What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urban form on distance

Re:What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urb... by krautsauer on Monday September 28, 2026 @10:27PM (#49887341)

This is not quite a spherical cow and there is something to be learned here, but really, I'd like to see this with

- non-square-grid cities with highways, public transport, …

- realistic synthetic populations doing non-random destination selection (nobody randomly goes to a supermarket at the other end of a city, after all)

- actual traffic simulation with jams (or at least using real traffic data)

and then evaluate both the energy use and travel times. That being said, doing this kind of thing, e.g. with ActivitySim, even for one real city, is quite a bit of work.

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Re:What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urb... by brudgers on Monday September 28, 2026 @11:27PM (#49887776)

Google Maps has all that data.

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Re:What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urb... by krautsauer on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @01:03AM (#49888479)

You can look at small parts of it there. And sometimes you can't even buy what you're looking at, GMaps API won't hand out public transport trips in some countries. And where you can, it's fairly expensive. (No idea about traffic or people movement data.)

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Re:What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urb... by brudgers on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @01:12PM (#49896684)

Restricted access to the data makes it hard for you to do it.

But that’s a you problem.

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Re:What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urb... by krautsauer on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @01:20AM (#49904664)

Not only that, it also means that some other researcher can't do it either, and I can't get free access to the results.

In any case, do you have some helpful comments too, maybe?

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Re:What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urb... by twelvechairs on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @03:27AM (#49889462)

The reality is a lot depends on your economy. A manufacturing and port city will necessarily be very different urban form to a white collar office job city or a beach/lifestyle city full of remote workers. An egalitarian city will be very different from a socially segregated city. Etc.

Cities are also never perfectly efficient because they are always evolving in function and use

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Re:What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urb... by fzeindl on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @05:10AM (#49890288)

Tangential, but Barcelona has superblocks which seem to work fine:

https://citychangers.org/barcelona-superblocks/

Also the blocks are octagons which improve traffic flow: https://www.reddit.com/r/CityPorn/s/iCcOGMqoNH

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