Minor observation: you were in east TN, so chances are if you'd stood by your car with your thumb out, the next car would have stopped and happily offered you a ride to Walmart. (Said as someone who's hauled more than a few random people where they needed to get to in east TN)

Part of Tennessee's charm is how far you can get with a smile and "Gosh, I hate to bother you, but could you..."

does this apply if you are, say, Black or Latino?

Dunno why this is getting downvoted. It's a fair and important question. I've never been to Tennessee, but I spent a week in Atlanta once 15 or 20 years back, and as an Australian the segregation and underlying racism really surprised and disappointed me. (Not that Australia is really any better with respect to how we are institutionally and often socially and causally racist towards our indigenous people...)

> Dunno why this is getting downvoted. It's a fair and important question.

It's getting downvoted because it's neither of those things. It's basically bigotry towards his outgroup ("ewww those rural hicks" drips from that comment) with a thin veneer of pretending to be concerned for minorities.

this right here is why acknowledging racism is so hard for so many. The US south has a long history with racism, this is a website that skews white and wealthy and your accusation is that a question asking about rural racism is bigoted against rural people?

wow.

Say you don't know southerners without saying you don't know southerners. And the answer is yes.

Presumably if they were familiar with Tennessee culture, they wouldn't be asking?

Now they know

I know a lot of people in the area. I'd say yes.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44251098 and marked it off-topic.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

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

Isn't that standard though? If I get a flat, I hop out and replace it with a spare. Then I drive to a shop to have that flat tire either patched or replaced entirely.

I know some new models don't include spares, but they often have run flats and temp sealant kits included.

What are the other options?

The problem was less that we had to replace it and more that it was a fairly significant distance away. (A distance made longer because we weren’t on the freeway but heavily trafficked roads in a tourist-heavy area.) We were near downtown Gatlinburg, and there were places that were closer, but they were all closed because it was a Sunday.

We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the closest gas station wasn’t 10 miles away.

15 miles is nothing on a spare tire. I'm not sure how many poor people you've spent time around, but I regularly see Nissan sedans driving around with multiple spare donuts on them.

For some reason, it's always a Nissan.

Nissan's been making minimum cost models for awhile*, that are just reliable enough to stay rolling.

Ergo, if you want the cheapest car you can get, it'll probably be a Nissan.

* Before the late-10s Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi insanity

Oh I know. Carlos Ghosn got them to focus more on the fleet market. I'll always be a Toyota/Lexus man, but I owned a Datsun wagon for a while and I followed the industry closely when I ran an import repair shop (which was never open on a Saturday or Sunday).

It's wild how that one man managed to change the entire path of a once great brand.

I think of it as one too many levels of management. At some point, your nearest understanding of the business is powerpoints about powerpoints about powerpoints... and then dumb ideas start to seem reasonable.

>For some reason, it's always a Nissan.

If you have a pulse and a recent paystub, you can get financing from Nissan.

Goodness. I've seen people drive for years on a spare. I don't know why you would sweat going 15 miles on one...

Ya, changing a flat tire was once part of learning to drive. Also, manual transmissions, jumpstarting, swapping a fuse, and basic low-speed maneuvers like rocking out of snowbanks or crossing large potholes. All that is now gone. Most care owners dont know what a tow eye is, let alone where to find one. It is so bad that there are now university-level "adulting" courses for millenials. First up: changing a tire.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/adulting-101-life-skills...

We know how to change a damn tire. We just couldn’t easily buy one because Gatlinburg didn’t have any garages open on Sunday morning.

> It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a donut to get there.

I would describe that as "inconvenient" but actually very fortunate!

Walmart was only 15 miles away? You have a donut/spare, or AAA has provided you with one? That's lucky! Nowhere near "problem" territory at all.

Just an interruption to your schedule, but that happens on road trips.

A very large portion of the country doesn't have garages open on Sunday.

Most mechanics charge double time for working Sunday, even if they had not work at all the previous week (which doesn't happen, but if it did). Retail is open weekend, but mechanics like just about everyone else wants to work their 9-5 monday-friday job so they get weekends off.

In the US, I've only lived in Chicago, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Dallas, NYC, and Auburn, but I don't think I have ever seen an automobile garage open on a Sunday unless it was a WalMart, Sam's, or Costco.

Where do you live that has garages open on a Sunday morning? I don't think I've ever seen a tire shop or auto repair place that's open on a Sunday.

I decided to take a very non-representative sample, and found that in many (but not all) parts of northern California, locations of the chain tire shop that I use are closed on Sundays, but most locations in the LA area are open 7 days a week. This chain has a lot of locations. It could be that they're responding to what their competitors do in both cases. So maybe getting tires on Sunday is a so-cal thing? TBH, I personally am more used to expecting the tire shop to be open 7 days a week, unless it was a small, locally-owned place.

LA is an anomaly. Most places are 5-6 days a week, tops. Around where I'm at currently, if the place is open on Saturdays, they're closed on Monday to compensate. There's a lot of those

But it does sound like you didn't know how to repair a flat. Any hardware store and most gas stations will have either a plug kit, or some of that horrible blow-in sealant in a can. Either will get you back on the within an hour.

(Fyi, if anyone reading this does ever use that sealant stuff, when you get to a proper repair shop TELL THEM about the sealant before I pop the bead and spray it all over the shop.)

Ref for anyone reading, plug kits + a DC-powered inflator should live in all your cars. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ocVkYAAaVg

Turns an "omg" problem into "eh, hold my beer..." for 99% of tire punctures.

I would add a jumpstart kit and/or cables, preferably with the knowledge of how to use them safely. (Even teslas occasionally need to be jumped.) On long drives I also bring a small fire extinguisher (I take the one from my kitchen). Never had to use it but you don't need it until you do.

As my father quipped, 'It's amazing how much luckier well-prepared people are.'

Our tire was shredded so that would not have worked.

Exactly, more rails would not be useful because there is lower density in the US. Denmark is 141 persons/km^2, whereas the U.S. is about 36 persons/km^2 (census data).

Even if you built train lines everywhere outside urban areas, any stop you step off at would still require a 20 minute drive to get to where you are going. (Or in your case 15!)

You could make the same argument about highways if you didn’t have the massive federal funding. Maintenance of an interstate averages around $15,000 per lane/mile. Bridges are 7-12x.

We had a viable rail network all over the country as recently as the early 1950s. Federal policy blew it up because dispersing the population was seen as a civil defense priority for an atomic war, and cars and airplanes provided an economic engine to keep workers and returning soldiers employed.

Later, the shift to rural industry and trucking was a way to break unions. Meatpacking transformed from a good union gig back to an oppressive industry fueled by undocumented labor. If the workers acted up, the owners would realize they knew where a bunch of undocumented people lived and call in INS/ICE.

> dispersing the population was seen as a civil defense priority for an atomic war

Do you have a citation for this?

(I'm not necessarily doubting, it's just a claim I have not heard before).

It’s a fascinating area. Here’s one focused on evacuation: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/civildef.cfm

Also google the “Clay report”, there’s a bunch of books and sources from there.

At this point, (1955) bombers and fission bombs were the threat. That’s why we had AT&T invest in hardened long lines facilities, shelters and duck and cover.

The reality of hydrogen bombs and ICBMs kind of took the wind out of sails of civil defense. You’re not going to drive out of Manhattan with 20 minutes notice and get to a place where you’ll survive. This really affected the people associated with this — the think tank guys at RAND and other places assumed they’d all be dead by the mid 1970s, and I can’t help to think that it didn’t affect their points of view.

The US is a very large country. If you limited your population density numbers east of the Mississippi and the fast west coast from California to Washington you will discover population densities very similar to parts of Europe that have great transit.

There are plenty of places where it would make sense, actually, but Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg are very much not on that list. They are towns surrounded by mountains where once you get off the strip, you may not even run into a gas station or grocery store for a while.

Also, that was 15 miles, not 15 minutes. I think it took us more than an hour to get there with all the traffic. Excellent example of a tourist trap.

A related quirk of the area is its onetime attitude towards free alcohol samples, which I wrote about last year: https://tedium.co/2024/11/10/free-sample-history/

It’s not just surrounded by mountains, it’s just outside the border of Great Smokey Mountains National Park. It’s essentially a dead end for rail because to continue on you need to either go up a mile in elevation in a very short span or tunnel mountains inside a national park.

One of the worst places for rail east of the Mississippi.

Is there a reason Denmark was chosen for comparison, rather than neighboring Norway (15 persons/km^2) or Sweden (25 persons/km^2)?

The article mentions Denmark's economy is about the same size as Tennessee's.

Parent should have compared Denmark's population density with TN's (65/km^2).

I'm sure that density is even lower in most of the US south

Most of the land area of almost every state is below that number, but there are 23 states below that number overall and only 3 are Southern.

Nearly all of the low population density states are out West.

Yeah, and in the mountain west probably much lower still. I think to be useful, the numbers need to be regional

With that logic airportd should not have been built everywhere and useless, yet they were and are not.

Most airports are privately owned.

By that logic, airports should only have been built in cities...which is exactly where they are.

"There are approximately 14,400 private-use and 5,000 public-use airports, heliports, and seaplane bases in the US."

Works out to about 288 private airports per state on average, and 100 public per state (on average).

It is funny the author chose Denmark as an example because Greenland is technically a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, and with Greenland included the Kingdom of Denmark has a population density of 2.68 per km^2.

Does this mean it is not worthwhile to build public transit in the European part of Denmark? If not, then why does the population density of the entire US matter in a discussion about Tennessee, a state 80% denser than the American average?

By the way, Finland has both a smaller economy and a way lower population density (18.4 per km^2) than Denmark and the US. Would railways be not useful in Finland because of that?

It’s really not that simple.

If Denmark population 6 million people and 141 people per/km^2 has zero issue with trains then Florida a flat state population 22 million population density 163/km^2 should be full of them.

And it’s not alone. MD has 6 million people and 246/km^2, Massachusetts 7 million 347/km^2, New Jersey 9.3 million and 488 people / km^2.

Further, if you consider the road network the overwhelming majority of roads are in high populations density areas. NYC alone has ~1/6 as many road miles as the entire interstate highway system which criss cross the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System It’s a classic edge to surface area problem, 10,000 acre farms need 1/100 the roads per acre as 1 acre suburban homes. The same kind of scaling applies to rail networks.

It's a blessing that you were able to find help so easily.

Oh, AAA.

My husband and I were driving a camouflaged CUCV (military bronco) from VA to WV around Thanksgiving. Towing a trailer full of stuff and had four large dogs.

The truck died. In Virginia, one mile from the WV line. Someone picked me up and dropped me off at the first gas station so I could call AAA. I had to talk with several CSRs; the last one told me the closest tow truck was in Charlottesville, hours away from where we were on I64. I was beet red, smoking like a chimney, and making up curse words.

Once we kinda agreed that there was likely a closer alternative, the young woman asked how the tow truck driver would identify the truck since it was camo. I told the men, they chuckled, and I told her it was CAMO, it was not covered by a cloaking device. I hung up.

The young man at the gas station/coffee shop called a local tow truck and we were dropped at Gate 3 of fair grounds in Fairlee, WV.

Ended up that the camo/cloaking device paled in comparison to the later challenge: It was the first day of hunting season and most garages were closed during the week of Thanksgiving.

I hate AAA.