Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    if Texas is any example it seems like the whole fuck cars movement is just people yelling into the void.

    It’s a captive society. People aren’t simply yelling into the void, they’re yelling into a wall of money. Money owned by a cartel of people who won’t let people out of their cars.

    That path forward cannot exclude rural peoples or presume that everyone can or should move to a city.

    These suburban landscapes aren’t natural. They aren’t sustainable. People can’t just live 20 miles from one another and expect infrastructure to just exist in the gaps indefinitely.

    The costs are simply too immense.

    The rural communities are drying up because of these huge gulfs. People are being forced into the cities by economic necessity. And the only way to reverse this trend is to rebuild the old small town centers. It’s can’t just be Amazon warehouses shuttling cardboard boxes to people in the ass end of Idaho because that’s where land is cheapest.

    People need to be able to have productive conversations without name calling

    Cheers to that. Although that’s going to be a harder one than the infrastructure bit.

    anytime I try to say what it isn’t or speak against obvious propaganda people try to paint me as a liar, shill, idiot, redneck etc.

    It echoes a certain amount of car industry propaganda. There’s plenty of truth in it, but that doesn’t matter when the words are used to divert billions of infrastructure dollars to an extra four lanes on a ten lane highway.

    Nobody in rural West Texas is going to see their lives improve once we’re done wiggling the stretch of I-45 that runs through Houston.

    Anyway if ive been difficult I apologize.

    No problem. You came around and this has been a good conversation to have. Glad to speak with you.

    • desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      I acknowledge that for the continental us suburbs exist and can be solved, however is there a better method for hostile areas like Alaska, where planes and roads are the current methods of transit. I would imagine that more rail service between Fairbanks and ancorage would help, however there are tens of thousands of people spread across thousands of square miles.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        however is there a better method for hostile areas like Alaska, where planes and roads are the current methods of transit.

        Whittier, Alaska relies primarily on elevators.