Q I find this very counterintuitive because you hear a lot of things, especially in these discussions around gentrification and cities now sprawling out into suburban centers and going beyond that everyone's becoming more and more dispersed. What's the relationship in this schema you just painted of the suburb to the city?
A From my perspective, we have to remember that in every American city, with the possible exception of New York, more space is devoted to sleeping cars than sleeping people. And what happens if autonomy arrives in the form I anticipate and in the form that I certainly favor, which is autonomous vehicles, which are shared and used multiply. Then all of a sudden, a huge amount of urban real estate, downtown central city real estate opens up. And I think what it does is it sucks both residential and business activity away from the inner ring of suburbs. Those hollow out, and then we have the challenge of what do we do now with a hollow core around a vibrant, a hollow ring around a vibrant metropolis. So I think the real challenge is going to be what happens to that, that first layer of low density suburbs.
AI assessment note: “it sucks both residential and business activity away from the inner ring of suburbs.”