![[image] People would probably hate cars a lot less if they were limited in size and speed to a golf cart](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fcb4382e-b548-472d-95d1-b9ed667805da.jpeg){kind=link}
Pros of golf carts and neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) replacing all private cars within a city:
- Only goes as fast as a bicycle, so isn’t a viable suburban commuter vehicle, meaning you’ll probably only take it to the nearest transit station
- Only goes as fast as a bicycle, so isn’t likely to kill people
- Excellent visibility, so less likely to run over children
- Much smaller and lighter, so building parking garages for park-and-rides would be a lot cheaper and less objectionable than with our current style of cars
- Electric
- Smaller batteries than jumbo EVs
- Compatible with dense, transit-oriented city development
- Could be installed with mandatory speed limiters
Cons:
- Less profit for GM and ExxonMobil
This post is talking exclusively about cities, I’m not sure why this argument about rural areas comes up so often when it’s not relevant.
There are cities like New York, and then there are cities like Reading, PA. The places where you could swap cars with golf cart style cars are pretty limited. It would have a huge and beneficial impact in NYC, and it would be great if smaller cities also had better public transit. But that’s why people bring up objections to this sort of idea.
Yes but that’s a different argument again. The post said cities and the response was about rural areas
Rural people know their way of life is utterly unsustainable and feel very defensive because of that
Really? That is very naive of you. I don’t see a lot of farming In city centers. Rural life is just as sustainable as city life. I have always driven much less when I have lived in the country. Being able to live where you work makes a commute unnecessary. So just the once a month drive to town for supplies.
Both cities and the country have its place. One is not better, the worst way to get people to listen to you is to insult one of the basic qualities of who they are.
One of the worst ways, absolutely worst ways, to get people to listen to you is for “rural can’t survive without cars” people to wade into a post about cities and keep going on about them, as if they’re the only ones that matter and city dwellers shouldn’t solve their city problems without the permission of someone far away who doesn’t live there.
It’s just not about you. Please try and have the humility to not act like it is.
Weird enough I never said anything of that, but thank you for the reminder on the importance of reading comprehension.
They just shared their perspective with people in this thread, not agreeing with the person posting this comment. If it was according to your logic, I would’ve agreed that rural places require cars (even though I’ve been in rural areas that mostly move around with public transport) just because I disagreed with someone saying that rural living is unsustainable as compared to urban living.
What rural jobs are you talking about?
Yes, farmers tend to have to live on their farms, because farms need frequent attention. Each farmer needs to live on their own farm, so they do necessarily need to be spread apart. But, other than farming:
Forestry: people don’t live there full time because they’re cutting down trees or planting trees, then moving to the next area. They might want a temporary camp, but for a permanent house, there’s no reason not to live in a city.
Mining, oil drilling, etc: has to be where the resource is, but, with everybody working at the same place, it should be a pretty densely populated area around the mine / well, etc.
Wilderness guide, tour guide, park ranger, etc: A park ranger overseeing a wilderness area might need to stay in a very remote area, but AFAIK they rarely live there. Instead they’re temporarily posted to very remote areas, but when not “on the job” they live somewhere else (could be a city). For wilderness or tour guides, they might need to do the guiding in rural areas (hiking trails, ski slopes, etc.) but most of those wilderness activities start from some central hub, at least a small mountain town.
Am I missing some jobs that have to be done in rural areas?
I think you missed my point. All I was saying was I think you might be missunderstanding the amount of daily driving done in many rural areas.
Remember all resources are grown or mined. That is literally the only way to get more raw materials. activities that predominantly in rural areas. Pre industrial society was something like 85+% rural and it wasn’t until after WWII that more people lived in cities in America than in the country.
So whether it is the food in the cupboard, the clothes in the closet or the lithium in the phone battery. It has come from a rural area.
As I said before cities and the country both have their place. Attacking one will never be helpful.
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Yeah, and I addressed both of those. There’s no reason that they should be in low density rural areas where golf-cart type cars wouldn’t do.
For mining the mine entrance is going to be a single point everybody has to get to, so it makes sense to build a dense area around that point. It may once have been a rural area, but due to the presence of a useful resource, it becomes densely populated. For drilling it’s basically the same, but people don’t need to live next to the drills. For forestry, the area you’re harvesting or replanting keeps moving, so you need to commute to that point, it makes sense to live in an urban area and go from there to the forest.
Yes, and it was mostly farming. And now it’s 2%. The 2% who are still farmers do need to live on their farms, the other 98% don’t.
Why is it that you think rural areas have their place? If rural areas use significantly more energy than dense urban areas, and we need to reduce energy use per capita so we don’t kill the planet, then what is it that makes rural areas necessary, other than the 2% for farming?
Okay I really am not sure what to say here. The way you address those things sounds like you don’t have any understanding of how either rural life works, or how those industries work.
You have proposed making company towns for mines, which used to be a thing (and sadly still are in some places). The loss of workers rights and the solidification of corporate power. Is guaranteed with company towns. Two things that I think we can both agree are not good for the world.
Second you proposed. Centrally located services for the few farmers who are allowed to live in the country. This could easily put them 6 to 8 hours drive from any kind of service. I am not just talking about a guy to fix the tractor, but banking and insurance services (I don’t want to go into the details but no those services are unique to farming and can’t be online only). Plus we have things like groceries, medical services, farm surplus, and ect. All happening on an individual scale, ignoring any kind of economy of scale. Plus I don’t want to drive 16 hours for milk, do you?
All of your proposals seem to require longer drives not shorter ones. This would of course require ICE not EV because the charging infrastructure is not there. Of course we could put the infrastructure in that would allow charging. Though as long as we are doing that maybe we could just let these people live near their point of work. It is cheap to move electricity down wires it is expensive to move people.
You also missed my point about the rise of the city. First as you point out a very small fraction of the population lives in the country. So even if they had a much higher energy use(I have never seen any information to suggest that is true.) It would still be a small fraction of total energy use. It seems like we would get a lot more energy savings by getting the urban environment to reduce energy use buy just 1% per person than say a 10% per person reduction in the rural environment.
As for the idea that the country uses more energy. You are welcome to cite a source if you have one. I would be surprised if that was true. We don’t have street lamps that on on all night. Or 24 hour stores that keep the lights on for just a few sales. Nor do we have the all night clubs or all the ride share people idling their engines. That and more is all energy use only found in cities.
Lastly it was not until the industrial revolution and the rise of the urban environment that there was any significant rise of the mean global temperature. Here is a handy graphic from xkcd https://xkcd.com/1732/ It shows how it took 22000 years for the planet to warm 4°C as it left an Ice age and a hundred years to raise 1°C with the start of the industrial revolution. It is on track to raise another 3.5°C in the next hundred years. This rise in temperature has a very strong positive correlation with the rise of industrial cities. It seems quite possible it is not the country that is the problem but the cities.
As for why I think the rural environment has its place. It has much lower noise, light, water, and air pollution. I have drunk water right out of the mountain steam, watched comets from my front porch and seen the pine trees light fire when the morning sun hit the ice on them. I don’t hold it against people that enjoy the city, but it is not for me.
Did I miss any of your points?
Nope, you’re the one who said that. You can’t put words in my mouth and then say why the thing you said is bad. What I said is that they should be densely populated.
Deadwood, South Dakota is famous as a “wild west” town, but the reason that it exists because of the gold rush. And, guess what, it was densely populated. You can look up historical images, you’ll see that even if it was a “rural” location built around mining, it was densely populated because at a time when cars weren’t an option, it made sense to make a dense area.
Again, putting words in my mouth. If you can’t make your point without doing that, I’m just going to say I won because clearly you can’t actually attack what I’m actually saying. At no point did I say anything about people being “allowed to live in the country”. I only talked about farms being the only place where you actually had to live on-site in a very low density rural area.
That’s absurd. There’s nowhere in the continental US that’s a 6 to 8 hour drive from a built-up area that exists today.
“cities have the lowest annual energy use per household (85.3 million Btu) and household member (33.7 million Btu) of all four categories. Rural areas consume about 95 million Btu per household each year”
“Why the difference? Aside from environmental factors, it’s a combination of infrastructure and behavior, Battles says. The compact construction of urban condo towers and apartment buildings helps insulate their indoor climates, while large homes common in less dense areas need more energy for heating and cooling, and have a harder time keeping air from leaking outside.”
https://www.treehugger.com/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-energy-efficient-4863586
The research is everywhere. Dense housing where people share walls means lower heating and/or cooling bills. Using public transit instead of a car means far lower emissions for transportation. Smaller housing means less energy to heat and cool, and fewer leaks.
Suuuuuuure…
Riiight… because when talking about a theoretical future world where more people live in built-up areas, the right thing to do is to consider current charging infrastructure.
Pretty much all of them, and deliberately it seems.
Been busy, took me a day to look into your post.
Okay so call it what you want but a group of people all working for the same company and it being the only real source of income for the town is a company town. Don’t gild the pig. But for arguments sake lets look at your Deadwood example. Are you suggested that we should go back to small scale wildcat mining? If so that sounds even worse than company towns. I have lived in areas with the environmental legacy of that and it is still a problem. Not that this could happen due to the kind of regulatory compliance required for mining operations. The number of laws and administrative agencies that would have to change for that kind of mining to happen again is numerous. Oh and did you see the deforestation in those pictures? I think we should keep some of that regulation.
As for the “centrally located services” you did say that in a reply to someone else. I didn’t put words in your mouth.
And here is the link to your post too https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9190403
Okay so you got me a little on the drive time. I was a little optimistic on my estimate. The longest drive time between two cities I could easily find is El Paso to San Antonio which is 8 hours so if you live right in the middle of the interstate. You would have an 8 hour round trip. Still too long for milk. Now you are going to say what about the towns in-between? Don’t worry we will get to that.
Thank you for your source on energy use I went and read the article. I think we should look at the quote you sourced in context. Here is the paragraph you pulled from and the preceding one.
As we can see the first thing said is this “self reported and unscientific” that seems like a big problem to me. Let’s work with it though. The next thing I see is that you cut the quote about annual energy uses short. Looking at the whole quote we can clearly see that rural areas are the second most efficient, with towns and suburbs being worse. This feels like you are trying to cherry pick data.
It took me a little bit to find the source of this data, but I did. It is from 2005. Seem to me 20 year old data is maybe not the best source. Additionally it doesn’t actually address the point I made on this. This article is talking about energy use of household not of the additional infrastructure required for cities that is not required in the rural environment.
So let’s get back to this distance between cities thing. I said "All of your proposals seem to require longer drives not shorter ones. " To which you replied “Suuuuuuure…” This seems like ad hominem, but let’s look into that. I went and looked up what a rural area was and this is no clear definition but the federal government uses populations of between 2500 and 50,000 depending on agency. Let’s split that and choose the middle number 25,000. This means that a state like Wyoming would lose all but the 4 largest cities. That seems like that could extend drive time to me. (See we got back to it) Oh as you have said you you want people to live in more built up areas. That would require people moving from less built up areas. Don’t go saying otherwise.
Where you quote me about the charging infrastructure. Your response is completely out of context and doesn’t respond to the argument I was making. Also probably ad hominem.
Lastly this is definitely ad hominem
I don’t know why you have such an animosity towards people who live in the country. It seems like you should be going after suburbs if energy efficiently was your real goal.
I look forward to your response
Not agreeing that you need a car to live in rural areas, considering the ones I’ve been in before primarily uses public transport, but their primary appeal is that you could own land of your own far cheaper than in the cities, you can do recreational husbandry/farming/gardening, you just like the natural environment compared to the urban environment, also YOU CAN GROW TREES!!! Not everyone wants what the urban environment has to offer, and they also dislike its limitations because it just limits what they want to do in life.
Tradespeople that fix their stuff.
They need to travel to rural areas to fix the stuff, but they don’t need to live there. Given that they’re probably servicing a big area, it makes sense for them to be centrally located, in a city for example.
Nah, I’d say that most city living is unsustainable, just without it being visible to most people. The huge amounts of people in a city benefit from unsustainable commercialised farming practices, for example. I mean in rural areas (the ones that aren’t corpo-owned at least) you’re likely to have people growing locally-adapted seeds that don’t require lots of watering/fertilizer/pesticide. There’s more cooperation, too.
Replace rural with suburban sprawl.