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Old Posted Sep 22, 2019, 8:32 PM
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Yuri Yuri is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by llamaorama View Post
Yuri's question is a real one. Our present modes of transportation mean you can only go so far and so fast and as density increases that effects what transportation we can use. Autonomous cars might increase the potential size of a city, so would high speed regional rail. If more people worked in virtual reality rather than in person the attraction to population centers would revolve around access to things which people's travel time tolerances are higher, like cultural and natural amenities, or access that's infrequent like health care services, then there would be less traffic and people would go further so if people still accepted higher densities you could have very big cities.
Another challenge is world's demographic winter. As population grows ever slower, we'll have less candidates for this new 50 million people kind of metropolis. Urban China is already growing considerably slower, so this would leave us with only New Delhi that could potentially replace Tokyo as world's biggest metropolis.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc View Post
They are distinct right now but who knows what could happen in 50-100 years? Both cities are dramatically different than they were 50-100 years ago and American culture in general is gradually homogenizing. I see less of a cultural difference between here in Texas than the northeast than I did as a kid.
In this case, aside cultural traits and very separated labour markets, I guess the long distance (150 km apart) and the slow growth of New York and Philadelphia MSAs (roughly 3%/decade) are the major obstacles for both merging as one polycentric metro area.
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