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PoliteThaiBeep t1_iwc3vhc wrote

Reply to comment by rodchenko in Waymo’s driverless taxis keep making incremental progress, while others flounder by AdmiralKurita

Public transportation is too centralized. It's efficient to move large masses of people all at once long distances - like a plane, long distance train or medium distance bus. But last mile transportation nothing beats small vehicles like cars.

With carpooling in mind self driving cars are the most efficient way for transportation for distances 50 or below miles. It has a potential to be like 5 cents a mile with self-driving EV's

Urbanization is at it's all time peak right now as more and more opportunities for remote work open up to people.

Which means people are moving away from ultra expensive urban areas to inexpensive areas away from urban centers.

Excessive centralization around urban centers was a nessessary evil when there was no way to do things other than moving your physical self to do things. It is already changing rapidly accelerated by pandemic.

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oiseauvert989 t1_iwgbclo wrote

It was supposed to change due to the pandemic. That prediction turned out to be wrong though. The pandemic made a much smaller than expected change.

In the last couple of years I learned that urbanisation hasn't been knocked off it's long term path and if Covid couldn't do it, probably nothing will. 2 years ago I expected something quite different. I think one of the reasons was that many rural and suburban places were hit hard by Covid. If rural areas had escaped Covid, then I think the effect would have been stronger. Remote work changed a lot of thing but this aspect is turning out to be a much smaller and shorter lived change than I expected.

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PoliteThaiBeep t1_iwggp8k wrote

Really? I was saying that people would move away from cities for years and it was very slow before the pandemic, but the pandemic blew up my best expectations out of the water.

I never expected this mass exodus, certainly not at this rate (I am talking about San Francisco for example) even though I did expect people to move away from metro areas, but I expected slow gradual transition not massive shift like what is happening.

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oiseauvert989 t1_iwgiqyk wrote

Yeh SF isnt really representative of most cities in that sense. Even there, the only year with a significant drop was January 2020 to January 2021. SF has big barriers to building houses which creates all kinds of problems.

Some cities will stagnate, some cities will grow strongly but no cities are heading for big population drops except for places like Japan where the whole country is disappearing. Even there it is the rural areas that are becoming depopulated first. That is a much stronger trend over all and we are going to see much more of it in a lot of countries.

Well, we wont see it in person because we wont actually bother to visit those places but statistically it will be recorded more and more.

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