Gregory's Server@breadandcircuses Not everyone lives in a city. All those millions of people in towns and villages will always need private transport of some kind, unless one would rather try to forcibly depopulate the countryside like some modern-day version of the Highland Clearances.
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42 comments
 @chrisblake @breadandcircuses Yes, I forgot to say, that's the other option: we forcibly drive the rural population back into the pre-industrial age, where the people are mostly subsistence farmers and extremely poor, have few prospects of decent education or success compared to those in cities, and many never leave the place they were born. That's why most Central American countries are not considered developed. Is that really your vision of the future? @hughster Wow, there's a lot to unpack here. I don't understand in what sense communities that have routine access to things like buses, heavy goods vehicles, usually radios and TVs, often some computers, and increasingly even shared internet access are "pre-industrial". If people have regular opportunities to travel to large cities by bus or other public transportation, then it's obviously not the case that they would never have the option to leave the towns they grew up in. @breadandcircuses I've personally known people who grew up in small Central American or South Asian villages, went to university, worked in a city or even overseas for some years before moving back home, speak 3 or more languages, and are some of the most worldly, broad-minded, and well-educated people I've ever met. All without ever owning or regularly driving a car. Obviously there are many rural places where people don't have cars and also happen to be living in grinding poverty, but that's not what I was talking about. There are plenty of people in the world who lead rural lives without cars while also enjoying all the things they need and then some, because their societies are set up to facilitate that. They provide examples of how that's possible, which we in the "first world" should be trying a lot harder to learn from. You're basically presenting a false dilemma in which the only options compatible with non-urban living are a high-impact car culture vs. abject poverty with almost no modern technology at all. There's a lot of space available in between those extremes. It all just seems unthinkably exotic to many of us in the "first world" because our societies for the most part no longer *allow* us any of those other options. @chrisblake Yes, in any poor communities there'll be unrepresentative exceptions, a minority lucky enough to escape their circumstances and do well despite the odds. That isn't an argument in favour of the environment. Which central American and south Asian countries are we talking about specifically? @hughster The people I mainly had in mind are from Belize and Nepal. Note, though, that I never said the people I was referring to grew up in and had to "escape" poverty; that was an assumption you made. I just said they grew up in villages and didn't have cars. The former came from a family that would probably be considered middle-income by her home country's standards and apparently had a reasonably comfortable upbringing there, but was not affluent by "first world" standards. But that just illustrates my point, which I think you're still missing. In many parts of the world, even rural people who are reasonably well off economically typically don't own cars because regardless of where they live, it's unusual that private car ownership actually makes more economic sense than using things like buses. It's just hard for us to see that because our governments use very heavy subsidies to aggressively distort the market in favor of private cars. In other words, if my villager friend had tried to purchase, fuel, and maintain her own car, that likely would have driven her into poverty. Instead, using more convivial modes of transportation helped her to leverage what we would probably consider quite modest means to pursue experiences and opportunities she wanted. I say you're missing my point because you still seem to be conflating poverty with rural non-car-ownership, and my point is that those are two different things. Obviously a very poor villager will not have their own car, but the converse doesn't follow; living in a rural community without one's own car doesn't intrinsically drive people into poverty. If anything, when there are more efficient shared alternatives in place it can often help keep them out of it. I'll end by sharing that if anyone reading this is unfamiliar with these points and would like to learn more, a good place to start is Ivan Illich's short book "Energy and Equity", which presents some very interesting observations about the economics of different transportation modes. Illich was kind of a seminal (and pretty devastating) critic of conventional "human development" discourse along these lines, informed largely by his own experiences living in rural Central and South America.  @chrisblake It's part of the First World "saviour" complex to believe that everyone in the Third World is living in poverty. There's millions who grow up and go to school in villages and small towns, further their education in larger towns or cities, and then return to their regions. Since they haven't transplanted to the First World and been "saved" by access to cutting-edge trends, they somehow don't exist. @chrisblake @hughster @breadandcircuses It should be perfectly possible to live in a town or village and get around to do one's routine necessities without owning a car. Millions did, and millions more are even still nostalgic for that lifestyle. @hamishb @chrisblake @hughster @breadandcircuses impossible, only jobs are way away in towns or cities where people want late or early opening, often the only one on the bus going to work, most shiftwork carework etc there is no bus, no can = no job @maiamaia I'm certainly not disputing that in most wealthier countries we currently have a complicated and tangled up mess of economic policies and cultural factors that make non-urban car-free living highly impractical for many people. I'm not saying all of us can just stop driving tomorrow without any larger changes in our economies and cultures. My point is that there are current, real-world proofs of concept that show it doesn't have to be this way if we collectively want to change.  @hamishb @chrisblake @hughster @breadandcircuses @hamishb @chrisblake No, millions *didn't*! Before Cars came along most rural areas were significantly underdeveloped and sparsely populated. The entire reason rural towns and villages have exploded in population and grown in prosperity over the last century is cars. @hughster @hamishb @chrisblake ever hear of trains? Trains did that long before cars. Ditch cars and make rail better. @afterconnery @hamishb @chrisblake They didn't, and they never can. Even before Beeching trains only went to towns, and only past the occasional village on the way. And the routes didn't take you in every direction you might want to go. (They certainly don't now.) Good luck trying to build railways to every village with today's prices... @hughster @hamishb @chrisblake That's funny because trains did that where I'm from. And canals did it before trains. It stopped when auto companies bought out and then gutted other forms of transportation. It may be different where you're from, but your history is different than mine. Try not to universalize your history upon everyone else. @hughster Here is an example from near where i live. This one ended up as a bust, but they were being built everywhere at the time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewater_Canal Also the Cardinal Greenway, rails to trail path, goes from Richmond to Muncie and there are various towns along the way. A hundred years ago people would take weekend trips from Richmond to these small towns by rail. @afterconnery It doesn't look like that canal went to an awful lot of villages. And for those lucky enough to have been on the route who wanted to go to other places on the route, what would the journey times have been for passengers in the towpath era? @hughster @chrisblake "Underdeveloped" reflects an urban, industrialized perspective. Populations sufficed for a thriving agrarian economy, & people used trains, local buses & taxi services & mutual aid. "Development" since then reflects exurban sprawl ("country living with city amenities"), a luxury we can no longer afford. @hamishb "Underdeveloped" means what it says: people were poor, they had little access to good education and work and leisure opportunities, health outcomes were bad, precious few services and amenities were available, etc. You're imagining a rose-tinted version of the past that never existed. Have you ever actually lived in the countryside? @hughster Old towns all over where I live in Ontario have centres full of solid commercial building and fine houses. They were quite prosperous. There were regional train services and milk-run buses regularly. @hughster Or, OK, how about you say what "development" means to you, because that's where we began? Is it car dependent lifestyles? If you're talking about settlements that are both so tiny and so remote that they can't feasibly have any type of transit service but you also can't feasibly ride a (possibly electric) bicycle to the nearest town that does (or could) have public transit links, my position is that people should be encouraged to move (with economic assistance if needed) to settlements that are not so remote from the rest of society. Unless they actually prefer a very remote, almost purely subsistence-based lifestyle, in which case I respect that, but they also need to be willing to accept the implications of it. As @hamishb pointed out, it is never going to be biophysically sustainable for significant numbers of people to have quick and convenient access to both rural and urban extremes at the same time. That's a peculiarly "first world" extravagance we indeed cannot afford. @chrisblake @hamishb And there we have it: "depopulate the countryside". Knew it wasn't far beneath the surface! You people are fanatics and you deserve to lose. @hughster @chrisblake On reflection a harsh response on my part, so apologies. It is pretty much the upshot of what you said though, from what I can tell, i.e. that people in the countryside who genuinely need cars to get around should have to move. That is an extreme position. @hamishb ☝️ Living the dream in Victoria, Canada Village Life is good #village #CarFree #walking #biking #TheGoodLife #CleanAir #exercise #ClimateCrisis @hughster @breadandcircuses before British Rail was hammered by the Beeching cuts and later was privatised, even many tiny villages had train stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts @apolaine @breadandcircuses I know, there are numerous such closed branch lines around here, including one that's now a heritage line. There's no doubt many of them should've been saved, and we'd be in a lot better position now had they been. But even then the lines didn't go everywhere and the routes weren't always that useful for passengers, given most were built with freight in mind. And we are where we are now: the lines would be prohibitively expensive to reopen and most have been built on. |
@hughster
In less wealthy countries - say, much of Central America - there are indeed millions of people who live in rural villages, and very few of them own private cars. They live in those places because they're engaged in land-based subsistence activities and produce most of what they need locally. They often have a bus that periodically takes people to the nearest city, and usually bulkier supplies that are needed from a city are delivered occasionally by a cargo vehicle.
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