this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Why do we accept that urban life is worse than rural life?
Cars ruin cities. There's more we can do to make cities better but that's the big one
I mean, do you think cars aren't a thing in rural areas or something? You think us country bumpkins are riding our horses around?
No, but it's much, much easier to get rid of them in cities where they can be replaced by subways, tramways, buses, bikes, and the like.
All of which make for a way better quality of life than car hell. If people wern't sitting in unbearable traffic all day complaints about urban living would be far less common
Dunno. In rural areas I know there are more bikes than in city or cars in same area. Cause you know, cars are expensive.
What if you want to leave the city?
When you want to travel to the third world countries that connect the cities of the US you could rent a car, which is necessary because rural areas have apparently forgotten about public transit of any kind. In civilized countries, there's a solid network of mass transit basically everywhere. It doesn't matter that you're in a podunk town, a bus comes by every half hour because it's a necessity to have a regular bus more than a full one.
Bullshit. There are vast areas of the western US and Alaska where this simply is not economically possible or even desirable. The same is true for huge parts of Canada and Australia and other countries that have very remote and thinly settled regions. Even when I lived in Ireland, which is tiny and relatively densely populated, there were rural communities that only had bus service once or twice a day.
Life is not economically possible or desirable by capitalism.
ЭД4
Then you take the train. If this is not an available option, you take the car, one of which you either own but barely use when staying within the city, or that you buy (which is the option I chose, it's a lot cheaper than to own one).
There also should absolutely be trains that connect cities together too, it's already mostly the case in Europe which is around as big as the US, including high speed trains between major cities, but there is also a lot of regular trains that connect moderately sized towns with their nearby city. This can be both a cheaper and faster alternative to driving a car if you go somewhere you won't need a car (say, a city with very good public transit). China may be more comparable to the US as it is a single country with a similar size, but the size of their train network grew tremendously over the last twenty years, especially their high speed network. I guess a good start for the US would be to connect the major cities on the East Coast with high speed trains, such as DC, New York, Chicago, and other cities nearby, I can guarantee you there will be demand for that.
In fact, I'm about to take a high speed train from Paris to Lyon. Including the time I'll have spent in public transit to go to and come back from the train station, it'll take me three hours total vs four and a half hours by car without stops on traffic jams to travel some 400km (around 250 miles). The tickets cost me 90€ both ways, including the subway and tramway, while the same travel by car would cost me at least that much in not double.