Now, this right here is some funny, funny stuff:
Are We in For a Dystopian Future of Endless Suburbs and Robot Cars?
The author of the piece discusses the idea that the advent of self-driving cars will allow for the spread of suburbs, with people leaving dense city centers for spread-out suburbs. This sounds not unlikely to me. But where it gets funny is… well, right off the bat:
If you are exactly like me, you live in a dense urban environment and assume that dense urban environments are the way of the future, and suburbs are dark hellpits full of enormous PetSmart outlets and molly-soaked teens. … If you are exactly like me, you naturally expect that over time a larger and larger percentage of the population will move to dense urban areas, which are more efficient and more lively and more ecologically sound and which will be, with proper political leadership, more cost-effective…
No, dude. Not exactly like you. I’ve lived in the burbs, I’ve lived in the country, and I’ve spent time in the dense urban environment. While I certainly prefer the country to the burbs, I couldn’t get out of the city fast enough. And that’s just on a one-day *visit.*
Sure people are different. lots of people prefer to be in tightly packed peoplezoos like Chicago or New York. But the reasons typically given for why they prefer the cities generally strike me as being logically flawed (such as the notion that citylife is “greener” that non-citylife… how many acres of green growing stuff does the author have? I have 4.5 or so), or appeals to emotions that will only appeal to a certain percentage of the population. If your big thrill is to get coked up and party all night at a club, or to spend *vast* sums at restaurants, then, great, cities are for you. If your goal is to be able to see the Milky Way, to see wildlife, to actually look *outwards* rather than *inwards,* then cities really aren’t for you.
Something I inevitably see in these articles about how preferable cities are to anythign else is that public transportation, buses and trains, is just vastly better, cheaper, cleaner, more efficient than privately owned cars. If your world is just a few miles wide, from your small apartment to your small cubical to your clubs to your bars… then, yeah, being on a small track makes sense. But if your world is wider than that, then public transportation is less than useless. If I suddenly decide that I want to be 100 miles away in some random direction, simply because that’s what I want to do, what train or bus will take me there?
Plus: when the inevitable happens – a nuclear/biological/chemical attack, a Carrington event, an economic downturn, a public sector strike, a plague, etc. a self-contained arcology full of feminist studies majors and artisanal wine connoisseurs and man-bun aficionados doesn’t really seem the place to be. When New York City goes down, that place is going to eat itself… and then it will slowly spread outwards, turning the surrounding regions into a blasted wasteland.