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
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
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.
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.
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.
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”
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
In America, it’s 5:1 urban to rural. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america.html
And the threshold for rural is 500 people per square mile. So the 5 minutes to neighbor is at a rare extreme. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/acs/acsgeo-1.pdf
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Tiny cars is the only solution
I would unironically drive something like this. I’ve often wondered if I could make a street legal go cart.
But what if one day five years from now you need to move 20 refrigerators at midnight and all the trains suddenly break down?
/s
I swear this sub is the same thing repeated in different variations over and over
I checked the sub again and it’s only the front page posts I see that aren’t any good, they’re just text post rants like this one, kind of like the Lisa Simpson template, not even a meme
But then how can we turn trillions of dollars by shackling people to an expensive automobile along with its repairs and insurance costs? How can we further exploit by forcing the use of these vehicles, thus requiring the purchase of their fuels and the use of asphalt companies to pave endless highways and streets? The public yearns to be exploited- no, it needs to be.
So, I don’t know if you know this or not, but a majority of people want their cars. Nobody is forcing their use. Roads exist because people want their cars, and they want to be able to get places in those cars.
This exactly. Do I want a car in the US’ current car-centric hell where taking a bus across town could take two hours? Yeah, absolutely. Would I want one in a US with robust public transit and micromobility infrastructure? Almost certainly not. It’s a constant financial drain and huge pain in the ass at every turn.
When people say we need to get rid of cars, we mean that we need to 1) build up viable alternatives to cars and in conjunction 2) stop letting the interests of cars dominate everything else. Car drivers in the US are actively given enormous privilege over every other mode of transportation. Businesses need to meet ridiculous parking minimums to ensure you can drop your giant metal box anywhere, anytime and for free, dramatically reducing walkability; speed limits are basically never enforced, speeding up car commutes but dramatically increasing the danger for those who elect for micromobility; ungodly amounts of transportation funds get funneled into unsustainable road projects while public transit starves; car companies are deliberatelly allowed to skirt environmental regulations by selling even less environmentally friendly trucks and SUVs; and basic traffic calming measures are given ridiculous thresholds like “Have X number of people died here yet?”
If you start taking away the insane privileges that are afforded to and often even mandated for cars, you make way for other means of transportation to grow and become the optimal choice for most people. Some people will still use cars because they need to or want to, but even those people will use them less frequently.
I want my car, and I want 100 others. I just can’t afford all the cars I want. Most of the people I know also want more cars or sportier, more expensive cars.
Do they want to get to places on those cars, or do they want to get to places and cars are the only (or only practical) way?
They want to get places in those cars. Why do you think everyone “goes to work”? They go to work, because … they’re providing a service for people who are…
dun dun dun…
Driving cars to the places they want to get to, for commerce. This shit isn’t mandated. You don’t HAVE to own a car. Everyone WANTS to own cars.
As a mid-westerner, cars and driving is in my culture and DNA. For many of us, cars are our freedom machines, the only way to move on in life, the only way to get anywhere. I love to drive and I can drive almost anything. What I don’t like, is having to drive to survive, having to constantly be in a hurry.
Im pretty anti car but I do like having the option that is my own. I just want my driving to be like the used car salesmans little old lady that used it briefly once a week. Im one of the few anti car that want to make it more a choice so that they can be kept parked as much as possible.
Same, I really enjoy driving in rural areas across long distances with low traffic. I hate driving in cities.
Any time I go to a city with a decent subway/metro/light rail line that is my first choice if possible. Or walk, since a lot of city downtowns are very walkable, especially compared to rural areas and spread out midwestern towns woth barely any shade trees.
A majority of heroin users want heroin too. Roads exist because people want to go places; they preceded cars by a couple thousand years
“But i really waaaaaaaant it” isn’t grounds for policy making
It really is though. Why do you think Marijuana is being legalized? It’s because “I really waaaaaaant it”…is literally grounds for policy making.
