If I understand correctly, skyscrapers don’t scale as well due to shadow. For every additional floor of skyscraper that’s built, there’s multiple floors worth of ground area on which building another skyscraper is now a bad idea. So a large region with densely packed 4-storey buildings packs more people than the same region but with some 100-storey skyscrapers.
I think we’re in agreement that dense 4-story buildings tend to be usually more efficient than skyscrapers. I’m mostly referring to the cities like Paris which are shorter than free market economics would build—and especially cities (and even more, suburbs) of the USA where land use restrictions are even more restrictive.
Yes I’m assuming political elites ambitious enough to build a intracity network of bullet train will also figure out some solutions for this. Land use restrictions are okay if the city is big enough. Assuming 400 km * 400 km city with 200 km/h train, that’s a lot of land area. Even if some of it is used inefficiently, it may not have large effects. I do think allowing free market-ish building for the city makes sense here though, rather than a slow permitting system for each building. This is for speed alone.
Can you share why?
If I understand correctly, skyscrapers don’t scale as well due to shadow. For every additional floor of skyscraper that’s built, there’s multiple floors worth of ground area on which building another skyscraper is now a bad idea. So a large region with densely packed 4-storey buildings packs more people than the same region but with some 100-storey skyscrapers.
I think we’re in agreement that dense 4-story buildings tend to be usually more efficient than skyscrapers. I’m mostly referring to the cities like Paris which are shorter than free market economics would build—and especially cities (and even more, suburbs) of the USA where land use restrictions are even more restrictive.
Yes I’m assuming political elites ambitious enough to build a intracity network of bullet train will also figure out some solutions for this. Land use restrictions are okay if the city is big enough. Assuming 400 km * 400 km city with 200 km/h train, that’s a lot of land area. Even if some of it is used inefficiently, it may not have large effects. I do think allowing free market-ish building for the city makes sense here though, rather than a slow permitting system for each building. This is for speed alone.