Blimps would have to somehow fit in. Having considerable air resistance, blimps cannot travel as fast. Being unable to travel as fast, they would fall behind at moving X people per hour - while a blimp makes one roundtrip, a jet aircraft would make multiple roundtrips.

Blimps are far worse than airships; the fundamental advantage of airships is that they scale up well (doubling the size nets you 8x the volume), which blimps just don’t. And blimps are far less safe, due to their gas bags needing to be pressurized where airships’ gas bags can be unpressurized. More specifically, if you puncture a pressurized gasbag, then its contents spray out due to the pressure, which in the context of hydrogen would mean it rapidly mixes itself into large amounts of hydroxygen just begging to explode, whereas unpressurized gasbags will just slowly diffuse hydrogen like piss in water. Still potentially dangerous, but far less so.

Weirdly, when it comes to cargo airshipping, airships are actually faster than cargo freight (not to be confused with parcel freight, which is what post (e.g. Amazon packages) uses). Cargo freight takes 4-5 days, which airships can easily beat via shipping point-to-point.

https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php is another good post about building better for fun and profit.

Isn’t that the same link I posted? Do you mean https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php ?

The European and Japanese cities featured in this article as exemplars evolved they way they did under severe feudal land restrictions

Ok, how about the city of Pompeii (which was entombed by the volcano in ~50BC), or Tenochitlan/Mexico city (which was built before European contact, or the city of Cusco (ditto), or the city of Petra (which had plenty of spare desert)? Or Venice, or Mateba, or pick-a-town-any-town.

What “severe feudal land restrictions” do you mean? Can you elaborate?

Here on slrpnk.net I see quite a few “new urbanists” endorsing solarpunk visions with wide streets. I posted this partially in response to that.

I could link a newer article, but this one works just fine. Articles don’t have an expiry date, if you have an actually valid criticism then say it.

If it helps, replace “organically” with “incrementally and due to decentralized choices”.

He was originally Australian:

Andrew grew up in Australia and now lives in the Hoboken, New Jersey with his wife. Andrew’s motivation is to create a great place that he and his wife, and one day their children and their future generations will want to call home.

(from the ‘about’ page)

So just to be clear: a cube truck (like in the top picture in that wikipedia link) is 2meters wide. A 6 meter wide road can have 2 cube trucks, passing eachother by, while still having room between both eachother and the walls. Also, you can literally park a cube truck in front of your store to unload it, and there’s room for another cube truck to go around it.

In fact, I’ve been to this one street of warehouses (literally a street of warehouses, in an industrial area) whose road couldn’t have been more than 10m, wall-to-wall, and I didn’t see them having throughput problems. People massively overestimate how important throughtput is, mainly because the throughput they look for is passenger cars.

Also: Deliveries don’t need to be cube trucks. There are other options - vans, cargo bikes and bike-trailers, literally just walking in with a tray of the delivery, whatever. The smaller the street, the smaller the businesses should be, and the less throughput they should need.

I can’t tell what A.A.P.'s (the link guy’s) beliefs on this are, but generally the answer is either 1) it’s fine (see: the cube truck thing), 2) arterial streets every ~5 blocks (that are wide and primarily for cars), or 3) trains. Or some mixture of them all.

with supermarkets, do we build service lanes designed more for delivery trucks

As a quick aside, before I answer that: Honestly, supermarkets suck and mostly make sense when people are carrying their shopping by car. Smaller shops work just fine.

To answer your question: I don’t think so, but don’t quote me on that. Supermarkets receive… one or two trucks per day? And supermarkets are big (partially due to wide aisles to handle the trolleys needed to buy a whole carload of goods, to be fair). So I don’t think they’re that important.