oiseauvert989 t1_iwgbclo wrote on November 15, 2022 at 12:52 PM

Reply to comment by PoliteThaiBeep in Waymo’s driverless taxis keep making incremental progress, while others flounder by AdmiralKurita

It was supposed to change due to the pandemic. That prediction turned out to be wrong though. The pandemic made a much smaller than expected change.

In the last couple of years I learned that urbanisation hasn't been knocked off it's long term path and if Covid couldn't do it, probably nothing will. 2 years ago I expected something quite different. I think one of the reasons was that many rural and suburban places were hit hard by Covid. If rural areas had escaped Covid, then I think the effect would have been stronger. Remote work changed a lot of thing but this aspect is turning out to be a much smaller and shorter lived change than I expected.

PoliteThaiBeep t1_iwggp8k wrote on November 15, 2022 at 1:41 PM

Really? I was saying that people would move away from cities for years and it was very slow before the pandemic, but the pandemic blew up my best expectations out of the water.

I never expected this mass exodus, certainly not at this rate (I am talking about San Francisco for example) even though I did expect people to move away from metro areas, but I expected slow gradual transition not massive shift like what is happening.

oiseauvert989 t1_iwgiqyk wrote on November 15, 2022 at 1:58 PM

Yeh SF isnt really representative of most cities in that sense. Even there, the only year with a significant drop was January 2020 to January 2021. SF has big barriers to building houses which creates all kinds of problems.

Some cities will stagnate, some cities will grow strongly but no cities are heading for big population drops except for places like Japan where the whole country is disappearing. Even there it is the rural areas that are becoming depopulated first. That is a much stronger trend over all and we are going to see much more of it in a lot of countries.

Well, we wont see it in person because we wont actually bother to visit those places but statistically it will be recorded more and more.