alt Hacker NewsIt would be really interesting if it turns out that something like this improves the city's overall economy by encouraging people to go to neighborhood businesses instead of driving all the way across town to go to whatever place is currently trending.
I'm thinking here of when I lived in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee has a strong culture of driving across town to a small number of trendy neighborhoods. Which leads to hyper-concentration of commercial investment in those areas, since they're the only ones that get any traffic. Which might be fueling a vicious cycle that helps explain Milwaukee's rather extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities. It's harder for people in a neighborhood to have income if there aren't any nearby jobs. It's hard to hold down a job across town from where you live if you aren't wealthy enough to own a car.
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> extreme neighborhood-to-neighborhood prosperity disparities.
It may also make running a business more expansive. It limits locations and pushes rent up.
I can understand why poor families might save enough money to make the trip across town to a nice restaurant or a high end shop in a wealthy neighborhood they could never afford to live in. I can't understand how making it prohibitively expensive for poor people to drive into those nice neighborhoods will result in them becoming rich enough to open fancy restaurants and shops in their own poor neighborhoods where no rich people will ever travel to. The people in the poor neighborhood can't afford to eat/shop in such places often enough to support them and rich people won't go into poor neighborhoods for them either.
Shutting poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods by making it too expensive to drive into them will just cause poor neighborhoods to become ghettos. People living there will have to effectively take a pay cut to commute to work in nice parts of the city and they'll be less likely to ever be able to move out.