...it becomes essential to have residences w/in walking distance and some sort of transit as well as parking.pic.twitter.com/ajMblKKnYw
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Frequency = vehicular throughput = cars (or buses, etc) per hour. 2,000 cars per hour could be 2,000 people or 10,000 people.
Vehicular throughput has severe space constraints, so multipliers are important. To move 10,000 people by car, you need...
...either one lane of road, at 60 mph, w cars carrying 5 people on average, w/o stopping...or 5 lanes, 1 person avg, same speed, no stopping
The higher the capacity multiplier, the lower the frequency you need to achieve the same throughput.
Buses have 10 times as many seats as cars, which is a huge boost. Trains have 10 times as many as buses, as they are effectively...
...grouped "sets" of buses that move simultaneously. Instead of getting ten buses, one after another, through a stop, move them all at once.
It should be clear, btw, that "train" here does not necessarily mean "uses two steel rails." The tech can vary as long as the form is right.
The crucial thing is that cars, buses, etc, have one capacity multiplier (seats); trains have two (seats per carriage + # of carriages)
So, trains can manage the best throughput per lane, a station with 10 tracks can handle FAR more people in an hour than a highway w 10 lanes
So, why all this emphasis on commercial space and throughput? Futurism!
Technological development is a process which occurs in active & growing cities--Jacobs writes about this in "Economy of Cities."
So, cities need to grow--which means they need to be able to handle greater and greater concentrations of commercial activity.
IF--big if--the only limits to human development are ingenuity, then I think "3 dimensional" commercial space will be more common in future.
Currently, development of this intensity only exists where the transportation tech allows it to: at a handful of VERY busy stations in Japan
Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Yokohama, Shibuya, Tokyo, Osaka, etc...a handful more, tops. But I suspect this is the core of cities of the future.
There is in fact one example of a city which WAS built according to this principle, now demolished: Kowloon Walled City.
It solved the transportation problem in a drastic fashion; everyone who worked there also lived there. Remarkable place, RIP.
Kowloon represents a rough draft, a trial run. The transit hubs of Japan are a second draft, more "first-world" this time.
For this sort of truly spatial (rather than planar) development, high-capacity transport is needed on X and Y axes; elevators & trains.
This, then, is my way of saying that cities w/o cars are possible, and cities w/o trains WERE possible...but prob won't be from now on.
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