this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
1203 points (86.6% liked)

Fuck Cars

9368 readers
133 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure.

Someone has never heard of "well and septic".

Out in the country, you have enough biological diversity around you that sewage is just fertilizer for your lawn. You don't need the extensive network of sewers to concentrate it, the chemicals to treat it, and the sufficiently large body of water necessary to dilute it back down to something that nature can tolerate.

Much the same with potable water: there's no need for an extensive system of water treatment plants, chlorination, the network of underground piping when you are just pulling water up out of the aquifer. It has been filtered through hundreds of feet of sand and gravel, in the absence of oxygen. All the biological material has been filtered out, leaving just water and some trace minerals.

Electrical infrastructure is moving away from centralized fossil fuel plants to distributed solar and wind power. Spreading the load out allows generation to be moved closer to the point of consumption, which reduces the total load at any point on the grid, and increases redundancy and resiliency.

Spreading homes apart introduces a natural firebreak between them, reducing the demand on fire services. A single kitchen fire in an apartment complex can put hundreds of people out of their homes. High-rise fires are especially dangerous. It's much easier to attack a house fire than an apartment fire.

Roads are not reduced: food and raw materials used by humanity come from the countryside. Transportation infrastructure must stretch out to the farms and mines. Housing farmers and miners in the cities just increases their commutes on top of their long work days.

Wireless data can be much more feasible in the country than the city. Less building interference; less RF interference.

No, I'm afraid you've overblown the cost difference considerably.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I started to respond to this but it's so full of obvious bullshit it's not worth the time. Dump raw sewage into the ground in suburbia? What the fuck kind of capitalism hellscape do you live in?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Septic tanks aren't raw sewage, where are you getting your info from? Where do you think treated city sewage from a big plant goes?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Dump raw sewage into the ground in suburbia?

Well and septic are viable options down to as little as half-acre lots, yes. Raw sewage is dumped into the first of 2-3 tanks, where it is biologically processed with virtually no intervention, before the nutrient-rich effluent eventually flows into a leach field and soaks into the topsoil.

Municipal sewage processing does it much the same way. The problem is that the cities don't have sufficient biomass, so they have to discharge their effluent over a very large area. A city typically converts a nearby river into a massive leachfield.

You have a problem with individuals processing their own sewage and discharge it to vegetation on their own lands, but you support massively upscaling that process and dumping the effluent directly into waterways.

"Capitalism hellscape" accurately describes one of these scenarios, but not the one you're thinking of.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you obviously need to come up with misinfo to justify your "correct" way of living

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't even know where to start in explaining all the things wrong here

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

When I left home this afternoon, I briefly disturbed two doe and four fawns eating ground ivy in my front yard. When I get home, I'm going to hear crickets in the woods behind my house, and bullfrogs in the pond. I'll probably hear the big owl in my neighbor's tree, talking to his girlfriend down the road.

While I was last in the city, I saw a homeless guy pissing on the sidewalk, dozens of boarded buildings, and hundreds of broken windows. I heard four sets of gunshots. The local "park" has nothing growing in it; it has an asphalt basketball court and a gravel playground with busted equipment. An industrial site has a methane flare burning overhead 24/7.

The reason you are having a rough time explaining what's wrong with my argument is that you are accustomed to the dystopian nightmare of urban living, and expect everyone to accept and tolerate that nightmare.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't have a difficult time explaining anything, where did you get that from lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm. I must have misunderstood when you said:

I don't even know where to start in explaining...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sorry dawg I grew up in a rural area. I have to return to rural areas frequently to visit family and I currently live in a suburban area so... sorry? But your anecdote is pretty awful