1) I think disproportionate focus on financial profitability actually holds back the development of public goods like infrastructure where vast majority of economic value is not captured in the market transaction but positive societal externalities (or mitigating negative ones) that feed into the broad economy. In such an environment, it (somewhat counter-intuitively) makes sense to reduce financial profitability (lower fares) if it drives more network usage. This is why pure market-based approaches have largely failed for public infrastructure. 2) You can tie in the general concept of reducing physical distance with Geoffrey West's work 👇 on the superlinear scaling laws driven by social interaction network density (specifically as a city's population increases, economic outputs like GDP/wages/innovation rise at a power-law exponent of ~1.15. I think that is the real long-term experiment here: What happens to productivity when 50-60M people in the Pearl or Yangtze deltas live within a "1 hour commuter zone" - compare to equivalent Tokyo at ~30-33M. The experiment is a new form/level of urbanization intensity. xitter.cf/GlennLuk/status/129849…