Hacker News with Generative AI: Urban Planning

NYC Congestion Pricing: Early Days (thezvi.substack.com)
People have to pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. What happened so far?
Making an intersection unsafe for pedestrians to save seconds for drivers (collegetowns.substack.com)
How the redesign of a street in a walkable college town reflects our broader values for cars over people.
Tokyo drift: what happens when a city stops being the future? (theguardian.com)
Tokyo remains, in the world’s imagination, a place of sophistication and wealth. But with economic revival forever distant, ‘tourism pollution’ seems the only viable plan
Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes (construction-physics.com)
The most common style for skyscrapers in the US (and probably the world) is the glass box — a structural skeleton of steel or concrete, with a skin of non-load bearing curtain wall made of glass and metal (typically aluminum), and without much in the way of decoration or ornament.
The case for letting Malibu burn (1995) (longreads.com)
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
How to Build a Better Bike Lane, According to Transportation Officials (bloomberg.com)
Over the past decade, protected bike lanes have gone mainstream in US cities. A new traffic engineering guidebook invites them to think even bigger.
Can American Drivers Learn to Love Roundabouts? (bloomberg.com)
They save lives, reduce traffic delays and cut emissions. Still, communities often resist them. Can cities get drivers to turn the corner on circular intersections?
U-Haul Growth Metros and Cities of 2024: Dallas Top Metro for In-Migration (uhaul.com)
PHOENIX, Ariz. (Jan. 3, 2024) — The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area, better known as the DFW Metroplex, is the leading U-Haul Growth Metro of 2024.
'Living proof that you can spend money on the poor': Utopia comes to Mexico City (theguardian.com)
A visionary mayor has harnessed her imagination to promote health, wellbeing and culture in one of the Mexican capital’s most impoverished neighbourhoods
Tokyo makes 3D data available (tokyo.lg.jp)
サイバー空間上に東京都を再現し、様々なデータを重ねることで、これまでは気づき得なかった新たな視点に出会うことができます。
Rethinking Zoning to Increase Affordable Housing  (nahro.org)
Zoning, initially designed to regulate land use and density, has evolved into a significant impediment for growing communities attempting to adapt to current circumstances.
London Transport Explained in Nine Graphs (londoncentric.media)
How the ability to travel around the city shapes the capital, its residents, and the lives we lead.
Converting shopping malls into apartments [video] (youtube.com)
Good cities can't exist without public order (noahpinion.blog)
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a huge fan of dense, walkable cities. Much of my enthusiasm comes from living in Japan for several years, and I’ve written a bunch of posts about why Japanese cities are so especially great. Here was the most relevant one for today’s post:
Bogotá’s open streets program is the oldest and most successful (slate.com)
BOGOTÁ, Colombia—At 4 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 15, Jerson Osorio stood at the center of several thousand traffic signs, speed bumps, and hip-high yellow cones.
Wuppertal's suspended monorail proved its doubters wrong [video] (youtube.com)
Visualization of cities with similar road networks (github.com/anvaka)
This website shows cities that have similar road networks.
Kowloon Walled City: Heterotopia in a Space of Disappearance (2013) (mascontext.com)
The Kowloon Walled City is known by many as the informal settlement that once existed seemingly out of place within modern Hong Kong.
A cross-section illustration reveals the happenings of Kowloon Walled City (thisiscolossal.com)
At its height in the 1990s, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong housed about 50,000 people.
The five-minute city: inside Denmark's revolutionary neighbourhood (theguardian.com)
While ambitious urban planners try to make 15-minute cities a reality, the Nordhavn district of Copenhagen has gone one better. What’s life like when everything you need is just a stroll away?
The Dumbest Bike Lane Law Just Passed in Canada [video] (youtube.com)
Landlords Are Using AI to Raise Rents (gizmodo.com)
Landlords Are Using AI to Raise Rents—and Cities Are Starting to Push Back
NYC votes to approve City of Yes upzoning plan (abc7ny.com)
The New York City Council voted 31-20 to move forward with the Adams Administration's City of Yes affordable housing plan on Thursday.
Why housing shortages cause homelessness (worksinprogress.co)
Why do high-cost cities have more homelessness? It’s not just about rents — it’s also about the rooms friends and family can’t afford to share.
Cycling is ten times more important than electric cars net-zero cities (theconversation.com)
Globally, only one in 50 new cars were fully electric in 2020, and one in 14 in the UK. Sounds impressive, but even if all new cars were electric now, it would still take 15-20 years to replace the world’s fossil fuel car fleet.
Landlords Are Using AI to Raise Rents – and Cities Are Starting to Push Back (themarkup.org)
Federal prosecutors have accused software company RealPage of enriching itself "at the expense of renters who pay inflated prices"
A federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert (theatlantic.com)
The concept of the food desert has been around long enough that it feels almost like a fact of nature. Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the general consensus is that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate sufficient spending on groceries, or they can’t overcome a racist pattern of corporate redlining.
Natural soundscapes enhance mood recovery amid anthropogenic noise pollution (plos.org)
In urbanised landscapes, the scarcity of green spaces and increased exposure to anthropogenic noise have adverse effects on health and wellbeing.
Dutch suburb where residents must grow food on at least half of their property (theguardian.com)
In the suburb of Oosterwold, a living experiment in urban agriculture, the 5,000 inhabitants find different creative ways to fulfil the unique stipulation
Show HN: My city makes me smoke 40 cigarettes per day (air.nmn.gl)
The problem isn't natural - it's caused by humans.That means we can fix it through action.