Autonomous ride-hailing could free up a fifth of city land

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:33:58

   on the spot just go one level above it because merge the last two concepts together you talked about we talked about the federal government doge etc isn't there the potential for just a complete surplus of physical inventory that exists in america oh yeah okay so big time so what does that mean for commercial? How do you navigate around that? Because you got to evade the falling knives first. So, okay. So let's just go down ride-sharing lane. So autonomous ride-sharing lane. You go down that lane, car ownership, which is already dropping, drops like a knife all the way down. And there's this thing in cities, which takes up 20 to 30% of all the land. It's called parking. It's no longer necessary because cars are getting utilized. The cars that exist on the roads are getting utilized 15x more than they were before per car. So you need hypothetically

2. 1:34:50

   one-fifteenth the number of cars. Maybe you could say one-fifth or one-tenth because you want to be able to surge to rush hour and things like that. It depends on what kind of carpooling and things like this that are going on. But let's just call it 10x fewer cars, one-tenth the land necessary for parking, at least one-tenth. Maybe it's less than that. So now you're opening up you're opening up 20% of the land in a city that just goes fallow.

3. 1:35:19

   But what should we do with that? And is there a demand for that land? Well, look, I mean, maybe it's the- Should it be housing? And then don't we have to reevaluate all of the city planning today? Because city planning today, to your point, works backwards from all these constraints that are 1.0 constraints. Like here's the traffic flow, here are the traffic patterns. Those don't exist theoretically anymore, or they would exist in a totally different way, right?

4. 1:35:44

   Yeah. I mean, there's a massive amount of creativity to say, what can I do with that land with a high ROI? Some people are like, you're going to have farms, hydroponic farms in urban environments, I'm like, that's not a bad idea if you want to have farm-to-table healthy food. It's literally farm-to-table. It's like a mile away from you. Yeah. So there's some interesting ideas. The land price has to really come crashing down, and there's interesting ramifications if it were to do that. You could imagine- But that's what I wanted you to say, not to try to get you there, but that seems like the crazy thing that nobody is thinking about, which is in this push, this physical built inventory has so much value built up in the 401ks of individuals to the balance sheets of huge pension funds, but that value could be very different. Right. But the crazy part is,

5. 1:36:38

   is it could just be electricity production and electric capacity on the grid could be the gating factor that makes it a slow burn. Potentially. I'm just riffing here, guys. Right. Makes total sense. And if you want to see what happens when you have unlimited land, If you live in Austin and you see the distance between San Antonio, Houston and Dallas and Austin in that triangle, you get 30 minutes outside of the city centers.

6. 1:37:05

   There's just unlimited land and there's less regulation. And you know what's happened? Housing prices and rents have come down two or three years in a row. So this could happen in other major cities. And if Doge has less regulation, you can build more. It could be amazing for Americans to actually be able to afford homes again and maybe convert some of this space. Right. You go energy storage, electric grid upgrades, sort of modular energy capacity upgrades and production. This is going to be very, very important. Right now, we do this all the time. We have, of course, facilities all over every major city in the US and really around the world. Utility upgrades is the long pole in the tent in construction development.

7. 1:37:54

   in a lot of our cities, not all cities, but in a lot of our cities. The Fed held rates. They're getting close to the goal of 2%. I guess we're at 2.4,