In "Where Is My Flying Car", Hall argues that what we really value in cities isn't necessarily physical density, but *temporal* density—ie low travel time. If all points were 5x further apart, but we move 5x faster, we'd prefer it: everyone could have more space. Is this right? /
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Seems very odd to say at all that people value physical density - most people hate it and only put up with it because of other things (incl temporal density, but that's one in a long list). So I am slightly skeptical of the initial framing which seems to be squishing words.
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Yes, I see where you're coming from! Per , what I "really" want is extremely low density for *my* house and extremely high density surrounding it (i.e. cultural energy, low travel time, etc).
agreed!
cars were supposed to deliver on this. naive model was "with a car, I have access to 10x more stuff given the same travel time!"
but cars take tons of space of their own. this dilutes the interestingness/mi², resulting in far less temporal density than we expected
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One reason the Bay Area is actually pretty cool is I was able to hike in three different awesome parks a short drive from SF in the last three days
Honestly, the only reason I live near a city is for job density. WFH is changing this dynamic rapidly.
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