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How about instead we start to question our city-centric culture? It's no problem getting around by car in a town of ten thousand, or even sixty thousand. But i

• simval 11y ago
  In a city of ten thousand, there is no reason why 20 to 40% of trips shouldn't be done on foot or on a bike. A bus network can easily provide mobility in a city of 50 to 100 thousand. In Sweden, some mid-sized cities have lower car use per capita than Stockholm, the capital. Anyway, I think you've got it all wrong. There's no good reason NOT to cram into large cities. In the past, people had one job and they did it till the day they died. Most small towns of the size you describe were built around one employer. In the modern economy, having one job only during one's life is next to unheard of, at least, in the private sector. What replaces job security is the ability to find another employer in close proximity, so you don't need to uproot yourself and your family when you change job. It also means that you can have a few big companies working the same sector, then have a lot of small companies specializing in providing professional services for these big companies, which creates a very dynamic industry where the contractors acquire expertise working with the big companies and can share that expertise with startups and smaller companies. That's why Silicon Valley exists and why even IT companies, the most liable to transfer to telecommuting, tend to gather around a few hubs rather than spreading far apart. Telecommuting is also not applicable for a lot of industries, even when it is, being physically present in one office can be quite beneficial for expertise sharing through casual contacts rather than relying on formal internet communication.
• Mz 11y ago
  I am anti-car, not anti-city. When you go rural, people become more car dependent as they need transportation to get to the grocery store, etc. A really smart urban planner said once on a forum I blong to that you need at least 10k-15k population in a town to support a grocery store. Port Aransas is less than 4k population and has a grocery store, but that is permanent population and does not count snow birds who spend half the year there nor does it count the weekenders and tourists. According to an article I read, the population can swell to 60k on weekends. A local merchant I spoke to disputed that. He thinks that, on busy weekends, it swells to 60k cars, many with more than one passenger. The weird population dynamics impact the business model of the grocery store. It is an odd little duck, with an unusual mix of goods, heavy on the microwave meals and camp-friendly foods and single serve items (and it seemed like half the store was alcohol). But it did get sufficient traffic to remain open. In my lifetime, we transitioned from more than half the global population being rural to more tban half being urban. We now have about 7 billion people on the planet. We cannot support that by spreading them out. It works because large modern farms produce enough food to support large populations doing something other than subsistence farming. Maybe we don't need ever larger cities. Maybe we do need more mid sized cities. But I have had a class on economic geography, and some things simply cannot exist, much less thrive, without certain conditions. And there is a lower limit on some things for which the Internet is no substitute. Your figure of "city of 10,000" is problematic. That is the lower limit for supporting a single grocery store without competition. It gives consumers no other options. I personally like cities of about 50k-100k or so, but I also like to be no more than about two or three hours travel time from a major city with a serious airport and other big city amenities. There are things you just cannot find in most smaller cities. Fifteen years ago, I had a medical crisis. I lived in part because in the midst of it, we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. I had access to specialty testing and expertise in Sacramento, San Francisco and at the regional military hospital on Travis AFB. The hospital on Travis is a teaching hospital serving military members in eight western states. One of its hallways is something like a quarter mile long. It has its own gate -- ie guarded entrance onto the base. That blew my mind the first time we went to base to take me to the ER, asked how to get to the hospital and the gate guards said "Oh, best way to get there is to use the hospital gate." Some of our modern amenities only exist because you have enough people (both overall and gathered in one spot) to support specialty/niche markets -- even if it is something you are disinclined to think of in commercial terms or wish it weren't a commercialized thing, like medical care.