And what of people that live out in the country, far from a city? Not walkable or bikeable. Building public transport there is not viable. Cars with sustainable fuel sources are the far better solution.
Rail used for freight. Do you think people were taking the train to the grocery store or the doctor’s office? Not to mention, that’s still in the city. There are people that live many miles away from the nearest public infrastructure, outside of roads and electricity.
Then there’s the dilemma of being at the mercy of the train schedule. 1 to 2 stops a day. It’s not like public transport in metropolitan areas where there are many stops a day.
Back then, they were walking to the general store or the doctor’s office if they lived in town, and they were riding their horse if they were a farmer living out in the fields. Today, we have such inventions as bicycles and paved roads to replace horses. The future is now!
Yes, I have. And being an australian, our rural areas are a lot more rural than the rural areas most of these americans are from. Now I’ll tell you a secret: There’s a good reason australia was mostly empty before colonisation, and there’s a very common sense reason why australia’s environment has been dying ever since then.
Dude… Australia is still fucking empty. The majority of you live in cities, and not rural. The majority of you live on the coast. The majority of Americans do not live near a city, most of us a miles and miles from one.
Four out of five Americans (80%) live in an urbanized area according to the Census Bureau. Only 20% of us live in rural areas. That shifted slightly toward rural in the 2020 census (it was 80.7% urban in 2010), because the Bureau revised the cutoff for urban area upward from 2,500 to 5,000 people. A large proportion of that “rural” 20% live in towns of up to 5,000 residents. The number of people who truly live miles from anybody else is quite small.
You guys are acting like urban is the same thing as metro. Things in urban areas are still far apart a lot of the time. Urban sprawl needs to be fixed (which involves relocating millions of people) before the banning of cars would even be even somewhat reasonable.
In 1790, only about one out of every twenty Americans (on average) lived in urban areas (cities), but this ratio had dramatically changed to one out of four by 1870, one out of two by 1920, two out of three in the 1960s, and four out of five in the 2000s.
Urban areas are based off of 2.5k people in an area…I own a 200+ acre farm and have to drive 30mins (17miles) to the nearest grocery store…I am included in this urban classification…thats how the census is based.
There are people that live many miles away from the nearest public infrastructure, outside of roads and electricity.
Yes! And they should move away and be helped with that.
Rural places will never have city services. Never. There’s only a tiny minority of professionals and artists who want to heroically settle into such places. What would be needed in this case, if you really wanted it, would be a military/authoritarian like regime to force people to work there. It happened in the past, I have lived in such times in my part of Europe. I don’t see that happening in liberal capitalism.
It depends how far back you want to go, but it absolutely was true.
Ignoring that fact, everything is designed around car transportation. You can’t just kill that off in any reasonable amount of time with a different solution. You’re talking no less than 50+ years if that is the main focus, ignoring all of the other much more significant issues. Rails don’t just pop-up. Rural living residents and small townships aren’t just gonna up and leave. Cars are here to stay, the best you can hope for is better public transport, some functional rails, and realistically, more efficient vehicles. Welcome to reality.
Cars will be around for our entire lifetimes. I do think that having a modern rail system in place would be great, to complement cars. In cities it’s easier and makes more sense, but there will never be a train that comes to my house, and if there is, I’m moving, because I sure as shit don’t want to live next to a train. I’d love to be able to jump on a cross Continental, high speed rail to go on affordable trips, but that isn’t possible and won’t be. As long as I can pay roughly the same for a flight to my destination, and get there significantly faster, I will probably never opt for a slower option, and I’m definitely not in the minority by saying that.
With that said, assuming we spend the next 50 years eliminating cars and moving to rails, it still won’t touch emissions, because cars are not the leader and are continuing to get better and more efficient. So starting now would be convenient and not a bad idea, but it won’t change anything substantial from an emissions standpoint.
In 2021, transportation accounted for 28% of U.S. CO2 emissions, the largest source by economic sector. Absolutely, we need to address cars to reduce emissions; they’re not getting that much better. Getting rid of them won’t fix the problem, but conversely, fixing the problem requires getting rid of most of them. But why does it have to be rails? What if it was a café near your house? A doctor’s practice? A bookstore? It’s not foreordained that everything has to be so far apart that you need motorized transport (car or train) to get to it. The large majority of car trips Americans take are short distances, not cross-country journeys for which we need high-speed rail or airliners. Do away with single-use zoning, put the places people go every day close to where they live, and we eliminate the need for a huge number of daily car trips. No rails through your front yard needed.
Because unless the Rockies are gonna move to the Midwest, they won’t be within walking distance of me. Having some places closer would be great, but I very deliberately chose to not live in a bustling neighborhood. If a bunch of businesses opened up on my block, I’d sell and move out. If I had to choose between a 10 minute round trip car ride to the store vs walking for 5 minutes, I will drive everytime. There’s a golf course literally a block and a half from my house, and the three times I’ve been, I’ve driven. I don’t have to be in the elements whether that’s hot, cold, snowy, or rainy and I start and finish in my garage.
Which is why it’s not the right solution to emitting less pollution. It would take far longer than we have until we’ve fucked the planet completely at the rate. That’s why switching to green vehicles is a far more achievable goal. Humans are selfish and they’ll burn the world if their short-term livelihood is at stake.
“Green” vehicles aren’t doing to do it, though. They solve the problem of tailpipe emissions, yes, but not the resources needed to manufacture, operate, and dispose of them. I saw an infographic recently that pointed out than an electric car uses (generously speaking) only about 2/3 of the energy of an ICE car over its whole lifecycle. That’s… good, but not enough. It also doesn’t account for the direct CO2 emissions from the chemical process of curing concrete. EVs still need concrete to run on.
Also, CO2 emissions are not the whole story on how cars fuck the planet. There are the lifecycle resources, all of the plastic, glass, and metal, which still take fossil fuels to produce, either as a raw material, or as energy. There’s ecological destruction to get those resources, to get the resources to build the roads, to clear the space for the roads, for the sprawl that they facilitate, in the fragmentation of habitat, and the heavy toll taken on wildlife directly by roadkill. There’s also the pollution, like PM2.5 from tires, which causes asthma and heart disease in humans, and runs off into waterways and destroys zooplankton. There’s groundwater, lakes and streams becoming saline from widespread use of road salt.
I mean, we’re in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event on Earth, and it’s only fractionally driven by climate change. Automobiles, even the “green” variety, contribute greatly to the problem.
Cars aren’t the main problem. They are a factor, yes, but not the big fish. Good thing EVs are become more mainstream and as technology progresses, they will be the dominant choice. Trying to get rid of all cars is quite frankly fucking stupid.
We need net zero by 2030. We need to turn that 100% of CO2 into 0%. Cars are 12.1%. Cars are our second priory behind manufacturing and construction, and we need to eliminate ALL of the priorities. No half measures.
Really? You mean when people in rural areas had to stay overnight if they went to town for supplies because the trip there took so long? And that’s before a century of planning around the convenience of cars.
Yeah, I mean then. Some people got used to driving their SUV 200km into town to get a haircut and buy out of season fruit every saturday. And that lifestyle relies on unsustainable and dangerous technologies that we can’t afford to keep running. It was never going to be permanent. If you want metropolitan conveniences, you’re going to have to live in a metropolitan area. This isn’t difficult logic.
Let’s say you need a plumber to come fix a leak. How does he get his tools and supplies there? On his mule and cart?
For this example I’ll use the US average commute of 27.6 miles (44.4 km) one way. Based on what I looked up, a donkey pulling a cart is ~4.5 mp/h (7.2 km/h). That’s 12 hours of travel time there and back. Help me understand how this is reasonable.
Where’s all this rail infrastructure coming from? If cars are banned it will take exponentially longer to complete. What does the population do in the meantime?
That is a very vague term and I don’t think my job fits neatly into blue collar or white collar. If you’re asking whether I do hands on work at jobsites, the answer is yes.
No, most traffic isn’t. A large portion of the population would be just as well off if they used public transport. However, there’s also a portion that the complete banning of road vehicles would be extremely detrimental to their livelihoods.
Again, sufficiency and resilience. If you live in a rural space, you learn to fix shit yourself. Famously: tractors.
If you believe that rural just means “own a house in a village or next to a town”, that’s not it, that’s tourism. That’s like owning a cabin in the woods or like the car-dependent suburbia. What makes you a rural dweller is participation in the rural economy or subsistence living. If you live like a guest, you are a guest.
Based on your replies to my comments, I agree with you a lot. I haven’t been saying that we shouldn’t transition away from car-focused infrastructure and living. Rather, OP’s pipe-dream of banning cars and solving the infrastructure/living issue in 5 years is ridiculous.
Eh. I don’t hate cars. I just want better infrastructure for all street users. Everyone is capable of acting like a complete asshole using the public right of way. Think of the worst shithead that cut you off on the freeway. Now imagine that same shithead doing the same to a pedestrian or cyclist? It’s really fucking dangerous. All you have to do is google ‘pedestrian hit and run’ to see that we have a huge fucking problem on our hands. Ban all cars? No! Ban private vehicles where pedestrians, cyclists , and transit riders are? Yes! That way people don’t need to fucking die. Some people don’t need to drive. I’m sure we’ve all mumbled that under our breath after nearly getting wrecked by some dipshit that had no business driving to begin with.
Personally, I’m not a fan of government policies that ban things, because a ban is a blunt instrument that often leads to perverse results. Instead, I think that government should internalize economic extenalities, and let the individual incentives work. People who live out in the countryside get massive tax subsidies in the form of all those roads on which only they drive, for the most part.
So, fine, if cars are the only practical transportation, then the people who want to live out there need to pay for their roads with their own money.
(That is the long way to say that I don’t think personal cars out in the countryside are all that practical.)
Indeed, the topic was people living in the countryside, and (I hope) not about Soylent Green. As for the farms producing food in the countryside, they need to pay directly for the road infrastructure they use, too. That way, the true cost of transportation gets priced into the product, which lets the market allocate resources more efficiently. Government subsidy distorts the supply and demand curves, it leads to what I believe economists call deadweight loss.
For example, with subsidized road transport, the cost to the farmer of locating a farm far from the city is reduced. That lowers demand for land near the city, which makes it more attractive to build housing on big lots on the land instead. That kind of sprawl means more driving, more pollution, more environmental damage. Plus, the local government has to subsidize even more pavement, which is becoming a major issue as the burden of maintenance costs is overwhelming them in many places. (Incidentally, lots of farms and food processors at least in Wisconsin face labor shortages, because the workers can’t find affordable housing out in the middle of nowhere.) We might benefit from cheaper food prices, but the cost to society is a lot higher than the benefit, hence the “loss” in deadweight loss.
I’m suggesting that we remove the subsidies which are harming us, and let individual incentives (a.k.a. “the market”) sort it out. That probably would mean more food production closer to where people live.
Fun fact: The Segoe typeface that Microsoft uses extensively was named after Segoe Road in Madison, WI. I mention it because it’s a good example: The street is a boulevard almost 2.5 miles from end-to-end, with an enormously-wide right-of-way. If we were to take just the median strip, about 20 feet wide, that’s about 6 acres of land, or enough to feed 12 people for a year. If we took half of the ROW, that’s 18 acres of land, or enough to feed 36 people. And if we took 2/3rds, leaving a very adequate 40-foot-wide street, that’s 60 people fed.
And that’s just one boulevard in a whole city. There are plenty more wide streets that don’t need to be. Add in land from parking lots. Repeal the grass lawn ordinance and let people grow food in their front yards. Grow food on commercial building roofs, as some grocery stores have started to do. Wisconsin also has a successful hydroponic grow operation, Superior Fresh, that produces a lot of food in a relatively small footprint, and provides fresh, local produce even in January, so that’s a possibility. Add all of that up, there’s plenty of land in the city, not even counting the handful of farms that still exist within city limits.
A private car is owned by a corporation. For example, a CEO’s limosine would be a private car. Or a plumbing company’s van. A personal car is owned by an individual.
I think farming is one of the few applications where horseless carriages make sense, but they obviously have to be 100% electric in order to stop climate collapse.
I don’t think you realize how much of rural America is a random exit off the interstate. Which is mostly not local traffic and paid for those who travel it.
We have more than 4,100,000 million miles of highway in the United States, but only 48,756 miles of Interstate highway. That doesn’t sound like most places are just off of a random exit, and with one glance of the map, one can see vast swathes of land nowhere near an Interstate highway. However, the system does carry about 1/4 of all highway miles in the country, so that’s a lot of lightly-traveled non-Interstate pavement. Furthermore, revenues from highway users does not cover the cost of the Interstate system. The Highway Trust Fund has been shrinking, because the $0.184 per gallon tax hasn’t changed since 1993, and the fund is projected to be depleted by 2028. The Federal government has shored it up multiple times with transfers from the general fund. Wisconsin has done the same, I know, and likely quite a few other states that I’m not familiar with, as well.
In short, the massive subsidy to automobile travel, especially in rural areas, is not practical, because it is not sustainable.
Yes. One of the problems is the USA is government banning mixed zoning and every tyoe of home except single family home. It can only turn in suburban sprawl and car use.
In reality, the industrial revolution and especially the Green Revolution have ended the rural economy and, with that, the rural society. These places will remain unsustainable, nonviable, slowly dying as people try to move away for better lives or as they remain stuck, dependent on some corrupt local politicians and leaders.
It’s a simple matter: once a couple of people with lots of cool machines and work vast tracts of land, the rest of the people in the area become useless.
Rural spaces are, currently, in a transient situation.
If the industrial economy collapses, then, yes, rural spaces will be great again.
I’m not trying to promote some false dichotomy, this is the economy and the people stuck in rural places are usually worse off - and that’s for a reason. They will never be better off in this context, it is not happening.
So, instead of trying to prop up a dying place, help the people migrate. End the subsidized fantasy and end the sunk cost loop.
But this is basically as radical of a suggestion as banning cars lol. We’d have to have affordable housing, jobs, social services, food and resources, etc. available for those trying to migrate into cities. Most US cities don’t even have those things for the people that already live there - almost always due to NIMBY regulations with some good old fashion bigotry mixed in.
We would basically have to first see a massive change in governance trends before this could be doable.
Of course, this is entirely ignoring the cultural challenges.
Pareto principle. Don’t lose sight of 80% of cars for the 20% rural.
Edit: maybe I misread your point. All these rural drivers are using roads that they don’t pay to build or maintain. They should be charged for their true cost of transportation instead of it being subsidized by wherever they drive.
![[meme] Simple problems require simple solutions](https://imgur.com/8cT1yFG.png){kind=link}
And what of people that live out in the country, far from a city? Not walkable or bikeable. Building public transport there is not viable. Cars with sustainable fuel sources are the far better solution.
Nearly every single small town was built on a backbone of rail. They could at the very least put back what was stolen.
Rail used for freight. Do you think people were taking the train to the grocery store or the doctor’s office? Not to mention, that’s still in the city. There are people that live many miles away from the nearest public infrastructure, outside of roads and electricity.
Then there’s the dilemma of being at the mercy of the train schedule. 1 to 2 stops a day. It’s not like public transport in metropolitan areas where there are many stops a day.
Back then, they were walking to the general store or the doctor’s office if they lived in town, and they were riding their horse if they were a farmer living out in the fields. Today, we have such inventions as bicycles and paved roads to replace horses. The future is now!
Have you ever even been to a rural area? Based on your comments it seriously does not seem like it.
Yes, I have. And being an australian, our rural areas are a lot more rural than the rural areas most of these americans are from. Now I’ll tell you a secret: There’s a good reason australia was mostly empty before colonisation, and there’s a very common sense reason why australia’s environment has been dying ever since then.
Dude… Australia is still fucking empty. The majority of you live in cities, and not rural. The majority of you live on the coast. The majority of Americans do not live near a city, most of us a miles and miles from one.
Four out of five Americans (80%) live in an urbanized area according to the Census Bureau. Only 20% of us live in rural areas. That shifted slightly toward rural in the 2020 census (it was 80.7% urban in 2010), because the Bureau revised the cutoff for urban area upward from 2,500 to 5,000 people. A large proportion of that “rural” 20% live in towns of up to 5,000 residents. The number of people who truly live miles from anybody else is quite small.
You guys are acting like urban is the same thing as metro. Things in urban areas are still far apart a lot of the time. Urban sprawl needs to be fixed (which involves relocating millions of people) before the banning of cars would even be even somewhat reasonable.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/built-environment/us-cities-factsheet#:~:text=It is estimated that 83,to live in urban areas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/18/americans-say-theres-not-much-appeal-big-city-living-why-do-so-many-us-live-there/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States
Y’ALL ARE CITY FOLK.
Urban areas are based off of 2.5k people in an area…I own a 200+ acre farm and have to drive 30mins (17miles) to the nearest grocery store…I am included in this urban classification…thats how the census is based.
Yes.
Yes! And they should move away and be helped with that.
Rural places will never have city services. Never. There’s only a tiny minority of professionals and artists who want to heroically settle into such places. What would be needed in this case, if you really wanted it, would be a military/authoritarian like regime to force people to work there. It happened in the past, I have lived in such times in my part of Europe. I don’t see that happening in liberal capitalism.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but people travelled in the country before cars were invented
Yea, and it took 80 years and three generations to get to your destination.
That’s not true.
It depends how far back you want to go, but it absolutely was true.
Ignoring that fact, everything is designed around car transportation. You can’t just kill that off in any reasonable amount of time with a different solution. You’re talking no less than 50+ years if that is the main focus, ignoring all of the other much more significant issues. Rails don’t just pop-up. Rural living residents and small townships aren’t just gonna up and leave. Cars are here to stay, the best you can hope for is better public transport, some functional rails, and realistically, more efficient vehicles. Welcome to reality.
If that’s true, and it’s going to take 50+ years, shouldn’t we start, like, now?
Cars will be around for our entire lifetimes. I do think that having a modern rail system in place would be great, to complement cars. In cities it’s easier and makes more sense, but there will never be a train that comes to my house, and if there is, I’m moving, because I sure as shit don’t want to live next to a train. I’d love to be able to jump on a cross Continental, high speed rail to go on affordable trips, but that isn’t possible and won’t be. As long as I can pay roughly the same for a flight to my destination, and get there significantly faster, I will probably never opt for a slower option, and I’m definitely not in the minority by saying that.
With that said, assuming we spend the next 50 years eliminating cars and moving to rails, it still won’t touch emissions, because cars are not the leader and are continuing to get better and more efficient. So starting now would be convenient and not a bad idea, but it won’t change anything substantial from an emissions standpoint.
In 2021, transportation accounted for 28% of U.S. CO2 emissions, the largest source by economic sector. Absolutely, we need to address cars to reduce emissions; they’re not getting that much better. Getting rid of them won’t fix the problem, but conversely, fixing the problem requires getting rid of most of them. But why does it have to be rails? What if it was a café near your house? A doctor’s practice? A bookstore? It’s not foreordained that everything has to be so far apart that you need motorized transport (car or train) to get to it. The large majority of car trips Americans take are short distances, not cross-country journeys for which we need high-speed rail or airliners. Do away with single-use zoning, put the places people go every day close to where they live, and we eliminate the need for a huge number of daily car trips. No rails through your front yard needed.
Because unless the Rockies are gonna move to the Midwest, they won’t be within walking distance of me. Having some places closer would be great, but I very deliberately chose to not live in a bustling neighborhood. If a bunch of businesses opened up on my block, I’d sell and move out. If I had to choose between a 10 minute round trip car ride to the store vs walking for 5 minutes, I will drive everytime. There’s a golf course literally a block and a half from my house, and the three times I’ve been, I’ve driven. I don’t have to be in the elements whether that’s hot, cold, snowy, or rainy and I start and finish in my garage.
Which is why it’s not the right solution to emitting less pollution. It would take far longer than we have until we’ve fucked the planet completely at the rate. That’s why switching to green vehicles is a far more achievable goal. Humans are selfish and they’ll burn the world if their short-term livelihood is at stake.
“Green” vehicles aren’t doing to do it, though. They solve the problem of tailpipe emissions, yes, but not the resources needed to manufacture, operate, and dispose of them. I saw an infographic recently that pointed out than an electric car uses (generously speaking) only about 2/3 of the energy of an ICE car over its whole lifecycle. That’s… good, but not enough. It also doesn’t account for the direct CO2 emissions from the chemical process of curing concrete. EVs still need concrete to run on.
Also, CO2 emissions are not the whole story on how cars fuck the planet. There are the lifecycle resources, all of the plastic, glass, and metal, which still take fossil fuels to produce, either as a raw material, or as energy. There’s ecological destruction to get those resources, to get the resources to build the roads, to clear the space for the roads, for the sprawl that they facilitate, in the fragmentation of habitat, and the heavy toll taken on wildlife directly by roadkill. There’s also the pollution, like PM2.5 from tires, which causes asthma and heart disease in humans, and runs off into waterways and destroys zooplankton. There’s groundwater, lakes and streams becoming saline from widespread use of road salt.
I mean, we’re in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event on Earth, and it’s only fractionally driven by climate change. Automobiles, even the “green” variety, contribute greatly to the problem.
We don’t have 50 years. As Bill Nye said, the planet’s on fucking fire. Emit less carbon, motherfuckers.
Cars aren’t the main problem. They are a factor, yes, but not the big fish. Good thing EVs are become more mainstream and as technology progresses, they will be the dominant choice. Trying to get rid of all cars is quite frankly fucking stupid.
We need net zero by 2030. We need to turn that 100% of CO2 into 0%. Cars are 12.1%. Cars are our second priory behind manufacturing and construction, and we need to eliminate ALL of the priorities. No half measures.
Yes, ain’t happening. RIP.
Really? You mean when people in rural areas had to stay overnight if they went to town for supplies because the trip there took so long? And that’s before a century of planning around the convenience of cars.
Yeah, I mean then. Some people got used to driving their SUV 200km into town to get a haircut and buy out of season fruit every saturday. And that lifestyle relies on unsustainable and dangerous technologies that we can’t afford to keep running. It was never going to be permanent. If you want metropolitan conveniences, you’re going to have to live in a metropolitan area. This isn’t difficult logic.
Let’s say you need a plumber to come fix a leak. How does he get his tools and supplies there? On his mule and cart?
For this example I’ll use the US average commute of 27.6 miles (44.4 km) one way. Based on what I looked up, a donkey pulling a cart is ~4.5 mp/h (7.2 km/h). That’s 12 hours of travel time there and back. Help me understand how this is reasonable.
He loads up his hand cart with his tools, he walks 500m to the train station, he travels 43.4 km on the train, and then he walks 500m to my house.
Where’s all this rail infrastructure coming from? If cars are banned it will take exponentially longer to complete. What does the population do in the meantime?
I think 5 years is a reasonable span of time to transition out of cars if it’s our top priority and we put all our resources into a green new deal.
Just curious, are you a white-collar worker?
That is a very vague term and I don’t think my job fits neatly into blue collar or white collar. If you’re asking whether I do hands on work at jobsites, the answer is yes.
Most traffic is neither freight nor service teams with their turnout kit.
No, most traffic isn’t. A large portion of the population would be just as well off if they used public transport. However, there’s also a portion that the complete banning of road vehicles would be extremely detrimental to their livelihoods.
Easy. Get rid of indoor plumbing
Again, sufficiency and resilience. If you live in a rural space, you learn to fix shit yourself. Famously: tractors.
If you believe that rural just means “own a house in a village or next to a town”, that’s not it, that’s tourism. That’s like owning a cabin in the woods or like the car-dependent suburbia. What makes you a rural dweller is participation in the rural economy or subsistence living. If you live like a guest, you are a guest.
Based on your replies to my comments, I agree with you a lot. I haven’t been saying that we shouldn’t transition away from car-focused infrastructure and living. Rather, OP’s pipe-dream of banning cars and solving the infrastructure/living issue in 5 years is ridiculous.
Yeah, you “went into town/city” rarely. Rural life meant a lot of local sufficiency.
Commuting was not a thing. Only trains started to make that an option.
This comm is literally called fuckcars
Which explains the irrational opinions such as OP’s
Eh. I don’t hate cars. I just want better infrastructure for all street users. Everyone is capable of acting like a complete asshole using the public right of way. Think of the worst shithead that cut you off on the freeway. Now imagine that same shithead doing the same to a pedestrian or cyclist? It’s really fucking dangerous. All you have to do is google ‘pedestrian hit and run’ to see that we have a huge fucking problem on our hands. Ban all cars? No! Ban private vehicles where pedestrians, cyclists , and transit riders are? Yes! That way people don’t need to fucking die. Some people don’t need to drive. I’m sure we’ve all mumbled that under our breath after nearly getting wrecked by some dipshit that had no business driving to begin with.
Personally, I’m not a fan of government policies that ban things, because a ban is a blunt instrument that often leads to perverse results. Instead, I think that government should internalize economic extenalities, and let the individual incentives work. People who live out in the countryside get massive tax subsidies in the form of all those roads on which only they drive, for the most part.
So, fine, if cars are the only practical transportation, then the people who want to live out there need to pay for their roads with their own money.
(That is the long way to say that I don’t think personal cars out in the countryside are all that practical.)
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Indeed, the topic was people living in the countryside, and (I hope) not about Soylent Green. As for the farms producing food in the countryside, they need to pay directly for the road infrastructure they use, too. That way, the true cost of transportation gets priced into the product, which lets the market allocate resources more efficiently. Government subsidy distorts the supply and demand curves, it leads to what I believe economists call deadweight loss. For example, with subsidized road transport, the cost to the farmer of locating a farm far from the city is reduced. That lowers demand for land near the city, which makes it more attractive to build housing on big lots on the land instead. That kind of sprawl means more driving, more pollution, more environmental damage. Plus, the local government has to subsidize even more pavement, which is becoming a major issue as the burden of maintenance costs is overwhelming them in many places. (Incidentally, lots of farms and food processors at least in Wisconsin face labor shortages, because the workers can’t find affordable housing out in the middle of nowhere.) We might benefit from cheaper food prices, but the cost to society is a lot higher than the benefit, hence the “loss” in deadweight loss.
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I’m suggesting that we remove the subsidies which are harming us, and let individual incentives (a.k.a. “the market”) sort it out. That probably would mean more food production closer to where people live.
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Fun fact: The Segoe typeface that Microsoft uses extensively was named after Segoe Road in Madison, WI. I mention it because it’s a good example: The street is a boulevard almost 2.5 miles from end-to-end, with an enormously-wide right-of-way. If we were to take just the median strip, about 20 feet wide, that’s about 6 acres of land, or enough to feed 12 people for a year. If we took half of the ROW, that’s 18 acres of land, or enough to feed 36 people. And if we took 2/3rds, leaving a very adequate 40-foot-wide street, that’s 60 people fed.
And that’s just one boulevard in a whole city. There are plenty more wide streets that don’t need to be. Add in land from parking lots. Repeal the grass lawn ordinance and let people grow food in their front yards. Grow food on commercial building roofs, as some grocery stores have started to do. Wisconsin also has a successful hydroponic grow operation, Superior Fresh, that produces a lot of food in a relatively small footprint, and provides fresh, local produce even in January, so that’s a possibility. Add all of that up, there’s plenty of land in the city, not even counting the handful of farms that still exist within city limits.
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Private trucks and personal cars are using the roads. Not private cars.
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A private car is owned by a corporation. For example, a CEO’s limosine would be a private car. Or a plumbing company’s van. A personal car is owned by an individual.
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I think farming is one of the few applications where horseless carriages make sense, but they obviously have to be 100% electric in order to stop climate collapse.
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I don’t think you realize how much of rural America is a random exit off the interstate. Which is mostly not local traffic and paid for those who travel it.
We have more than 4,100,000
millionmiles of highway in the United States, but only 48,756 miles of Interstate highway. That doesn’t sound like most places are just off of a random exit, and with one glance of the map, one can see vast swathes of land nowhere near an Interstate highway. However, the system does carry about 1/4 of all highway miles in the country, so that’s a lot of lightly-traveled non-Interstate pavement. Furthermore, revenues from highway users does not cover the cost of the Interstate system. The Highway Trust Fund has been shrinking, because the $0.184 per gallon tax hasn’t changed since 1993, and the fund is projected to be depleted by 2028. The Federal government has shored it up multiple times with transfers from the general fund. Wisconsin has done the same, I know, and likely quite a few other states that I’m not familiar with, as well. In short, the massive subsidy to automobile travel, especially in rural areas, is not practical, because it is not sustainable.Yes. One of the problems is the USA is government banning mixed zoning and every tyoe of home except single family home. It can only turn in suburban sprawl and car use.
It turns out that you can do rural spaces bad too. Rural sprawl!
https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/Settlement-patterns
In reality, the industrial revolution and especially the Green Revolution have ended the rural economy and, with that, the rural society. These places will remain unsustainable, nonviable, slowly dying as people try to move away for better lives or as they remain stuck, dependent on some corrupt local politicians and leaders.
It’s a simple matter: once a couple of people with lots of cool machines and work vast tracts of land, the rest of the people in the area become useless.
Rural spaces are, currently, in a transient situation.
If the industrial economy collapses, then, yes, rural spaces will be great again.
I’m not trying to promote some false dichotomy, this is the economy and the people stuck in rural places are usually worse off - and that’s for a reason. They will never be better off in this context, it is not happening.
So, instead of trying to prop up a dying place, help the people migrate. End the subsidized fantasy and end the sunk cost loop.
You’re not wrong at all.
But this is basically as radical of a suggestion as banning cars lol. We’d have to have affordable housing, jobs, social services, food and resources, etc. available for those trying to migrate into cities. Most US cities don’t even have those things for the people that already live there - almost always due to NIMBY regulations with some good old fashion bigotry mixed in.
We would basically have to first see a massive change in governance trends before this could be doable.
Of course, this is entirely ignoring the cultural challenges.
I guess you can wait until the economic ponzi game ends for those places and people abandon it:
As people give in* and leave, this decay accelerates as the measly taxes cover even less of the required maintenance.
The politics people are avoiding now will be orders of magnitude worse when it comes time to do bailouts.
Damn that industrial revolution
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Please don’t make light of mental illness symptoms. Triggers are serious business, they’re not a joke or an insult.
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Pareto principle. Don’t lose sight of 80% of cars for the 20% rural.
Edit: maybe I misread your point. All these rural drivers are using roads that they don’t pay to build or maintain. They should be charged for their true cost of transportation instead of it being subsidized by wherever they drive.
Find some other fucking community to shit on.