Addy, WA. Cozy little bar and restaurant in a tiny town in NE Washington.
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@Chzikken_1486 uuuh does it usually look like this on the countryside there?
Yes, rural US looks *exactly* like that. You can pin that as being western because of the construction style, but the shoddiness and decay is universal.
In general rural America is very different from rural Europe, which has been slowly civilized over the course of thousands of years. Most of America was still untouched forest 200 years ago
@Kazak @cjd @Chzikken_1486 I dunno, we also build WAY closer. I went for a walk via streetview through those towns and it's crazy how many cars there are sometimes on a single property
@Kazak @Chzikken_1486 @cjd if a european had designed those towns, they would be a third of their current size in actual square whatever
Yeah the design pressure is that you NEED a car to get around in rural areas, which makes rural town design car-centric, which reinforces the need to have a car, etc. Walkable villages aren't really prevalent except on the East Coast, where civilization arrived before the invention of the automobile
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@Kazak @cjd @Chzikken_1486 there was a time when car lobbyism also transformed west germany into a more car centric society after ww2 but most of that has been reversed
All over Europe, same.
If you're in a rural area, you basically need a car to get to work, that's just reality. MAYBE by some miracle, you happen to work at the corner store that's walking distance from your house, but this is really not that realistic. 99% of everyone has a commute.
So walkable villages is kind of a cute thing, it's not really that useful in practice.
When you get into more urban areas with more commercial, then yes, walkability makes the place a LOT nicer. But this is also challenging because you need parking lots or parking garages because most people will be coming into those areas by car.
And then to make matters exponentially worse, Low Time Preference Individuals are weaponized and used to make public transport and public areas unsafe and dystopian so as to ruin nice cities.
So walkable villages is kind of a cute thing, it's not really that useful in practice.
When you get into more urban areas with more commercial, then yes, walkability makes the place a LOT nicer. But this is also challenging because you need parking lots or parking garages because most people will be coming into those areas by car.
And then to make matters exponentially worse, Low Time Preference Individuals are weaponized and used to make public transport and public areas unsafe and dystopian so as to ruin nice cities.
@cjd @Chzikken_1486 @Kazak I used to commute to freiburg via bus and train. Took forever but it worked. Handheld gaming and music were mandatory to stay sane