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Comment by la6472 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing is better than sprawling outwards. Most of the white collar jobs can be done remotely , so commute is not needed. Most of groceries and other stuff can be delivered. A truck doing 100 deliveries is surely less traffic than everyone going to the supermarkets. And most importantly with sprawling outwards citizens can enjoy the outdoors and take care of their health. And even more importantly high density of population leads to increased crime , encourage homelessness and provide all sorts of administrative nightmares.I would say we have reached a technological inflection point where we at at last free to spread out and yet stay connected. Let us embrace it. This is the future. This is the way.

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Service availability decreases with population density, and relying on subsidized last mile delivery for the economic elite is not a sustainable model for an entire society. The road network alone is a funding quagmire, to say nothing of hiding the infrastructure burdens of servicing sprawl into the eldritch horror that is the municipal bond market.

> Service availability decreases with population density, and relying on subsidized last mile delivery for the economic elite is not a sustainable model for an entire society.

I don't think this is strictly true. I don't like the model, but big box stores seem pretty sustainable (everyone drives to a distribution center for their goods). An actual last mile distribution system (a la Amazon) also appears to work pretty well. Neither of these are exclusively available to the economic elite.

> The road network alone is a funding quagmire, to say nothing of hiding the infrastructure burdens of servicing sprawl into the eldritch horror that is the municipal bond market.

I don't doubt that infrastructure costs decrease with density, but density doesn't keep urban municipalities from building infrastructure that they can't afford to maintain any more than other places. Quality of governance and density are almost certainly independent variables.

Service availability decreasing with population density is still old school thought. Rapid advances in technology over the years enable stretching infrastructure outwards. Who knows someday we may be extending our infrastructures to cover the whole globe and even to outer space. It is not subsidized and it is certainly not for the elite only. It is more about human aspiration. As a species we can look towards piling on top of each other or we can choose to expand and live a quality life according to one’s own aspiration. Look at the big picture.

> A truck doing 100 deliveries is surely less traffic than everyone going to the supermarkets. And most importantly with sprawling outwards citizens can enjoy the outdoors and take care of their health.

No, the lowest traffic solution is having the smallest number of trucks that are needed to serve local markets that a relatively high volume of people can access via walking, biking or mass transit. All that walking, very healthy.

Further, why should city dwellers subsidize this expansion? Surely these far flung communities won't have sufficient revenue to support the infrastructure needed to make all that work.

City dwellers are not subsidizing anybody. In fact there are certain things the government does for the common good. Like protecting border or extending healthcare. It is the kind of civic planning that determines if a community will be able to support ordinary human aspirations like living a comfortable life in a spread out space or a community is going to pile like ants on top of each other. Of course certain people in the top (elite?) may actually love the second option and would love to see people stuffed in small apartments and live life like mechanical robots so that they can enjoy their life in Malibu beach houses.

The government pays for those things with money generated in the cities. We need rural communities to grow food, but most rural and suburban communities in the US do not generate enough revenue through taxes to support themselves without federal assistance. Sometimes it is worth doing, but the cities make the money that pay for it. So again, why should we subsidize lower density that requires more subsidy and more energy to support? Our existing cities could be redesigned to be more human friendly and higher capacity - if we are going to spend federal dollars, thats where they need to go.

Suburbs are not rural areas. Suburbs are sane living condition which every human being in the planet is entitled to.

Suburbs are also the source of majority of tax revenue.

Entitled, huh? I don’t see what entitles you to any particular mode of living, but its your ethos.

Suburbs may be the majority (I have no idea if thats true), but that doesn’t make them self-sustaining. They only exist because cities paid for highways, water, and power infrastructure to make it all possible (and continue to fund their maintenance) - exponentially moreso the further west you go.

Nope I don’t agree. Cities have morphed into Subarus in the 1950s and since then they have been the source of more influence and revenue generation at least in NA.

> City dwellers are not subsidizing anybody.

City dwellers already subsidize rural living through taxes. On the federal level, more rural states are subsidized by more urban ones, paying more per capita and receiving less per capita. Similar things happen at the state level, but the numbers are a bit harder to track down.

The decreased density of sprawl causes the maintenance of infrastructure such as roads, electricity and water to often need to be essentially subsidized by higher density areas. For example, in suburbs with culs-de-sac, taxpayers fund the streets (in perpetuity as they must be maintained) but the vast majority get no utility from them. To your example of a truck doing deliveries, if it did those same deliveries in a more dense area it would obviously travel a smaller distance. IMO sprawl also makes life more difficult and more dangerous for those without cars.

I cannot imagine ordering fruits and vegetables online: how do you assure its quality without actually looking at them? I always prefer picking these myself, so yes, maybe it is a good idea to offer better transportation means to those who prefer to do in person grocery.

Just grow as much as you can yourself. After all that is the perks of living in the suburbs.

this is objectively wrong. it may be the future but its not the way

I too wonder about the sustainability of the Mexico City paradigm. When land becomes precious, we re-pave and re-evaluate. In Japan (On the island of Japan), space is precious, if you are going to build it, it better last, and it better make sense to keep around. Until we reach a limit on land area, it seems that slime-mold-esque endless sprawl is somewhat inevitable. I do wish the opposite, that we would heed the lesson before driving off the proverbial cliff.

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