cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/16511967
Someone got woken up on Sunday morning 🤣
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Most people suggesting we should densify are targeting suburbs, not rural areas. Suburbs are incredibly expensive and environmentally wasteful per square inch. They have all the utility of a city but spread out with more asphalt, cement, power, sewer, water, gas, cheap inefficient homes that leach heat/ac at an alarming rate, etc.
In rural areas the infrastructure isn't always as expensive because some residents have their own septic and well, live on a dirt road, heat with a wood furnace, etc. A few of those things are also more renewable. Additionally, rural areas are still required for our way of living (farming, logging, mining, fishing), while suburbs have negative societal value (they take more than they put back into the system).
I suspect the suburb issue is one of car centric US suburbs where you can't even get out of it without a car, rather than somewhere like the UK, where I effectively live in what is now a suburb of a larger city (if I drove there, it's about ten miles, through an entirely built up area), but that "suburb" is also a town that's been here since medieval times with it's own shops and workplaces and facilities.
Seems to me the issue is less about low density suburbs, and more about the fact that there's nothing there apart from rows and rows of identikit housing.
Absolutely, North America has a special level of stupidity. To clarify yes, the suburbs in the US mostly don't even have a real town center, many are just residential, malls, and big box stores. The average property size and spread is also often much less dense than nearly any suburb in the UK. So the infrastructure and environmental cost is much much higher.