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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

The article mixes together some good points, some true but somewhat slanted positions and some highly debatable points. And calls this "literacy", in analogy to very basic, object things everyone should know. It's extremely off-putting.

Example of highly debateable position: "That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car and the telephone."

Automobile based urbanization has entirely reshaped the landscape of rural America rather than just giving previous here a way to get around. Where I live, once there were small cities, 1000-2000 people in walking distance of each other, dotting the landscape. Now it's a carpet of dispersed single family homes. Many debate the value of the landscape - in California, huge level of urban-wildland interface development has rather disastrous consequence, being a significant factor in our massive fires.

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Have you lived in a 1000-2000 people town/village without a car ? I did at one point when I was younger - our islands here have plenty of such places.

I can't see anyone with the ability to drive chose not to in this situation - even the basic things like shopping - there's usually one or two small stores arround but getting to a bigger shopping mall was 30km round trip, doctor comes to town ambulance three times per week and if you have a medical emergency you're at the mercy of your neighbors or lottery that the ambulance from the closest ER is not busy, taking your children anywhere involves planning bus trips with limited time windows, if they miss a buss to school they are out for the day. And not to mention about 70% of people need it for work.

If anything that's just an argument to move most people(other than those strictly necessary for agriculture) from rural towns into dense cities.

Where "dense city" is still a pretty small town. A five digit population can easily support a hospital, a school, a train station and other basic necessities of life (e.g. jobs that don't require commuting to the next urban core).

There are unique opportunities in such small communities and qualities that cannot be replicated in denser urban areas. Once my children grow up I could see myself living there. Suggesting that we shouldn't live that way because it nececitaces a car ridiculous.

In my opinion living on the country side is a luxury. Sure, feel free to live in a small town, but please pay for all the externalities yourself.

Those would be minuscule per capita, and are already included in high gas taxes we have around here.

What makes you think fuel taxes are already including the cost of carbon capture?

Because they are higher than carbon taxes on industry from what I remember.

The cost of giant road network connecting a patchwork of exurbs is vast. If the exurbs wind-up being considered a luxury and inhabited by those who can afford, the cost per-person goes up. Even more, if the US gets rid of its extreme wealth/income imbalance, the number who could afford it would go down even further.

Essentially, Exurbia is millstone around this country's neck, effectively moving the place palpably to disaster via fire, unhinged ideologies and generally unsustainable infrastructure.

How do you propose to force people to move?

Urbanization is already happening anyways. It could probably be sped up if we get rid of the implicit subsidies of rural living.

That's already happening. You don't need to "move" people. More and more people live in dense cities.

Farms take up massive areas so farmers can not live in cities. Natural resources like minerals are unlikely to be located close to major population centers, so miners can not live in cities. Between population centers there must be people maintaining the transportation infrastructure, these can not live in cities. All of these people who can't live in population centers need various services, the providers of which also can't live in cities. The people in rural areas are overwhelmingly there because they need to be. People want to live in urban areas, it's a real problem that people leave rural areas despite the need for their services, and thus the rural communities are no longer capable of providing good quality of life, leading to even more people leaving until only those who can't escape remain. If the communities providing resources to the cities collapse, what happens to the cities?

Have you lived in a 1000-2000 people town/village without a car ? I did at one point when I was younger - our islands here have plenty of such places.

-- I called the points debatable. The entire argument strategy is looking point X in history and then point Y in history, noting Y is better than point X and then saying essentially that anyone questioning the steps that took us from point X to point Y is a complete moron and doesn't deserve to have their position addressed further.

I'm actually living in one of the few surviving original cities of the area (Nevada City, official population 3,000).

I could drive my car 1-2 a week before Covid and drive it even less now. Of course, as hip, hippy town the place now benefits from it's connection Sacramento and the Bay Area. But those longer connections could happen primarily by rail, in places in Europe, these connect do happen by rail. Brighton wouldn't be Brighton-as-it-is without rail connections to London.

I see this not changing the fact that genuinely rural populations genuinely need an automobile.

Yes, American urban population, and city builders can certainly consider going without a car, and building cities without making car ownership a prerequisite to live in.

Yeah, but this works both ways: people live in rural places where they absolutely need to have a car, because they have access to cars. Without cars, less people would live there. Society adapts to the existence of the car.

They've lived there before there were cars though. They just didn't have options to go to the next town, or the hospital when they'd need it.

People lived before modern medicine as well. Without modern medicine, less people would live. Society adapts to the existence of modern medicine.

I don't think "genuinely rural" means anything. Plenty of places in the US and around the world have been abandoned when no economic opportunities existed. As I said, the cities of 100 years ago are abandoned - rural population of that era has moved - some a short distance, some a long distance. The US has made decision (consciously or by default) to encourage dispersed rural/exurban/suburban development fueled by the private automobile. It probably can't reversed entirely but there's no "genuine, authentic rural thing-in-itself" that cries for automobile without history.

Before automobile, people were using horses and buggies to travel to neighboring farms and the nearest town. They weren't that isolated.

They say the bicycle did wonders for genetics.

Not everyone could afford a horse before the automobile. Most people only had their feet. And modest families were much more numerous than today.

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