Agree, businesses should just provide a real number of services, that they are willing to provide. That allows customers to more effectively compare different service providers and allows providers to avoid the situation, when they have to secretly throttle certain users.
But it is so hard to explain to product people, that there is a limit how much certain services can scale and be profitably supported.
But rich cities can also have great public transit. New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Singapore... in fact rich cities with transit as awful as the Bay Area seem to be the exception, not the rule
They are all much more dense than the bay area, and I don't get the sense that many people want them to be denser other than, again, for affordability reasons.
I don't have data but in Moscow where I'm from the typical well to do thing was moving to a "cottage village", something between a suburb and a gated community, despite good transit and horrendous traffic. In the 90ies it was stereotyped as a nouveu riche thing but in 2010s I even knew a senior dev who did it as it became more affordable. When I was visiting Tokyo iirc most local devs I was working with lived in the city but their manager lived in an outlying less dense area, since presumably he could afford it). I get a sense that people are likely to move to have more space and privacy, unless it's locally difficult or expensive.
That's right! And on average, the impact of mass protests in recent years, towards the causes they support, is somewhere between "zero" and "massively negative". Care all you want and politics will just ignore you or get angry at you for caring.
See e.g. throwing oil on famous paintings, or everything re Palestine in the past couple of years.
Protesting effectively is a skill which the present generation lacks. They don't even realize it's a skill issue. "Surely if we just care harder somebody will do something..!", they think, over and over. Doesn't make it so.
France Yellow jackets, China anti-lockdown protests are well known failure with 0 impact.
I will also tell the friends I made/lived with in NDDL that our action had no impact and that the airport is being built (given that a couple of them bought a house where the airport was supposed to be, they might not all believe me).
Your argument about increasing demand for services isn't convincing. Since there are more people in the area, should supply be higher as well, balancing prices?
It seems more likely that costs are higher in cities because there are valuable opportunities for skilled people who demand high salaries, simultaneously encouraging dense living to maximize access and increasing cost of living through the Baumol effect. High prices causing density, not the other way around.
> Since there are more people in the area, should supply be higher as well, balancing prices?
I think we are starting a conversation about gentrification: Rich white-collar/coat workers move into an area creating demand for service work. There is some price competition for their service work labor, raising wages, but typically housing costs are too high for these workers, so they leave (lowering supply, pushing up wages).
But this is just assuming the conclusion. Suppose that you were to increase the housing supply as much as, or more than, the increase in population. The existing lower-wage workers don't have to leave until prices have already increased to price them out, so their leaving can't have been the cause of the higher prices but rather its effect.
So it's a feedback loop, but one which is prevented by keeping supply enough to meet demand, because then lower paid workers aren't priced out and cost of living doesn't increase.
That's just one area in Halifax, but the idea is that higher population densities require less infrastructure per person. Less road, power line, water/sewer pipe, etc. However, low density houses usually pay less in property taxes per unit area than high density, meaning that increased infrastructure cost is coupled with a considerable tax break.
I was going to mention WebRTC! It seems designed for video calling, but there are lots of cool use cases - I recently ran across https://github.com/dmotz/trystero , a dead simple WebRTC library for peer-to-peer multiplayer browser games.
This discussion is about public EV charging. If you live somewhere rural or suburban and can afford a car, you can probably afford a garage for it. The push for public EV charging is in more urban places, where public transit would be a better investment.
The question here is how many people don't have a garage but still want a car. The rural and suburban folks are out - plenty of room for garages and charging. So any discussion of public charging infrastructure is focused on places where public transit would be a better investment.
