> > Iowa who live 20 miles from the "main road" are never going to be > > served by a Postbus or train. Their kids commute 50 miles to high > > school. > > Why are urban areas surrounded with a halo of suburbia, and no > commute infrastructure there, though. There are certainly no > reasons by history/politics to go with it.
Because there's a subspecies that doesn't like neighbors and has delusions of privacy grandeur. Being rich enough to own land has also meant being rich enough to control one's own commute, at least until now. But Eugen, you made a big leap here, from my discussion of ranchers to your gripes about suburbia. I was in no way defending suburbia. > > Don't get me wrong - I am by no means defending the widespread > > infestation of the one-person car in the US. But it's very > > important to keep in mind that "it's a scale thing". The last > > No, it's not. Cities are the same everywhere. Hickistan doesn't > figure. Again, you're trying to change the argument :-) Cities are certainly not the same everywhere - you can't compare, say, Amsterdam and Mumbai and Beijing and conclude that "they're the same". But my point about scale is not the cities themselves, but the surrounding area. The larger the city, the larger the required food infrastructure to support it. The larger that infrastructure, the more vast the distance between the housing to manage the land. I agree that densely populated urban areas should be well-supported by public transport instead of being infested by personal powered vehicles. But it's less easy to support that argument as the distances between urban areas increases. > I question the whole idea of shipping primates around in a diurnal > cycle. The whole idea is barbaric. It's hard to manufacture widgets at home.
