What's so special about rail, though? Why can it provide the most capacity? A brief digression about capacity multipliers...
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...grouped "sets" of buses that move simultaneously. Instead of getting ten buses, one after another, through a stop, move them all at once.
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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.
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The crucial thing is that cars, buses, etc, have one capacity multiplier (seats); trains have two (seats per carriage + # of carriages)
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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
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So, why all this emphasis on commercial space and throughput? Futurism!
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Technological development is a process which occurs in active & growing cities--Jacobs writes about this in "Economy of Cities."
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So, cities need to grow--which means they need to be able to handle greater and greater concentrations of commercial activity.
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IF--big if--the only limits to human development are ingenuity, then I think "3 dimensional" commercial space will be more common in future.
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Currently, development of this intensity only exists where the transportation tech allows it to: at a handful of VERY busy stations in Japan
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Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Yokohama, Shibuya, Tokyo, Osaka, etc...a handful more, tops. But I suspect this is the core of cities of the future.
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There is in fact one example of a city which WAS built according to this principle, now demolished: Kowloon Walled City.
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It solved the transportation problem in a drastic fashion; everyone who worked there also lived there. Remarkable place, RIP.
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Kowloon represents a rough draft, a trial run. The transit hubs of Japan are a second draft, more "first-world" this time.
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For this sort of truly spatial (rather than planar) development, high-capacity transport is needed on X and Y axes; elevators & trains.
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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.
End of conversation
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