This is basically a prisoner dilemma, you enjoy the common goods of the city but don't get the downsides by defecting to the countryside, making the city worse in the process. In the end everybody loses.
This is a citation needed comment to me. It's one heck of an assertion that I have never heard. Most folks I've chatted with who have made this transition do it because of the density of people, not the pollution (which is miles better in cities than it was even 20 years ago).
The first and biggest pollution is the noise. The ambient car noise has a huge effect on stress level and sleep quality. When you remove the car from the city, it's almost at silent as the countryside.
The second is the danger in the street. Your brain registers those big fast moving cars as potential danger to avoid and raises your stress level and makes you want to move away from it.
The third one is the space the car take. When you remove the cars you have the opportunity to either make things easier to walk to, or to add parks and greenery. When you remove cars, modern cities are surprisingly empty, much less dense than a village.
Then there's the air pollution.
What do you plan on doing about emergency vehicles and their sirens and construction? Those are by far the biggest sources of noise for me in a city. Normal car traffic is omnipresent but usually has a fairly low ceiling that doesn't go through walls all that much.
Normal car traffic absolutely goes through walls, you think you are used to it, but it actually stresses you quite a lot.
Construction work can be an issue indeed
As it is in suburbs too. My parents' house is fairly quiet, until a neighbor is hammering or sawing. And that doesn't even include the loud insanity of lawn mowing in the desert.
I can tell you're almost certainly totally wrong, and "fleeing from car pollution" not a big part at all. IMHO, the biggest driver by far is wanting more space. If there's any pollution people want to escape from, it's probably noise pollution (e.g. seeking peace and quiet).
If that's true, I think the right way to think about it is transportation is the contributor to noise pollution, not cars specifically. We're not getting rid of transportation. If you somehow got rid of cars, bus, train, and truck traffic would have to increase to compensate.
As for the others, you're probably right.
That said, we don't necessarily need to get rid of cars. EVs are much less pollutant than ICEs, both in terms of air and noise. They don't solve tyre pollution.
Getting rid of (or massively reducing the reliance on) cars might have other advantages though. Less honking, for one. Probably less police, ambulance and firefighter sirens since it's likely to be less traffic. Fewer people shouting with other drivers. Busses can be made fairly silent. Trains, especially underground metro ones, are not all that disruptive to the general city life.
Again, I'm not saying any particular solution is necessarily correct or desired. I just went off and tried to picture what it could look like.
Can I hear the neighbor's kids when they're screeching because they're fighting or playing? Can I hear the neighbors having sex? Can they hear me?
For example, the legislature just passed a law that stripped Austin of the ability to make various ordinances. It also funds its rural schools with payments from the cities — a consequence of having no state income tax and instead a high property tax.
How is Texas funding rural schools with urban property taxes if they're in different districts?
The money doesn’t even go to education in rural areas, not completely. It just goes into the general state budget.
The really fucked up thing is that local ISDs are intentionally underfunded because of this policy.
Stick the liberals with the pollution, kill their public schools, take their money and spend it on vouchers for private religious schools.
Oh, and gerrymander the fuck out of their districts so the suburbs and ranch dwellers have all the say, all the time.
Not saying it's not worth looking into but it's like trying to get unbiased information on all political candidates in a race by going to one candidate's campaign website.
It seems like the answer to "How is Texas funding rural schools with urban property taxes" is most likely "they're not, they're taking money from both schools for general budget appropriations."
Citation is badly needed. I live in Austin and I don't pay any taxes to the state. My property taxes are going to the city, Travis county and multiple school districts.
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/education/2023/06/26/au...
It's 2.1 budget for the year:
* 940 million goes to the state as recapture (1.8 billion was collected in property taxes)
* There is a few hundred million in state and federal grants coming in
* They are spending 52 million more than grants + leftover property taxes
Over 60% of Austin voted to end unregulated camping: the former progressive mayor of Austin said he would not enforce it, and that he would designate all parks as legal unhoused camping zones. This pissed off a lot of the local population, the governor and the senate.
By trying to get around the local vote against allowing unregulated vagrancy from the houseless population he pushed the state senate to strip the city of those rights. The other pork just came along with it as a nice bonus "screw you"