. Andrew’s motivation is to create a great place that he and his wife, and one day their children and their future generations will want to call home.
(from the ‘about’ page)
Ah, that explains it.
I’m a fan of this design principle and agree with the author on most points, but I am curious how cities like this deal with big box purchases - appliances, furniture, etc.
For retail stores, how do they get stock in? Same with supermarkets, do we build service lanes designed more for delivery trucks and waste collection?
For customers, how do you get that new washing machine or dining table home? These aren’t everyday purchases individually, but it a city they collectively are.
So just to be clear: a cube truck (like in the top picture in that wikipedia link) is 2meters wide. A 6 meter wide road can have 2 cube trucks, passing eachother by, while still having room between both eachother and the walls. Also, you can literally park a cube truck in front of your store to unload it, and there’s room for another cube truck to go around it.
In fact, I’ve been to this one street of warehouses (literally a street of warehouses, in an industrial area) whose road couldn’t have been more than 10m, wall-to-wall, and I didn’t see them having throughput problems. People massively overestimate how important throughtput is, mainly because the throughput they look for is passenger cars.
Also: Deliveries don’t need to be cube trucks. There are other options - vans, cargo bikes and bike-trailers, literally just walking in with a tray of the delivery, whatever. The smaller the street, the smaller the businesses should be, and the less throughput they should need.
I can’t tell what A.A.P.'s (the link guy’s) beliefs on this are, but generally the answer is either 1) it’s fine (see: the cube truck thing), 2) arterial streets every ~5 blocks (that are wide and primarily for cars), or 3) trains. Or some mixture of them all.
with supermarkets, do we build service lanes designed more for delivery trucks
As a quick aside, before I answer that: Honestly, supermarkets suck and mostly make sense when people are carrying their shopping by car. Smaller shops work just fine.
To answer your question: I don’t think so, but don’t quote me on that. Supermarkets receive… one or two trucks per day? And supermarkets are big (partially due to wide aisles to handle the trolleys needed to buy a whole carload of goods, to be fair). So I don’t think they’re that important.
In the medieval city center I grew up in, there are market streets that are 6-10m wide, which are accessible for utility and delivery vehicles in the early morning. All the cars come and go before 9 AM, after which the area is pedestrianized. The market street can then be used for restaurant seating, public gatherings, market stalls, or just a spacious boulevard.
Residential streets are narrower, but still wide enough for one-way car traffic plus pedestrians (cyclists needed to dismount or go around). Utility and delivery vehicles can use these streets, blocking them for other vehicles while they’re unloading, but since pedestrians and cyclists can pass it doesn’t disrupt people from going about their day.
Ultimately the delivery vehicles do go to dedicated car roads, a two-lane 50 km/h ring roughly 1 kilometer in diameter around the medieval city, but that means you can walk to 3000 people’s houses, as well as markets and restaurants and schools for tens of thousands of people, without crossing a car street.
Thanks. Know I actually get, why one of the modernist developments feels so much better then a new urbanism one I have been to.
Interesting read, thank you for the introduction to the author.
https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php is another good post about building better for fun and profit.
@PuddleOfKittens It is very much a mistake to suggest that “traditional” cities grew “organically” or “naturally”, or even that they represent “human scale”. Human settlement has always been subject to land use restrictions. The European and Japanese cities featured in this article as exemplars evolved they way they did under severe feudal land restrictions, not because there was any kind of conscious choice to build that way. Article is 11 yrs old, “New Urbanism” is no longer fashionable.
The European and Japanese cities featured in this article as exemplars evolved they way they did under severe feudal land restrictions
Ok, how about the city of Pompeii (which was entombed by the volcano in ~50BC), or Tenochitlan/Mexico city (which was built before European contact, or the city of Cusco (ditto), or the city of Petra (which had plenty of spare desert)? Or Venice, or Mateba, or pick-a-town-any-town.
What “severe feudal land restrictions” do you mean? Can you elaborate?
Here on slrpnk.net I see quite a few “new urbanists” endorsing solarpunk visions with wide streets. I posted this partially in response to that.
I could link a newer article, but this one works just fine. Articles don’t have an expiry date, if you have an actually valid criticism then say it.
If it helps, replace “organically” with “incrementally and due to decentralized choices”.
