[arrosenberg]

> A truck doing 100 deliveries is surely less traffic than everyone going to the supermarkets. And most importantly with sprawling outwards citizens can enjoy the outdoors and take care of their health.

No, the lowest traffic solution is having the smallest number of trucks that are needed to serve local markets that a relatively high volume of people can access via walking, biking or mass transit. All that walking, very healthy.

Further, why should city dwellers subsidize this expansion? Surely these far flung communities won't have sufficient revenue to support the infrastructure needed to make all that work.

[la6472]

City dwellers are not subsidizing anybody. In fact there are certain things the government does for the common good. Like protecting border or extending healthcare. It is the kind of civic planning that determines if a community will be able to support ordinary human aspirations like living a comfortable life in a spread out space or a community is going to pile like ants on top of each other. Of course certain people in the top (elite?) may actually love the second option and would love to see people stuffed in small apartments and live life like mechanical robots so that they can enjoy their life in Malibu beach houses.

[arrosenberg]

The government pays for those things with money generated in the cities. We need rural communities to grow food, but most rural and suburban communities in the US do not generate enough revenue through taxes to support themselves without federal assistance. Sometimes it is worth doing, but the cities make the money that pay for it. So again, why should we subsidize lower density that requires more subsidy and more energy to support? Our existing cities could be redesigned to be more human friendly and higher capacity - if we are going to spend federal dollars, thats where they need to go.

[la6472]

Suburbs are not rural areas. Suburbs are sane living condition which every human being in the planet is entitled to.

Suburbs are also the source of majority of tax revenue.

[arrosenberg]

Entitled, huh? I don’t see what entitles you to any particular mode of living, but its your ethos.

Suburbs may be the majority (I have no idea if thats true), but that doesn’t make them self-sustaining. They only exist because cities paid for highways, water, and power infrastructure to make it all possible (and continue to fund their maintenance) - exponentially moreso the further west you go.

[la6472]

Nope I don’t agree. Cities have morphed into Subarus in the 1950s and since then they have been the source of more influence and revenue generation at least in NA.

[shkkmo]

> City dwellers are not subsidizing anybody.

City dwellers already subsidize rural living through taxes. On the federal level, more rural states are subsidized by more urban ones, paying more per capita and receiving less per capita. Similar things happen at the state level, but the numbers are a bit harder to track down.