it's better as long as everybody realizes how they got to the current situation, and is willing to continue to make experimental, ad-hoc adjustements to suit the current needs as they change.
the problem happens when somebody decides a design that was arrived upon by spontaneous growth is perfect as-is, and when needs change instead of just fixing it, you need a 6-month study and a planning commission to make a change to existing infrastructure that only had five minutes of thought put into the original design.
I don't favor arbitrary requirement for studies but I think it's fair to acknowledge that whatever has grown organically over the years does have legitimate reasons why it's the way that it is, even if it wasn't master planned (arguably it probably makes more sense if it evolved) and so you cant really assume that the status quo can be dismissed just because it's not consciously deliberate
It presumably had a good reason for being in each intermediate state before the one you became attached to, and people were presumably attached to those.
I was thinking about this playing Cities Skylines today. I feel like I hate "master-planning" things when I start the game, but then my cities end up being chaos and needing lots of demolishing to fix broken stuff.
Certain things lend themselves well to master-planning. TCP/IP, or where transit lines are run before the city builds up around them. But only things that really need to be master-planned do better when planned that way; much of the best "large things" seem to work out better when many of the aspects are organic and human-scale.
From my experience playing factorio, the best way to approach it is to plan out the areas you are building to allow future "backtracking" possible - increase space between buildings, ensure new "roads" are "reasonably" arranged to allow future expansion, etc. An example of this is ensuring that driveways/building distances are a certain minimum from the road, allowing you to expand a 2 lane road to 3, etc.
You build your infrastructure to, or just past the edges of what you know is being built, and make sure you reserve space past that to accompany further expansion.
The lets you expand the ~factory~ city while still allowing some sanity to the underlying infrastructure.
* This will likely apply to anything that needs both preplanning and unknown future expansion such as codebases
You see stuff like that done in some places (eg: https://goo.gl/maps/q4Qm1cjjF9rA6MQY6 - the "highway" has space all around it for expansion, and has had that for decades from when there was nothing there)
They aren't independent, the city will tend to build up along the transit lines due to the easy access to transit. E.g., the NYC outer boroughs and the DC metro area.
That may be true for immovable train lines, but vehicle transit such as buses have routes which are subject to change, and therefore developers cannot depend on the transit lines being there in 10-20 years.
Bus lines instead tend to follow where the traffic wants to go. Around here, many shopping malls double as bus stations because the primary aim of transit seems to be circulating consumers around places they will spend money.
Consider the income levels of the staff that work at shopping malls and what that implies for their ability to pay for reliable personal transportation.
> Bus lines instead tend to follow where the traffic wants to go. Around here, many shopping malls double as bus stations because the primary aim of transit seems to be circulating consumers around places they will spend money.
This is circular reasoning though. Bus lines go to the mall, but malls are built where the bus lines go. Malls use a lot of space, so carving out a little bit for transit is easy.
Maybe not so much the where, but the how (zoning regs) matter. In SLC, the roads are pleasantly wide for a city it's age. Turns out they had to be wide enough for a wagon to turn around.
Trying to avoid painting yourself into a corner without over thinking is the game.
Yeah, the main advantage of pre-building is that land is cheap and nobody's using it, vs post-building where you know where the density is but you have to get the land.
In the cases I know of the density followed upon building the line, but that may not be universally true.
> The city may not build up in the way the planners anticipated.
It might not, but planners have a lot of forcing functions.
For example, if they build a transformational backbone, and nobody uses some part of it, they can fix it, by say, moving major government offices to that area. Residents, other businesses, services will follow suit.
What doesn't work is half-assed planning, where you have a grand, but myopic vision, implement it, and never adjust after-the-fact.
In what sense is TCP/IP master-planned? TCP has tons of options, and one of its key components, the congestion control algorithm, is unspecified and left up to client choice. Both of these facts have led to significant improvements, but even greater improvements were obtained by dumping TCP altogether, in large part because TCP ossified due to middleware behaving as if TCP were master-planned when it isn't. TCP, at least, is an anti-example to your point!
At a broader level, TCP/IP was just one of many competing networking technologies. Nobody master planned which one would win. That emerged organically through gradual decentralized convergence as many individual actors concluded TCP/IP was in some sense "better" than the alternatives.
I believe all cities people love to visit were built organically by huge numbers if individual actors doing what they thought best with their part of it.
Or are there any preplanned great cities I'm not aware of?
Eixample is alright, and supposedly a decent place to live, but the main touristy part of Barcelona is the old town, Barri Gòtic, which is a typical chaotic maze of streets. Eixample receives a lot of visitors too, of course, but not so much, I think, because it's very charming in itself, but because it makes up a large part of the inner city and thus contains a lot of tourist attractions (including Sagrada Familia and other buildings by Gaudí) and shopping streets.
Also, once you go beyond Eixample (except to the east) the city's not a regular grid anymore. In the end, Eixample and other, newer neighbourhoods built on a grid probably represent a (substantial, of course) minority of the city.
“The ITS system is not the result of a human wave or crash effort. The system has been incrementally developed almost continuously since its inception. As the system has matured there have always been new features to add to those under consideration as others were implemented or discarded.”
I appreciate the beauty that comes with the organic evolution of these buildings but if it leads to a "break lock in emergency" door, it is definitely not better.
I think but could be wrong that the article alludes to but does not explicitly state but that door is in fact a joke for instance it is a door that has a file cabinet on the other side and they didn't want people to go through it and they made a joke by labeling it thus and pretending the keys are lost. McMurdo feels like the type of place where someone could acquire a crowbar in under 10 seconds and that is the true key for that door if you ever in fact needed to use it.
A place I used to go to as a kid used to have a giant throw switch which said it would turn off the waterfall if thrown which was a joke they played on kids. It was in fact just the old Master throw switch for the house when they originally electric it up.
I think of long-established cities. You may have buildings of several different eras sitting next to one another, each with different ideas of electricity, water and sewage, connected to standard interfaces and coexisting.
If you're affluent enough to mitigate the negative effects of no zoning, sure -- i.e., able to afford different housing if needed.
If you lack that financial security, you may be stuck next to all sorts of undesirable properties, like a busy 24-hour shopping center. I saw that sort of thing frequently in Texas.
Of course, poor people get less desirable properties even in cities with zoning. But zoning does discourage some of the more haphazard "jigsaw puzzle" construction where residential buildings frequently abut busy non-residential parcels.
Zoning does that too. Usually MF is designed as a buffer between commercial and single family (as proxy for more/less affluence). Without zoning, it just happens more naturally because the commercial is going to usually want to be on a major road, then land next to busy commercial is not desirable for single family housing so a MF developer will build there.
The part I liked about it was the city was able to adapt to change. I saw the inner-loop part of Houston as a hellscape as a kid. Then ~2000s when inner-city gentrification began, it went quick. Neighborhoods tend to support more local business than the big box strip centers that proliferate in the master planned world. Also, master plans are just copy&pasted every couple of miles so it all just looks the same[0]. I liked having neighborhood restaurants and other quirky stuff inside an old house in the neighborhood, you actually knew the owner and it facilitated a sense of community. It's rarely ever actually in the neighborhood, just on a main thoroughfare that pretty much is high traffic regardless of the business use. I see living on a high traffic road not very different than living next to a busy shopping center.
The other thing I've noticed now that I live in Dallas (which is pretty similar to Houston except with zoning). I frequently see an undeveloped parcel of land and I think, "wow a X shop would do well in this location." I look up zoning and it's not allowed. What is allowed, IMO, wouldn't do well in that location. That's why it's still undeveloped land. Some map drawn 50+ years ago probably made some bad assumptions. Typically the neighbors will fight any zoning change because they actually like that nice undeveloped lot next door. Developers with bigger pockets pay the neighbors off so they don't fight the zoning change.
Hard to explain, but Dallas is known for 'lack of culture' and having lived in other Texas cities prior (Houston and Austin) I think it's largely due to with how it was designed. It's difficult to build anything unique or artistic here. Until it was banned a couple years ago, many of the city's in the metroplex building code would mandate exactly what brand and color of brick you could use. So we have entire small cities in the metroplex that are red brick (it was a trend in the 90s when that area was being swallowed by sprawl, and it's exactly what's off trend the last decade+) Actually, most cities still mandate it and if you're a developer you'd have to file a lawsuit to get your non-conforming design permitted (you'd win because State of Texas banned this a few years ago, but many municipalities have conveniently not updated their building codes).
Which segues to this;
> If you lack that financial security, you may be stuck next to all sorts of undesirable properties
But at least your in the mix of the city and somewhat able to interact and have social mobility, access to the core business districts and jobs that service the higher income citizens. In Dallas, the economic core/center of gravity is moving north towards Plano and those lacking financial security get pushed further and further south (usually). This essentially is a ghetto, food desert, high crime yet over policed, etc and provides little access to social mobility. It also reinforces a lot of the race issues that exist in our country. Dallas is very segregated compared to Houston.
[0] Most of Houston is very guilty of this, most of it also has defacto zoning by another name. I forget what it is, ordinances on noise and traffic impact or something. The inner loop area is pretty organic and sense it's well developed, you pretty much know who your neighbor is going to be. If you buy a house next to an undeveloped lot, you're rolling the dice, but there's likely not any lots big enough to build an oil refinery or a shopping mall or whatever. If you're in a residential area, it's likely a small lot and will eventually be built as residential.
I work at a large mining complex in Canada's far north. We have a mix of all types of door handles and mechanisms in outside-facing doors, like McMurdo, it would seem. Even the best of them fails to keep snow out and heat in when you get snow and ice caught in the door creases. Salt, sand, and shovel and pick are the motto.
Thankfully, more doors are further off the ground because of permafrost. Having stability and door-jam-avoiding benefits simultaneously.
What's really nice is they have an RSS feed, so after one of these posts showed up on HN a month or two ago, I've been following all their posts since.
When I hear McMurdo Station, I think of a single solitary building with maybe a dozen people. I had no idea McMurdo was so large with so many buildings! I spent a few minutes trying to find a decent map of the entire station, but came up short.
FSTP, prounounced "F-stop" like the camera setting, was the "field safety training program" and basically it refers to the group of mountaineers that the US Antarctic Program's contractor hires to live in Antarctica and help out with fieldwork. It also refers to the classes that they teach in McMurdo.
Basic FSTP "snow school" used to be required for everyone at McMurdo, and for many, it was the most fun thing you would get to do the whole season. You would learn to set up camp, cook, use radios, sleep out on the sea ice for one night (in a tent, igloo, snow trench, depending on the year and instructors).
I did a bunch of other FSTP-organized courses too, including how to travel on sea ice, and some mountaineering.
We had FSTP mountaineers with us up on Erebus and the joke was "the F stops here."
I think it got renamed to something else in 2017 or so... around when the BFC stopped referring to themselves as the building fulla chicks...
Right. So when I first went (2010-11), everybody going to mcmurdo had to sleep out on sea ice one night (and it was called "happy camper" or "snow school"). They gradually scaled back the program; added lesser versions and made it so your group had to request it. Maybe meanings of "snow school" and "happy camper" diverged at some point.
You're thinking of South Pole Station. That's mostly one large building for a few dozen people, and very photogenic for snowbound isolation, so it's usually the picture used for Antarctica articles.
(McMurdo is not at the south pole, it's on the coast near New Zealand.) (Edit since I keep getting nitpicked - near in relative terms, it's at NZ's longitude and closer to NZ than to anywhere else.)
That's what I meant - subconsciously you probably were thinking of the base that is the South Pole Station, since that's the one with more pictures of it and that's the location where you'd intuitively expect an antarctic base to be.
"If average speed of your car will be standard for this route between New Zealand and McMurdo, Antarctica and road conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to arrive to McMurdo, Antarctica will be 1 hour."
"Distance between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA is 99 miles.
If average speed of your car will be standard for this route between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA and road conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to arrive to Los Angeles, CA will be 1 hour."
Scott Base is easy walking distance from McMurdo, not 99 miles (or 100 kilometers and 100 miles and 100 nautical miles - that site is quite confused!).
Both are actually in New Zealand depending on the purpose, due to the Ross Dependency[1]. For instance, most of those folks in McMurdo station have longer NZ visas than typical US tourists visiting NZ would get (3 months), because when they fly down to The Ice they're not technically leaving the country.
An interesting corner case is when something happens at one of the US stations in the Ross Dependency, which New Zealand wants to investigate. The Rodney Marks death[2] is a particularly well-known example.
McMurdo is 2385 miles from Christchurch NZ, where support flights originate[0]. Flying from the south coast of NZ at Invercargill saves 208 miles[1]. It's 3222 miles to the South Pole[2].
I'm typing this in New Zealand at latitude 42 degrees south (so about half way from the equator to the pole). So no, not near NZ, a bit less than 1/8 of the circumstance of the Earth away, maybe 1/10, more than 2000 miles.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica, a twenty-minutes-into-the-future ecothriller, is much recommended reading for anyone who'd like to know more about McMurdo, the South Pole Station, and about the history of Antarctica's exploration and its geography and ecology. As is usually the case, KSR has definitely done his homework. (Disclaimer: you might fall in love with Antarctica, or at least develop a serious crush, as a result of reading this novel.)
It's a very cold place right...? And a place where energy is insanely expensive because all fuel has to be shipped thousands of miles?
So energy efficiency is paramount.
So why are these doors, even the modern ones, just a few inches thick? I'd expect to see the doors being 6 inch thick foam, and every outdoor door to be a double door (ie. into an entrance room, and another door into the rest of the building, such that only one door is ever open at once, to prevent heat loss).
I'd expect all the walls to be 12 inches thick (with 10 inches of foam) too - and again, this doesn't seem to be the case.
McMurdo during the summer routinely gets above freezing and isn't all too different from Alaska or northern Canada in the early spring. During the winter of course it gets cold.
As for power, McMurdo has a mix of power sources including a number of renewables. For about a decade ('62-'72), McMurdo also had a small nuclear power plant on site as well. This was also only a few years after McMurdo was established ('56). So there was definitely a time where energy was not particularly expensive and the greater issue was the cost per kilo for shipping supplies.
Of course now that shipping logistics are mostly ironed out and nuclear was deemed too problematic, various fossil fuels are used for power and heating a good chunk of the site (whatever the scattering of renewables can't handle).
McMurdo has a deepwater port, and a lot of fuel storage tanks as a part of its facilities. Tankers and can just drive up in summer and offload large quantities of fuel. It's not like the South Pole station where everything must be flown in. And the "waste heat" from the generators making electricity is routed throughout the base and used for heating.
Not to mention almost a megawatt of wind turbines in the near constant wind.
A study on the feasibility of electric vehicles had the expected cost of electricity per kWh at the base lower than California residential rates.
Man this brings me back. I did a year at McMurdo in 2004. We got hit with such a bad storm that conex boxes were tossed all over the yards. Snow drifts covered up some doors, but... they opened inward ;)
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.
I've been following this blog since someone posted it a few weeks back. Aweosme reads imo, satisfies my childhood curiosity of Antarctica and I appreciate all the photos he includes.
In an environment where you presumably know every single human on the site and there are probably no other humans in any direction for 1000 km, is there a need for locks on anything other than bedrooms and bathrooms?
The threat is not from strangers, but from fully vetted and trusted community members having some kind of psychological event that leads them to bad actions.
The various entities working at McMurdo do pretty thorough pre-deployment psych evals to try to catch the kinds of people who would break vital equipment (think furnaces, or water-treatment equipment or high-cost/one-of-a-kind research equipment) or equipment necessary to fix vital equipment. But there's really no guarantee until you're out there that any given person is actually trustworthy. To say nothing of emergent psychological events that would drive a person to do such a thing. And anyway, the kind of person who wants to go to Antarctica frequently doesn't conform to our expectations of what a well-adjusted personality looks like. When your threat model is "trustworthy community members who occasionally and unpredictably become threats", you lock doors.
I've been down with the USAP a couple times, most recently about a decade ago, and in that span the psych eval was required for winterover deployments but not summers. It was very questionable.
I like to think that a spoof "How to Pass the Psych Eval" video we made one winter might've somehow contributed to that particular system being torn down a few years later, though I don't have firsthand experience with the system that replaced it. My understanding is that the new one involves more "team building" type stuff before deployment, which sounds like a step in the right direction.
One issue is that by the time a person has gotten to that late stage in the hiring process, they are often deeply invested in deploying - having packed things in to storage, quit "real world" job, etc. and their nominal manager understands that. Another issue is that people behave differently in different environments, and Antarctica is quite unlike Denver.
My information is about 10 years old, so that makes sense. It also makes sense that such evals are of limited utility, as the people I know who worked down on the ice were ... difficult personalities to get along with.
McMurdo is one of the major logistics hubs for the entire continent, this means that it has a relatively high population (~1000 in summer), but also that a lot of people pass through on their way to other parts of Antarctica. It's definitely not a situation where everyone knows everyone else.
Looks like they don't really care about heating, as many buildings don't have a vestibule. Where I came from (cold winters) most buildings have a very small room at the entrance, kinda like airlock.
The first thing I think about isn't snow or handles, it's the framing. Poor framing results in door sagging which results in sticking, wearing or even broken doors. A handle you can replace pretty easily with basic tools (and a crescent wrench and square tube works as a handle in a pinch). A poorly hung door requires more skill.
Unless you're a scientist or researcher in a field that would be performing research at McMurdo, your best bet is probably to apply for a support position with one of the organizations or parner institutions listed here: https://www.usap.gov/jobsandopportunities/
Though as the blog mentions in an earlier post[0], you may have to re-apply repeatedly over the course of several years.
I kept hoping I could trick NASA into sending me down there for a few weeks. Surely a senior Linux/Unix admin would be useful there? Ah, well, there's always the tourist option.
Citation: I have actually drank at the bars in McMurdo.
Your link is Pole, not McMurdo. It sounds like that is people bringing their own, or buying from USAP for the field, which is allowed. It may have changed, but when I was there, McMurdo bars only served beer and wine.
Great pictures, but I’ve never seen someone call a doorknob a “rotating handle” before. I guess that is what it is, but there also is a word for it, “doorknob”.
I find everything about McMurdo fascinating because it's such an extreme place. I looked at every one of these doors and read about them. And a friend of mine from college worked (works?) there after and has cool stories to tell.
Like penguin feces smells awful because it's predator feces raised to the fish power.
And emperor penguins are huge, and if they whack you with their wings they can break finger bones.
And people who newly arrive look "orange".
And this wasn't from him, but some other documentary: Chips left out don't go stale because the air is so dry. In fact, they may get crispier.
over time i have become more and more convinced that this state of affairs is _better_.