My wife and I once left Gatlinburg after a week there and our tire blew out on the way out of town. It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a donut to get there.
There is a trolley system but it is anemic.
Part of Tennessee's charm is how far you can get with a smile and "Gosh, I hate to bother you, but could you..."
I know some new models don't include spares, but they often have run flats and temp sealant kits included.
What are the other options?
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/adulting-101-life-skills...
I would describe that as "inconvenient" but actually very fortunate!
Walmart was only 15 miles away? You have a donut/spare, or AAA has provided you with one? That's lucky! Nowhere near "problem" territory at all.
Just an interruption to your schedule, but that happens on road trips.
(Fyi, if anyone reading this does ever use that sealant stuff, when you get to a proper repair shop TELL THEM about the sealant before I pop the bead and spray it all over the shop.)
Turns an "omg" problem into "eh, hold my beer..." for 99% of tire punctures.
We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the closest gas station wasn’t 10 miles away.
For some reason, it's always a Nissan.
Ergo, if you want the cheapest car you can get, it'll probably be a Nissan.
* Before the late-10s Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi insanity
It's wild how that one man managed to change the entire path of a once great brand.
If you have a pulse and a recent paystub, you can get financing from Nissan.
My husband and I were driving a camouflaged CUCV (military bronco) from VA to WV around Thanksgiving. Towing a trailer full of stuff and had four large dogs.
The truck died. In Virginia, one mile from the WV line. Someone picked me up and dropped me off at the first gas station so I could call AAA. I had to talk with several CSRs; the last one told me the closest tow truck was in Charlottesville, hours away from where we were on I64. I was beet red, smoking like a chimney, and making up curse words.
Once we kinda agreed that there was likely a closer alternative, the young woman asked how the tow truck driver would identify the truck since it was camo. I told the men, they chuckled, and I told her it was CAMO, it was not covered by a cloaking device. I hung up.
The young man at the gas station/coffee shop called a local tow truck and we were dropped at Gate 3 of fair grounds in Fairlee, WV.
Ended up that the camo/cloaking device paled in comparison to the later challenge: It was the first day of hunting season and most garages were closed during the week of Thanksgiving.
I hate AAA.
Even if you built train lines everywhere outside urban areas, any stop you step off at would still require a 20 minute drive to get to where you are going. (Or in your case 15!)
We had a viable rail network all over the country as recently as the early 1950s. Federal policy blew it up because dispersing the population was seen as a civil defense priority for an atomic war, and cars and airplanes provided an economic engine to keep workers and returning soldiers employed.
Later, the shift to rural industry and trucking was a way to break unions. Meatpacking transformed from a good union gig back to an oppressive industry fueled by undocumented labor. If the workers acted up, the owners would realize they knew where a bunch of undocumented people lived and call in INS/ICE.
Do you have a citation for this?
(I'm not necessarily doubting, it's just a claim I have not heard before).
Also google the “Clay report”, there’s a bunch of books and sources from there.
At this point, (1955) bombers and fission bombs were the threat. That’s why we had AT&T invest in hardened long lines facilities, shelters and duck and cover.
The reality of hydrogen bombs and ICBMs kind of took the wind out of sails of civil defense. You’re not going to drive out of Manhattan with 20 minutes notice and get to a place where you’ll survive. This really affected the people associated with this — the think tank guys at RAND and other places assumed they’d all be dead by the mid 1970s, and I can’t help to think that it didn’t affect their points of view.
If Denmark population 6 million people and 141 people per/km^2 has zero issue with trains then Florida a flat state population 22 million population density 163/km^2 should be full of them.
And it’s not alone. MD has 6 million people and 246/km^2, Massachusetts 7 million 347/km^2, New Jersey 9.3 million and 488 people / km^2.
Further, if you consider the road network the overwhelming majority of roads are in high populations density areas. NYC alone has ~1/6 as many road miles as the entire interstate highway system which criss cross the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System It’s a classic edge to surface area problem, 10,000 acre farms need 1/100 the roads per acre as 1 acre suburban homes. The same kind of scaling applies to rail networks.
Also, that was 15 miles, not 15 minutes. I think it took us more than an hour to get there with all the traffic. Excellent example of a tourist trap.
A related quirk of the area is its onetime attitude towards free alcohol samples, which I wrote about last year: https://tedium.co/2024/11/10/free-sample-history/
One of the worst places for rail east of the Mississippi.
Parent should have compared Denmark's population density with TN's (65/km^2).
Does this mean it is not worthwhile to build public transit in the European part of Denmark? If not, then why does the population density of the entire US matter in a discussion about Tennessee, a state 80% denser than the American average?
By the way, Finland has both a smaller economy and a way lower population density (18.4 per km^2) than Denmark and the US. Would railways be not useful in Finland because of that?
Nearly all of the low population density states are out West.
Works out to about 288 private airports per state on average, and 100 public per state (on average).