One possibility is to take a Lyft to the train station and then an Uber to your office. Which is slightly easier if you've automated the cars so that you don't have to load-balance the wetware part of it, but it's not entirely necessary.
Getting more people into the city is also helpful, but that's a lot of change. A lot of people have become adapted to the pace of suburb life, including me. Getting me into the city is less about cost than about the stress of having so many people around all the time. A lot of people want that, but a lot of people will want to live in the big empty green space, and would pay the costs -- including externalities, if we were to price them in. Improving city mass transit is good, but ultimately I think we'll also have to cope with a lot of people who just want to disperse at the end of the day.
> One possibility is to take a Lyft to the train station and then an Uber to your office. Which is slightly easier if you've automated the cars so that you don't have to load-balance the wetware part of it, but it's not entirely necessary.
Sure. But you can do that already. There are already trains/subways/buses in cities and there is already Uber and Lyft, without any need to close interstates that still have other uses, like transporting bulk material. (Notice also that most interstate highways go between cities.)
Moreover, the original claim was that we should have more trains which would make it so we wouldn't need electric cars. But now we're back to at least needing electric cars for Uber and Lyft.
> A lot of people want that, but a lot of people will want to live in the big empty green space, and would pay the costs -- including externalities, if we were to price them in.
Which is fine. Let the people who prefer the suburbs to live there. You don't need 100% of people to live in the city, what you need is to make it so that all the people who want to live in the city can afford to do so.
And fortunately electric cars powered by solar/nuclear get rid of most of the "externalities" of that -- the only one really left is traffic congestion. Which can be solved not by making it more expensive to live in the suburbs but by making it less expensive to live in the city. Then more people do, even if none of them is you, and there is less congestion on the road because all the people who do prefer to live in the city can use its existing mass transit system.
Getting more people into the city is also helpful, but that's a lot of change. A lot of people have become adapted to the pace of suburb life, including me. Getting me into the city is less about cost than about the stress of having so many people around all the time. A lot of people want that, but a lot of people will want to live in the big empty green space, and would pay the costs -- including externalities, if we were to price them in. Improving city mass transit is good, but ultimately I think we'll also have to cope with a lot of people who just want to disperse at the end of the day.