Comment Re:Ain't no body got time for that (Score 3, Insightful) 606
What we have in a lot of cities - and London is an absolute exemplar of this (New York isn't quite as bad) - is a model of urban development which, through pricing and housing availability, forces most people to live in suburbs but commute to work in the city centre.
There are big, big drawbacks to that model.
First, your average citizen wastes a lot of time commuting. While travel-time isn't necessarily dead time in either productivity or leisure terms, the nature of commuter mass-transit makes it worse than most other types of journeys. People are crammed into high density vehicles, may not have a seat and may need to make frequent changes of bus/train. It's not enjoyable and it's very hard to be productive while going through it.
Second, it places huge strains on your transport networks. It channels most of your commuter traffic into two huge peaks (usually a very sharp morning peak and a longer but still significant evening peak). Road travel generally just can't cope with the resultant congestion. Railways (including underground and light rail) are more effective at moving large numbers of people but have very high fixed infrastructure costs (a mile of railway costs many times more per annum to maintain than a mile of road), meaning they inevitably require large taxpayer subsidies. Worse still, because of the "peaky" nature of commuter traffic, you have to spec your mass-transit systems to handle the peaks and accept that they'll be pulling around mostly fresh air for at least 18 hours every day.
And all of that congestion? Pretty terrible for the environment. High carbon emissions and, if you're relying on cars, buses or diesel trains, horrible for air quality as well.
Ideally, you want people to live close to their workplaces. Some cities are better at that than others - ironically, often those which have evolved without much assistance from urban-planners (who historically have loved to neatly segment industrial, commercial and residential districts apart - a trend that SimCity hardly helped reduce).
So google-buses aren't necessarily fantastic either, if you're moving people a long distance to an out-of-town campus. They're probably better than the city-centre model, because their traffic is more likely to be contra-flow. But ideally, you might have small-to-medium sized business conglomerations around a city, each with appropriate housing nearby.