My ideal city of the future is a small walkable town with everything within a 15-20 minute walk, possibly a part of a conglomerate of towns that run trains or buses between them.
I currently live in one such historical town in Southern Europe that's protected by Unesco. The streets are so narrow that not only there's no public transport, all non-resident and non-delivery traffic is prohibited and there's no Uber even. And yet you have everything you need for life and work within a 15-20 minute walk max. More for remote work, obviously.
An ideal city of the future doesn't need to be medieval but maybe we should go back to a city planning concept that is made for humans and not cars. And you know, narrow pedestrian streets are totally fine, they are cute!
Ah yeah sure I'll just find work in a place and then buy a house there. It's not like 3+ decades of mismanagement on migration and internal policies left even places 30+ minutes by car from work unafforable by mere mortals.
I always sort of assume people who are into de-urbanization are also de-dev, because I don't see how or why the large-scale industrial base would be needed or could be sustained with only smaller, distributed cities, but it's interesting to hear another perspective.
Very many people, including me, want to live in a glorious walkable bijou old-town stone apartment, except they can't afford to because they stopped building them like that in about 1756 and the only jobs within walking distance of the old town are in hospitality and those do not pay the salaries to buy one of the treasured old town apartments from under an AirBnB host.
And if it's a really small, non-tourist town in the middle of nowhere, it may not even have the hospitality sector. So, yes, that bijou property may indeed only cost 50,000 euros, and yes, you can walk to the boulangerie or the confitería or whatever but you're probably going to need a car to get out of your tiny town and go to work or basically anywhere else.
There's lots of solutions.
That doesn't make sense to me. Medieval towns existed for centuries before industrial civilization and without it we might see a drastic increase in medieval style living...
In any case the poster is talking about their own ideal future scenario, maybe leaving out the details like the robots working in underground manufacturing facilities or fusion-powered hydroponic vertical farms etc.
...or just any kind of remote work. Still limited, not available to everyone obviously but can't be omitted.
In other words, I could not use the service in any honest sense.
Perhaps a nice future is a hybrid model of public transportation plus personal transport via bicycles and scooters, especially with battery powered options becoming so robust.
Is that because many people find even first tier city public transit inadequate for much of their normal in-city transport, or are there a lot of people living in the first tier cities who need to visit the smaller cities or rural areas often enough that it is worth keeping a car just for those occasions?
Categorically this isn't true, I easily found good and affordable public transport in smaller towns. It's definitely less common, but to bluntly say that only first and second tier cities have gold and affordable public transport is inaccurate and dismissive.