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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

But would a streetcar go past my house? How far do I have to walk to get from my house to a bus stop or train station? Because I own 19 acres and my nearest neighbor is three miles from my house. The nearest town is 20 minutes by car. How would public transport deal with that kind of remoteness? My office is one end of the equation, my home (and the homes of my coworkers) are the other end.

It's surprisingly common when you leave the bigger cities. 90% of the country might live in cities, but the other 10% is spread out across the other 99% of the nation.

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The urbanization statistics are also misleading. According to the US census, 80% of Americans are urban. The definition of urban includes the town where I live which has about 7,000 residents and I live on 5 acres and my neighbors more.

The move to cities stats are also way overapplied. College educated young people are indeed moving to a few mostly urban dense cores like Brooklyn. More broadly there's somewhat of a shift from true rural to the suburbs but most of those people will still need cars.

You are obviously not the median person, and the median solution will therefore not work for you.

Wait now we're talking median solutions? I thought we were talking about replacing all roads with rails/streetcars? That's what the grandparent comment was saying

So if I don't fit into this world, how do I get around? Obviously we already ruled out self-driving cars, since they'll never work. So I assume I drive my own car? Since I'm already driving my own car, why can't I just drive it to the grocery store? Do I have to drive to the train station and get on a train to get groceries, or are there still parking lots for me? How far am I expected to walk from the train to the grocery store even though I have my own car and could drive right to their door? Or are we assuming self-driving cars work for me but don't work for anyone else? In elementary school I rode the bus for an hour and a half (not even exaggerating) to get from my house to school, am I making that same trip every day to get to and from work? Even though it's 20 minutes by car?

We're talking millions of people across the country here, not an inconsequential number. We're talking about thousands of small towns where trains will NEVER work. Are we just relegating them to second class citizens who have to ride their horses to town? Damn it's so easy for people in big cities to come up with these clever solutions, of course everyone can just take a train or a bus. Except millions of people can't.

But they're just minor outliers, right?

If government built a road in front of your house, they can build a streetcar line in front of your house as well.

This is the cost of living in luxury with your own 19 acres.

And if you have your own farmland, you are richer than half the country.

Today I learned that poor rural farmers are living lives of luxury. Such a luxurious life in areas with no cell service, no high speed internet, and a several-hour streetcar ride into town to get groceries.

So glad to know that food stamps, welfare, and homemade methamphetamines qualify someone for luxury living.

Jesus fucking Christ this thread is cancer.

It's really not. Calm down and don't pick up on one minor point and reply with a giant response. Obviously no one else thinks that cars are unnecessary.

No, it really is. So far I've seen people saying buildings older than "a few decades" should be torn down to move them closer to street car lines, people calling that "urban renewal", people saying that the problem solves itself because all young people are moving to cities as a rule, people saying self-driving cars will never work and every road should be replaced with street cars that lead to busses that lead to trains, but for the rural population the median solution wouldn't work so they'd have cars of course, but you wouldn't need them because you would just tear down your home and move to the city. Oh and also farmers are rich, but at the same time farmers have to move to the city.

Every single person in this thread lives in a big city and never stepped foot on land that didn't have a sidewalk next to the road. We're not talking "minor points" here, we're talking about 46 million Americans who don't have cable internet or cell phone reception, but somehow public transport will work there or we'll just force them to move.

I knew HN was a bubble but god damn, this is some next-level shit if you can just pretend 15% of the country doesn't exist.

You're in the discussion about Apple's self-driving cars.

Do you think Apple is going to create a car for the 15% of the rural people?

This is why your limited market is irrelevant and worth exactly 0.

It's your responsibility to catch up with the world, not the world's responsibility to cater to you.

No, pretty much all the things you're claiming people have said are egregiously uncharitable readings of their comments.

Someone suggested abolishing public transport might not be the best idea, and you seem to have interpreted that (and all subsequent defences of it) to mean we have to abolish cars instead. No one's suggesting that, they're just saying that we should use more public transport where it makes sense.

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