Sigh. Democracy is going to hang itself with the bike lanes and public transit, isn't it?

Density increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages. Just ask France.

In the US we have insane bureaucracy as well as lazy, incompetent, and corrupt politicians. Never let them say you can't have both

It evolves. Laws, rules, regulations accrue but are very rarely re-evaluated to see if they serve their original purpose. It's easier for most lawmakers to leave things alone. Eventually, the state declines or fails under the weight of a century of well-intentioned (maybe) laws that have outlived their usefullness.

Knowing human nature, the best plan for a state that wants to survive is to set a 20 year expiration on laws. Broadly accepted laws would easily be renewed, but obsolete ones would be allowed to die.

There are multiple ways of imposing this structure, laws, and trade-offs between various stakeholders. For example, Japan has a national top-down system where municipalities have little control over development, and therefore by necessity the system is mostly rules-based - if you meet the hopefully well-crafted requirements, you build. Whereas in North America, housing is a top-down and centrally planned economy at the municipal level. In Britain and a lot of North America, decisions are 'discretionary' and subject to reviews and debates and NIMBY tantrums (otherwise known as democratic control by taxpayers). Various bandaids are applied over the North American system to attempt to stop it from becoming a Kafkaesque bureaucratic mess where nothing gets built, and at times those efforts even partially succeed, even if the whole thing has an air of reforming the Gosplan.

This is a particularly Western democratic trend. Japan and Singapore both have their own models for democracy. Each builds differently, in their own way, and gets it done.

Everyone wants to be the one with the power to remake the world according to their own designs. Everyone also doesn't want to be the one being remade according to the designs of others.

It's really weird that in "the last of the free" it's considered completely normal for the government to tell you that you can't build a shed bigger than a certain size.

Or when things get done it is because of corruption? And the constraints are put in place to protect $, aka not democracy but actually plutocracy.

We don't live in a democratic country. We live in a plutocracy. We explicitly allow money to influence our democratic process.

Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways while locating all of the toxic pollution producing manufacturing to the remaining lower-income minority neighborhoods, obliterating walkability and pedestrian safety everywhere.

I think if you follow actual development stories, you'll see a lot of this continuing to hold true. Seeing NPUs as being actually effective at curbing development is very naive. NPUs rarely push back against development, and it takes a lot of organizing to even get something up for a vote at City Council. And even then, most councilmembers are taking campaign funds from private-equity backed developers.

A lot has been written about this. In my city, we call it the Atlanta Way (derogatroy). There's a recent book covering this that's a great read: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/red-hot-city/paper

I spent the last couple years trying to get contractors out to pave our private road. They'd either no-show, or ghost. It didn't make any sense since these were all 5-figure jobs. I'm trying to give you money, what gives? I learned from the contractor who did end up taking the job that our city is absolutely brutal with contractors... which can be a good thing for quality of work, but too much in this case means many contractors just refuse all work in the city. They're big enough that it's no great loss.

"but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport."

The only people who don't like low density are the poor, and this is why most of America is car culture, and owns their own houses. "Housing shortages" is another way of saying that existing home owners are earning strong equity.

Yeah, I do want no traffic and lots of parking, so low density please!

The point is to slow things down, so only the things that truly matter get done. Otherwise growth for growth's sake leads to chaotic hellscapes where no one is at rest, everyone is confused and scared. Slower is better.

Prospective residents and transit riders are harmed.

Rules and hearings overwhelmingly favor existing residents. If an existing resident opposes construction nearby due to noise, traffic, etc., the city will probably grant his wish. Because that piece of land is off limits for denser housing, now prospective residents face a smaller housing supply, higher prices, and longer commutes.

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…” – Winston Churchill

It's very easy to throw stones through windows. But before discounting one of our greatest creations, one which is so annoying and yet has brought us so much prosperity, what alternative do you propose?

Reminds me of a book I read, The Master of Harmlessness, by Ingo Swann. The book is supposed to be this treatise on how to live peacefully, but it accidentally serves as a demonstration of how any rule, taken to an extreme, becomes absurd.

Communities should have a say in their community. The issue is lack of new towns being built with high speed rail / transportation to bring people into central hubs. All the good land is taken. Build further out with tiny homes and build public transportation lines. Let people build affordable communities that suit them. No, they aren't going to have beach views or anything like that. But YOU will own it. We already know from the mouse utopia experiments that increasing density is a terrible idea for humans. Expand out.

It's not just democracy, but also huge population growth and population clustering. People moving from the country to the city as jobs increasingly moved into the city.

I have a house in Costa Rica where there a lot of expats living in communities need to self organize because zoning and permit laws are slow, bureaucratic, and basically unenforced.

I cannot tell you how insanely inefficient and impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something like a communal security system or a communal garbage can where all participants all fairly contribute and consume those services. And this is all done on a WhatsApp group over txt messages where nuance gets lost.

People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.

I first heard this on the Omega Tau Podcast [0], where the guest discusses an article he wrote [1] discussing, in part, the book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter [2].

[0]https://ota.skadi.cloud/en/episodes/040O0P0C0P2C180H2B3z1W1N...

[1]https://paularbair.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/the-crisis-of-co...

[2]https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/477.The_Collapse_of_C...

I guess you prefer this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Triumphal_Arch

"But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed."

Seems more like a flaw of high density than democracy if you look at democracy in low density areas and citizen happiness in other types of government in high density areas.

I don't mean to be pedantic but aren't democracy and zoning laws completely orthogonal and neither entail the other. You can have zoning laws without democracy and democracy without zoning laws.

Like Japan, being a democracy, seems to have a completely different zoning system than the US. We have the zoning system we have because we created it.

would you rather a china where 996 is technically against the law but you have to suffer it and no protection at all for your property rights and you can be moved for the three gorges dam for little compensation? i would much rather amtrack then the wenzhou crashing bullet trains from china where the executed's bullet fees are charged to the parents.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

Sounds like you don't really understand what a "democracy" is.

Sure, our system is not working currently. Doesn't mean that the principle of "democracy" fundamentally doesn't work, does it?

Don't forget all the entrenched interests, both inside and outside government, that benefit from the status quo and are willing to fight to maintain it.

USA harms a lot under the orange clown. So first that term you use must be defined - what IS a democracy?

Russia and North Korea also claim to have some kind of democracy some sorts.

There are just too many differences in the term here.

Many are corrupt. Many are incompetent. Many are lazy.

By the way, at best you describe indirect democracy. This one has more limits than democracy, which - conversely - requires more effort.

If you think this kind of over-abundance of laws and regulations is exclusive to democracies, early 18th century France would like a word. It’s a problem that plagues most places. Laws compound upon themselves as time goes on. It is less about keeping everyone happy so much as it is about keeping stakeholders happy. If it wasn’t a democracy, those stakes holders would just be oligarchs, nobles, the military, etc.

Is this a necessary hypothesis when we can explain the situation simply enough by cutting straight to "politicians [are] lazy, incompetent, or corrupt"?

Particularly if we define or replace "corrupt" by "extracting funds in every practicable way," which is observable behavior (regardless of reason or motivation) and which is _not_ covered in your explanation?

Democracy never handles situations well where one side of an issue is a small highly motivated group, and the other side is a larger group that kinda-cares.

It's the reason we subsidize farmers. It's the reason our tax code remains so complicated. It's also why it's hard to get anything built: Existing owners are highly motivated to block development, and the potential beneficiaries (people who might someday live there, etc.) are too diffuse to mount a defense against them.

Seems pretty earned in a lot of ways

I’ll take either genuinely rural, or high-density urban over low-density urban/suburban any day of the week. (And have lived in each of the above for at least 5 years each.) I intellectually understand that it ticks a lot of people’s boxes for convenient, low-friction lifestyle, but viscerally, even nice suburbs with a little character just feel like a superficial, tepid, soulless simulacrum of an actual community to me. I’m clearly missing some connection or meaning in those places that other people are more attuned to.

You're talking like this is the same group of people that want no traffic, less density, low noise, etc and then are complaining about housing shortages and public transport.

These are two distinct people. The former group is going to be mostly homeowners. People who bought property in a place are mostly happy with how it was when they bought it so if the public transport is bad they don't mind by selection bias. Obviously they don't really care about housing supply.

Non-homeowners, on the other hand, are usually looking for their golidilocks neighborhood (no blame on them, that's why looking for a home is so difficult and why people who find them are protective of them). They are the ones who found a place they can afford but the commute is too long and public transport is bad or they can't afford a place near their work because it's all low density and in high demand, etc.

Importantly, I think the groups of people with gripes about the housing market are pretty distinct sets of people who really don't agree with each other. There are people who are price out of home ownership (always with the caveat of "in the place they want to live") and there are people who are priced out of living where they want to live, even renting. One group wants density and one group wants those SFH and low density, just cheaper.

The SFH crowd can't be satisfied. It's just reality that highly desirable places are more expensive. The high density folks could be satisfied but at the expense of all the people who chose to live in the neighborhood they do. I find it hard to sympathize with people who don't live in a place and want to change it to suit their needs, at the expense of people who do.

Yes, working as intended.

As a mildly related aside, It's funny to me how "NIMBY" has gone from someone who wants something, in general, but not near them (homeless shelters, for instance) to someone who just doesn't want a thing at all while still carrying the same stigma. Certainly the people who live in a place should have more of a say as to what goes on there than the people who don't.

I only blame the politicians who make promises they know they can't keep. They're typically not lazy, incompetent or corrupt, they just lied to get elected.

It's not the result of 100 years of democracy: it's the result of Euclid v Ambler and the subsequent cases that support it. Exclusionary zoning baring residential zoning outright is a taking and should be treated as such. Filthy poors are a nuisance:

"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite . . ." Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926)

Yeah how awful that a government system works for its people....

Smell like spaghetti code, due to refractor.

You could find extreme difficult level in nuclear industry: from my country argentina (I tried to build a service company providing nuclear solutions to an important client in Europe; killed by my government bureaucracy) to the US (se Nuscale hugh expenses on certifications from 2016 to 2020).

Dwarf City

Songs of Syx is closer but still too micro

SimDwarfCity, basically.

I've heard the soviet one is closer to what you're looking for - https://www.sovietrepublic.net

I just played it for half an hour, it's enjoyable! My budget's tidy, the beloved raccoon still has a place in the city hall, and my mayor approval is steadily- but ever so slowly- going up. Feels like old school sim city!

I'm really impressed by the quality given that it seems heavily vibe coded, I'd assumed I would encounter many issues, but I've found only minor bugs so far.

Ah yeah, AI, the digital fleshlight...

fine by me

Same issue, can't scroll nor locate a button to play.

I’m able to scroll but the submit button is behind the address bar so I can’t press it.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/administratorio

For those wondering. I haven't played, nor am I planning to. I already suck at vanilla Factorio, tyvm.

I’m sorry you ran into this! It looks like the game tried to allocate too much memory. I got claude to fall back to lower resolution textures when this happens, thanks for reporting.

I think the overwhelm is kind of the point. If you want a well-balanced video game, where everything is optimized to help you learn the ropes and to get you into a flow state, the classic versions of SimCity provide exactly that. But this game's implementation of a full-fledged city builder is quickly drowned out by the fact that it's shoving resident petitions and requests for variances in your face every 20 seconds. It's an attempt to put the player into the shoes of an actual city planner, mayor, or city councilor that is drowning in interruptions and paperwork.

Yeah I was excited to try this right up until I looked at the toolbar and inspected a property and got the AI wall of text.

The subject area is great (teach actual civics) but this fails in execution. It could really use a strong pass on UX and learning curve, because right now its a product that everyone is just going to bounce off of.

Whether or not the topic is complex is beside the point. The point of this project, as far as I can see it, is get to teach this subject through experience to as many people as possible. Walls of text and tons of controls fundamentally undermine that purpose. Teaching complexity comes by removing everything that isn't absolutely necessary and arranging the complexity in a form that introduces it in compelling bite-sized chunks, so the player is always engaged.

To the creator - this is cool, you're certainly barking up the right tree subject-wise. The best thing you can do now is identify the specific learning goals and sequence, and the magic moments you think are possible along the way, and radically simplify the approach. Fork the project and take a different angle on it. I bet there's solid foundations here but if you want to influence you gotta refine.

I've never seen this, but this is amazing!

Discussed recently here:

A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036864 - Oct 2026 (201 comments)

I think the bigger reason the original "EPCOT as a city" didn't happen is that once Walt passed, everyone else in the company looked at the plan and knew it would be a bottomless money pit from day 1.

Disney (the company) did eventually make a kind of Epcot - Celebration, Florida[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

scrolled down like 100 posts to find one that actually referenced the op's game directly.

I'm pretty sure the point of the game was to make a statement and make people think/talk and boy-howdy op you did a great job.

There are fully planned and built cities, like around here so called "Garden Cities": Welwyn Garden City, Milton Keynes.

I've been in several and they actually feel okay to live in, to run errands, to shop.

It only sounds funny if it's cranked up to the extreme -- like abusive housing associations, a cancer growing on the corpse of the old communities which just wanted some quiet evenings and the bins to not be overflowing, but it can be done well.

It sounds essentially like 1984. Not that the world needed him for that though because with the most recent Samsung TV scandal about microphone and camera spying on users it seems also that fiction became reality to a certain extent.

I’m sorry but regulations weren’t the ultimate reason Epcot never happened. Basic economics weren’t ever going to make it happen.

This thinking is, in short, the context of the film Demolition Man!

seriously

Optimistically, because each one has a different optimal solution given all the unique constraints for each airport project.

Also, airports aren't just built and then done. Often the cities around them will grow and the airports will need to expand and adapt to new constraints, sometimes many decades after they were first built.

Every airport is different because every local geography, existing land use, and weather pattern is different.

Seattle has generally ether north or south winds depending on season, and the airport is located on the only buildable flat plateau for miles around, so has 3 runways all going the same direction, N/S.

https://wrcc-archive.dri.edu/cgi-bin/wea_windroseclim.pl?laK...

Denver built an all-new airport way outside of town where there was unlimited buildable land. Their winds are highly variable even within one season, so they have 6 runways in a crossing configuration.

https://wrcc-archive.dri.edu/cgi-bin/wea_windroseclim.pl?laK...

The optimal airport has two parallel runways, 9,000 feet apart, that align with prevailing wind. If a location has variable strong winds, another set can be built at a 90° angle. It's possible to add more runways at 9,000 intervals, but you're usually better off building an airport somewhere else.

Most airports were built during or before WWII, so few are designed to most efficiently accommodate modern usage. Maybe in the future we can better handle closer runways in low visibility, but first we'll have to figure out how to have two computers communicate directly with each other, instead of having one computer generate routes that get read out load by a human, transmitted over an analog radio, listened to by another human, then typed into another computer.

We have done this internally at our company (link in bio). We have an internal simulation game, kind of like the OP. The game was vibecoded, but it can run using the same rules as a city in our actual system. The simulation game is really just a toy that is fun to mess around with, but the rules engine is an actual thing in our product.

I'll get downvoted by the Musk fans, but the NY-DC Hyperloop corridor failed because Hyperloop doesn't work, is non existent, and that corridor is already served by the only profitable train line in the US, the Amtrak DC -> Boston train. It made no financial sense to do this. Bureaucracy is just an excuse for yet another Musk pipe dream to pump stock.

If you wanna talk about abundance, talk about abundance, but mixing that with the disaster of yet another snake oil Musk project being stalled is not something to blame it for but to be thankful for.

Thanks so much for your feedback! I originally started with a pretty diverse corpus of prewritten story arcs for diversity, and went back to retrofit them into the engine once I started customizing stories and details for the city. It looks like I missed a few spots, sorry about that!

And yes, I did sketch a version that is even more procedurally generated, but it’s taking longer to get right than I thought

some of the things come up over and over and over... I've trained 5 people in being food service acapble for the volunteer fire pancake breakfast and they've all moved to the county seat. I'm just a jobs program I guess.

First, it's awesome the developer is giving this away for free. I love the tongue in cheek approach, and the polish and labour-of-love artifacts visible in portions of the UI and gameplay.

That said, after playing it for a while something just felt "off". I like the idea of being involved in individual proposals, but there are too many immersion-breaking dialogs that come up (some of which just seem too irrelevant). And the text in them is sometimes "off" in a fashion that feels like it was written by AI (though I'm not sure if it was). The news articles and such in SimCity felt more hand-curated, concise and clever - thus more entertaining.

This is how real life works when when your proposed development doesn't fit the vision some random unaccountable bureaucrats and/or institutions you have to go through have for the vibe of the community.

There's no need for it, archive.org, myabandonware all have [play] on your browser support via emulation, C&C isn't there because of copyright reasons, and also you can do an AI recompilation which means most of the code should be thrown out.

I remember in Transport Tycoon, under certain conditions, you were no longer allowed to bulldoze willy nilly. If you wanted to put in a new bus station and were out of favour with the populace, you could try the old fashioned way: with bribes (and tree planting).

I recommend reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. This permitting we have today is in response to very real problems of unrestricted growth in the past. It led to horrible pollution and squalor.

The pendulum has swung so far we cannot build anymore. We can't solve the problems of today because our regulations that are responding to the problems of yesterday. I'm hopeful there's a better way but I haven't seen it yet.

In an open market, you can only have so much oversupply of any product, before people stop investing in building more, or too little supply before investment increases. There's some lag between demand and production, from the time it takes to produce any given good, but for houses, not counting permitting delays, it only takes a few months to build one.

When zoning regulations first started, it wasn't uncommon for people to drink unfiltered surface water and drain their sewage into an open pit. This heavily limits density, and was what zoning was targeting. There are areas in the US, especially in the south, where permitting and zoning are much weaker than in the rest of the country, but high-quality housing is just as prevalent.

Perhaps we hn-ers tend to be rule followers? So we'd naturally fall into thinking "well, just make a rule that you can't dump trash", problem solved!

I’m sorry you ran into this! Taking a quick look.

found the problem

My immediate thought: "Ah, SimSeattleProcess"

zoning was designed to keep undesirables out, not to set clear ground rules. because that was its goal, we’ve also intentionally let local control laws and appeal rights/systems inflate to act as secondary/tertiary controls on development. most land use law exists only to protect incumbents

Not sure what the "this" is that you think zoning didn't "solve" exactly. Where I live (Melbourne, Australia), I think zoning does work pretty effectively. Industry builds in industrial zones, houses and apartments get built in residential zones. Fortunately (I think) the government is generally on the side of increasing the density and changing the rules to make it possible, so we don't have a San Francisco type situation where no one can build anything because the residental lobbies are so powerful.

The pain points for us are to do with attempting to increase the density of the city, which means building apartment buildings where there used to be just single story houses with backyards - something those residents don't like. Or the complexities of big projects like new train lines, that impact an awful lot of stuff around them.

But in general, a lot of stuff is getting built, it's just expensive.

What you're talking about is called ministerial approval. Some zone regulations do require it, but many are specifically written to prevent it, giving every opportunity possible for anyone who disagrees to delay any project for any reason.

Thanks for checking it out! Eminent domain and covenants are great material - I’m definitely going to work those into the next update.

I’m aiming for a specific mood so the others are going in the backlog until i can do them uhh tastefully

It's fun browsing the HN games compilation here

I fixed some of these road issues in the latest release, and added those zone overlays that were missing. Still ironing out bugs in both these systems, but thanks so much for writing this up!

Thanks! Yes almost all claude, with me focused on gameplay, art direction, mechanics, and storytelling. Keep at it - Claude makes some things possible and other times it only helps you realize sooner your idea was too fuzzy!