Former Chief Urban Designer of The City of New York Alexandros Washburn joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about city planning. How does the New York City Subway compare to others worldwide? What are the pros and cons of rent control initiatives? Which city can lay claim to being "smartest" in the world? Or has the best airport? What challenges will the urban designers of tomorrow need to meet? Alexandros Washburn answers these questions and many more on City Planning Support.
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00:00I'm Alexandros Washburn, former Chief Urban Designer of New York City, and I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.
00:06This is City Planning Support.
00:08City Planning Support
00:13At UrbanistOrg asks,
00:15How can cities make bike lanes safer?
00:18The answer might surprise you.
00:19You know what we found out in New York?
00:20The best way to make a bike lane safer on, say, 6th Avenue?
00:24Park cars next to it.
00:26We moved the parking lane away from the curb and put the bike lane on the sidewalk side of the cars.
00:32Now those parked cars act like a buffer.
00:35ERWNN asks,
00:37Is the New York City subway really that bad compared to other world city metro systems?
00:42Short answer is yes.
00:44It's a great system in the way it's been laid out and how many miles it is.
00:49It's one of the world's largest systems.
00:50It hasn't been maintained very well.
00:52And one of the reasons is that the city that never sleeps, we never shut down the subways at night to fix them.
00:57The cumulative effects of lack of maintenance or sleep for our subways have really caught up with us.
01:02And things are not good right now.
01:04It's also interesting if you go to another city with a major metro system, say like Moscow,
01:08you will be amazed at how fast the trains run and how fast the escalators go.
01:13There's just kind of a sense of pace that we seem to have lost.
01:17We have neglected our subways and we have a long way to go to make them halfway as good as many cities around the world.
01:24At DeepYearning asks,
01:26Guys, can anyone help me understand something?
01:28Is rent control bad or good?
01:30Like what are the pros and cons of it?
01:32Rent control is a tool to make cities more affordable.
01:36It should be a good thing.
01:37Some places in the world where rent control is actually a national policy,
01:41say Germany, has a pretty stable, solid housing market.
01:45It seems to work.
01:46But then again, rent control in other places has different effects.
01:51Sometimes people don't want to build a building if they know it's going to be rent controlled in the future.
01:56Sometimes banks don't want to give a loan on a building that will be rent controlled in the future
02:00because nobody knows what the future will bring and development starts drying up.
02:05Why can rent control be workable in one place and then have a chilling effect on another?
02:11And you know, I think the answer is actually societal.
02:14You know, places where it works best are relatively homogeneous societies.
02:18It becomes a policy tool, not a discrimination tool.
02:21Keep rent control in your toolkit.
02:24But there are other tools like rent support vouchers or simply increase your supply.
02:30At InfoSecTaylor,
02:32Okay Boston folk, you win.
02:34This is the worst city I have driven in.
02:36You get the gold medal.
02:37Why would you let your city planners do this to you?
02:40As we all know, Boston was planned by cows.
02:43Essentially the streets of Boston follow 17th century cow paths that crisscrossed it.
02:49It's as simple as that.
02:50Sometimes even the planners aren't at fault.
02:52At PKCG5 asks,
02:56Why so green Singapore?
02:58Singapore, one of my favorite cities.
03:00A green city because it made a decision at its very start to be a city in a park.
03:05Everything about it is geared towards bringing the nature into the city and using nature like infrastructure.
03:11Part of their main issues is of course the very hot climate.
03:15So nature becomes a way of creating a microclimate.
03:18So the plants have a cooling effect on the city.
03:20In fact, they're little solar panels.
03:22They take solar energy and they turn it into biomass.
03:24And that biomass pulls the energy out of the microclimate system.
03:29And beyond that turns it into shade which then protects the pavement itself from getting over hot.
03:35And it creates oxygen to boot.
03:37It's a win-win-win.
03:38Singaporeans are pretty smart.
03:40Ah, Damon Prince of Corn.
03:42What airports are perfect, close to perfect, or otherwise great?
03:47So Singapore is the best because anytime they have to figure out how many square feet do we need for say security,
03:53they double it, triple it, quadruple it.
03:55They know that everything is growing.
03:58So they look ahead.
03:59Then they ask, are people bored in between flights?
04:03The answer was yes.
04:04So they built the most incredible nature park inside of an airport with hundreds foot tall waterfall,
04:11incredible jungle trails you can take, shopping, dining.
04:15It becomes a place.
04:17It would be good for us in the United States to start thinking about it that way.
04:21Let's make an airport you actually will be delighted to visit.
04:24All right.
04:25EnergyPer250MLServe asks,
04:29Are there any cities that are really doing everything or almost everything right in regards to urban planning?
04:35The answer is yes.
04:37And that city is Paris.
04:39They do everything right.
04:41And it's very annoying.
04:42Bikeshare.
04:43They did it first.
04:44New York.
04:45We love our city bikes, but we stole the idea.
04:47The High Line.
04:48They did it first.
04:49It was called the Promenade Plantée.
04:51We stole it.
04:52The next one that I'd like to steal from them is that they've made a network of streets that are meant to get to schools.
04:58So they're like super safe streets.
04:59Streets where you'd be happy for your kids to walk on their own or bike on their own to school.
05:04What a great idea.
05:05Let's steal that one too.
05:07AtEndava asks,
05:09What makes a smart city smart?
05:11A smart city is a city that makes the right decisions.
05:14Now the best cities right now for smart are the ones that have great databases because the data helps you make the right decision.
05:20An example of data a smart city would use are traffic flows.
05:24Where are all the cars right now?
05:26Where are they going to be?
05:27What are the impediments?
05:28How do we open up?
05:29How do we change the patterns?
05:31It's the ability to respond in real time that makes a really good smart city really smart.
05:37Reddit sub admin,
05:38What is the biggest reason America is so car dependent?
05:41The one thing that says it all is a phrase from the 1950s.
05:45What's good for General Motors is good for America.
05:48The United States, right at the beginning of its largest growth spurt, decided that cars were the answer.
05:56Everything in American city planning was dimensioned to a car.
06:00How far it turns, how many parking spaces you have to have, how wide the streets are, etc.
06:05Once you make those decisions, you can't change them.
06:07It's called path dependency.
06:09To change that requires a lot of ingenuity.
06:12We talked earlier about how you put bike lanes and parking lanes together.
06:15But it's going to require thinking outside the box, thinking outside the car.
06:21Lianen salary say,
06:23Not sure why they aren't turning the current empty office blocks into small apartments.
06:28Don't we need housing more than offices?
06:30Indeed we do.
06:31And it's totally doable except that we stand in our own way.
06:35We've created an incredible framework of rules that a building has a specific use and only one use.
06:42What are some of these rules that stand in the way?
06:45There's light and air.
06:46It's the first one.
06:47If you're an apartment, you need to be able to open the window.
06:49And for some reason, somebody in the 60s or 70s came up with this idea that if you're an office, you don't need to open a window.
06:55Now, that's not the way it is in Germany.
06:57But in America, it's that way.
06:59So you've got all these hermetically sealed buildings.
07:01And now we've got to get past that.
07:02Open the window.
07:04And then people say, well, you're going to be too far away from a window if you fill an office building with apartments.
07:09You don't have to have the apartment go all the way back to the elevator.
07:13What if it stops 30 feet back?
07:15Which is the current rule for how far away you can be from an open window.
07:19And after that, why not make some space where we can perhaps have some vertical farming?
07:23Sure, you can put storage or bill of storage.
07:25But why not grow some vegetables?
07:27Okay, Stata6738 asks, what do you think are the current and future challenges that affect urban planning?
07:34It's declining population.
07:36We're not there yet.
07:37Certainly not in America.
07:39Certain places are, like Bulgaria, for instance, where there are a million more apartments than there are people.
07:45The movement from the countryside to cities is starting to slow down.
07:51And we've been in this frenzy of city building.
07:53And we haven't done a very good job with it.
07:55The biggest challenge for urban planning, looking into the 50-year future, I'm not talking about next year,
08:00is what are we going to do when population starts to plateau and then decline?
08:06And then all the pressure on building more and new and better is not there.
08:12And we have to deal with what we have.
08:14At Aaron Rose Glass, what if public libraries were open late every night?
08:20And we could engage in public life there instead of having to choose between drinking at the bar and domestic isolation?
08:26Great suggestion, but I wouldn't limit it just to public libraries.
08:29Every city has got to have public space.
08:31If you don't exclude people, everyone comes together.
08:34Whether it's your library or your park or in the ideal world,
08:38every street that you can walk down should be a place where you can respectfully interact with your fellow citizens.
08:44And that interaction is what builds up sociability.
08:47At Wildflower Milk, whoever made tolls a thing, I just want to talk.
08:52Like, why do I have to pay to drive around the city I live in?
08:56What the ****?
08:57Who pays?
08:58Who pays for the roadbed?
09:00Who pays for maintaining the streets?
09:02Can you pay a toll?
09:04Can you pay the full cost of driving around your city?
09:07Well, we've never done that in America.
09:09We've always hidden the true cost of driving in other budgets and not passed them on to cars.
09:14There's always been one toll in America, and that is the highway gas tax.
09:19But that is an absurdly small percentage of every gallon of gas you buy.
09:24Congestion pricing, tolling cars in certain areas of the city,
09:28that's a way to try to recover some of the costs of maintaining a road network in the city
09:34and pass them on to the people who actually are using them, the drivers,
09:39and not to bury them into the municipal tax budget, which otherwise could go to schools or daycare.
09:46At Eddie345 asks,
09:53Someone who has been in 51 degrees Celsius summer heat in Dubai, I know what you're feeling.
09:57The three things you've got to do.
09:59Number one, you can adjust your clothing.
10:01There are certain standards of kind of international dress, you know, suits and shoes and stuff like that.
10:06Forget about those in the 51 degrees.
10:09Open-toed shoes are fine.
10:11Two, adapt your hours.
10:12Don't go out in the middle of the day.
10:15Dubai at nighttime can also be pretty hot and humid.
10:18So that gets me to the third one, and that is humidity control.
10:21You know, we've been so focused on air conditioning and bringing the temperature down,
10:25but you'll find that a lot of what makes you comfortable is a certain level of humidity relative to a certain temperature.
10:30Dehumidification takes less energy than air conditioning.
10:33And guess what it makes?
10:35It makes water.
10:36And who needs water?
10:37Oh, the Gulf states need water.
10:39As you pull that humidity out of the atmosphere, you make yourself more comfortable,
10:43and you create for yourself some potable water.
10:46C. Sosa asks,
10:50My answer is, maybe you don't.
10:52L.A. is a much more progressive city than we understand from urban planning tours because it is what's called a polycentric city.
11:00Yes, L.A. has huge traffic problems.
11:03But over time, different neighborhoods have started growing into places.
11:07Now L.A. is becoming a city of cities.
11:10Once you do that, you can start not needing a car as much.
11:14L.A., everybody loves to hate it for the traffic, but it may have a thing on the future
11:19where if it succeeds in connecting its nodes through things other than cars, then it's going to thrive.
11:24And we might be looking to L.A. in the future as an example, not a punchline.
11:28That's it. That's all the questions.
11:30Hope you learned something.
11:31Till next time.