3 ms·
> However if you have a niche interest you may discover not enough people live within range to support a place for your interest even though across the entire c
by pandaman 3y ago
> However if you have a niche interest you may discover not enough people live within range to support a place for your interest even though across the entire city there are enough people.
How are the cars limiting here? It's quite the opposite - you can have a special interest shop/venue in a cheap mall in some industrial area and get enough customers who can reach you by car. Without the car ubiquity you'd need to get into expensive real estate in the city center to get potential customers and charge them for your rent, which is fine if you are dealing in, say, collectible wines or artisanal Swiss timepieces and no business if you want to sell Gundam models or knitting sullies.
- bluGill 3y agoCars work best in low density. Eventually the total area of the city is so great that even though in theory you can drive across it, the total time that takes means some trips are unreasonable to do. If that story that sells Gundam models (I have no idea what this is so I assume it is a great example of a rare niche) is on the other side of the city it may be more than an hour drive at off peak times to get there and so for practical purposes it isn't in reach.
- pandaman 3y agoIf it takes more than an hour of car travel then how long will it take without a car? I imagine your argument is that without cars the city wouldn't be as big, but the math doesn't work out: the travel time is proportional to the square root of the area while the additional area is linear. If a city with cars is triple the size of the same one without it would have taken only 1.7 time more to travel through. Public transit is way slower than 1.7x.