Modeling rural communities as remotely self-sustaining economically is a fantasy. They "manage" to maintain these roads through heavy subsidization by more economically-productive cities.

Obviously dense cities (in their current form) aren't completely self-sustaining either, given that they need food. But this is universally-understood, while for some reason many people seem to be unaware how much of a closed-loop rural communities _aren't_ when they talk about the sustainability of sparse living patterns at modern standards of living.

Sounds like farm towns could self-sustain with a sacrifice in some luxuries and tax money from cities, but cities would starve.

Luxuries like what? Roads? Fire departments? Police? Schools? There’s a floor, and often they don’t generate it, instead relying on state and county funds.

The economics at the state level, play out just like how they do at the national level. The high population, economically vibrant parts generate tax revenue, which is redistributed to the sparsely populated, economically depressed areas, of which are not self sustaining, no matter how much the net receivers think they are.

Compared to food and water those things are luxuries.

Obviously both types of regions need each other to maintain the modern style of living as mentioned, but in some kind of societal collapse situation you'd probably rather be on some isolated farm that could theoretically sustain itself. And I feel like if those areas chose to go on with less subsidy money they could do so, but it's not a bad trade for food and everything else that comes from them. If one really wanted to hold the other hostage the one with the food would win.

When did we go from 'self-sustaining' to societal collapse? It seems to be some weird fantasy where these isolated towns are somehow more self-sustaining because they could vaguely survive in the case of a societal collapse.

That doesn't make them self-sustaining in modern society. And saying that roads are a luxury seems to be incredibly ignorant of how society evolved and how important trade routes (as well as ocean access, something cities generally have) for getting resources you otherwise don't have access to. Such as materials, spices and meds. Something that, you know, an isolated farm wouldn't readily have access to.

Especially since salt is kind of a big deal for food preservation.

The original comment you replied to explicitly mentions "at modern standards of living".

Many rural areas don't have fire departments in the same way that cities have fire departments. They have "volunteer" fire departments, who do receive public funding but who are not expected to put out any particular fire. There aren't enough fires to justify anything more.

Your "state level" explanation seems to ignore states that don't have major metropolitan areas.

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion from either my comment or contact with the real world. I chose my words pretty precisely to avoid my point getting buried by a tangential conversation about the other direction of dependency: "dense cities in their current form" depend on rural areas. It's pretty easy to imagine an almost-fully urbanized society that grows food without having to sustain a significant amount of population spread sparsely.

On top of that, the idea that rural areas' standard of living without urban subsidization would amount to losing "some luxuries" is so out of touch with reality that I don't even know where to start (though the sibling comments do a good job).

Luxuries like roads and power?

Ruralites can (and often already do) drive 4WD vehicles and run generators (or nowadays solar + batteries) for power. In an extreme case, they'd be at least somewhat willing to revert to horses and candles (hell, quite a few might even consider that fun). It'll take adjustment, but it ain't an insurmountable problem.

The far bigger concern is that very few (if any) rural towns in the US have self-sustaining food supplies. Cut off their access to the outside world, and there's a very high probability that they'll starve just as quickly as a larger city will. American agriculture has shifted hard from diversified/robust subsistence farming to large-scale industrialized monocrop farming, so you'd have to rewind a century or so of "progress" in order for a rural town to be able to feed itself. This is also not an insurmountable problem, but the effects are quite a bit more dire.

Cities would starve from...what?

This narrative always seemed remarkably short-sighted because cities have enough economic bargaining power that they can just import the goods they need. Farm towns would quickly fall apart the moment they had to pay for all of their infrastructure (meaning power, internet, gas, transportation) because all of that is heavily subsidized.

The unrealistic hypothetical seemed to be essentially that a city or a farm town was moved to an island on its own or otherwise barricaded. The city would suffer a big population loss and have trouble making the land usable for growing food again, while the farm area would have an easier transition to a frontier-town-like lifestyle.

Yea, my original comment implied this unrealistic hypothetical because I wanted to avoid the conversation getting derailed by the inevitable rural fetishists pretending that cities are irredeemable cesspits instead of "what makes modern standards of living possible, for both urban and rural areas".

Don't get me wrong, as much as I prefer dense urbanism, there are plenty of things about sparse living that appeal to me, and I fully understand how many people would choose suburban or rural life. Hell, I'm not even supposed to some degree of subsidization from more efficient communities, just on grounds of diversity and anti-fragility. It just gets frustrating how committed sparsity advocates are to pretending that these lifestyles aren't heavily subsidized. A self-sustaining rural community (despite having its charms) would be appealing to far fewer people than one that gets to have its cake and eat it too, by redistributing some of the societal advantages of urban living (like economic efficiency).

Just importing the goods they need works fine until there's some global crisis that disrupts food supply chains so much that you can't anymore. Say, a pandemic so disruptive to global trade and economic activity that a bunch of less wealthy countries just decide to say they're going to keep their food to themselves so their people don't starve. You know, like the one happening right now.

Anti-fragility of supply chains is (mostly) orthogonal to the urban/rural question.

Some big parts of why we subsidize rural areas is 1) an emergent property of allowing people to live where they choose and providing a base standard of living for every community, and 2) romanticism for our pastoral past, and an implicit belief that societies should provide the opportunity sparser living with more exposure to nature.

I don't want to brush off these aesthetic concerns as "wrong": the 100% urban megalopolises of science fiction always carry at least a tinge of dystopia, because a desire for nature and open spaces is to some degree hardwired in us. But they have nothing to do with what we're talking about, which is sustainability.

The kind of robustness you're talking about doesn't have a whole lot to do with the urban/rural divide. It's entirely possible to have an almost-universally urban population and still maintain domestic food production, either by changing agricultural practices to fit cities better or at worst by having a "skeleton crew" instead of entire communities (the number of people living in sparse communities right now is _far_ below the minimum number of people we'd need to grow food).

Again, I'm not suggesting we do this, or that there's a clear path from point A to point B. I'm just illustrating how your point is a non sequitur.

Yes, and you're saying that smaller towns would be immune to this effect?

Because again, despite what people seem to think, smaller towns rely a lot on cities as part of their supply chain for things such as medical supplies, gasoline and infrastructure. Isolated farms are not self-sufficient no matter how much you may believe it to be so, because once the power runs out, once the water stops flowing and the supplies stop coming in, said isolated farm is far and away from other natural resources that are rather important for farming and survival.

I'm wondering if people have ever been to the midwest?

To be fair, rural roads are almost always heavily subsidized from higher levels of government. The sparsely used road users aren’t bearing the full cost.

When people look at the tax base and where federal dollars are spent, the Red areas usually end up getting anywhere from $103 to $110 in federal dollars for every $100 collected in federal taxes, and much of that comes down to roads and highways.

Without the highways most of these areas wouldn't be able to buy or sell goods to the outside world.

(Aren't trains cheaper? Maybe we should be building more track and fewer lanes)

the assumptions going on here are all about costs.

when in reality current transportation infra funding from federal government is about military defense.

its the same reason electricity lines, highways, and train rails don't occupy the same space. there is no reason they couldn't and would reduce costs overall. but it also means a single strike can disable all 3 systems.

in today's world I think its a pointless effort and we should resolve those issues to reduce the overall costs. but here we are.

> its the same reason electricity lines, highways, and train rails don't occupy the same space.

They sometimes do, though. Namely: if you're going through the mountains, there are only so many mountain passes, and therefore only so many places where these things can get through the mountains. I-80 in the Sierra Nevada mountains is a perfect example of this; between Colfax and the 80/20 interchange (if not all the way to Truckee) they're very much occupying the same space because there's nowhere else to go (thankfully that power line's pretty minor compared to the one following 49 to the north, but the one following 49 also happens to be colocated with rail).

The more viable solution - and indeed, if you look at a map of our energy infrastructure¹, the one that we use - is to make the connections as redundant as possible. This has plenty of peacetime benefits, too (for example, if I-80 and the adjacent railway both shut down because of a blizzard or avalanche, trains and trucks can route around it, albeit with delays).

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¹: https://www.eia.gov/state/maps.php

"To be fair, rural roads are almost always heavily subsidized from higher levels of government."

This is generally true - typically, paved rural roads in the US are county roads. Nicely maintained gravel roads are typically county roads as well.

I live in rural KS. We afford our roads in rural areas by purposely not paving them. Maintenance of gravel roads in the East and dirt roads in the West is accomplished by running a road grader down them every few months. There are paved county roads every 5 to 10 miles. These are generally only chip and sealed every 3 to 5 years, not repaved, and are not smooth. Every 15 to 25 miles there is a paved state road. Even many of them lack shoulders, leaving nowhere to stop in emergencies and causing semis to roll when they catch the edge of the road. Even for those of us in town, UPS and FedEx packages are generally coated in dirt upon arrival. The one benefit is the low cost of maintenance.

Long term, the cheapest roads are in older towns that still have brick streets. Some are a 100 years old and have nearly zero maintenance. They are slick and noisy.

On a side note, we have hundreds of miles of gravel roads to bike. We even have an internationally attended event called the Dirty Kanza.

Most of those roads are

1) city or county highways and also serve a commercial purpose

2) are bad quality and have been left to decay

3) have been crushed and turned to gravel roads

A dirt or gravel road wide enough for one car. Also lacking lights plowing or a sidewalk.