this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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Absolutely both are needed. I struggle to understand how people think a rural area with 5 minute drives between homes could be connected to a public transit network that is timely and not astronomically expensive.
Similarly, I struggle to understand why people think paying for roads to connect houses 5 miles away from each other isn’t astronomically expensive
Not sure who's downvoting you, you're absolutely correct. Infrastructure for rural, and even suburban areas isn't even close to being paid for by the people living there. I thought this was common knowledge. It should be obvious that 5 families living in a single large building require significantly fewer resources than 5 individual homes 5 miles apart.
Rural people, and I get it: I grew up in rural Montana. But America doesn’t run on people like my grandpa driving 6A worth of corn to the grange any more. People like my grandma driving literally 7mi each way to the nearest grocery store isn’t sustain long term
Yeah, I’d love to live in my own mansion on an island and fly my private jet to work. But that’s not realistic if everyone waaaaaaaants to do it
Discussions like this are always a good reminder that area descriptions are different across the world. I live in what is considered a rural area here(in a small terraced house where houses where already there when the Ferrari maps of the Southern Netherlands where drawn in 1780...). Farms everywhere. Behind the terraced housing and small apartments. Still have a population density of 500 people per km². And our public transport is shit outside of the typical congestion hours. Personally I wish they'd both put tram tracks down again with a dedicated track cars can't drive on and improve the cycling paths to be more safe. Guess I'm part of the problem driving an EV, but it gets me to work in 15 minutes. While with public transport it'd 90 minutes if nothing happens when I need to go from one bus to the other. And there simply are no safe cycling paths. (And no showers at work) Shopping I can do by bike or by walking though.
You don't understand how minimal maintenance on roads is less expensive than the equipment and personnel to drive through it on a frequent basis?
That's worrying indictment of the education system.
I'm not sure what your comparing here, but there are constant budget shortfalls for rural paving in my state. It's not cheap. There's also the cost to build the roads (and run electric, phone, internet, etc). There's a reason we needed a bunch of subsidies to add services to rural (and even suburban) places. I think we owe it to everyone in our society to provide basic services, but we don't have to pretend it isn't expensive to do so.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money
Actually I understand it just fine. My city alone has a $4.4B road maintenance backlog, and it’s not that big of a city
It’s cheap”er” to maintain roads. It is not cheap. Use Google next time
And how much do you think a transit system that is meaningfully comparable to cars would cost?
Edit: either big"I was told there would be no fact checking!" vibes from anonymous downvoters or sour grapes on my end., I guess.
To your edit: it's the former
The taxes might be cheaper, but everyone on these cheap roads purchases their own car, their own insurance, wastes their own time in traffic, lives near nothing but a church an hour walk away, etc.
I’m curious so let’s explore this. Say someone in a rural area needs to drive 10 mins down the road a day and 10 mins back. Let’s say you employ one person for just 12 hours at federal minimum wage. That’s $609/week PLUS maintenance and gas on the bus. If someone owned their car/truck and paid maybe $2.50/gal with a 15mpg car, that would only be like $1.70 a day for them. (30mph20min/15mpg$2.5/gal*7(days)=$11.67). That community would only need 60 people taking the exact same path as the bus to make it worth it for them.
I’m all for public transit. I take it to work a few times a week and even when doing leisure, but it’s not a replacement for extra-suburb transit.
The problem comes when people who insist on living away from civilization demand the perks of civilization by being able to drive to a city and park their cars for free.
This becomes very expensive, and degrades the quality of life of those who live in the City.
If left to private companies, they can’t even seem to bring internet service 5 miles down a rural road. How the heck do you even imaging the whole road being a reasonable idea
Roads in rural new England are most often publicly funded, and are connected into a network of roads and are for transit, so rural roads are in fact a public transit network. I get that you mean trains and buses, though.
Rural roads are just expensive, period. Putting electric cars on them would additionally shorten their lifespan, so I fail to see how either public transit or electric cars are supposed to help. Plus, rural folks are not major emitters, so it doesn't really make much sense to even try to find meaningful emission savings there.
"On average, cities and large towns produce about four tonnes of CO2 per capita, compared with more than six tonnes elsewhere in the UK"
https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/net-zero-decarbonising-the-city/why-cities-will-need-to-play-a-central-role-in-the-net-zero-agenda/
That is per capita my guy. They emit more per person, but when you've only got 5 families in 10 square miles, getting them to emit less is fuckall in comparison to everyone in a city emitting less.
Very few people ought to be living that way. I think it's fine for those people to use ICE cars. I also don't care very much if the tractors use fossil fuels.
To each their own. I don't live in the boonies but I'd like to retire there with some nice land to work on etc.
You can have nice land to work on in rural village. Being miles from your neighbor is not a sustainable way to live. And probably not healthy for a social animal like humans.
Transit between rural villages and the nearest city is possible and has been implemented in other countries
I was at my healthiest mentally and physically when I lived that far from people and went weeks without seeing another person, so every time I see people say this I wonder if I'm actually human.
Hmm. Healthy for who?
I have no close friends and I couldn’t be happier. As a matter of fact, give me a cave, a phone, a single outlet and BAM. I’m good to go. I don’t want friends, I want to laugh at a stranger’s joke on the internet and I’m good.
That puts you at an extreme, where there are not many like you. So I don't care if you have a gas car. But you should not stand in the way for most people to live more ethicaly, without a car. Support dense cities so there are plenty of pristine caves for hermits to live in.
I mean, yeah. Why not? I don’t want to live in a city, but if you give me a cave, I’m in.
I wish I wasn’t me. I really do.
You eliminate the rural area with 5 minute drives between homes. Japan has a much higher population density more generally, granted, and they do occasionally get older, offset, single homes that are miles from anything else. But they also have extremely rural villages with maybe 2000 people that are still about as rural as you can get and still go in for farming. Many other places (I would say, basically all of them?) do this as well, and not all of them have high population density. I think, almost definitionally, the land use I'm proposing has a higher pop density, but the style of development generally, you'd be hard pressed not to classify it as rural.
The solution here is to orient the land use radially. Also probably to use less land generally, but that's a separate issue. Most land use in america looks like having 20 different farms, that are each like 3 or 4 miles across, sometimes with multiple plots, with each house being positioned as far away from the other houses as possible, usually somewhere along the edge of a plot, and then running roads out to each of them, sometimes dirt roads, sometimes paved, usually some combination of the two for higher use vs lower use vs private.
Instead of that, you do what people have been doing for centuries. You clump the 20 different houses together in one contiguous strip that's placed along some sort of rail line or higher traffic road, and then you disconnect all the plots of land from the particular houses. Ownership doesn't necessarily have to correlate with one plot of land vs another. Then you gain all of the benefits that entails, and if everything is laid out sensibly, then you're only about 3 miles from your specific plot. Utilities become cheaper to maintain, emergencies like fires, medical problems, natural disasters, become much easier to deal with, you can start building some actual infrastructure, like, say, a rail line.
That becomes much easier to justify if you only gotta send that shit to like one concentration of 20 or 30 or houses instead of sending it to those 20 or 30 houses individually, most especially if that line is just passing through before heading somewhere else, which should generally be the case. Maintenance of that rail line also becomes less problematic compared to that of a road if we're considering that this rural area is probably mostly going to be farmland that demands larger industrial equipment shipments, and is going to be shipping back and forth things like grain, bulk goods which would do much better to be shipped by train compared to most other forms of transit. Slap that together with a multi-daily passenger rail line that passes through it as a stop and you're pretty much set.
If we were allowed to Sim City our way to goodness, I'd pretty much agree with you.
But my province, a fair chunk of that land is held and others aspire to it.
I mean, my answer doesn't make any of those people happy, but it's basically just, fuck those people, if there's a correct way to do something, we should do things in said correct way, rather than capitulating to everyone's half-baked propagandized idiot desires
I'm pretty sure this is the reasoning espoused by every autocrat in history, many of whom thought they were doing things for the better.
I mean, yeah, but the major difference is that they were wrong and dumb and I am correct
sounds more dictatorial by the minute
and I'm loving every minute of it jerry
Except we already have built it wrong. Maybe if the government bought all of those houses and re-zomed the land forbidding houses but we're talking more than 10 million homes (probably WAY more) probably $4 trillion+ and that isn't even accounting for building new infrastructure. Not to mention people would refuse to leave their land. Realistically this is probably a $50 trillion undertaking.
Money's just an object. Just do maybe 3 or 4 five year plans, and you'd probably be able to get there. If they don't like it, eminent domain their asses. I dunno. It's not a real obstacle, to me, that they're deciding to intentionally be obstinate and intentionally deciding to make all their neighbor's QoL worse. Just an slightly smaller version of the problem where some iowan baron decides it's their right to dump their 84 million people's worth of pig shit into a massive pig shit lagoon, tainting 70 something percent of the water supply. Except in this case, people aren't getting malaria and we're not having water quality issues. Instead, they're getting heart disease and increased risks of lung cancer from needing to drive everywhere, they're having to work fruitlessly on road and utilities maintenance jobs for longer, and grandma dies maybe 10 years earlier than she would've cause she was 5 miles away and nobody was able to notice that she wasn't coming out of the house.
It's not a big obstacle to your theory in your mind. A lot of rural people would go to war before being forced to abandon their properties. It becomes a pretty big problem to reality then. And in some of the more rural areas the backroad dirt or gravel connectors are maintained by the residents. You should spend a couple of days exploring the upper peninsula in Michigan. You need at minimum an AWD vehicle with a foot of ground clearance. There's honestly like one paved road.
I don't live in a place like that, I live in a shitty suburb with no sidewalks or bike lanes, or even a shoulder on the road. You can't go anywhere without a car, it's deadly. But I do vacation in places like I was describing almost exclusively. And most of them would never move to a city. But you'd just force them? My politics are anti-authoritarian. If I understand you correctly, you would empower monsters to do heinous things to your own citizens.
Yeah, i would empower monsters to do heinous things to my citizens, like forcing them to live in a rural village where someone will care for them when they're old, and their utilities layouts will make sense, and their cost of living and lifestyle footprint will massively decrease. Oh no! The horror!
Also, I dunno. ahh, they'll go to war, how horrifying! whatever shall we do! How many of these people will actually go to war, though? That's some shit that floats around a lot, but I realistically think that if you just kick someone into some situation that's realistically better than what they were previously hucking, then they'd probably just take it. IF you really wanted to swing it, though, then you could just swing it all through the markets and then fuck them over that way, just like they're already being fucked. Not many people actually have that killdozer gene in them, though, and they wouldn't really have a good target. There's no amount of "blowing stuff up" or "going to war" that can realistically bring back a, by it's nature, highly vulnerable, detached development style like that, and blowing stuff up doesn't really help you contest with whatever your current standards of living are.
Lemme ask you this, though. How do you think we should solve the problem of the suburbs? Do you think a market solution is going to operate fast enough? Do you think those solutions are going to solve the broader problems with the housing crisis popping up in every major city? Do you think they will be enacted fast enough to mitigate climate problems?
I struggle to think how you see a generic statement about improving public transit and immediately go to "but what about the places where it cant help?"
Well shit Einstein, I suppose this is just referring to places where it does then.
Your comment does nothing to support or contradict the idea we should improve public transport...
It was more about the "we need both" parts.
Though, dismissing the some half of the country that lives in rural areas is kind of why politics is what it is I guess.
Less than 20% of people live in rural areas in the USA.
Fair, but you add suburban about a third live urban. And realistically, connecting suburbs to a system that is anywhere comparable to cars is also pretty expensive.
True, but catering to people who make poor life choices also isn’t sustainable. Living in a rural area and having many kids are both choices. I few people should be able to make those choices, and should also be responsible for paying for them
I'm super curious, do you know/realize that's pretty much the conservative perspective on a bunch of issues (with which I also disagree.)
I don't think it is, the conservative perspective is that you should have to pay to live, while this guy is just saying that you should have to pay to live the way you want if that way is expensive.
The problem with conservatism is that we are subsidizing people living in the equivalent of downtown penthouses in cost because it's tradition, instead of the people in the streets.
Yes, and as conservatives see it, jobs are available and it's on you to get one and support yourself and/or your family. If you can't afford a family, it's not on the state to subsidize yours.
Such is the conservative answer to addiction/homelessness, healthcare, education and pretty much everything else.
So my take is that there is a difference between saying "if you can't afford to feed your family, starve", and "if you can't afford a lifestyle that's decidedly much more expensive than that of most people, get a cheaper living".
TBH in my perfect world, you would get free room and board in high density housing for free without stigma, and you could work to get something better. Does saying "I don't want to pay to sustain people's expensive rural lifestyles, I'd rather the money would go to help more people for whom not getting help means starving instead of moving" make me a conservative?
Improving public transit does nothing to impact rural area car travel. Saying we need both on a comment how we should improve public transport is replying to something not at task here.
Maybe you should look at the post again? I'm agreeing with OP who posted the meme with the note "Both is good" and I agreed.
Are you maybe confused and thinking you're in a different thread?
The point is the post seems to minimize improve cars in favor of mass transit. The post didn't start with we need both, it started with "get rid of cars" as the general sentiment.
Which is a fine sentiment in city centers, but that's only a piece of things. Incidentally, I think the cities are generally trying to build out that transit.