h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Growing up in Peterborough, I know Cambridge and its surrounds reasonably well.

You raise some good points PT that do need to be thought about. With no work, there's no value in the housing.

Things to add to this though I think are that the UK no longer has any heavy industry, and as such I don't think it needs large areas given over to that use.
I also think that setting up a township purely to provide commuter living won't work in the long term, a recent example of this is Dublin where the new commuter town still stands more than half empty years after it was built.

I fully agree about your views on what will be looked for to win though, but the altruist in me can't help but feel that if something good was presented, we might stand a chance.

"The best place to put a new city is where there is a proven over-supply of work and under-supply of housing stock" [Phoenician Trader]

That makes a lot of sense. Does it have any chance of influencing the final results?

A quick search shows towns with the 5 best worker/unemployed ratio are: Aberdeen, Reading, Cambridge, London, Milton Keynes.

The 5 towns with the highest rental demand are: London, Luton, Cambridge, Milton Keynes

Food for thought.

I also agree that Garden Cities as commuter towns for London sucks as an idea. The town needs its own employment engine. Cambridge Uni has taken on about 6000 post-docs in the £30K range in the last couple of decades and that will grow. The tech start-up hubs are largely bio/medical/heavy engineering (not software) and probably have legs too. The hospital is about to become the largest medical research centre in Europe. Together that is probably another 6000 workers. The city has a population of 100K in Victorian terraces. People are having to pay extortionate rents in the nearby villages to be anywhere near their lovely high paying jobs (plus the thousands upon thousands of support jobs that follow on which pay national minimum wages).

Aberdeen may be a better place for a case study. Milton Keynes is already on the case. I have no idea what the underlying employment drivers are in Luton. If we could solve London's housing issues we would not be writing dreamy posts here.

I am not saying this is the only way to think about the problem but it may be the kind of thing the judges like.

It would be much, much cooler to do something in the North but its justification would have to stand up though.

These are definitely things to take into account when choosing locations for the towns.

One possible thought on this is to have somewhere near Cambridge, so that it's commutable to Cambridge itself, but to offer lower costs and encourage businesses to set up there instead, encouraging people to move out of Cambridge and London to it.

I'll have a look at the maps...

Right, East Anglia location prospects...

Cambridge has the universities and a fair few tech companies. It's also very expensive land wise.

Over towards the coast however, you've got Ipswich. Just outside is BT's Martlesham Labs, as well as a lot of other tech companies.

Both places have good rail links to London, and they have a connecting rail link. Both rails links are however already *packed* during commuter times. And putting any new town on those lines will cause problems.

The Thames Valley, out of London towards Essex already has a lot of planning going on, and Cambridge I believe already has some stuff happening.

Anywhere else around there suffers heavily from the Nimbys, or is so far off what little motorway network there is that it'd involve a massive spend to just site it.

And you can't really go north east of Cambridge towards Ely, because you're then heading into flood land, and you'll have a how heap of extra issues to deal with. Plus the people are weird out there.

{Plus the people are weird out there.}

They've only themselves to blame.

Making a case for siting it up'North is a lot easier these days.

Manchester Airport is growing fast, and they're planning a new business city there. There's also a lot of technology companies moved up here from London, some because they realised the workers were up here, and land was cheap. Others because they followed the BBC. Government and BBC contracts are supposed to be being put out of London, well a certain percent are, and over the last few years I've seen more and more companies based in London either move up north, or contract up north.

Liverpool has a pretty good university, Manchester has three pretty good ones, Leeds a bit further east is also quite respected. And in the last two years since the companies have been moving up here, a lot of students who have been graduating, have been staying in the area. House prices up here are rising sharply in general. Recently both Manchester and Liverpool saw massive building schemes, whole new areas of regeneration and new flats being built in the city centres. The market's fallen out of it at the moment, because everyone was charging a lot of money, and people don't have it.

There's a need for a lot of new, decent quality housing in the area, that doesn't cost a fortune.

Plus there's the prospect of the HS2 rail line. Looking at the proposed routes for that, a major intersection will be just south of Crewe, with mainline services merging there. So, siting the new garden city north of Crewe could be a possibility. There's triangle of towns between Crewe, Chester and Northwich, with Oulton Park Circuit in the middle. This location would provide good commuting access to Crewe, London, Manchester, Chester and Liverpool.

Size wise on a map, Just north between Liverpool and Manchester you have Skelmersdale, which is a new town that went hideously wrong.

In fact, there's a train line between Crewe and Chester that goes just south of Tarporley. So a new station wouldn't be a difficulty. But the A51 would need some serious upgrading.

And looking at the terrain it's reasonably flat too.

And it has a canal.

A canal? Why didn't you say? Our rapid transit commuter problem is solved

Was thinking more about the drainage and landscaping, but if you think gondolas are the way forward...

Seriously, you have to think 3D for the way forward in transport. Whether it's tunnels or flyovers doesn't matter - we have to stop all this contention for space.

I like this pedestrian roundabout above a vehicle roundabout in Shanghai:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/_chrisuk/7580861928/

That's a great photo, and a great idea.

There's a photo of a similar, albeit smaller bike roundabout in Stevenage.

Splitting the traffic is definitely something to do I think. Bikes and pedestrians can go along side each other, it worked well in Peterborough because the pedestrian "half" was raised slightly, so it was obvious which was the footpath and which was the cycle path. A network of these, with decent junctions like those roundabout, and shorter, lighter underpasses and flyovers would be a very good thing to do.

I think it would maybe make sense to move the really large streets below ground level, not necessarily completely underground, but with many large bridges, even bridges/tunnels for the parks so the vegetation can just grow on the roads and the roads are not such a big barrier for pedestrians, bicycles and smaller roads.

There's some screen shots here from a game (Cities XL) that show a sunken highway:
http://xlnation.net/content/ultimate-sunken-highway-system?page=2

I like the idea of dropping roadways down if it's done right. You remove them from the horizon/view, and you also reduce the noise as the walls/verges pick it up and muffle it. It also means that you can keep your cycle and pedestrian ways flatter, and easier to use. Rather than making those getting by on their own steam have to go up and down ramps.

The downside to them though is that they cost a bit more to build, and if there's accidents they can really clog up. But then, so can all roads.

But yes, I like the idea of the main transport corridors for cars being sunken, with the smaller roads branching off that at coming up to ground level.

Given the space needed for the verges and the up and down bits, it would force in wider avenues of greener space, making the whole place seem nicer.

This blog about how they're handling mixed traffic in Central Park is also quite interesting:
http://www.streetsblog.org/category/neighborhoods/central-park/

If it's a garden city we're looking at, then maybe looking from the direction of gardens/parks first could bring in some ideas.

I've been thinking about the problem of people carrying large amounts of groceries home on foot. How about moving sidewalks, like those people-movers at the airports? They wouldn't move unless someone wanted them to move -- push a button or pull a lever or use a remote device.

Yes, Paulh, it seems like they want ideas like that because they#re talking about jet-packs and such in the text. What about having small(ish) tubes reaching ever house for delivery purposes? there shouldn't fit a human into them, but maybe something the size of a sixpack of water?

There was something else I wanted to say...
ah yes, about the parks etc. i think the larger areas of green should all be connected to allow animals as well as people to completely move through the city (or agglomeration of villages) without leaving the park. It has to be decided how wide the pieces of green should be at a minimum.

I've been sketching, mostly transport corridors and interchanges.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BZbzZ9KIgAACMbQ.jpg:large

This is one from the idea of a city centre-less city. The idea that the city is made up of smaller hubs, each between four and five miles across. This particular sketch is colour coded so I can see what I'm doing, the yellow is footpaths, the orange cycleways, the purple trams. The red hatch is zoned commercial/recreational, the green is managed grass/park.
You can see the rings of cycle parking each side of a inner cycle ring road, and right in the middle outside a central Hub. The hub itself I'd see as something similar to what they've tried in Manchester, but failed with, but is a cafe and cycle repair place. You give them your bike in the morning, and pick it up after work all fixed. It'd also have showers and lockers, and would be the transport shop too, to buy tickets etc.

One thing with this hub idea, the centre is all pedestrianised with tram/cycle routes. No cars. Cars are stopped at the outside of the central hub with car parks there, and only access/delivery into the buildings, and away from the pedestrianised areas. It also doesn't have any through roads through the centre itself, they're all on the outskirts.

I like the idea of a proper pedestrian city centre with near by parking
often parking is too little and cars are too many... is there some sort of park and ride scheme or something perhaps (I dont know... well i think i know but..) and perhaps a bike hire for people who dont have bikes, and not just bikes but bike operated family transport things...

I think there should be some sort of identifiable landmarks, its horriable when you go into a place and everything looks the same and then you get lost...