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> will reduce housing pressure in urban places and has the potential to lift up previously rural communities. I'm skeptical because 1. a large part of the hou
by dcosson 10y ago
> will reduce housing pressure in urban places and has the potential to lift up previously rural communities.
I'm skeptical because
1. a large part of the housing pressure in many urban places is artificially created by the past several decades of bad building/zoning policy.
2. the usual type of struggling rural community we think about is often more than an hour from a big city. I doubt even a self-driving car makes a 3-5 hour roundtrip commute appealing. And this doesn't address traffic at all, which is already often the bottleneck of how far out from a city it is feasible to commute from.
I'm generally excited about the prospect of self-driving cars but apprehensive of this idea that it will let us continue/increase our suburban sprawling for free.
- goseeastarwar 10y ago#1 is right, but if you replace rural with exurban (which I think is more appropriate in this discussion), you're hugely improving the quality of life for millions with autonomous commutes.
- bredren 10y agoIf you can believe work will be increasingly remotely performed and that greater "commutes" will be tolerated, cities will need to go into sell mode and make policy changes. Many cities have gone through drastic swings in population due to structural changes in the economy. Some, like Oakland, did not handle it well and paid dearly for it. Long ~3 Hr RT "Self-driving" commutes already exist to some extant: FB, Google, etc, Oakland->MTV buses. People use them and they are required for talent retention.