Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

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> The enduring popularity of these articles on hacker news just shows a demographic bias. Sure if you are young and live in San Francisco or New York City, this might seem reasonable. But for the other 80% of America,

And this sort of comment shows demographic ignorance. Do you know what percentage of the US population lives in rural areas?

Fourteen percent. Not even 1/5th of the US population. The rest live in urbanized areas.

The percentage of the population over 60? About 17%.

Pre-pandemic, in the Boston area, the regional transit system handled around 2 million trips a day.

> Cars may be environmentally awful, but they’re great in basically every other way, so let’s just electrify them and build lots of new clean energy and stop trying to make everyone ride a bike.

60% of all car trips in the US are less than three miles, electric cars don't solve congestion and land use waste nor all the injuries and deaths, and last but not least:

nobody is "trying to make everyone ride a bike." Stop straw-manning.

I feel like this is a bit misleading in the other direction, as it's lumping suburban in with urban. Which makes sense in some contexts, but probably not this one. Suburban sprawl is a huge problem wrt infrastructure.

> According to data HUD and Census collected in the 2017 American Housing Survey (AHS), 52 percent of U.S. households describe their neighborhood as suburban, 27 percent describe their neighborhood as urban, and 21 percent describe their neighborhood as rural.

It's less about rural population and more about smaller metro populations. Places where there aren't bike lanes - where people on mopeds are really risking their lives trying to go twelve miles. The rural population quote of 17% are legitimately rural counties where population density below a certain point exists. Most smaller metro counties have rural infrastructure supporting a higher population density and simply are not safe for bikes, and a large number of people who are classified as urban are the people making up the population in metro counties. The US Census classifies as rural and urban so it's really hard to know exactly what, but assuming that anyone living in an urban area who is physically capable of doing so could ride a bike is incorrect.

I spent ~six months of the pandemic in my family's mountain cabin, very rural. Nearest major grocery store about 20mi, closest convince store 5mi. I did most of the trips to both on an e-bike that I borrowed from a neighbor, which spurred me to buy my own when i returned to seattle.

The two lane highway with it's shoulder painted bike lane that was the only way to traverse either trip was a bit sketchy and nerve wracking, especially on the weekends. The speed limit is 40mph, but when it's not ski season it's not ever that busy and so people speed on it constantly. But even given the longer 20mi trip I'd often look forward to it even though it was about an hour each way.

That sounds like a fun route to pull a trailer with my 2 kids in to go grocery shopping. Add in that I wouldn't be able to load up as much and I'd probably need to make that trip more often. I'd rather drive and spend that time playing with my kids in the back yard.

Nobody is asking you to switch over to bicycles exclusively, they are just saying that it would be nice if there was better non car infrastructure.

That way, there will be less traffic for people like you who choose to live in a way where a car is necessary, and more options for others who don’t want to travel in traffic with cars.

Yeah, let me be clear, I had access to a car, i had to use one to get there and in case of emergency (not a lot of car share up on mount rainier). I just chose to see what an ebike would enable for me.

Urbanized areas isn't what you think. I looked up several small town around me and they are all known for being agriculture towns, and they all qualify as urbanized areas. Some of them don't have proper grocery stores. These towns are miles away from the next town. They are in that 80% of urbanized America. America is huge.

Page 3 details how the definition is arrived at.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

> Do you know what percentage of the US population lives in rural areas?

> Fourteen percent. Not even 1/5th of the US population. The rest live in urbanized areas.

Not-rural is not the same as being in a city though. Maybe only 14% live in rural areas, but most people don't live in cities either. Most people live in the wide suburban type areas that cover everything between city and rural.

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