• Lauchs@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      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.

    • lemming934@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • Lauchs@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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.

        • lemming934@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 month ago

          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

          • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            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.

            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.

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            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.

            • lemming934@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 month ago

              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.

              • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                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.

    • PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      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…

      • Lauchs@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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.

          • Lauchs@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            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.

        • PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • Lauchs@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            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?

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            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.

    • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • Lauchs@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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.

        • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          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

      • doingthestuff@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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.

        • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • doingthestuff@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            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.

            • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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              1 month ago

              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?