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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Not "premium" so could not read the last of the article.

Highways now seem to be a driving force for the populations in the outlands. Perhaps small towns along the highways get a few restaurants and gas stations for business while small towns not on the highway disappear.

I noticed this looking at a satellite photo of Nebraska recently — the towns lit up following a major East/West interstate across the state.

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In Nebraska, the towns aren't following the interstate. That's the Oregon Trail. Why does the Oregon Trail follow that path? It's the Platte River which provides convenient access to water while traveling.

So the river was there first, then the trail, then the railroads, then national highways, and then finally the interstates. The towns were mostly established at the same time as the railroad.

> I noticed this looking at a satellite photo of Nebraska recently — the towns lit up following a major East/West interstate across the state.

At least for the midwest - specifically west of Chicago, the way I always heard it was that the towns are fairly equally spaced (look at a night-time light map of the US) because there needed to be a rewatering / refueling place for steam engines, so towns popped up at the range of steam engine service intervals.

I bet the towns existed on a nice line (the rail line) first, and then it made sense to put the interstate parallel to the existing towns.

Yes this sort of things fascinates me - the links from the past explain how fundamental things are structured today. A Harvard professor has a few books about this and talks specifically about how railroads stops from way back when are responsible for much of the layout of suburbia today. I'd imagine much of the placement of things is based on railroads from the steam era.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/388804.Outside_Lies_Magi...

Fun related story re: links to the past https://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html

Even away from the railroads towns would space "roughly" equally if there was nothing else to distinguish them, because they'd be travel destinations for those around them. Something like a day's travel between, which becomes more dense over time, with places appearing roughly at midpoints.

Yeah. If you fly over the Midwest on a clear day, a lot of it is almost a cookie-cutter pattern.

Driving those grids off-freeway (and even off-highway) you come through town and town again, and sometimes it's really clear why there's a town (say, you pass over a river or by a lake in or next to the town) and others are more like what was said "a town that exists only so the map won't be too empty".

My favorite part of it is road jogging: https://aewinc.com/why-do-roads-jog-part-1-of-3/ - because a curved earth can't take flat maps and 1 mile squares without something breaking.

(part 2 https://aewinc.com/why-do-roads-jog-part-2-of-3/ and part 3 https://aewinc.com/finally-why-do-roads-jog-at-some-intersec... as they didn't link well)

The distance a horse can travel in a day (25-40 miles) is another common distance between towns.

Many of California's original cities grew up around Missions, which were constructed to be roughly a day's journey on horseback apart.

https://www.visitcalifornia.com/experience/california-missio...

A large part of west Nebraska is known as the “sand hills” it’s not very fertile mainly cattle ranchers are out there. It is interesting that 30 miles or so east of where sand hills start is some very good farm land, but go west into the sand hills you risk blow out if you try to do anything with the soil (basically if you uproot some grass it will create a patch of sand, over time the wind will make the patch of sand bigger and bigger). In fact sometimes people put stuff like used tires in the spots to help prevent blowouts from getting bigger. Another fun fact about sand hills is that when it rains it replenishes the underground Ogallala Aquifer which is a pretty amazing source of water, one of biggest in the world, and very important for irrigation ect. Anyways, I think that geography has a lot to do with eastern side being more populated.

[1] Sandhills: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhills_(Nebraska)

[2] Ogallala Aquifer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

It's the equivalent of towns being built on waterways in the past. The interstate brings commerce and tourists, and lets you travel from place to place more easily, so it makes sense that people tend to build close to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Los_Angeles#Industr...

Maybe you can read the whole thing here: https://twitter.com/tomaspueyo/status/1641853715354091532

It's hilarious that you provide twitter link for that reason. Twitter, for people not logged in, shows just a scrap of text and a graphic. It doesn't even tell if it's a thread or how long.

It's a long story of transaction costs along the way.

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