> If I could get to hong kong in 15 minutes, I might go there this afternoon for some dumplings.
And that's a good thing, because it increases the amount of demand available to businesses. The more potential customers you have, the more product you can make to sell to that market, and the more product you can make, the better your economies of scale.
The large population of New York is what allows it to offer so many niche and specialty stores, which would otherwise struggle to stay in business.
counterpoint: it's also a bad thing because society functioning now becomes more reliant on this transportation method.
It destroys "walkable" spaces and encourages centralization of services, when a more uniform spread of services across space is in fact healthier.
I heard of a study recently that showed that cities in Japan that ended up getting Shinkansen stations ended up almost always shrinking, because people got used to going to Tokyo all the time and ended up just moving there. You see similar centralization in places like France (everything goes through Paris)
I realize your point but food deserts exist for a reason.
> a study recently that showed that cities in Japan that ended up getting Shinkansen stations ended up almost always shrinking
I welcome you linking to this study, because a naive explanation for parts of Japan shrinking would be Japan's overall population decline (i.e. shrinking demographics). So unless the study controlled for that, I'm rather disinclined to think that the Shinkansen by itself caused areas outside Tokyo to shrink.
If anything, centralization happens because of the difficulty of transportation. Highways were what drove "white flight" to the American suburbs. Jammed highways and hellish commutes are driving gentrification.
And centralization improves walkability, if anything. If I need to take a train to get into the city, then I need the city to be walkable after I get there, because I don't have a car with me anymore.
You see the same in London too, where even within London, boroughs that'd be viable large cities of their own if they were further separated from London, has big gaps in various types of things because you can just go in to the centre.
E.g. nightlife is a typical one, where there are a few centres in London (and they change over time), and clubs and bars outside of those regions suffer compared to even smaller towns elsewhere.
On one hand it's great - you can head where the action is. On the other hand it means a night out might easily be an hour travel each way and/or expensive tax rides, instead of a 20 minute walk.
I heard of a study recently that showed that cities in Japan that ended up getting Shinkansen stations ended up almost always shrinking, because people got used to going to Tokyo all the time and ended up just moving there.
This is so counter intuitive. This is the exact opposite of suburbia. Faster and cheaper transport led to the growth of suburbs. Can the movement of people to Tokyo be attributed just to the faster trains ? Can you please share a link to the study if you have it handy.
OTOH, it reduces the amount of such businesses, since each one now has to compete with many more for the same customer base. In the limit (cheap teleporters) this leads to what we have on the Internet - winner-takes-all global competition.
On the contrary, such competition drives business to hyper-specialize, in order to carve out its own market niche. There was so little competition in Ye Olde Medieval European Village that you didn't have a choice what kind of meat or metal you could buy - there was a guild-protected artisan, and what he made was what was available for sale. Now you have a choice between organic and free-range (usually both) and between Game of Thrones replicas and Lord of the Rings replicas.
Yes, but the point was that if you could get to Hong Kong in 15 minutes for dumplings, you couldn't get to Hong Kong in 15 minutes because everyone else was going there, too.
And some of us don't live in New York because of the friction involved.
The point (at least my point) is that if you could go to Hong Kong in 15m, we would be consuming a lot of "transport," thousands of times more KMs than we currently travel for dumplings or work or whatever. Whatever teleportation technology is responsible, needs to be almost unlimited in its capacity because our demand is almost unlimited.
When supply is limited (teleportation wormhole congestion) and demand is unlimited, something will negotiate the difference. This can be prices or congestion.
If you aren't too pedantic about the definition of nobody it actually makes sense though. In this case "nobody" could be 5 billion+ people not going because it's too crowded, yet there would still be large crowd.
And that's a good thing, because it increases the amount of demand available to businesses. The more potential customers you have, the more product you can make to sell to that market, and the more product you can make, the better your economies of scale.
The large population of New York is what allows it to offer so many niche and specialty stores, which would otherwise struggle to stay in business.