Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
This person has never lived anywhere close to an actual small American town and has no idea how small towns are structured.
“Here’s a solution”
“That solution doesn’t work for A LOT of people”
“Well you don’t think it’ll work for valid reasons you must not want anything to work ever”
“That solution doesn’t work for A LOT of people”
Mass transit is how you create large population centers. A big reason small towns collapse stems from the degradation of their incredibly expensive per-mile asphalt system collapsing under the weight of heavy trucks and eighteen wheelers. The cost of maintaining the road infrastructure cripples the municipal budget.
Commercial Rail takes that weight off the back of the local community. And busing allows for denser housing closer to the center of town, which saves money on everything from municipal plumbing to trash pickup to public schooling to health care delivery.
Historically, small towns have relied on centrally located city services to both fuel local commerce and keep cost of living down. The death of a small town’s city center is typically the prelude to the collapse of the township on the whole. That’s a fact people who actually live in these towns are keenly aware of. But it is routinely overlooked by big city suburbanites who think everyone in the family owning a $40k personal vehicle is normal and taking the bus or the bicycle into town is something rural communities are totally unfamiliar with.
