I think it's because the young people online are much more drawn to the active, exciting urban lifestyle than the average American. The average American would much rather have the safety, quiet, and just space that comes with suburban living. People want yards to play with their kids, and that sort of spread-out living just necessitates cars. Housing prices aren't high because of cars. Housing prices are high because people want their own personal space.

Nobody's going to build a rail system with a thousand subway stations connecting every neighborhood in a US metro area. That would cost like a trillion dollars, plus maintenance. It's just not feasible to cater good public transport to people living that spread out. And no one wants to walk miles to a less-dense rail system or take some slow bus route.

And outside of major cities, I've never heard of someone complain about cars. Most people are perfectly happy with cars. Sure they might think trains are cool, but they wouldn't want to move inward for it or pay whatever cost would be necessary for trains to come outward.

While all that might be true, it is also true that hardly anyone would be willing to cover the true cost of living in rural areas far away from things. In pretty much every country I'm aware of the urban population is strongly subsidising the rural. And that is only covering first order cost (just look at the massive subsidies to get broadband to rural communities), if we would put prizes on second order cost like pollution, CO2... rural living would become unpopular very quickly (the reality already is that there is a massive move into the cities not the other way around).

> the reality already is that there is a massive move into the cities not the other way around

That's not what the data says, at least in the US. We consistently see a net change of about 2 million people per year moving out of cities and into the surrounding suburbs: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/12/16/in-2020-few...

And the desire to live in cities is shrinking as well, now at under 20%: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...

That is arguably because US cities suck. They don't have good public transportation, the kind that even well to do people choose to ride regularly like they do in say Tokyo, London, Switerland, Netherlands, etc.. They also don't have good bicycle infrustructure. And they have lots of crime or crime of the types and amounts that get people to want to live in the safer suburbs. Even the cities in the US are usually designed around cars, not people

Could you be specific about how the urban population is subsidizing the rural? Also, where does most of your food come from?

What do you mean in regards to CO2? I'd suggest that many people living a rural lifestyle completely offset their CO2 footprint due to carbon sequestration. I know I have enough trees and vegetation on my acreage to completely offset my carbon emissions. But, of course, to counter your argument I really only need to offset the extra emissions that come with driving an extra n miles into the city.

It's not an offset if it would have been that way anyway - In other words, you owning/living in a rural area does nothing extra to offset carbon emissions, because that rural area would have offset it regardless.

The infrastructure-to-population cost ratio of urban areas is way, way higher than rural areas. A meter of footpath, road or sewer in a city is reused by (just spitballing numbers) 10x as many people compared to a suburb, and probably 100x vs a rural area. Infrastructure is just much cheaper in cities relative to the served population, because so much less land area needs to be covered.

Since people generally pay the same taxes no matter where they live, the net result is cities generally fund a lot of infrastructure for other areas, as they are so much more efficient.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with this for genuinely rural areas - we do need farms etc, so infrastructure built to serve them is well spent. The issue arises when we sprawl with suburbs, as they don't serve any particular purpose that couldn't be fulfilled by a dense city, but cost much more in terms of infrastructure expense.

I have no problem with people living in suburbs, so long as they bear most of the cost of living that lifestyle, rather than dense urban areas funding them.

You posted this comment once, it was flagged by users, and you deleted it. If your intention was to post a new version that didn't break the site guidelines, I think that's probably ok (albeit borderline). But in that case you should have removed this too:

> Love the "gosh if you want to eat we need to fund lifestyle ruralism with billions of dollars of infrastructure annually" whataboutism, like that's supposed to be some kind of a gotcha

That's obviously against the site guidelines. Please make your substantive points without doing that in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly. I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some.

> There's a lot of miles of power lines and roads for what is, in the end, maybe 10k people in that county outside the cities/towns.

Power plants are (mostly) created in rural areas, so your argument is a bit backwards: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-power-plant-in...

Your story that the last miles are costing us an arm and leg don't really hold up to comprehensive analysis: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-elec....

The tldr of this is that the higher number of connections to the energy grid, the higher the cost of the grid. It doesn't really matter how you distribute them.

> But we don't need to be encouraging "lifestyle ruralism". That's extremely infrastructure-heavy and it's absolutely true that people living in, say, Mikado MI (pop 899) or along one of the state highways out there are using disproportionate amount of infrastructure funding relative to the number of actual people there.

I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about. My water was drawn from a well into a community water storage tank that was then pumped to the local community. This was repeated all through that area. Water, in this case, was a co-op as well as energy. Sewage was done on-site; I had an aerobic septic system. For all intents and purposes, with respect to the angle of your argument, the footprint of my town was miniscule compared to a city.

More anecdotally, when I worked for a water startup we had a way easier time getting into rural areas because many of them had never had public water infrastructure.

> classless

Uncivil, violates site rules. You can express yourself without putdowns.

> I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some.

Eh, rather dismissive yourself.

> I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about.

How many miles of roads and power lines in your rural area, divided across how many people?

Again, I very clearly expressed what I meant by "infrastructure heavy", but with you self-admittedly not really being a full and fair participant in the discussion, I can see why you might have some confusion.

> Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly.

The saying goes that people use the "downvote" like a "disagree" button and when it comes to political debates people use the "flag" button like an "I really really disagree" button. If I don't see a particular reason a post is flagged then yeah, I don't really have a problem with recreating it.

I shouldn't be suppressed by average users for expressing a well-reasoned argument they disagree with, nor censured for a single disagreeable line. Even you yourself cannot avoid technical violations of the site rules, your comment itself is violating the same rules to the same extent as mine.

Realistically, that rule is a "please", as I've been repeatedly told when I point out violations of it, and virtually every comment has something that someone can be offended about. I'm not going out and attacking people here, it's just a "jaywalking" violation that everyone does and people fall back on when they're losing an argument. The strictest interpretation of the rule essentially forbids any sort of "active-voice" argument that's strong enough to make a positive point (because someone can ALWAYS find be offended by any positive point) and that's incredibly harmful to discourse.

If you have a problem, call it out specifically, or get dang, otherwise if people don't bother replying and are just using flags as a way to suppress opinions they disagree with then yeah, I don't really care and I'm not going to be suppressed just because of some meta-gaming from people who disagree with me so little that they can't even reply.

Similarly, I find your "won't respond to the comment because I disagree with it" against the spirit of this community and doesn't belong here either. If you have nothing to say, don't post at all, but "cheerleading" is not constructive or beneficial to the discourse here at all.

Spirit of the rules vs text of the rules, my fellow. Your comment violates the textual rules. Actually your post attacks me as an individual, so in that sense it's really kinda worse, isn't it? And on the flip side, I was dismissive of an argument in a single line of a 3000 character comment. Oh no.

> Similarly, I find your "won't respond to the comment because I disagree with it" against the spirit of this community...

Not what I said, I was just clarifying I disagree with most of what you said but I'm only going to respond to a few points. I didn't have time to respond to each of them because my lunch period was ending soon. On top of that, nobody here owes you some full-scale rebuttal to a long reply; I disagree that it's part of the guidelines. I'm happy to read them again though.

You're right, maybe I shouldn't have called it out. Understand that what you're callously calling a "lifestyle" is a life I lived, not out of a "lifestyle" choice but because I wasn't saving any money. I lived in a trailer; not exactly a lifestyle choice. Mixed with factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations, you're right - I probably wasn't the person to respond to this without two sentences of emotion.

That's fine. They just need to start paying for their externities and stop relying on being subsidized by the dense urban areas.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

They are. Via the same mechanisms - taxes paid to the county, who maintains that property. Plus, suburbanites bring a lot of money into the cities, even though they don't live there.

Cities could incorporate suburbs into their boundaries, yet cities don't want to do that, because despite griping about their lack of paying city taxes, they don't want to pay to maintain/manage those spaces.

I really believe the "suburbs cost cities money" statement is overplayed. Between county taxes (which feed back into the cities in those counties) and HOA (for neighborhood maintenance), they are paying for themselves.

If suburbs were truly paying for themselves, cities would love to incorporate them. As they do in countries where transit oriented suburbs actually do pay for themselves.

The truth is that row houses is the lowest density that still can just barely pay for maintenance of the roads, sewers, water lines, gas lines, electricity lines, and everything else.

Any lower density than that, and the taxes of the residents can't cover the actual costs anymore.

With the rising obesity rates in America I feel that doesn't help the situation either. Many would probably rather ride in a climate controlled car than get out of breath and sweaty walking. Which is somewhat sad since more physical activity including walking or biking would help a lot here.

Last time I check, these 'dense' urban area aren't exactly great for anybody but cars.

As a former resident of Manhattan, this is where I'm most resentful about car supremacy. I truly don't care that there exist car-centric suburbs. Anybody who lives there knows exactly what they're signing up for. What's insane to me is that we allow cars to dominate even our most urban spaces. When I would walk to work through Midtown, my senses were practically assaulted by automobiles. Honking, speeding, stereos blasting, engines revving, cars encroaching on the crosswalk, and on and on. It's an enormous quality of life issue and one of the things I hated most about living in NYC.

"Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.

> What's insane to me is that we allow cars to dominate even our most urban spaces

NYC would be so much better if it weren't for all the car traffic. It's not the density that's strangling it, it's the car completely degrading the experience.

> "Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.

Yes! Americans have a real lack of imagination when it comes to city life. Makes me sad.

Yup, I relate to this so much as someone currently living in Philly. We have basically the same issue even in Center City.

Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8

Correct. The car situation is worse there, which is why I think their theories are so whacky when postulated as "get rid of cars" because it fails to be relevant beyond those areas.

I don't want a life without a car within the constraints of the current options for going car-free within the US-- mainly living in a large high density city, and still having to contend with vehicular traffic and pollution. But, I strongly desire life without a car.

If there was a 50K population max car-free walkable town with all the necessities available within said town, I would move there in an instant. I've searched for this, in the past, it doesn't exist. I live in the next best, a <50K population town where I can get most necessities via walking/biking, but have to contend with hostile vehicular traffic that is especially daunting on longer routes to the outskirts of town that are only serviced by freeways (like the college I used to work at)-- I am terrified to bicycle on these routes with 85mph traffic brushing past (technically those sections are not "freeways", but are indistinguishable save the signage "begin freeway" [no bikes] "end freeway" [bikes allowed]).

For long range travel, expand passenger trains. There is an Amtrak stop in my town, and I travel via Amtrak extensively to visit friends-- it is a very nice way to travel long distances.

And are young enough not to being dealing with physical issues/disability.