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It seems like it's usually a cost per length/area problem. Cities are small, and they have a lot of people who pay taxes, so the marginal cost to pave a road be

It seems like it's usually a cost per length/area problem. Cities are small, and they have a lot of people who pay taxes, so the marginal cost to pave a road between any two places and make regular deliveries along it is small. Frontier areas are enormous, and roads barely last a few decades before they need replacing. Moving goods and services to any one house or hamlet also adds a significant marginal cost to existing routes. I once saw an ambulance pull out of a small clinic and turn its lights on in New Mexico. I followed it along a highway at 75mph for over an hour (its lights flashing the entire time) before it took an exit to reach the emergency. The coverage in these areas is just abysmal, but I would guess that it's still pretty expensive per capita. >Where do you think the food, water and gas come from in the first place? And how do you think they get to the cities? We can stop subsidizing that, I guess, but food, water and gas in cities is going to cost a hell of a lot more. From my anecdotal experience, I don't think that most farmers would be in favor of ending domestic ag subsidies. But I think you're on to something in saying that the negative externalities of cities aren't priced into our markets either. All of the pollution, noise, stress, congestion...those things should be subsidized for people who live in cities, but they aren't, and the resulting increase in the cost-of-living in cities relative to rural areas probably drives up prices for the specialized manufactured goods and services that everyone depends on.

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
> All of the pollution, noise, stress, congestion...those things should be subsidized for people who live in cities, but they aren't.... On a per-capita basis, people who live in cities generate less externalities than rural dwellers. So I'm not quite clear on your point.
- kolanos 7y ago
  > On a per-capita basis, people who live in cities generate less externalities than rural dwellers. So I'm not quite clear on your point. Of course there's more externalities, 3% of the population feeds the other 97%. Cities consume all the food, water and gas that those "wasteful" rural folk produce for them. Interesting that we don't account for that and just attribute the externalities to them, as if that's the whole story. Cities are certainly more efficient per capita, but they're not self-sustaining. If we demolished all those wasteful roads between cities and rural parts of the country, the cities would starve.
  - akiselev 7y ago
    I was under the impression that most of what we consider rural populations are left overs from transportation arteries and extraction industries that popped all over the country during the industrial revolution. I thought the actual number of farmers is vanishingly small and I doubt it takes an entire 3% of the country to support a mostly automated industry. It's not a topic I've seen well quantified.
    - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
      The parent to you was trying to say we are somehow taking advantage of them. Before covad-19 at least, we could just buy food from some other place. We don't need a lot of the rural land. The same thing goes the other way, the people living in small town could get medical care from some international company, but it would cost way more than their subsidized us federal govt healthcare because in my hometown more than half the people are retired. In washington state we have the same arguments. If you really want to make people in rural areas made, point out that we are subsidizing them. i'm not against building infrastructure that we all need. But lets be honest about it. A significant amount of tax revenue from Seattle goes out to pay for things in low population counties. It does against the dishonest ideaology that they are the real producers of things and we somehow take what they make. We need each other, but we city folk like me subsidize your local docs so they don't leave, subsidize your schools, and we pay for roads that are used to then get to timber to harvest.
luckylion 7y ago
> Frontier areas are enormous, and roads barely last a few decades before they need replacing. I think the issue is that you need to have the roads in the rural and frontier areas to get the food to the cities, i.e. even if nobody lived there, you'd still need to maintain them until we switch to soylent green and the cities become self-sustainable.

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago

> All of the pollution, noise, stress, congestion...those things should be subsidized for people who live in cities, but they aren't.... On a per-capita basis, people who live in cities generate less externalities than rural dwellers. So I'm not quite clear on your point.

kolanos 7y ago
> On a per-capita basis, people who live in cities generate less externalities than rural dwellers. So I'm not quite clear on your point. Of course there's more externalities, 3% of the population feeds the other 97%. Cities consume all the food, water and gas that those "wasteful" rural folk produce for them. Interesting that we don't account for that and just attribute the externalities to them, as if that's the whole story. Cities are certainly more efficient per capita, but they're not self-sustaining. If we demolished all those wasteful roads between cities and rural parts of the country, the cities would starve.
- akiselev 7y ago
  I was under the impression that most of what we consider rural populations are left overs from transportation arteries and extraction industries that popped all over the country during the industrial revolution. I thought the actual number of farmers is vanishingly small and I doubt it takes an entire 3% of the country to support a mostly automated industry. It's not a topic I've seen well quantified.
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    The parent to you was trying to say we are somehow taking advantage of them. Before covad-19 at least, we could just buy food from some other place. We don't need a lot of the rural land. The same thing goes the other way, the people living in small town could get medical care from some international company, but it would cost way more than their subsidized us federal govt healthcare because in my hometown more than half the people are retired. In washington state we have the same arguments. If you really want to make people in rural areas made, point out that we are subsidizing them. i'm not against building infrastructure that we all need. But lets be honest about it. A significant amount of tax revenue from Seattle goes out to pay for things in low population counties. It does against the dishonest ideaology that they are the real producers of things and we somehow take what they make. We need each other, but we city folk like me subsidize your local docs so they don't leave, subsidize your schools, and we pay for roads that are used to then get to timber to harvest.

luckylion 7y ago

> Frontier areas are enormous, and roads barely last a few decades before they need replacing. I think the issue is that you need to have the roads in the rural and frontier areas to get the food to the cities, i.e. even if nobody lived there, you'd still need to maintain them until we switch to soylent green and the cities become self-sustainable.