I'm Alexandros Washburn,

former Chief Urban Designer of New York City,

and I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.

This is City Planning Support.

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@UrbanistOrg asks,

How can cities make bike lanes safer?

The answer might surprise you.

You know what we found out in New York?

The best way to make a bike lane safer

on say Sixth Avenue, park cars next to it.

We moved the parking lane away from the curb

and put the bike lane on the sidewalk side of the cars.

Now those parked cars act like a buffer.

@erwnn asks, Is the New York City subway

really that bad compared to other world city metro systems?

Short answer is yes.

It's a great system in the way it's been laid out

and how many miles it is.

It's one of the world's largest systems.

It hasn't been maintained very well.

And one of the reasons is that the city that never sleeps,

we never shut down the subways at night to fix 'em.

The cumulative effects of lack of maintenance or sleep

for our subways have really caught up with us.

And things are not good right now.

It's also interesting if you go to another city

with a major metro system, say like Moscow,

you will be amazed at how fast the trains run

and how fast the escalators go.

There's just kind of a sense of pace

that we seem to have lost.

We have neglected our subways

and we have a long way to go to make 'em halfway

as good as many cities around the world.

@_deep_yearning asks,

Guys, can anyone help me understand something?

Is rent control bad or good?

Like what are the pros and cons of it?

Rent control is a tool to make cities more affordable.

It should be a good thing.

Some places in the world

where rent control is actually a national policy,

say Germany, has a pretty stable, solid housing market.

It seems to work.

But then again, rent control in other places

has different effects.

Sometimes people don't wanna build a building

if they know it's gonna be rent controlled in the future.

Sometimes banks don't wanna give a loan on a building

that will be rent controlled in the future

because nobody knows what the future will bring.

And development starts drying up.

Why can rent control be workable in one place

and then have a chilling effect on another?

And, you know, I think the answer is actually societal.

You know, places where it works best

are relatively homogeneous societies.

It becomes a policy tool, not a discrimination tool.

Keep rent control in your toolkit.

But there are other tools like rent support vouchers,

or simply increase your supply.

@infosec_Taylor, Okay, Boston folk, you win.

This is the worst city I have driven in.

You get the gold medal.

Why would you let your city planners do this to you?

As we all know, Boston was planned by cows.

Essentially, the streets

of Boston follow 17th century cow paths

that crisscrossed it.

It's as simple as that.

Sometimes even the planners aren't at fault.

@PKC5G asks, Why So green, Singapore?

Singapore, one of my favorite cities,

a green city because it made a decision at its very start

to be a city in a park.

Everything about it is geared towards bringing the nature

into the city and using nature like infrastructure.

Part of their main issues is of course the very hot climate.

So nature becomes a way of creating a microclimate.

So the plants have a cooling effect on the city.

In fact, they're little solar panels.

They take solar energy and they turn it into biomass.

And that biomass pulls the energy

out of the microclimate system

and beyond that turns it into shade,

which then protects the pavement itself

from getting over hot,

and it creates oxygen to boot.

It's a win win win.

Singaporeans are pretty smart.

DaemonPrinceOfCorn,

What airports are perfect, close to perfect

or otherwise great?

So Singapore is the best

because anytime they have to figure out

how many square feet do we need for say security,

they double it, triple it, quadruple it.

They know that everything is growing, so they look ahead.

Then they ask, are people bored in between flights?

The answer was yes.

So they built the most incredible nature park

inside of an airport with hundreds foot tall waterfall,

incredible jungle trails you can take, shopping, dining.

It becomes a place.

It'll be good for us in the United States

to start thinking about it that way.

Let's make an airport

you actually will be delighted to visit.

All right, @energyper250mlserve asks,

Are there any cities that are really doing everything

or almost everything right in regards to urban planning?

The answer is yes.

And that city is Paris.

They do everything right, and it's very annoying.

Bike share, they did it first.

New York, we love our city bikes,

but we stole the idea.

The high line, they did it first.

It was called the Promenade plantee; we stole it.

The 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.

So they're like super safe streets.

Streets where you'd be happy for your kids

to walk on their own or bike on their own to school.

What a great idea.

Let's steal that one too.

@Endava asks, What makes a smart city smart?

A smart city is a city that makes the right decisions.

Now, the best cities right now for smart

are the ones that have great databases

because the data helps you make the right decision.

An example of data a smart city would use are traffic flows.

Where are all the cars right now?

Where are they gonna be?

What are the impediments?

How do we open up?

How do we change the patterns?

It's the ability to respond in real time

that makes a really good smart city really smart.

REEDIT_SUB_ADMIN,

What is the biggest reason America is so car-dependent?

The one thing that says it all is a phrase from the 1950s,

What's good for General Motors is good for America.

The United States, right at the beginning

of its largest growth spurt

decided that cars were the answer.

Everything in American city planning was dimension to a car.

How far it turns, how many parking spaces you have to have,

how wide the streets are, et cetera.

Once you make those decisions, you can't change 'em.

It's called path dependency.

To change that requires a lot of ingenuity.

We talked earlier about how you put bike lanes

and parking lanes together,

but it's gonna require thinking outside the box,

thinking outside the car.

@LeannanSaoirse,

Not sure why they aren't turning

the current empty office blocks into small apartments.

Don't we need housing more than offices?

Indeed, we do.

And it's totally doable except that we stand in our own way.

We've created an incredible framework of rules

that a building has a specific use and only one use.

What are some of these rules that stand in the way?

There's light and air. It's the first one.

If you're an apartment,

you need to be able to open the window.

And for some reason, somebody in the sixties

or seventies came up with this idea

that if you're an office, you don't need to open a window.

Now, that's not the way it is in Germany,

but in America it's that way.

So you've got all these hermetically sealed buildings,

and now we gotta get past that, open the window.

And then people say,

well, you're gonna be too far away from a window

if you fill an office building with apartments.

You don't have to have the apartment go all the way back

to the elevator.

What if it stops 30 feet back?

Which is the current rule

for how far away you can be from an opening window.

And after that, why not make some space

where we can perhaps have some vertical farming?

Sure, you can put storage or bill of storage,

but why not grow some vegetables?

Ok-Status6738 asks,

What do you think are the current and future challenges

that affect urban planning?

It's declining population.

We're not there yet. Certainly not in America.

Certain places are like Bulgaria, for instance,

where there are a million more apartments

than there are people.

The movement from the countryside to cities is starting

to slow down and we've been in this frenzy of city building,

and we haven't done a very good job with it.

The biggest challenge for urban planning,

looking into the 50-year future,

I'm not talking about next year,

is what are we gonna do when population starts to plateau

and then decline

and then all the pressure on building more

and new and better is not there

and we have to deal with what we have?

@erinroseglass,

What if public libraries were open late every night

and we could engage in public life there

instead of having to choose between drinking at the bar

and domestic isolation?

Great suggestion,

but I wouldn't limit it just to public libraries.

Every city's gotta have public space.

If you don't exclude people, everyone comes together.

Whether it's your library or your park

or in the ideal world,

every street that you can walk down should be a place

where you can respectfully interact

with your fellow citizens.

And that interaction is what builds up sociability.

@wildflowermilk,

Whoever made tolls the thing, I just want to talk.

Like, why do I have to pay to around the city I live in?

What the [beeps]?

Who pays?

Who pays for the road bed?

Who pays for maintaining the streets?

Can you pay a toll?

Can you pay the full cost of driving around your city?

Well, we've never done that in America.

We've always hidden the true cost of driving

in other budgets and not pass them on to cars.

There's always been one toll in America,

and that is the highway gas tax.

But that is an absurdly small percentage

of every gallon of gas you buy.

Congestion pricing, tolling cars

in certain areas of the city,

that's a way to try to recover some of the costs

of maintaining a road network in the city

and pass them on to the people

who actually are using them, the drivers,

and not to bury them into the municipal tax budget,

which otherwise could go to schools or daycare.

@Eddy345 asks,

How to survive in 51 degrees Celsius Summer heat in Dubai?

As someone who has been in 51 degrees Celsius summer heat

in Dubai, I know what you're feeling.

The three things you've gotta do.

Number one, you can adjust your clothing.

There are certain standards of kind of international dress,

you know, suits and shoes and stuff like that.

Forget about those in the 51 degrees.

Open toe shoes are fine.

Two, adapt your hours.

Don't go out in the middle of the day.

Dubai at nighttime can also be pretty hot and humid.

So that gets me to the third one,

and that is humidity control.

You know, we've been so focused on air conditioning

and bringing the temperature down,

but you'll find that a lot

of what makes you comfortable is a certain level

of humidity relative to a certain temperature.

Dehumidification takes less energy than air conditioning.

And guess what it makes? It makes water.

And who needs water?

Oh, the Gulf States need water.

As you pull that humidity out of the atmosphere,

you make yourself more comfortable

and you create for yourself some potable water.

Cee Sosa asks, How do you fix LA traffic?

My answer is, maybe you don't.

LA is a much more progressive city than we understand

from urban planning tour

because it is what's called a polycentric city.

Yes, LA has huge traffic problems.

But over time, different neighborhoods

have started growing into places.

Now LA is becoming a city of cities.

Once you do that, you can start not needing a car as much.

LA everybody loves to hate it for the traffic,

but it may have a thing on the future

where if it succeeds in connecting its nodes

through things other than cars, then it's gonna thrive.

And we might be looking to LA in the future

as an example, not a punchline.

That's it. That's all the questions.

Hope you learned something.

Till next time.

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