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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Do most of your friends live in cities?

How do your french friends in the rural countryside manage without cars?

Young people living in the country side of France all get their driver’s license as soon as possible.

They move to the city. I wonder how much of that gasoline use reduction is simply a consequence of ever higher urbanisation.

Not many people live in the rural countryside, and those that do likely still need cars.

And yeah, it's very common for someone who lives in the city themselves to have all of their friends also live in the city. Not many young adults out in the boonies, plus how would you ever meet and become friends with them in the first place if you couldn't get there?

Some of them got their driver license early, some of them had their parents do most of their driving until they moved to the city.

Isn’t urbanization a thing?

As in "people moving to the city", it is. But in my area, the city density never reaches a level where anything except the car is really convenient. Sure you can take the bus. If you're back home at 11, willing make a 15 minute ride an hour's, and pay the same as for a cheap car.

Fair enough. But as a whole the people of the world move together in ever exanding lumps.

One (there are many pros and cons) slightly positive side effect is that efficency have to increase. It’s unavoidable as humans in general seems to have a will to survive.

What seems to slow it down is mainly an unbridled capitalism, which is why for example China in a weird and somewhat unexpected fashion leads the way.

EV’s are not only more energy efficient, they also have a positive impact when it comes to proximity pollution.

This is really an issue of the quality of public transport and general infrastructure. Southern Germany, Bavaria, has a very good railway system.

Even the regional railway lines often get you faster where you need to go than a car would, especially during rush hours.

There's also the rarely mentioned factor of parking space becoming increasingly harder to find and more expensive in city centers. In my region, this is being solved by building affordable, or even free, parking decks near subway stations on the fringes of the city.

But even with that the parking situation still remains tense.

I don't understand what you mean by saying that.

Do you think nobody lives in the countryside any more? Do you think the next generation will permanently live in cities? Who do you think will grow your food and look after your open spaces?

My point was the author of my parent comment probably has a very skewed view of the need for cars, if all their friends are young metropolitan professionals.

They have a blind spot to the needs of a lot of other people.

>Who do you think will grow your food and look after your open spaces?

Robots, i hope.

That's not remotely realistic any time soon.

We can't all move into the cities and leave the countryside as a wasteland. Many people want to live there, and we need people to live there to keep the spaces living and working.

I worry that many people in tech have never spent any time outdoors and have no appreciation of nature at all.

It is already true that robots grow our food, the labour productivity for food production is orders of magnitude higher than 100-200 years ago, huge tracts of land that previously required hundreds or even thousands of workers are now managed by a handful of people and their machines. That process in a way has already happened. And it is already the case that most career opportunities (and a high percentage of young people) are in the cities.

Not a wasteland, just sparsely populated like Isaac Asimov's Solaria. Don't worry, the countryside will be just fine without people. Just read The World Without Us.

I guess I'll become an agricultural robot repairman like the guy in Interstellar when I grow older.

>Robots, i hope.

Funny, I have the opposite dream for technology where it alleviates the need to pack in as tightly as possible into cities for no particular purpose other than a job. While some people do truly love the city for the density and variety of amenities (I did when I was young), many people are forced to go there because that's where the good jobs are. This is made obvious by the number of people willing to commute an hour in from suburbs.

Ideally the only people living in high density are people who want that, which could easily be enabled by technology (remote working).

My point was that on the whole this is what has been going on. Round the world.

In the context of the thread and with my own situation in mind I’m not surprised that the demand for oil to support public transport is decreasing.

I’m with you that the car is going nowhere!

I think we just missunderstood each other a little bit.

> Do you think nobody lives in the countryside any more?

Less and less people. Pretty much all of my extended family moved out two decades ago, for example, and several no longer live in the countryside because their region is no longer countryside.

And AFAIR France at least a few years ago had a problem with farmer solitude stemming from this, and ultimately from farm automation.

Public transport.

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