#Dont starve optimal layout full

The main thing that makes a well-functioning city is to be walkable. Grid streets make more sense to me than random streets. However, there are some things about older cities I wouldn’t imitate. Newer cities should look to older cities to see what works, not chase some mad dream that looks neat on an architect’s pad but is designed for robots rather than humans. It doesn’t matter whether they’re 1000 years old or 50 years old. There’s a right way and a wrong way to design cities. It is much tougher to convert a city like that into a city where people routinely walk, bike and take transit. The entire metropolis - 10th largest in the country - has grown up with the automobile. Now it has 1.6 million (and that doesn’t count the suburbs, which account for another 3.2 million). Phoenix, for example, was a small town before the automobile (it had 30,000 people in 1920). It is just tougher for a city like Seattle to reverse course (closing I-5 in Seattle is considered radical) and Seattle is one of the more progressive cities in that regard. Amsterdam is in much better shape, but that is both because they never ran freeways through the heart of the city (although they did form a ring around it) and were never as dependent on the automobile.

Then in the 1970s, both reversed course, rejecting further freeway expansion into the city, and pushing towards more transit, biking and walking ( ). As cities throughout the world began to reject the “freeways-everywhere” approach, it was much harder for American cities to reverse course.įor example, Amsterdam and Seattle both became very car focused after the war. Thus it was relatively easy to reject automobile-focused development (or reverse it) because there was plenty of infrastructure that existed before it. It has grown, but not to the same extent during this period. A lot of the cities didn’t exist, or were very small before the car. had a huge surge of population after the automobile was invented. People migrate from Europe to the US not the other way around.īut that is the point. You wouldn’t expect it to grow as fast as “the frontier west”. Yeah but… Germany is twice the size of WA but has 10X the population.

#Dont starve optimal layout full

Just like our email boxes are increasingly full of “junk”, we need to accept that the videos that are suggested to us for watching are going to generally devolve in information accuracy and value. Unless there is a fundamental restructuring of rail ownership and planning, it will remain difficult to implement high speed rail in the US - even in corridors that are well-suited for it. Highways and airports don’t wrestle with using private corridors for the most part (Texas toll roads notwithstanding). In that respect, Europe (and other parts of the world) has been able to avoid the complex and costly negotiations that we have in the US. The amount of city evolution that occurred in the automobile era is simply a much smaller proportion of their total development.Īnother structural aspect is the relationship between railroads and the government led to the better higher speed rail system. In this context, I have to take issue with the notion that proactive “planning” was a deliberate result of better city layout. Most American cities that are more walkable and have urban rail were generally began before the auto era too. Consider that the German population since 1960 (east + west before 1989) has grown by only 5 million, while Washington State alone has grown by well over 4 million (and the US by 152 million) in the same time period. During the automobile era, Europe had less population grown relative to the US.

Many grew quickly during the rail and subway building age.

Most European cities thrived for centuries on foot transport. I really dislike videos like this that ignore the chronological aspects of city development.