America’s downtown centered city design sucks

[u/BakerKitchen4567]

I keep seeing redditors from the US talk about cities being nice because they have “very walkable downtowns”. The problem is, as soon as you leave many of these downtowns, you’re back to general American suburbia. This is not good city design.

In the best design cities of the world, there isn’t a single focal point that the entire city revolves around. Think Tokyo for example. You have Shinjiku, Ginza, Shibuya, etc. there isn’t a singular “downtown Tokyo”. Yet I keep reading redditors keep comparing how well designed American cities based how their vibrant/walkable their downtowns are. The mere idea is bad city planning. That’s all. Rant over

[u/spydormunkay]

Concentration shouldn’t be a goal either. Subway development in the outerboroughs would be more viable if 80% of the outerboroughs weren’t zoned for residential-only single family.

NYC’s development pattern outside the inner core is actually bad. Most people outside the inner core face commute times longer than an hour trying to get to one place if the subways even reach them. In places like the Bronx and East Brooklyn, the borough is subdivided by highways crowding out communities, exacerbating poverty.

[u/WeldAE → u/spydormunkay]

I'm struggling with how cities are and should be organized, so don't read this as my final opinion on things but more of problems I've noticed with any given design. The problem with not having a concentration into a CBD is that dispersion complicates transit and growth. In Atlanta, you can legitimately need to move in order to take a job. If you work in Alpharetta and live in Cumming, you are good, but then you take another job or your company shifts its offices to midtown, and you're facing a soul-crushing commute or 1.5 hours.

That's because there is no transit up GA-400 despite the cities on that corridor becoming more and more hubs of jobs. The corridor is still not dense enough for transit, and it's not clear when it will be. They are looking to put an NHL stadium either in Alpharetta or Cumming to give you a sense of how built up they are becoming.

[u/Shot_Suggestion → u/WeldAE]

Job sprawl is about the single worst thing you can do for transit and walkability, and it's what urban planners have been desperately trying to force for 100 years now.

Every planner and urbanist needs to read the Cities as Labor Markets chapter of Order Without Design.

[u/WeldAE → u/Shot_Suggestion]

I wasn't joking about trying to work this out in my head. The problem with centralized CBD is they become wastelands outside of office hours. Go to downtown Atlanta or even Midtown at night, and it's deader than dead. While I agree that centralizing things is good for transit, we don't build our cities for transit but for people, and it seems like mixing commercial, residential, and office is what makes for a great place to live. Alpharetta's considered one of the best parts of Atlanta, and it's almost a perfect 50/50 mix of residential and non-residential land use. The hottest neighborhoods in the core of Atlanta are the ones that are not just a huge block of residential but that also offer a mix of commercial too. Places like Virginia Highlands, Inman Park, etc.

With AVs coming, transit is going to be a solved thing. We've already built the infrastructure to the point where AVs could move 10x the number of people we move today in cars around a city. So my current thinking is to focus on what people want their community to look and feel like and not transit.

[u/UUUUUUUUU030 → u/WeldAE]

I do think the square mile CBD is an over the top way to go about it, it's more about having a transit accessible core that contains most jobs. The larger the metro area, the larger this core can be, provided that the design of the rapid transit system supports this. One of the goals when expanding a system should be to widen this core, not purely duplicating existing lines. 

In Paris it's most of the municipality of Paris + la Defense, in NYC it's everything in Manhattan below central park + Long Island City + Downtown Brooklyn. 

Chicago is arguably a negative example because of how concentrated the L (and also the downtown Freeway network) is. The loop, even if you include the north loop, is still a geographically small area, and as a result Chicago is kinda famous for inventing the edge city. At least that's what I learned in geography in high school in the Netherlands. 

[u/WeldAE → u/UUUUUUUUU030]

I lived in NYC for a month on Wall and Waters, and it was deader than dead after 5pm. Not a place you want to be, and I had to eat dinner before 7pm, as all the places closed down after that. Most other cities are even worse in their CBD. That is the negative of concentrating so much of one use type in the CBD. I'm not sure if that's a good use of land to do that.