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Comment by karpodiem | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what percentage of urban dwellers remain in the city for their lifetime? I would imagine this number tracks inversely to the decreasing birth rate YoY decline (among this same demographic group) in the US. Specifically, I'm interested in the birthrates for the 50-75th income percentile for living in major cities (not metropolitan areas).

A couple cursory Google searches hasn't yielded any hard data, but hopefully someone has come across data on this.

tldr; I don't disagree with your assumption for decreased ownership for personal transportation, but I don't see this changing for families that live outside the Urban core until decades from now.

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I don't have an answer to your specific question but I do know ⅔ of all miles are driven in an urban environment in the USA. Urban is where the money is.

I believe that's only true if you include suburban miles under "urban", i.e., everything but rural. So that statistic really doesn't speak to karpodiem's comment about city dwellers:

> I'm interested in the birthrates for the 50-75th income percentile for living in major cities (not metropolitan areas).

Yes suburban is included however I strongly believe that the average suburban dweller will be more than catered for with self-driving taxis once we hit saturation point. During the service growth years it will probably be inconvenient but as soon as we reach maturity owning a car will be the inconvenience.

Sure, but I'd agree with karpodiem that this is likely decades from now, i.e., more than 20 years before half of suburban households drop their car for a autonomous taxi service. Computers took over a decade to really penetrate. 10% of people owned a computer 20 years ago, but no uses a self-driving car today. Further, the financial and regulator roadblocks are much larger for cars than computers.

It will take a while but perhaps now that everyone has a smartphone and is used to technology/ understands it's benefits, adoption rates will speed up.

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