Pros of yacht-centric development:

• If you own a yacht, it means you are rich and therefore better than others.
• If you’re in a car, some homeless guy could just walk up to your car and beg for money (so awkward!). In a yacht, what are they gonna do, swim?
• Waterfront access is the American dream. Building roads instead of canals is literally communism.
• Yachts and canals are great for home values. Gotta keep those prices going up!
• Cars just aren’t sufficient for your average person to haul 20 friends to their weekly parties on their private islands. People need their yachts to go about these basic necessities of life!

Pros of car-centric development:

• ???
• There are no pros of car-centric development.

Yachts are the cars of water

I once wrote a semi-satirical short story for a writing contest about Norway in the future, and I haaaate how much I had to trim that story down for word count, because I had a ton of ideas for it. I was going to write at length about how rising sea levels and more frequent flooding due to extreme weather had encouraged a shift to canal-centric reconstruction of Norwegian cities. These canals were known to locals as “moats”, because their primary purpose was not to facilitate transport, but rather to hinder it: traveling around cities now required either a fancy boat, or crossing one of a limited number of drawbridges, which frequently broke down for extended periods of time in poorer areas, and universally prioritized boat traffic over foot traffic.

The growing underclass of Norway still found some use for the canals, though, as they could fish for drift-litter in the contaminated waters, which they would use for crafts and gardening and such. Meanwhile in other areas, the canal water had been purified: the parks and plazas of Norway’s cities had all been transformed into public swimming pools, leaving would-be protestors with virtually no choice but to don their favorite bikinis and swim-trunks while holding up water-proof signs.

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Can’t drown on a road

Ah yes, B.O.A.T. (break out another thousand). Perfect replacement for cars (according to boat dealers).

Seems to me we’re just gonna transfer the car problem to boats. People worried about all those sports boats mowing over us poor kayakers and row boaters, and even worse, disregarding paddle boarders crossing at designated points, but it’s our fault because they have big boats that can’t stop, forcing us to row down small canals or risk being stranded on a narrow river arm with a hole in our hull and no flex tape to at least get to a repair shop. But maybe we’ll start getting protected rowing lanes and not just a line of buoys that tell us where to be.

But I do like the idea of the Venetian solution from another comment. Build bridges low enough to block boats from coming through but high enough to let rowers and paddlers through. And if we need a place to pass on foot on busy places, we can always build drawbridges, but those would get pushback due to the danger they’d cause distracted boat drivers.

The future is wet, but not so different.

Why not just live on a yacht?

This will happen as the climate crisis deepen

Rising sea levels flooding your land, you need to live in/on your yacht to avoid this

Ye fond of me lobster! I’ve seen it!

Why would I sit in a car and maybe even have to drive? What if get a craving for a club sandwich?

You really expect me to ask some stranger in another car for Grey Poupon?

I gotta bring a chef and kitchen and waitstaff with me everywhere, just in case!

Now where did I put those naval mine schematics?

Silly OP.

You don’t want to take it to waters, because there’s where Deep Ones live and Cthulhu dreams his everlasting nightmares embraced by the walls of R’lyeh.

Have to make sure the island city floats, when the inevitable polar icecaps melting floods their property value increases!