Cities aren't going anywhere. Building and maintaining roads and cars is expensive. Essentially you can either pay for endless freeways, or pay for a subway system. People need to get around.
None of this works with subway. Subways are for people without much luggage (statistically, I am sure someone here will destroy me with facts how he hauled a sofa and a refrigerator on subway in Amsterdam and has not broken a sweat). You still need roads for cargo and using them for people too seems pretty straightforward and rational to me. If my city was flooded with money and everything else was in top shape (roads, parks, schools, utilities, police) then and only then I would not mind spending money on transit.
I am not sure what does this mean. You want unpaved roads for trucks? And when there are rains and they become impassable you just go without cargo in your dense cities?
> you can make both the roads and the intracity freeways much smaller.
How much smaller? Narrower? The lane width is determined by the width of the truck, not the private traffic. Less lanes? You need at least two lanes in either direction so a broken truck does not leave your city without food and three lanes so you have a chance to get around a collision or can do road work without stopping all traffic. Which is the regular width of freeways.
- classic planes are on par with cars for very short flight, offer much bigger fuel economy for longer ones, but obviously need MUCH space for practical use, even for the "shortest" STOL, otherwise;
- ...choppers and alike consume MUCH more than cars. Enough to be too much to use for all on scale.
However many observe that the immense and largely ignored costs of big buildings and their infra + renewable progress and nuclear comeback will offer enough to sustain such system and flying stuff last for 50+ years (except the battery of eVTOL so far). Long story short: we are switching form a heavy society to a light one, able to do most of the move by air, goods included, and as much as local productions as possible, knowing that in a changing world we can't maintain roads and rails because no one know what happen next in a relatively short timeframe not only in climate terms but also in human wars terms. Essentially we need to be much more resilient, semi-autonomous, and that's incompatible with cities and their needed infra.
Of course to be realistic those who have realized that needs, also understand that so far we have no general solution, so they prefer having the people partitioned in "disposable factory units", disposable also in humans, used to create such new world while being tied in 15'-cities without any personal means able to move them for longer distance.
So far most call such crude distopic scenario a fantasy but a small step at a time the fantasy will be reality. People in many moment of the history have not moved at all except traders and ruling class or soldiers for a war. So yes, people need to move to live well, but not to live. Only goods need to move: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/trade-and-travel-time-epidemi... and https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/commute-time-savings-when-wor... also people aggregated in small not much dense areas still need a dentist, to eat and so on, meaning that such non-remote activities could be done in such areas from home anyway, the dentist have hes/her clinic on one side of hes/her land, the home on the other, the public laundry similarly it's in the basement while the owner live at the first floor. Accidentally this is the very same description of efficient cities by Strong Towns, only for moving in the modern world instead of in the ancient one. If you really try to compute such scenario you'll see that we are probably much far than the McKinsey report BUT not that far and yes it's perfectly feasible. The point is where you want to be, between the disposable humans in modern lager-camps named cities or between the Citizens outside.
No, they don't. They can just stay at home all the time, working at a work-from-home job and socializing entirely online while getting deliveries from Amazon. /s
I see you scenario much more in a dense city, goshiwong alike, than in spread area of single family homes intermixed with works buildings like EU Rivieras.
With this lifestyle you get:
- much more in-person social activities
- much better environment
- much more personal space
- much less to spend in consuming services, from ready made foods to fast fashion, mobile smart macrobugs devices and so on.
This last point is the reasons why big tech and in general finance capitalism hate such model.