![[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
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. Attaching one will never be helpful.
Spelling
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.
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.