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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 wor

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.

pwthornton 7y ago
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.
- bluGill 7y ago
  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)
  - corebit 7y ago
    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.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      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.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      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.
HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
wut? 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.
- SilasX 7y ago
  Interesting, most of Europe has much less of a car culture, and engineers seem to get jobs okay.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    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.
    - SilasX 7y ago
      >How many engineers in Europe live on small farms 20+ miles from their employer? Not many, because their urban planning is better. Bottom line, car culture is not some fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job, as the original comment was suggesting.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
        What does living on a farm have to do with urban planning?
notatoad 7y ago
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.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  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.
wil421 7y ago
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.

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.

pwthornton 7y ago

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.

bluGill 7y ago
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)
- corebit 7y ago
  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.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    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.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    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.

HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago

wut? 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.

SilasX 7y ago
Interesting, most of Europe has much less of a car culture, and engineers seem to get jobs okay.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  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.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    >How many engineers in Europe live on small farms 20+ miles from their employer? Not many, because their urban planning is better. Bottom line, car culture is not some fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job, as the original comment was suggesting.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
      What does living on a farm have to do with urban planning?

notatoad 7y ago

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.

pnutjam 7y ago
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.

wil421 7y ago

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.