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Did Sim City Make Us Stupid?

Posted on June 7, 2009 in Architecture, Education, Public Outreach, US Federal Policy
250px-SimCity_Classic_cover_art My post on the lack of good simulation games triggered this reverie from Peter, regarding the city-planning simulation game, Sim City:

Ah, SimCity.  … As a youngster I spent many hours building fields of residential tract housing, industrial parks, huge blighted and substantially vacant commercial districts, mega-highways connecting them all, and Godzilla.

When I recently discovered that the original SimCity was released as open source, I had to download it and try it out. I knew that it was inaccurate, but it was nostalgia. Then I discovered exactly how inaccurate it was. “No mixed residential and commercial areas?!? WTF!” I did play it long enough to also notice that transportation was pretty much a capital expenditure with no operating costs. Sigh.

Yes, those are the two of the worst fallacies built into the original Sim City:  

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The Joy of High Ceilings (also called Low Floors)

Posted on May 25, 2009 in Architecture

DSCF7886 The marvelous post at Light and Air on the recent history of ceiling height is mostly about architecture, but it resonated for me as a transit planner.*

Over the past century, U.S. citizens grew taller while ceiling heights shrank.  Simultaneously, the U.S. lost world leadership in average height to the Netherlands and eight other countries, whose people grew taller faster.  It is difficult to find people who prefer low ceilings.  In wealthy western societies there seems to be no other time when ceilings and heads were so uncomfortably proximate.  What does ceiling height tell us about our society …?

There is a reason that dark, low-ceilinged rooms are still commonly used in literature to describe spaces that symbolize poverty, danger and unhealthy conditions.

Ceiling height is interesting because it’s one of those things that strikes most of us subliminally.  We aren’t always aware of why a high-ceilinged space feels better, but it does.

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Is Elevated Acceptable?

Posted on May 19, 2009 in Architecture, Honolulu, Rail Transit, Vancouver

DSCN1552

The Transport Politic has an excellent post on the debate over the plan to build Honolulu’s proposed light rail system elevated through downtown, as opposed to at the surface as a group of architects wants.

Everyone is prone to reduce the complexity of urbanism to a problem solvable by their own profession, and risks being dismissive of the expertise of other professions’ points of view.  (See here, for example.)  When a group of architects proposes that a major new transit investment should be made slower and more expensive to operate in order to foster a better streetscape, as is happening in Honolulu, one hopes that they have thought through the urbanist consequences of all the people who’ll be in cars instead of on transit because the transit is too slow, infrequent, and unreliable.  Let me clarify each of those words:

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