Hacker News readers mock a paper that says travel distance depends on travel distance
What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urban form on distance
A Hacker News discussion of a Sage journal paper, "What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urban form on distance," turns skeptical fast. Commenters note that the abstract appears to conclude that how far you have to travel determines how far you have to travel, and that the authors built a model showing how far apart things are determines how far you travel to reach them.
Without getting behind the paywall, the abstract says that how far you have to travel determines how far you have to travel??
- krautsauer
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.
- irickt
Here's a preprint from 2025: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00100v1
- skullone
Just look at Magnasanti for the most efficient sim city