There is a lot of blame for Walmart, but let's not forget the car culture that has everyone leaving their town every day and commuting instead of living and working in a community.
Yeah, this isn't really a relevant critique in farm country. You can live in a town and walk to the grocery store, but then you need to drive to work. Or else you can live on a farm and drive to a town to buy groceries. But in no scenario does farming and density work together. Industrial-scale farming doesn't happen without car travel. Subsistence farming does, but if all the farmers are subsistence farmers then the cities don't get fed.
If you want to be a proponent of dense urban living, that's great. Dense urban living is good. But dense urban living is only feasible because farm country exists.
I'm not critiquing dense urban or rural living. However, when 70% of the people who live rural pass a couple grocery stores on their way home, the ones who don't commute are going to suffer.
Roads should be designed to travel between communities, not bypass communities.
I'm an engineer. I live on a small farm. If not for this "car culture" I wouldn't have a job. The closest business to my house is a bar about 3 miles away. The next closest is a gas station 7 miles away. There is no "community:" that's a fiction perpetuated by people who live in cities. Maybe there was 100 years ago, but there sure isn't now.
You can hate on cars all you want, but there's no denying that they opened up people's options. The fact that the small towns are emptying out is pretty much all the proof you need.
How many engineers in Europe live on small farms 20+ miles from their employer?
Look, engineers can get jobs in the United States without owning a car, too -- but they'd better live in an urban area with public transit, or work remotely (and live in an area where they can still get where they need by transit, bike, or walking). I suppose it's possible that engineers in the French or German equivalents of rural farm country do just peachy where they are, but I'm betting most of them are actually living in and around Paris, Berlin and Munich.
There is a lot between "urban" and "rural". You could be car-free in my non-urban area. I don't do that, but you certainly could. It's the Florida cities/towns of Melbourne, Indialantic, and Palm Bay.
From my house in Indialantic it's not more than a mile to my workplace, to Ace Hardware, to Dollar General, to an organic food store, to a seafood store (raw or cook-to-order), and to the beach. There are closer houses even, often below $400,000 for a 3-bedroom on a quarter acre.
Melbourne and Palm Bay are similar, but cheaper and with many more jobs for engineers.
What should I have said differently to substantiate my point that that circumstance wasn't an inherent necessity?
Citing "they're already doing X" is the best way to refute "things have to be not-X", right?
I wasn't trying to start a national flamewar, and I don't see how what I said was unnecessarily inflammatory. If no one has a better way, I think I was within the guidelines.
In case it matters, I don't live in the place I was saying does things better.
"Not many, because their urban planning is better" reads like a swipe. It's clear from your reply that you didn't intend it that way, but unfortunately intent doesn't communicate itself on the internet. The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. There are two main ways to do that. The first is to include more information in your comment—in this case you could have spelled out your argument more clearly and relied less on one-liners. The second is to use neutral and factual language. For example, you could have macroexpanded the nearly-informationless "better" into an explanation of just what the relevant difference is.
There's another point about how your comment was flamebaity: it steered the thread in a more generic direction. When discussions go from more-specific to more-generic, they typically get more divisive. This is what your comment did. All it said was "their urban planning is better" and "car culture is not some fundamental invariant". Those claims were larger and more generic than where the discussion was just prior to your post. This is basically always a step down in discussion quality, and nearly always makes a thread more divisive.
If you're going to do that, you should include enough specific information to put meat on the bones. Large claims with little information amount to provocation on the internet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21456176 was a predictable response to the provocation, and you reacted by taking a swipe at the poster ("I'm glad that gave you the opportunity for the zinger"). That's what I mean about taking threads further into flamewar.
This whole dynamic usually starts with the swerve towards more generic discussion. This is a subtle point, but a surprisingly reliable one.
I appreciate your elaboration and reference to the guidelines, but I think your application of them here is dubious.
>There are two main ways to do that. The first is to include more information in your comment—in this case you could have spelled out your argument more clearly and relied less on one-liners. The second is to use neutral and factual language. For example, you could have macroexpanded the nearly-informationless "better" into an explanation of just what the relevant difference is.
Sometimes greater detail is warranted, yes, but elaborating that way wouldn't have added relevant or decisive information. "Better" was already implicit from the previous post (enabling residents to get to destinations without a car); and the greater ease of such living in Europe, in more locations, is already undisputed. No one contested that point except to note that there still exist car-necessary rural areas in both places, which is exactly how they would have replied if I had done as you suggested. No loss of conversational efficiency.
>There's another point about how your comment was flamebaity: it steered the thread in a more generic direction.
I could maybe understand that in the absence of my next sentence, which was:
>>Bottom line, car culture is not some fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job, as the original comment was suggesting.
That was specifically aimed at preventing the discussion from broadening to the generalities of "Europe vs the US", by reminding readers of the original issue in dispute (necessity of car culture and accessibility of typical destinations) and asking that any discussion of European planning be mentioned with an eye for whether it speaks to that.
>id=21456176 was a predictable response to the provocation, and you reacted by taking a swipe at the poster ("I'm glad that gave you the opportunity for the zinger").
Only in the sense that you "took a swipe at me" by calling my comments flamebait. The comment you linked was unprovoked and itself flamebait in how it elevated an accident of wording to an opportunity to humorously ridicule someone with a pithy remark (rightly called a zinger). And you don't seem to have a problem with that, or the commenter's refusal to make a good-faith effort to read context.
Just as you felt the need to call out aspects of my comment that hindered quality discussion, I felt a need to call out aspects of that comment that did the same.
> Not many, because their urban planning is better.
I don't disagree, but I think it's easy to overstate how "planned" the differences between the population distribution in Europe and the United States are -- and I honestly think it can be easy for Europeans to underestimate how dramatic the population density difference is. The EU has over 50% more people in under half the square kilometers, giving Europe a density of ~118 people/km^2 and the US a density of 33.6/km^2 -- and there's almost certainly a wider variance in density over here.
Doing the numbers just now, over three-quarters of the US population lives in states that are less dense than Europe, and over a third lives in states half as dense or less. Car culture is not a "fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job," but for a lot of America, not having a car is simply not a realistic option.
Probably a lot more in Europe. Density there is so much higher that you really can't compare their rural areas to those of the U.S. In Germany you can live on a farm and commute by train to work in a city.
Yes, I should have used a more general term, like "land use planning"; I'm glad that gave you the opportunity for the zinger.
In any case, (literal) urban planning is definitely relevant to determining how many places someone can affordably live without owning a car, and lead to less people being in the kind of boxed-in situation where their best option is to live far out and car-dependent while having to drive far for necessities.
It wasn't a "zinger," I just had no idea what you meant.
That said, one important aspect that even US journalists sometimes don't get is that most of the people who live in rural areas are doing it by preference. It's not because of urban sprawl or limited housing options. Most of us just like having lots of space and keeping our neighbors at arms length.
>It wasn't a "zinger," I just had no idea what you meant.
That's why you read the rest of the comment -- for context that can disambiguate it.
>That said, one important aspect that even US journalists sometimes don't get is that most of the people who live in rural areas are doing it by preference. It's not because of urban sprawl or limited housing options. Most of us just like having lots of space and keeping our neighbors at arms length.
Of course, but I doubt it can account for the fully difference. In the later 20th century, there was a vast movement out to the suburbs, and I doubt it was from a spontaneous desire for more space.
People in rural areas used horses, then horse and carriages, and now cars. If we didn’t use a faster mode of transportation we’d be stuck where we were born.
It’s not feasible to connect every single small town.
This is missing from this. There aren't many small towns anymore. Those have been decimated. It's now random strip malls in random places. There is no reason that people should need a car to do everything in life, and that's not how things used to be, but that's how things are now.
In fairness to individuals, the federal government drove this with subsidizes for highway expansion and making it hard to get loans on denser building types (even something like an apartment over a store was hard to build).
The federal government basically forced this shitty sprawl on all of us and played a major role in destroying small-town America.
You seem to be confusing small towns for suburban sprawl.
Small towns don't have the problems you list: build a massive McMansion on the edge of town you are still walking distance to the other edge of the town. The whole value of your house will be more than a tiny house in San Francisco despite having 10x the floor area and 100x the land.
Hiways have been good for rural areas overall, because the few people who live there can get the things they need quicker. (when the trains existed before they didn't come often enough to be useful). In the suburbs the hiways killed the possibility of useful trains, but in rural areas that possibility didn't exist anyway. (if the hiways were worth the cost is a different question)
Actually OP is more right than even he knows, because the small towns themselves should never have been built but for massive federal government land subsidies for railroads in the 19th century - huge sections of which were never sustainable even when built, let alone a century later.
Interesting argument, but I'm not sure if it is correct. In the 19th century farms didn't have tractors so they had to be much smaller. Thus there were more farmers, and so more towns were needed to support the farms. The railroad helped things along, but many of them were built without federal land subsidies. The farther east you go the more likely the railroads were built without federal subsidies.
Someone in a different forum just pointed out to me that the federal subsidies for railroads were not massive in the 1860s. Today that land is worth a lot and so the subsidies seem massive, but back then the federal government had a lot of land that was essentially worthless - except for a few recluses nobody wanted it because you had to live a solitary life. By giving it to the railroad they were able to build a railroad that meant someone who moved to railroad land could get somewhere (IE back east to visit family for Christmas), and goods. The railroad made out great on this, but land that didn't have a railroad nearby wasn't nearly as valuable because you were stuck living there alone, with no opportunity to buy nice things to make your life better.
