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I am all for utility companies cutting service to rural areas, for cost savings or otherwise. Living in the country side is supposed to be expensive, but for t

I am all for utility companies cutting service to rural areas, for cost savings or otherwise. Living in the country side is supposed to be expensive, but for the past 40 years or so all of the population centers of America have been subsidizing rural life. My parents live 30 miles inland in Florida and recently wanted their 5 mile dirt road paved, total cost would have been north of $2,000,000... Even if that was split among everyone living there you are looking at $133,000. Things don't get better once you consider their power lines, at $285,000 per mile you are looking at $95,000 just to run power to their home and all adjacent homes. Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619. You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household. Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year. Meanwhile in a city, the amount each individual is paying is a tiny fraction, probably less than 0.01%. Sure a urban home is probably more expensive, but given that a rural home should incur a near $400,000 premium, you shouldn't have been able to afford that rural home to begin with. America stands to save hundreds of billions if we actually force the cost of living in rural areas to be what it is, rather than subsidize it. People who live in the country side already use wells for water due to the cost of water + sewage, why is it any different for power?

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
And meanwhile, all of these rural services have a greatly increased environmental impact than in urban environment. It sounds harsh, but some of these people will just need to adapt their lifestyles.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
On the other hand, rents and home prices are already unaffordable in many urban areas. If building infrastructure outside the most densely populated areas becomes a purely private responsibility, it will exacerbate these issues.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  The correct solution to do this problem is to build more cities.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    I agree, but "building cities" is essentially synonymous with subsidising infrastructure and providing building permits around existing towns and villages.
    - pm90 7y ago
      Investment in cities' infrastructure isn't a subsidy, its seed money to get the economic engine humming. Once it is, Governments reap in the benefits of increased tax receipts. Whereas, subsidizing rural and semi-rural populations, outside of those engaged in the primary sector, has no such benefit. In fact, they require more and more help as time passes with no benefits in tax receipts at all.
      - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
        Perhaps, but you may not always know ahead of time which one it's going to be if you let towns grow organically to become cities (or not). Building entirely new government planned cities on the green field is extremely difficult to get right. You're not just building infrastructure, you're effectively designing a social environment. What if it doesn't attract the right mix of people? What if it collides with democratic and legal rights of neighboring communities?
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Not disagreeing that more urban centers would be a good thing but I don't think it would solve this specific problem because population would just grow to fill the new city until the same economic 'pressue' is reached again.
    - pm90 7y ago
refurb 7y ago
Those costs get paid for by homeowners generally. Any extension of utilities gets paid for by the developer and passed on when the home is sold.
- village-idiot 7y ago
  I’m not sure about power lines, but that’s certainly not true for roads. A large portion of road maintenance is paid for by state and federal budgets out of the general tax funds, with the amounts varying based on where we’re talking about. Local drivers pay for some of their road coast in the form of gas taxes, but in no state does this cover even half of the cost road maintenance.
  - smileysteve 7y ago
    In Georgia, cities pay to maintain all of their local roads and onramps w/ property and sales taxes. The state gas taxes go to state and interstate highways; presumably the Federal gas taxes go towards interstate highways -- but they also just print money since the gas tax hasn't been raised in nearly 30 years.
    - village-idiot 7y ago
      That would be a good argument if many states weren’t also dependent on the federal government to maintain their own budgets. If you’re a tax payer in Connecticut, you’re absolutely funding the infrastructure of states like New Mexico and Alabama, albeit indirectly.
- ghouse 7y ago
  Well, not entirely. Maintenance liabilities dramatically outstrip compensation. See https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme for another point of view.
hpkuarg 7y ago
To be fair, country living also subsidizes the population centers, in that New York and San Francisco are not self-sustaining in terms of food production, not to mention the strategic value (to both the coastal cities involved and the country as a whole) in not having undeveloped wilderness in between major population centers. It seems unfair to say that there is some immoral wealth transfer from urban to rural.
- pkaye 7y ago
  That is not a subsidy since people are paying for that food. There are benefits to both sides.
  - chabes 7y ago
    This seems a tad unbalanced.. Farmers get paid almost nothing for the food they produce
    - pkaye 7y ago
      The definition of subsidy is "a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive." How does that fit in this context? The fact that farmers get paid little is due to supply vs demand. Agriculture has been optimized to a great level but food transportation is expensive.
    - spaced-out 7y ago
      They don't just get paid for the food they produce, they also get to claim subsidies for food they don't grow but could have.
    - stale2002 7y ago
      That's how markets work. They get paid a low amount, because the actual real costs to produce the food is low.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Taek 7y ago
It's potentially cheaper for a lot of these places to have off-grid infrastructure. + Solar + batteries for a home that uses a modest / conservative amount of electricity should be under $50k. + Water + septic should be under $25k, assuming you have a well + Gas can be installed for well under $10k, you have a large tank in your yard + Internet can be done using long range wifi. Takes the whole town to cooperate, but these days everyone wants internet, as long as someone spearheads it you can get an ISP out. That pretty much just leaves roadways, which you definitely have various qualities of roads that you can build, but I don't see a cheap way around this. edit: further research has revealed to me that lots of electric appliances can be replaced with gas powered appliances. So if you are primarily depending on gas for things like your refrigerator, you can bring the cost of a solar installation way down.
bleh123 7y ago
Boy, you should have been around when the pioneers were around! We'd have saved Trillions just staying in what is now New York. The arguments around treating rural living areas as sub-standard places of investment simply because of your inability to reason with potential future demand/growth/needs is astounding to me. The fact is, as cities become more and more dense, they tend to be less attractive to families or individuals for that matter looking to live an active life. Take even very well "planned" cities such as Singapore for example, you would hate living there for a year or more given how tiny the homes are and how expensive everything is. . .Your complaints about your parents location needing living facilities is pretty one sided given you're calculating the bottom line assuming no one else who buys property there has the access to the same, isn't it? If you apply the same logic to the post war highway projects, it would seem that those were money pits if the economic benefits and lifetime usage were completely ignored. Please do not skew your logical analysis of a subject by what seems to be a pre-existing bias against a section of the population.
rwbcxrz 7y ago
I agree that the marginal cost of providing those services to rural homes is higher than urban/suburban homes. However, I think you're vastly overestimating the actual costs incurred, as many (maybe most) people who live in rural areas don't have most of those things. I live in a mostly rural county in north-central Colorado. The county maintains ~250 miles of roads of which only 39 miles are paved (the rest of the roads in the county are state and federal highways). Outside the few small towns in the county, there's no sewer or municipal water. Everyone has a septic tank and a well on their property that they're responsible for maintaining. Same with cable/fiber. Unless you live in a town, your options are ~1.5Mbps DSL or ~5Mbps fixed wireless (if you have good line of sight to a base station). Neither the county nor any of the ISPs in the area have any plans to significantly improve services, so I'm really hoping that SpaceX gets Starlink up and running sooner rather than later. Considering all that, I don't think that your calculated premium of $400,000 per rural home actually applies in most situations.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  If you have cell service, look into a mvno such as Ubifi. It's made working from home as a software developer possible for me. https://www.ubifi.net/ https://www.ubifi.net/
  - rwbcxrz 7y ago
    Thanks for the link! I've looked briefly at LTE internet service but hadn't seriously considered it because I'm just on the edge of decent cell service. While my phone usually displays 1-2 bars, it's not even enough to make voice calls. I think due to the topography in the area, my phone can receive signal from the tower but isn't powerful enough to transmit back. It looks like UbiFi also sells 4G signal boosters and external antennas, and that might just do the trick.
    - zdragnar 7y ago
      I picked up a signal booster, but ended up not needing it- I typically get 2-3 bars, but found a spot in the house where I get 4, and that's good enough for decent speeds that I never got around to setting it up. Keep in mind that the signal booster isn't magic- it's just a relay with a bigger antenna than what your cell phone has. If you're brave enough, pop up onto your roof with your cell phone- if you get at least three bars up there, I'm guessing that the signal booster could do the trick. I wish that AT&T or Verizon would offer these unlimited style data plans directly. It seems strange to me that something like UbiFi can contract out off of AT&T's network and offer a flat rate plan, but somehow, phone tethering and data-only devices like verizon's jetpack are always limited to 20gb and slow speeds. Best of luck!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kolanos 7y ago
> Things don't get better once you consider their power lines, at $285,000 per mile you are looking at $95,000 just to run power to their home and all adjacent homes. Recently looked into this. New rural developments have to paid to get power lines run to the corner of their property (in western states, anyway). If your immediate neighbor has power (which they paid to run) this will cost the resident tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the distance. If you don't have an immediate neighbor with power, you're SOL. > Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619. Rural areas are predominantly septic tanks and well water. Paid for by residents. The only utility most rural residents get is power. > You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household. Give me a break. This doesn't happen in rural areas. Hel, go 15 mins/miles outside a densely populated area and your internet/cable options drop below third world standards. > Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year. Considering rural developments pay to have power run to them, this strikes me as a pretty good deal for power companies. Meanwhile, there is a trade-off here. In densely populated areas you're looking at complex/dense in-ground sewer, gas and electrical lines that likely cost a magnitude more than the rural equivalent. Sure at a certain population density this becomes economical, but many urban areas don't meet this standard. Take SF for example. For example, a residential well can be drilled for ~$15k in my area. A septic tank large enough for a home would be ~$10k. When the well runs dry or the septic is full it's the resident that pays.
- oasisbob 7y ago
  > go 5 mins outside a densely populated area and your internet/cable options drop below third world standards. You mention Western states - which ones are you familiar with? In NW Washington, there are counties with functioning fiber co-ops. It's very possible to get fiber to your property in some areas, economically, with functioning latecomers agreements. I can't say how common it is elsewhere, but you're painting with a VERY broad brush in describing the rural US internet experience.
  - kolanos 7y ago
    I meant to say 15 minutes (or miles). But what you're describing is the exception, not the rule. The western states I was looking at recently were CA, OR, NV, WY. But I also am familiar with WA and know that if you live outside King County your internet/cable options are sparse in most areas. Check out Broadband Now [0] for examples. Although I find their reported coverage for ISPs to not reflect reality on the ground in many cases. [0]: https://broadbandnow.com https://broadbandnow.com
themodelplumber 7y ago
> Living in the country side is supposed to be expensive I don't quite understand this...I have always been able to live in the country for cheap. Doesn't matter if I'm moving to a small town in Wyoming or literally being an Oregon Trail traveler. It takes very little to subsist, especially when the efforts are distributed across a family or small village.
ghouse 7y ago
If as a society we stop thinking about electricity reliability as a binary issue, we'd save a lot of money. We can achieve 99.999% availability with extraordinary safety in fire-risk areas, but it's very expensive. Would some consumers accept 50% off if if they had (only) 99% reliability? As a regulated (natural) monopoly, price is supposed to be determined by the cost. Fixed-costs are a factor of geography (including density), reliability, and safety. While marginal costs are driven primarily by when the electricity is used. Electricity use coincident with system peak is very expensive, driving marginal generation, transmission, and distribution capex. While marginal costs of electricity use coincident with system trough is very inexpensive, and perhaps negative.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  Depending on where you live, power outages can be fatal in extreme cold or heat, especially to the elderly. I abaolutely am comfortable with my current electrical bill if it means not risking an outage when the temperature is -40 or over 100 degrees F outside. In fact, I may install a backup power generator for the home anyway, but the cost of it running is not trivial and I would be happier never needing it.
  - Retric 7y ago
    In such situations having a backup power such as a generator for critical systems is common. The electric grid is designed to be cheap not nessisarily dependable. 27,000 x ~500$ generators = 13.5 million which is likely far less expensive than upgrading the grid.
- ip26 7y ago
  You might like this: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-lights-on-redefining-energy-security.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-th...
tomohawk 7y ago
I am all for farmers cutting off food supply to urban areas. Living in urban areas where there is no place to grow food - food should be in short supply there. And while we're at it, oil rich parts of the country need to stop supplying parts of the country where oil is scarce. Do you know expensive and unsafe it is to transport fuel? We're all in this together, and different areas have different strengths.
- evgen 7y ago
  Sounds great, and all of the urban areas can import their food from places where it is cheaper to grow and where they do not need to pay subsidies to farmers in the form of price floors and subsidies not to grow. You could empty rural America and let it go back to prairie and the cities would do just fine.
- bsder 7y ago
  > I am all for farmers cutting off food supply to urban areas. You might want to rethink this. The cities wouldn't even notice. Most cities have quite useful ports and can get food from elsewhere. Said farmers would now have no domestic market and have pissed off their gateways to the non-domestic market. In addition, the cities have very little love for the current crop of "farmers" as mostly they are servants of the big agribusinesses.
  - JetSpiegel 7y ago
    > Most cities have quite useful ports and can get food from elsewhere. Not for the same price. Either more money is spent on food or some city dwellers starve / overthrow the government.
joshe 7y ago
Also solar + battery is (very roughly) only double the rate cost right now, so you aren't really stranding people. I've been to farms with solar + battery only and it's totally fine. Back in the 1936 (rural electrification act) it was electric line or nothing, you were upgrading from candlelight. And it's $20,000 for a solar + battery system versus rate payers subsidizing (using your numbers) $95,000 for an electric line. It seems a bit weird.
bparsons 7y ago
It isn't just rural areas. Even suburbs relatively close to the city are completely unsustainable from a municipal services point of view. This article lays out a convincing case as to why most of America's cities are financially doomed because of them. https://grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-are-a-giant-ponzi-scheme/ https://grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-are...
oftenwrong 7y ago
Basically the point made here: https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subsidies/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs... https://granolashotgun.com/2016/09/01/them-thats-got-shall-have-them-thats-not-shall-lose/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/09/01/them-thats-got-shall-h...
Justin_K 7y ago
Most water comes from rural America and is pumped into the city. With your logic, rural folks should be allowed to cut off the city when they see fit.
sjg007 7y ago
$500,000 a mile seems excessive regardless... but fyi urban roads cost more to pave than rural roads.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

And meanwhile, all of these rural services have a greatly increased environmental impact than in urban environment. It sounds harsh, but some of these people will just need to adapt their lifestyles.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago

On the other hand, rents and home prices are already unaffordable in many urban areas. If building infrastructure outside the most densely populated areas becomes a purely private responsibility, it will exacerbate these issues.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
The correct solution to do this problem is to build more cities.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  I agree, but "building cities" is essentially synonymous with subsidising infrastructure and providing building permits around existing towns and villages.
  - pm90 7y ago
    Investment in cities' infrastructure isn't a subsidy, its seed money to get the economic engine humming. Once it is, Governments reap in the benefits of increased tax receipts. Whereas, subsidizing rural and semi-rural populations, outside of those engaged in the primary sector, has no such benefit. In fact, they require more and more help as time passes with no benefits in tax receipts at all.
    - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
      Perhaps, but you may not always know ahead of time which one it's going to be if you let towns grow organically to become cities (or not). Building entirely new government planned cities on the green field is extremely difficult to get right. You're not just building infrastructure, you're effectively designing a social environment. What if it doesn't attract the right mix of people? What if it collides with democratic and legal rights of neighboring communities?
- Spivak 7y ago
  Not disagreeing that more urban centers would be a good thing but I don't think it would solve this specific problem because population would just grow to fill the new city until the same economic 'pressue' is reached again.
  - pm90 7y ago

refurb 7y ago

Those costs get paid for by homeowners generally. Any extension of utilities gets paid for by the developer and passed on when the home is sold.

village-idiot 7y ago
I’m not sure about power lines, but that’s certainly not true for roads. A large portion of road maintenance is paid for by state and federal budgets out of the general tax funds, with the amounts varying based on where we’re talking about. Local drivers pay for some of their road coast in the form of gas taxes, but in no state does this cover even half of the cost road maintenance.
- smileysteve 7y ago
  In Georgia, cities pay to maintain all of their local roads and onramps w/ property and sales taxes. The state gas taxes go to state and interstate highways; presumably the Federal gas taxes go towards interstate highways -- but they also just print money since the gas tax hasn't been raised in nearly 30 years.
  - village-idiot 7y ago
    That would be a good argument if many states weren’t also dependent on the federal government to maintain their own budgets. If you’re a tax payer in Connecticut, you’re absolutely funding the infrastructure of states like New Mexico and Alabama, albeit indirectly.
ghouse 7y ago
Well, not entirely. Maintenance liabilities dramatically outstrip compensation. See https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme for another point of view.

hpkuarg 7y ago

To be fair, country living also subsidizes the population centers, in that New York and San Francisco are not self-sustaining in terms of food production, not to mention the strategic value (to both the coastal cities involved and the country as a whole) in not having undeveloped wilderness in between major population centers. It seems unfair to say that there is some immoral wealth transfer from urban to rural.

pkaye 7y ago
That is not a subsidy since people are paying for that food. There are benefits to both sides.
- chabes 7y ago
  This seems a tad unbalanced.. Farmers get paid almost nothing for the food they produce
  - pkaye 7y ago
    The definition of subsidy is "a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive." How does that fit in this context? The fact that farmers get paid little is due to supply vs demand. Agriculture has been optimized to a great level but food transportation is expensive.
  - spaced-out 7y ago
    They don't just get paid for the food they produce, they also get to claim subsidies for food they don't grow but could have.
  - stale2002 7y ago
    That's how markets work. They get paid a low amount, because the actual real costs to produce the food is low.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Taek 7y ago

It's potentially cheaper for a lot of these places to have off-grid infrastructure. + Solar + batteries for a home that uses a modest / conservative amount of electricity should be under $50k. + Water + septic should be under $25k, assuming you have a well + Gas can be installed for well under $10k, you have a large tank in your yard + Internet can be done using long range wifi. Takes the whole town to cooperate, but these days everyone wants internet, as long as someone spearheads it you can get an ISP out. That pretty much just leaves roadways, which you definitely have various qualities of roads that you can build, but I don't see a cheap way around this. edit: further research has revealed to me that lots of electric appliances can be replaced with gas powered appliances. So if you are primarily depending on gas for things like your refrigerator, you can bring the cost of a solar installation way down.

bleh123 7y ago

Boy, you should have been around when the pioneers were around! We'd have saved Trillions just staying in what is now New York. The arguments around treating rural living areas as sub-standard places of investment simply because of your inability to reason with potential future demand/growth/needs is astounding to me. The fact is, as cities become more and more dense, they tend to be less attractive to families or individuals for that matter looking to live an active life. Take even very well "planned" cities such as Singapore for example, you would hate living there for a year or more given how tiny the homes are and how expensive everything is. . .Your complaints about your parents location needing living facilities is pretty one sided given you're calculating the bottom line assuming no one else who buys property there has the access to the same, isn't it? If you apply the same logic to the post war highway projects, it would seem that those were money pits if the economic benefits and lifetime usage were completely ignored. Please do not skew your logical analysis of a subject by what seems to be a pre-existing bias against a section of the population.

rwbcxrz 7y ago

I agree that the marginal cost of providing those services to rural homes is higher than urban/suburban homes. However, I think you're vastly overestimating the actual costs incurred, as many (maybe most) people who live in rural areas don't have most of those things. I live in a mostly rural county in north-central Colorado. The county maintains ~250 miles of roads of which only 39 miles are paved (the rest of the roads in the county are state and federal highways). Outside the few small towns in the county, there's no sewer or municipal water. Everyone has a septic tank and a well on their property that they're responsible for maintaining. Same with cable/fiber. Unless you live in a town, your options are ~1.5Mbps DSL or ~5Mbps fixed wireless (if you have good line of sight to a base station). Neither the county nor any of the ISPs in the area have any plans to significantly improve services, so I'm really hoping that SpaceX gets Starlink up and running sooner rather than later. Considering all that, I don't think that your calculated premium of $400,000 per rural home actually applies in most situations.

zdragnar 7y ago
If you have cell service, look into a mvno such as Ubifi. It's made working from home as a software developer possible for me. https://www.ubifi.net/ https://www.ubifi.net/
- rwbcxrz 7y ago
  Thanks for the link! I've looked briefly at LTE internet service but hadn't seriously considered it because I'm just on the edge of decent cell service. While my phone usually displays 1-2 bars, it's not even enough to make voice calls. I think due to the topography in the area, my phone can receive signal from the tower but isn't powerful enough to transmit back. It looks like UbiFi also sells 4G signal boosters and external antennas, and that might just do the trick.
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    I picked up a signal booster, but ended up not needing it- I typically get 2-3 bars, but found a spot in the house where I get 4, and that's good enough for decent speeds that I never got around to setting it up. Keep in mind that the signal booster isn't magic- it's just a relay with a bigger antenna than what your cell phone has. If you're brave enough, pop up onto your roof with your cell phone- if you get at least three bars up there, I'm guessing that the signal booster could do the trick. I wish that AT&T or Verizon would offer these unlimited style data plans directly. It seems strange to me that something like UbiFi can contract out off of AT&T's network and offer a flat rate plan, but somehow, phone tethering and data-only devices like verizon's jetpack are always limited to 20gb and slow speeds. Best of luck!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kolanos 7y ago

> Things don't get better once you consider their power lines, at $285,000 per mile you are looking at $95,000 just to run power to their home and all adjacent homes. Recently looked into this. New rural developments have to paid to get power lines run to the corner of their property (in western states, anyway). If your immediate neighbor has power (which they paid to run) this will cost the resident tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the distance. If you don't have an immediate neighbor with power, you're SOL. > Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619. Rural areas are predominantly septic tanks and well water. Paid for by residents. The only utility most rural residents get is power. > You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household. Give me a break. This doesn't happen in rural areas. Hel, go 15 mins/miles outside a densely populated area and your internet/cable options drop below third world standards. > Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year. Considering rural developments pay to have power run to them, this strikes me as a pretty good deal for power companies. Meanwhile, there is a trade-off here. In densely populated areas you're looking at complex/dense in-ground sewer, gas and electrical lines that likely cost a magnitude more than the rural equivalent. Sure at a certain population density this becomes economical, but many urban areas don't meet this standard. Take SF for example. For example, a residential well can be drilled for ~$15k in my area. A septic tank large enough for a home would be ~$10k. When the well runs dry or the septic is full it's the resident that pays.

oasisbob 7y ago
> go 5 mins outside a densely populated area and your internet/cable options drop below third world standards. You mention Western states - which ones are you familiar with? In NW Washington, there are counties with functioning fiber co-ops. It's very possible to get fiber to your property in some areas, economically, with functioning latecomers agreements. I can't say how common it is elsewhere, but you're painting with a VERY broad brush in describing the rural US internet experience.
- kolanos 7y ago
  I meant to say 15 minutes (or miles). But what you're describing is the exception, not the rule. The western states I was looking at recently were CA, OR, NV, WY. But I also am familiar with WA and know that if you live outside King County your internet/cable options are sparse in most areas. Check out Broadband Now [0] for examples. Although I find their reported coverage for ISPs to not reflect reality on the ground in many cases. [0]: https://broadbandnow.com https://broadbandnow.com

themodelplumber 7y ago

> Living in the country side is supposed to be expensive I don't quite understand this...I have always been able to live in the country for cheap. Doesn't matter if I'm moving to a small town in Wyoming or literally being an Oregon Trail traveler. It takes very little to subsist, especially when the efforts are distributed across a family or small village.

ghouse 7y ago

If as a society we stop thinking about electricity reliability as a binary issue, we'd save a lot of money. We can achieve 99.999% availability with extraordinary safety in fire-risk areas, but it's very expensive. Would some consumers accept 50% off if if they had (only) 99% reliability? As a regulated (natural) monopoly, price is supposed to be determined by the cost. Fixed-costs are a factor of geography (including density), reliability, and safety. While marginal costs are driven primarily by when the electricity is used. Electricity use coincident with system peak is very expensive, driving marginal generation, transmission, and distribution capex. While marginal costs of electricity use coincident with system trough is very inexpensive, and perhaps negative.

zdragnar 7y ago
Depending on where you live, power outages can be fatal in extreme cold or heat, especially to the elderly. I abaolutely am comfortable with my current electrical bill if it means not risking an outage when the temperature is -40 or over 100 degrees F outside. In fact, I may install a backup power generator for the home anyway, but the cost of it running is not trivial and I would be happier never needing it.
- Retric 7y ago
  In such situations having a backup power such as a generator for critical systems is common. The electric grid is designed to be cheap not nessisarily dependable. 27,000 x ~500$ generators = 13.5 million which is likely far less expensive than upgrading the grid.
ip26 7y ago
You might like this: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-lights-on-redefining-energy-security.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-th...

tomohawk 7y ago

I am all for farmers cutting off food supply to urban areas. Living in urban areas where there is no place to grow food - food should be in short supply there. And while we're at it, oil rich parts of the country need to stop supplying parts of the country where oil is scarce. Do you know expensive and unsafe it is to transport fuel? We're all in this together, and different areas have different strengths.

evgen 7y ago
Sounds great, and all of the urban areas can import their food from places where it is cheaper to grow and where they do not need to pay subsidies to farmers in the form of price floors and subsidies not to grow. You could empty rural America and let it go back to prairie and the cities would do just fine.
bsder 7y ago
> I am all for farmers cutting off food supply to urban areas. You might want to rethink this. The cities wouldn't even notice. Most cities have quite useful ports and can get food from elsewhere. Said farmers would now have no domestic market and have pissed off their gateways to the non-domestic market. In addition, the cities have very little love for the current crop of "farmers" as mostly they are servants of the big agribusinesses.
- JetSpiegel 7y ago
  > Most cities have quite useful ports and can get food from elsewhere. Not for the same price. Either more money is spent on food or some city dwellers starve / overthrow the government.

joshe 7y ago

Also solar + battery is (very roughly) only double the rate cost right now, so you aren't really stranding people. I've been to farms with solar + battery only and it's totally fine. Back in the 1936 (rural electrification act) it was electric line or nothing, you were upgrading from candlelight. And it's $20,000 for a solar + battery system versus rate payers subsidizing (using your numbers) $95,000 for an electric line. It seems a bit weird.

bparsons 7y ago

It isn't just rural areas. Even suburbs relatively close to the city are completely unsustainable from a municipal services point of view. This article lays out a convincing case as to why most of America's cities are financially doomed because of them. https://grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-are-a-giant-ponzi-scheme/ https://grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-are...

oftenwrong 7y ago

Basically the point made here: https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subsidies/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs... https://granolashotgun.com/2016/09/01/them-thats-got-shall-have-them-thats-not-shall-lose/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/09/01/them-thats-got-shall-h...

Justin_K 7y ago

Most water comes from rural America and is pumped into the city. With your logic, rural folks should be allowed to cut off the city when they see fit.

sjg007 7y ago

$500,000 a mile seems excessive regardless... but fyi urban roads cost more to pave than rural roads.