4 ms·

How about fewer residents?

• ju-st 10y ago
  Why are there so many businesses/jobs in Manhattan?
  • afarrell 10y ago
    Before railroads, the Erie Canal was one of the few ways to ship bulk goods over the Appalachian divide. This caused the mouth of the Hudson to be a center of trade, particularly shipping goods to Europe. To make money on the return trip, they would put passengers in steerage and so lots of immigrants landed in New York City.
    • ghaff 10y ago
      Even before the Erie Canal, New York City was basically the best port on the Eastern seaboard so it was a natural trading center when it was initially settled by the Dutch. (And the Hudson provided good access to the interior even without the canal.)
  • michaelt 10y ago
    At least in London: Every employer moves to London because that's where the employees are; and every employee moves to London because that's where the employers are. Of course I don't mean /literally/ every employer or employee. But I've certainly been offered jobs in remote locations and turned them down because the locations only had one employer who needed someone with my skill set.
  • hiou 10y ago
    Because a service and investment economy is based on proximity to those with money as opposed to proximity to factories or resources.
• Shivetya 10y ago
  well autonomous driving will do that to cities more than public transportation did.
  • akgerber 10y ago
    Not Manhattan, or most other dense cities. There is simply not enough room for every human being who wants to visit to have 50 square feet of steel, rubber, and plastic around them.
    • Shivetya 10y ago
      I think many are vastly underestimating what full autonomous driving will do to society and movement patterns. Granted it won't be all on the individual level but it will reshape both cities and country side.
  • ghaff 10y ago
    Leaving aside timeframes (which I'd argue for cities are decades out) for purposes of discussion, Manhattan is perhaps notable in how relatively little I'd expect autonomous vehicles to affect it. After all, it already has vast fleets of self-driving cars. They just have (admittedly often rather flawed) organic computers in control. I'd be much less surprised to see impacts in more distributed areas where I could easily imagine people becoming much more tolerant of very long commutes. Especially if, at the same time, there's a greater overall acceptance of sometimes-remote work in some professions, it's not hard to imagine people doing a 2-3 hour commute a couple of days a week.
• ajmurmann 10y ago
  Higher density is much more efficient. There is so much expensive infrastructure that you must have that you can share (roads, sewers, phone lines etc.) and infrastructure that's not even viable otherwise like different forms of public transit. If you don't like cities for esthetic reasons you can always move to the country side.
  • ghaff 10y ago
    However, as density increases, the supporting infrastructure also can get significantly more expensive to create. Case in point: NYC's Second Avenue subway line that's been in the works for somewhere between a century and a few decades, depending upon how you count, and will end up costing something like $20 billion.
    • ajmurmann 10y ago
      True. But that's probably still cheaper than just the roads alone would be if all those people were living in the suburbs.