9 ms·

I live very rurally. Thanks to a state government with very little "nannying" our tiny county government can make infrastructure decisions that fit our needs, f

by pard68 4y ago

I live very rurally. Thanks to a state government with very little "nannying" our tiny county government can make infrastructure decisions that fit our needs, financials, and abilities. Almost every road in my county is dirt/gravel. When you have very minimal use, this is a vastly superior road medium. No specialty equipment is needed to maintain the roads, just a dump truck and (ideally) a grader or plow. Nearly every farm out here has both, so road maintenance is a community affair. Likewise, we have nearly no bridges, the roads just go through the creeks and you are expected to have the ability to judge whether or not you and your vehicle can cross. We have a bridge in need of repair, it's been closed for four years with no sign of fixing soon. We do not have the money (as a county) to fix it. The water crossings are closed after storms, for a few hours, this is vastly superior, for my rural community. It's the same as it is in tech. Your tech choice are partially informed by the size and capability of your org.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Kinda seems like a scenario where you can save 80% of cost by ignoring 20% of the problems. Not good enough for many, but it's a very strong value proposition none the less. How do you manage work and remoteness? Long commute? I imagine internet isnt good at home.
- oneplane 4y ago
  It ignores all sorts of externalities and world-wide interactions. The concept of living in an isolated rural bubble forever is an illusion. Air and water for example, they don't just stick around in one place. So if you pollute something, that pollution happily goes elsewhere making it everyone's problem. Same with disease, or cancer. Say you need to go out to the hospital for radiation treatment every day, and you can't do it without assistance from an ambulance, that gravel road and the no-bridge concept is suddenly a really bad idea. I think it's ignoring more than just 20% of the problems, it's ignoring looking (and planning) ahead, and understanding that not all factors are known, especially not in lower-populated areas. And then there is the power imbalance a supplier will have over a small rural town, as it is unlikely that there is much to choose from, and no real power to influence a large company anyway. So now you're stuck with undrinkable water, bad internet, and barely any healthcare.
  - bovermyer 4y ago
    > It's ignoring looking (and planning) ahead I think this is an unfair statement. You make it sound like rural communities intentionally do not plan ahead, which is both a generalization and inaccurate. I've lived in (very) rural communities that definitely plan ahead. When the consequences of not planning ahead can include death or financial ruin, the incentive to plan ahead is high.
    - tstrimple 4y ago
      Yes, they plan ahead so effectively that they have thrown their most valuable resource, fertile topsoil, away while ruining the water for everyone in the search of short term profits. https://www.iowapublicradio.org/news-from-npr/2021-02-24/new-evidence-shows-fertile-soil-gone-from-midwestern-farms https://www.iowapublicradio.org/news-from-npr/2021-02-24/new...
      - anonporridge 4y ago
        This seems like much more the result of external pressures from city dwelling corporate executives who drive competition for cheap agricultural produce to such an unsustainable level that everyone has to do the same destructive practices just to stay in the game. There are many farmers who would love to manage their land more holistically, but recognize that it's financially impossible to do so unless they get lucky and hook a privileged group of rich people who are willing to pay an extreme premium for their food in order to buy non religious indulgences to relieve their guilt for their own contribution to the problem. And really, to lay blame for this problem on the backs of any singular entity alone is absurd. It's a systemic problem that every single one of us participates in. All hail Moloch. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
      - bovermyer 4y ago
        How many small towns or rural areas have you lived in? Wait, don't answer that. Instead, tell me how much time you've spent studying rural economies, rural infrastructure, and the development of rural communities over time.
- pard68 4y ago
  Starlink gets me 120+ Mbps most days. No one knows I work hours from awired internet or a Walmart until it rains...
typest 4y ago
Other commenters arguing against you seem to be missing your point somewhat. I think right-sizing infrastructure to the community (and tax base) that supports it is a good and important idea. It took me awhile to realize the necessity of building infrastructure this way. Strongtowns talks a lot about this -- for instance, see this piece about how many cities in the US cannot afford their own water infrastructure [1]. It makes sense that larger, more dense, more economically productive areas need and can afford different infrastructure than more rural areas. If you mandate or incentivize rural areas to use the same infrastructure as the more urban ones, you can often end up with problems. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/12/1/we-cant-afford-to-maintain-our-water-and-sewer-infrastructureunless-we-build-more-productive-places https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/12/1/we-cant-afford...
- elgenie 4y ago
  The main issue with right-sizing infrastructure solutions by devolving them to small communities is myopia with respect to unknown-unknowns and especially to the question of whether there should be a small community in that location at all.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    The solution for unknown-unknowns is to make changes gradually and try to make them reversible (reversing should be cheap) to the extent possible (e.g., rather than destroying a bridge, you close it for some years first and if some need arises, you just reopen it). > whether there should be a small community in that location at all This isn't particularly actionable; we can't just forcibly uproot people. Moreover, liberals (including me) and progressives usually (and rightly) advocate for the state subsidizing public services for communities that can't afford them--e.g., quality schools and libraries and so on in low-income communities, but then when it comes to rural communities, there's often an attitude that rural communities are leeching resources that rightly belong to larger areas (especially urban centers) and that their problems are their own fault (despite that most rural people were born in their environments). This seems pretty philosophically inconsistent. By the way, I don't mean to impute this sort of attitude on the parent, by the way--his "whether there should be a community in that location at all" remark made me think of it, but I don't think he intended it as urban chauvinism.
theGnuMe 4y ago
I mean every place starts out this way, the issue is when density increases and people start to care about preventable deaths. Don't need stop signs, people die. People washboard on the road, people die. Emergency services can't get to you, people die.
turtlesdown11 4y ago
whats the average life expectancy in your county?
- hammock 4y ago
  Please impose your city slicker values on us poor people. We are too ignorant for our own good /s
  - wwweston 4y ago
    It's kinda hard to tell exactly what the /s applies to, but... The weird rural inferiority complex presented as the pretense that outsiders are looking down the country folks seems a lot more common than any actual down-looking. It's almost tempting to think that the source is actually a hierarchical worldview more commonly embedded in the minds of rural-dwellers. Personally I'd guess that lifespan and/or various quality of life measures don't correlate neatly along any urban-rural divide, so if I wanted to disabuse someone of the notion that they did, I'd go looking for statistics to that effect. If they show life expectancy for rural communities is the same or higher, then the question is answered. If they show life expectancy is lower, surely solving that problem would be more important than rural pride... unless of course that hierarchical worldview speculation is correct.
    - turtlesdown11 4y ago
      There is a neat correlation in life expectancy in the US in urban vs rural areas. Per this study, in urban areas women live 2.48 years longer, and men can expect to live 2.53 years longer than their counterparts in rural areas. The study notes a significant difference in cardiovascular disease as a primary cause. I guess eating healthy foods is a city slicker value... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8743112/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8743112/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5981900/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5981900/
      - pard68 4y ago
Steltek 4y ago
I think the equivalent thing here to your gravel roads is a public harbor and dock, instead of a ferry. A ferry for <200 people sounds like trying to run public transit through Nebraskan farmland.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  In California Caltrans operates a 24x7 oncall ferry service for cars in the Sacramento delta area serving an island of fewer than 300 people. It costs $4 million per year plus capital costs (this year: over $25 million in new capital). Because we are idiots.
  - Animats 4y ago
    No, because there's 17 square miles of cultivated land on Ryer Island. Few people, but active farms.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      That sounds like a good reason for a bridge and a bad reason for a ferry.
      - rnk 4y ago
        The taxpayers are subsidizing those farmers. What about those rural areas that want to survive on their own?
        jeffbee 4y ago
        I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with subsidizing agriculture and forestry and whatnot. But I do think there are better and worse ways to build transportation systems.
jeffbee 4y ago
I sometimes wonder what kind of event it takes for a place to revert from paved to gravel roads. In San Benito County, California, which is bigger than the whole state of Rhode Island but virtually depopulated, there are roads that were paved at some point because they served old cinnabar and asbestos mines that nobody needs any more. These roads are so bad that the locals, to the extent that any exist, drive with at least one side of wheels on the dirt shoulder. Every five or ten years the county comes and and throws materials into the potholes, which just makes the surface worse. Now this broke county is planning to repave some of these roads using federal bailout money. Is it only a lack of imagination that keeps them from retreating to gravel?
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >Is it only a lack of imagination that keeps them from retreating to gravel? I think the chance of the feds paying for the replacement is doing a lot.
- Animats 4y ago
  Reversion to gravel roads has already happened in some of the more depopulated states.[1] Dust control is a problem. [1] https://blog.midwestind.com/converting-paved-to-unpaved-roads/ https://blog.midwestind.com/converting-paved-to-unpaved-road...
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Oh, I thought we solved that by spraying the unpaved roads with the waste stream from making Agent Orange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri
ajross 4y ago
> this is vastly superior, for my rural community For 4WD vehicle owners in your rural community who don't need an ambulance, I guess? I mean, it's sorta reasonable to argue that this is OK for you personally (until your next hip fracture or stroke, anyway), but... you can't run a "community" well this way. What happens to elderly residents? I'm guessing they live in the wilds until they're too old and then move to a facility in the exurbs? Likewise anyone who needs regular health care access for chronic conditions isn't a fit. Bluntly: you're still being subsidized. Even if you don't take cash from the government for your infrastructure[1], you're still riding on the ability of the rest of society to take on the people who you can't support. [1] And I don't buy for a moment that you don't get any infrastructure funding. Your power lines and phones are regulated and required to be provisioned at a loss, if nothing else. Mobile and internet access is subject to similar laws in many states.
- rnk 4y ago
  Are there any predominantly rural areas that aren't being depopulated? Which I feel sad to even say out loud. My grandparents' lovely small town in the south faced this, both from Walmart and from the young moving to get jobs. Actually my other grandparents in another small town in another state also had this too. Both are 30mins away from bigger towns.
  - pard68 4y ago
    Same. Our county is a bit under the 10,000 pop. level and has a majority 70+ population.
- pard68 4y ago
  You mistook my meaning. I did not mean no cash, I meant, little to no "you need to have a bridge" type laws or anything. The OP is talking about laws that effect this rural community, I was explaining how at an infrastructural level there are little in the way of laws that hinder my county, Also, no one here uses an ambulance the hospital is nearly two hours away. You call 911 and a helicopter comes. You pay $120 / year per household for the helicopter evac coop or you pay a few grand when they pick you up. Edit: You do not need four wheel drive or all-wheel drive. The water crossings are capable in any vehicle with a standardish ride height (my 2001 Legacy can manage it with only ~6" of clearance). And these dirt roads are not like private ones you might have seen. These are well made and maintained roads. No more pot holes than a well kept paved road.

by pard68 4y ago

nonethewiser 4y ago

Kinda seems like a scenario where you can save 80% of cost by ignoring 20% of the problems. Not good enough for many, but it's a very strong value proposition none the less. How do you manage work and remoteness? Long commute? I imagine internet isnt good at home.

oneplane 4y ago
It ignores all sorts of externalities and world-wide interactions. The concept of living in an isolated rural bubble forever is an illusion. Air and water for example, they don't just stick around in one place. So if you pollute something, that pollution happily goes elsewhere making it everyone's problem. Same with disease, or cancer. Say you need to go out to the hospital for radiation treatment every day, and you can't do it without assistance from an ambulance, that gravel road and the no-bridge concept is suddenly a really bad idea. I think it's ignoring more than just 20% of the problems, it's ignoring looking (and planning) ahead, and understanding that not all factors are known, especially not in lower-populated areas. And then there is the power imbalance a supplier will have over a small rural town, as it is unlikely that there is much to choose from, and no real power to influence a large company anyway. So now you're stuck with undrinkable water, bad internet, and barely any healthcare.
- bovermyer 4y ago
  > It's ignoring looking (and planning) ahead I think this is an unfair statement. You make it sound like rural communities intentionally do not plan ahead, which is both a generalization and inaccurate. I've lived in (very) rural communities that definitely plan ahead. When the consequences of not planning ahead can include death or financial ruin, the incentive to plan ahead is high.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    Yes, they plan ahead so effectively that they have thrown their most valuable resource, fertile topsoil, away while ruining the water for everyone in the search of short term profits. https://www.iowapublicradio.org/news-from-npr/2021-02-24/new-evidence-shows-fertile-soil-gone-from-midwestern-farms https://www.iowapublicradio.org/news-from-npr/2021-02-24/new...
    - anonporridge 4y ago
      This seems like much more the result of external pressures from city dwelling corporate executives who drive competition for cheap agricultural produce to such an unsustainable level that everyone has to do the same destructive practices just to stay in the game. There are many farmers who would love to manage their land more holistically, but recognize that it's financially impossible to do so unless they get lucky and hook a privileged group of rich people who are willing to pay an extreme premium for their food in order to buy non religious indulgences to relieve their guilt for their own contribution to the problem. And really, to lay blame for this problem on the backs of any singular entity alone is absurd. It's a systemic problem that every single one of us participates in. All hail Moloch. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
    - bovermyer 4y ago
      How many small towns or rural areas have you lived in? Wait, don't answer that. Instead, tell me how much time you've spent studying rural economies, rural infrastructure, and the development of rural communities over time.
pard68 4y ago
Starlink gets me 120+ Mbps most days. No one knows I work hours from awired internet or a Walmart until it rains...

typest 4y ago

Other commenters arguing against you seem to be missing your point somewhat. I think right-sizing infrastructure to the community (and tax base) that supports it is a good and important idea. It took me awhile to realize the necessity of building infrastructure this way. Strongtowns talks a lot about this -- for instance, see this piece about how many cities in the US cannot afford their own water infrastructure [1]. It makes sense that larger, more dense, more economically productive areas need and can afford different infrastructure than more rural areas. If you mandate or incentivize rural areas to use the same infrastructure as the more urban ones, you can often end up with problems. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/12/1/we-cant-afford-to-maintain-our-water-and-sewer-infrastructureunless-we-build-more-productive-places https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/12/1/we-cant-afford...

elgenie 4y ago
The main issue with right-sizing infrastructure solutions by devolving them to small communities is myopia with respect to unknown-unknowns and especially to the question of whether there should be a small community in that location at all.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  The solution for unknown-unknowns is to make changes gradually and try to make them reversible (reversing should be cheap) to the extent possible (e.g., rather than destroying a bridge, you close it for some years first and if some need arises, you just reopen it). > whether there should be a small community in that location at all This isn't particularly actionable; we can't just forcibly uproot people. Moreover, liberals (including me) and progressives usually (and rightly) advocate for the state subsidizing public services for communities that can't afford them--e.g., quality schools and libraries and so on in low-income communities, but then when it comes to rural communities, there's often an attitude that rural communities are leeching resources that rightly belong to larger areas (especially urban centers) and that their problems are their own fault (despite that most rural people were born in their environments). This seems pretty philosophically inconsistent. By the way, I don't mean to impute this sort of attitude on the parent, by the way--his "whether there should be a community in that location at all" remark made me think of it, but I don't think he intended it as urban chauvinism.

theGnuMe 4y ago

I mean every place starts out this way, the issue is when density increases and people start to care about preventable deaths. Don't need stop signs, people die. People washboard on the road, people die. Emergency services can't get to you, people die.

turtlesdown11 4y ago

whats the average life expectancy in your county?

hammock 4y ago
Please impose your city slicker values on us poor people. We are too ignorant for our own good /s
- wwweston 4y ago
  It's kinda hard to tell exactly what the /s applies to, but... The weird rural inferiority complex presented as the pretense that outsiders are looking down the country folks seems a lot more common than any actual down-looking. It's almost tempting to think that the source is actually a hierarchical worldview more commonly embedded in the minds of rural-dwellers. Personally I'd guess that lifespan and/or various quality of life measures don't correlate neatly along any urban-rural divide, so if I wanted to disabuse someone of the notion that they did, I'd go looking for statistics to that effect. If they show life expectancy for rural communities is the same or higher, then the question is answered. If they show life expectancy is lower, surely solving that problem would be more important than rural pride... unless of course that hierarchical worldview speculation is correct.
  - turtlesdown11 4y ago
    There is a neat correlation in life expectancy in the US in urban vs rural areas. Per this study, in urban areas women live 2.48 years longer, and men can expect to live 2.53 years longer than their counterparts in rural areas. The study notes a significant difference in cardiovascular disease as a primary cause. I guess eating healthy foods is a city slicker value... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8743112/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8743112/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5981900/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5981900/
    - pard68 4y ago

Steltek 4y ago

I think the equivalent thing here to your gravel roads is a public harbor and dock, instead of a ferry. A ferry for <200 people sounds like trying to run public transit through Nebraskan farmland.

jeffbee 4y ago
In California Caltrans operates a 24x7 oncall ferry service for cars in the Sacramento delta area serving an island of fewer than 300 people. It costs $4 million per year plus capital costs (this year: over $25 million in new capital). Because we are idiots.
- Animats 4y ago
  No, because there's 17 square miles of cultivated land on Ryer Island. Few people, but active farms.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    That sounds like a good reason for a bridge and a bad reason for a ferry.
    - rnk 4y ago
      The taxpayers are subsidizing those farmers. What about those rural areas that want to survive on their own?
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with subsidizing agriculture and forestry and whatnot. But I do think there are better and worse ways to build transportation systems.

jeffbee 4y ago

I sometimes wonder what kind of event it takes for a place to revert from paved to gravel roads. In San Benito County, California, which is bigger than the whole state of Rhode Island but virtually depopulated, there are roads that were paved at some point because they served old cinnabar and asbestos mines that nobody needs any more. These roads are so bad that the locals, to the extent that any exist, drive with at least one side of wheels on the dirt shoulder. Every five or ten years the county comes and and throws materials into the potholes, which just makes the surface worse. Now this broke county is planning to repave some of these roads using federal bailout money. Is it only a lack of imagination that keeps them from retreating to gravel?

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>Is it only a lack of imagination that keeps them from retreating to gravel? I think the chance of the feds paying for the replacement is doing a lot.
Animats 4y ago
Reversion to gravel roads has already happened in some of the more depopulated states.[1] Dust control is a problem. [1] https://blog.midwestind.com/converting-paved-to-unpaved-roads/ https://blog.midwestind.com/converting-paved-to-unpaved-road...
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Oh, I thought we solved that by spraying the unpaved roads with the waste stream from making Agent Orange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri

ajross 4y ago

> this is vastly superior, for my rural community For 4WD vehicle owners in your rural community who don't need an ambulance, I guess? I mean, it's sorta reasonable to argue that this is OK for you personally (until your next hip fracture or stroke, anyway), but... you can't run a "community" well this way. What happens to elderly residents? I'm guessing they live in the wilds until they're too old and then move to a facility in the exurbs? Likewise anyone who needs regular health care access for chronic conditions isn't a fit. Bluntly: you're still being subsidized. Even if you don't take cash from the government for your infrastructure[1], you're still riding on the ability of the rest of society to take on the people who you can't support. [1] And I don't buy for a moment that you don't get any infrastructure funding. Your power lines and phones are regulated and required to be provisioned at a loss, if nothing else. Mobile and internet access is subject to similar laws in many states.

rnk 4y ago
Are there any predominantly rural areas that aren't being depopulated? Which I feel sad to even say out loud. My grandparents' lovely small town in the south faced this, both from Walmart and from the young moving to get jobs. Actually my other grandparents in another small town in another state also had this too. Both are 30mins away from bigger towns.
- pard68 4y ago
  Same. Our county is a bit under the 10,000 pop. level and has a majority 70+ population.
pard68 4y ago
You mistook my meaning. I did not mean no cash, I meant, little to no "you need to have a bridge" type laws or anything. The OP is talking about laws that effect this rural community, I was explaining how at an infrastructural level there are little in the way of laws that hinder my county, Also, no one here uses an ambulance the hospital is nearly two hours away. You call 911 and a helicopter comes. You pay $120 / year per household for the helicopter evac coop or you pay a few grand when they pick you up. Edit: You do not need four wheel drive or all-wheel drive. The water crossings are capable in any vehicle with a standardish ride height (my 2001 Legacy can manage it with only ~6" of clearance). And these dirt roads are not like private ones you might have seen. These are well made and maintained roads. No more pot holes than a well kept paved road.