No, not really, and pace the "we will all want to sit in single pod cars, talking to no-one" approach, I do think rail as we know it is over. Welcome to the car-train.
The subsidies for rail travel are vast, and when there really is a viable alternative an order of magnitude cheaper, the rail industry will go the same way as the dockers did after 1957 (first use of container freight)
That will be a horrible wrench across the world, and will need to be managed well - preferably starting now.
On the plus side, there will be quite a lot of suddenly cheap land for sale throughout western cities - that will play havoc with house prices in 2030.
The internet itself is extremely simple and has
survived mostly unchanged from the 1980s ...
innovation to take place at the edges...
allow decisions and implementations to be delayed to a
time when everything can be done faster and smarter.
Big projects that don’t plan this way are doomed to
failure.
This is the most interesting point out of the article for me - many of the big government projects are being technologised away. How do we judge government spending from now on? By its ability to be flexible in face of change? By its lack of vast gobs of money?
The subsidies for rail travel are vast, and when there really is a viable alternative an order of magnitude cheaper, the rail industry will go the same way as the dockers did after 1957 (first use of container freight)
That will be a horrible wrench across the world, and will need to be managed well - preferably starting now.
On the plus side, there will be quite a lot of suddenly cheap land for sale throughout western cities - that will play havoc with house prices in 2030.