The Dissection Room

TL;DR: Important points are marked in this color.

• American cities are way too spread out and hence cause traffic congestions. Indian (any developing country) cities are not designed to handle any kind of traffic whatsoever. Hence creating infrastructure there incur costs of re-settlement and demolitions which make costs (monetory/time/convenience) extremely high. Cheaper to create brand new cities.
• Desgin a cluster of small cities that are mostly walkable.
• Lay them out such that minimal construction of subway lines are needed.
• Mix of surburb and downtown lifestyles. Surburbs connected by cheaper bus lines working on existing freeways providing subway type convenience.
• Easy to understand transportation structure and city layout.
• Main component of the design is to  ONLY bring people (and NOT vehicles) into the city by using ample parking lots with convenient transportation.
  

Motivation:

Having lived in cities like Mumbai, Pune, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles, I have always wondered what it would take to rid these cities of a common problem all these cities have, and that is traffic congestion. One way NYC does it is by having a nice public transportation system (atleast within Manhattan). But building this much subway infrastructure is prohibitively expensive in terms of price, time and inconvenience. But what if we can design cities from scratch, what inspiration can we draw from cities we know to pick out the best parts. Smart designs like the stradling bus is what inspired me to keep thinking of such problems. I will now attempt to put this design into words and diagrams. I would love to use some urban planning software to do this design, but Im not sure, if I will ever find the time to do it. So rather than wait to have an immaculate design, I will start by using drawings and paper napkin sketches.

Indian cities have been seriously bad at planning. They have grown organically with practically no infrastructure. As they expanded roads and rails have been laid out to facilitate this expansion. But each job is just a patch work over an already bad design and layout. I personally feel the money spent in maintaining and building all this infrastructure is much more than what would be needed to build new cities altogether. And if you take into account the predicted rise in urban population in the next 15 years, there is need to more than double the existing urban expanse of most cities. Instead of grappling with infrastrure issues of existing cities, it would be so much easier and cheaper to build totally new cities, that are well planned and economically viable.

Existing City Problems:

Cities like Manahattan are better off as the city is much more dense and hence more walkable. but just the large size of Manhattan has forced it to build a large subway system that services it. The subway is way too expensive to replicate in other cities, especially since digging under an existing city is so much more expensive than laying the subway at ground level or at an elevation.

Hence the approach I have taken is to build mini Manhattans with a central backbone subway system, that has high frequency and load bearing capacity.

City Design

Layout:

In the design above, I have structured my city into smaller circular satellite cities (C1 to C6) which in turn are placed within a circle with the airport at the center. The circular arrangement is so that the maximum commute time from any part of the city is roughly the same, thus causing uniform expansion of the city and uniform rise in real estate. The main idea of the design was to have small densely populated and self sufficient areas, such that it is small enough to be able to provide all necessary infrastructure, but dense enough to provide the vibrant city feel. Also having a contained spread is cheaper to layout public transportation so that you do not need the number of subway lines New York has.

Stratergically positioned parking structures are the main element in the design of this city. It avoids bringing large traffic into the core, while not reducing the convenience.

Walkability:

Each satellite city is designed in a way to be either walkable or reachable by minimum public transportation. The diameter of each satellite city is 4km (2.5 miles), thus making traversing the city easy either by foot, bicycle or by bus / train. The circular design ensures that there is no diagonal element and the max distance between two points is always capped at 4km. Each city will contain all facilities including residential, workplaces, hospitals, schools and entertainment venues.

The Subway:

There will be two subway lines, the main circular line (red) that connects all the satellite citites and second east west line (blue) that connects the airport and runs across the surburbs to various important places of interest. The satellite cities were laid out in a circular fashion so that trains can be running in both the clockwise and anti-clockwise direction. There will be three lines in each direction thus providing ample room to carry the entire concentrated load.

The east-west blue line runs across the city and helps connects the core of the city to the surburbs and important places of interest, like the sport stadiums, entertainment centers and major hospitals and universities.

Bus Lines:

There are major bus lines coming towards the core from all directions I1 to I10. There also arehuge parking structures on these freeways so as to allow people living in the surburbs to be able to park in one of those and take the bus in. This provides ample backbone connectivity to the surburbs without laying down expensive train routes. Buses provide a much cheaper and greener approach that trains.

Each freeway will have dedicated bus lanes and dedicated pull out zones for busses to be able to quickly pull off to load and unload passengers. Each such zone will be located at the parking structure so that people can safely move from the freeway straight into the parking structure.

Future Satellite cities:

The areas at the intersection of the freeways will tend to become more densely populated as, space within the core gets filled up. These areas are marked in orange and can later be developed on the lines of the existing satellite cities.

Satellite City Details

Transportation:

The red subway line passes through each satellite city in the north-south direction and has three subway stops. This reduces the maximum distance to be walked to get to a stop, to be under 1 km

Also the city has 1 circular main road of 3km diameter and a cross road that runs in east-west and north-south direction. These roads are served by busses. All these roads pass through the major parking lots, so that people driving into the city can immediately avail of public transportation.

There is also a major road around the city circumference, which would fall within the satellite city limit. These major roads are needed for emergency services.

Parking Structures:

There are 8 parking structures inside the satellite city limits and are indicated by rectangular boxes. Parking here incurs high parking fees. The costs for any vehicle to enter a satellite city limits should be very high.

Roads:

Apart from the two major circular roads (One with diameter 3km and the other around the circumference), there will be yet another freeway that circles the city on the outside of the green limits. These freeways will also contain parking structures that will be less expensive and will also be used to serve the schools, colleges and buildings that lie around the circumference of the city.

Recreation:

5-6 major blocks in the center of the city [marked in green] will be reserved for parks. Apart from those 15 strtergically chosen blocks should also be reserved for parks and games. The major green cover will come at the circumference of the city with a 300 meter thick ring of green open space consisting of parks, sports like cricket grounds,tennis and basketball courts, golf clubs and the rest. Thus it would ensure that a park is at the most a km away from any place in the city.

Layout:

Certain areas around the subway stops will develop as office and other commercial space. With the central few blocks being reserved for hospitals, museum, city schools and colleges; night life would tend to grow around the central major ring as it would support a decent transportation system and still be away from the commuter and tourist rush. Residential buildings will spring more towards the circumference, as it will be closer to the parks while offerring sweeping views outside the city.

Emergency Services:

The major roads provide easy access to any corner within the city for emergency services to reach quickly. Also having a large cirumference, a circular design provides for easy evacuation of the city towards the parks.

Anyways these were my ideas on what an ideal city should be like. I am finally glad I could get it out of my system and onto a blog. If you are still reading this, I salute you for your patience. Thanks for reading.

As the debates over SOPA wage on, the internet community is screaming out that 'Innovation' rather than 'legislation' is the solution to combat piracy. But none in the media/music industry seem to get this point. And honestly, why would they get it, when they are run by lawyers rather than entrepreneurs. That is why they have done what they know best, and that is spend their time in courts, trying to shut down every file-sharing company out there. Following the failure of that effort, they are now trying to lobby Congress to get in legislation which will in effect, enable them to choke and strangle any company on the Internet.

So the question I have is, will they ever get what innovation means, without it being spelled out for them? Hence I would like to dedicate this post, and maybe a page, that calls on the tech community to define different initiatives the media industry can take, to spur on innovation.

• Data Availability: This would deal with music data available through a range of APIs for free, for developers and music startups. Sure, there can be various kinds of usage caps enforced. But the availability of data for developers to play around with, and build and validate their products, is according to me, the single biggest thing the labels can do.

• Startup Licenses: There should be standard licensing formats that will apply accross the board to all music startups, so that there is a minimal amount of, or no  human interaction cost, to have to negotiate terms with 1 & 2 person teams. The licensing should be free or very cheap, till the company can acquire some sort of scale.

• Labels Interoperability: The four major music labels should have a set of well defined terms so that licensing for companies owned by any of the labels is not an issue. This will help their own engineering teams to innovate as well as smoothen the process of mergers and acquisitions.

• Make music startups a rewarding experience: Pandora and Spotify are examples of companies which have to generate millions of dollars in revenue, just to break even. If founders cannot figure out a way to make money for themselves, while dealing with music labels, they will innovate in other areas (music creation and distribution tools), which in turn will undermine the labels. One way this can be achieved is by making the license deals less demanding, (the labels should not look to make all their money out of a few deals, but allow the ecosystem to find different revenue streams). They should also be pumping some dollars into the ecosystem, in the form of acquisitions, which will not only create success stories to inspire more founders, but also bring in the much required tech talent to provide innovation within.

• International Music licensing: Labels can probably give out cheap or free rights to certain international markets, so that innovative ideas can be tested out else where before touching the valuable US markets.

• Music Incubators: It will be great if the four big music / media labels can partner in a fund that will sponsor media startup specific incubators providing the necessary resources and advice that startups would need.

So even if music labels cannot innovate themselves, they are in a position to help build and nurture an ecosystem that will innovate for them. Because of owning the content, they will always be in a position to bargain at anytime. If they do not grab these chances now, innovation will continue to happen around ways to obliterate them or make them irrelevant.

I do not expect the music industry to start adopting any simiar suggestions, but would like the tech community to pour out their frustrations that the've had while working with the media industry, and come up with a detailed plan of what exactly do we think can put an end to the Music Industry's woes and help them look beyond their stupid ways for bringing in legislation to throttle the internet.

I have asked this question on Quora too.

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-problems-stopping-the-music-Industry-from-i...