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Comment by thesuitonym | Hacker News Reader

>Wonder how much of this is just due to how massive the us is

It has nothing to do with this. The US was settled, and most cities were developed before the introduction of the automobile. It's just that after WWII we bulldozed most of the country for highways and decided that cars were the only way to move around.

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> most of the country

I invite you to visit N. Montana or either of the Dakotas, or that stretch of highway in Nebraska that seems to go in a straight line for several hundred miles.

I live in the Dakotas, specifically in a town that was, get this, founded as a railway town. The towns and cities here are actually smaller than in other parts of the country because we have more of our prewar infrastructure.

Why is the Montana strawman always an example here? Almost no one lives in Montana and no one cares about vehical sizes in Montana, except _maybe_ in Bozeman proper. Let it go, no one is talking about Montana or the Dakotas.

I figured the statement "most of the country" applied to most of the country. If we mean "the most population dense parts of the country" I'd gladly concede the point.

> most of the country

The negative effects of vehicle size and dependence on infrastructure and society are intimately tied to where people live.

> Urban areas make up only 3 percent of the entire land area of the country but are home to more than 80 percent of the population.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america....

Most of the population density of the country doesn't live in dense areas either.

The issue isn’t with people owning big vehicles in rural area… it’s that we’ve built out _urban_ environments for cars instead of for people.

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