The easy solution: regulate dense office space. And rural areas SUDDENLY will become super-attractive.

Not really. It's a death spiral: more density makes cities more attractive for employers, as it offloads the externalities onto employees. This in turn attracts more people. This in turn attracts more employers, etc.

Exactly the same reason we had pollution before the environmental regulations.

But a remote job in Iowa will support a local restaurant that will employ the waitress.

10 minutes interval means that you're waiting on average 5 minutes. Then add time to get from the taxi stop to the train and back. Also, that's the _best_ case scenario with a very high frequency line.

And this only works if you live directly on the "trunk" line. If you have to wait for a particular bus, it will kill the average commute time. And most people, by definition, don't live on trunk lines. Otherwise, we'd be all living in that Saudi linear town.

Yeah, I should have been more specific. I meant "not-dense-urban" when I was talking about people preferring suburban living.

Yep. And In Seattle and SF taxis will be more effective with the road footprint at mere 3 persons per car. So it doesn't even need to be a "high density" carpooling, just picking up another passenger along the way will likely make it enough to increase the average throughput of lanes.

No. It doesn't assume anything different, just a stream of cars travelling at regular speeds and keeping regular distances.

Classic transit has an unavoidable tension: stops kill the average speed, but placing the stops further apart increases the time it takes people to get to them. Taxis don't have this tension, they can provide door-to-door transport.

That's just flatly impossible (on average). The fastest train frequency is in the Moscow Metro, 90 seconds between trains sustained over several hours. And this requires extremely careful choreography, that can't work in less controlled environments. NYC subway averages at 5 minutes during the rush hours and 12 minutes during off-peak hours.

Self-driving is really a game-changer for city planning, but somehow it's completely overlooked by the mainstream planners. I think it's mostly because self-driving will make most of the transit development unnecessary.

No. It's far more: https://app.hedgeye.com/insigh... - only 18% of the population prefers dense cities. There are other surveys, and depending on the type of the question, you get about 60-80% spread in preferences.

Sure. I'm not saying to nuke all the cities, some people will always want to live in dense areas. However, _most_ people (80+%) prefer to live in sparse areas. Around 15% of the total population would prefer to live in sparse communities, but they can't do that because of employment. If these people are provided with an opportunity to move out, this will drastically lower the pressure on the dense housing market.

The share is the same, but their _population_ is growing. And the rural areas reduced in percentage.

"Suburb (n): an outlying part of a city or town". And yes, I stand by my statement.

Correct. Suburbs _also_ have an internal pressure to densify and turn into mini-cities. Vancouver, CA is a great example, its inner city is metastasizing in dense clusters near subway stations, in areas that were suburbs before.

"Taxi" is just not a good word for this transportation mode. It's more like airport shuttles that drive around and pick up people. The other major difference is the cost, self-driving taxis can be _cheaper_ than buses. Splitting a taxi when paying $40 for a ride? That's terrible. Splitting a taxi when you're paying $5? Yeah, whatever.

Just doing one transit hop can easily add 15-20 minutes to your commute. It can be viable in some cases.

GHA average commute is 26 minutes. Berlin is 32 minutes, London is 45 minutes.

The average bus occupancy is 15 people in the US.

You forgot to account for the transit time (walking to/from the station) and waiting for the train. Buses also have shitty average speed due to the need for constant stops. And if you space bus stations further, people have to walk longer, negating the time savings from sparser stops.

EVERY country is bad at transit. It sucks universally. And yes, cars don't work for alcoholics, children, and disabled people. This problem is solved by self-driving taxis.

It doesn't conflict with what I said. Rural counties are declining (as your article says), and cities are growing. The suburbs that are growing are mostly located near the cities, and the growth is driven by the cities. Suburbs just become "extended city cores" in essence. The core cities themselves also grow.

The overall stats are also misleading, you need to break them down by city size. It's really bi-modal, smaller cities are stagnant, larger cities are growing.

I can't follow the logic, sorry. The families are getting smaller, so they need more space?

And it'll have exactly zero effect. So far, no nation managed to get to the population growth after the second demographic transition.