• wsweg@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Have you ever even been to a rural area? Based on your comments it seriously does not seem like it.

    • HardlightCereal@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Yes, I have. And being an australian, our rural areas are a lot more rural than the rural areas most of these americans are from. Now I’ll tell you a secret: There’s a good reason australia was mostly empty before colonisation, and there’s a very common sense reason why australia’s environment has been dying ever since then.

      • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Dude… Australia is still fucking empty. The majority of you live in cities, and not rural. The majority of you live on the coast. The majority of Americans do not live near a city, most of us a miles and miles from one.

        • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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          1 year ago

          Four out of five Americans (80%) live in an urbanized area according to the Census Bureau. Only 20% of us live in rural areas. That shifted slightly toward rural in the 2020 census (it was 80.7% urban in 2010), because the Bureau revised the cutoff for urban area upward from 2,500 to 5,000 people. A large proportion of that “rural” 20% live in towns of up to 5,000 residents. The number of people who truly live miles from anybody else is quite small.

          • wsweg@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You guys are acting like urban is the same thing as metro. Things in urban areas are still far apart a lot of the time. Urban sprawl needs to be fixed (which involves relocating millions of people) before the banning of cars would even be even somewhat reasonable.

            • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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              1 year ago

              I believe that I said in an earlier comment that I’m not a fan of bans. This is just a funny meme, which serves as a good jumping off point for discussion. Rather, the policies that I am suggesting here (user pays, essentially) are one mechanism by which urban sprawl could be fixed, without government bans or mandates, respecting individual choice. There’s one heck of a lot of land devoted to driving and storing cars that people could easily and quickly convert to housing, food production, and other necessities of life.

        • HardlightCereal@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/built-environment/us-cities-factsheet#:~:text=It is estimated that 83,to live in urban areas.

          It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/18/americans-say-theres-not-much-appeal-big-city-living-why-do-so-many-us-live-there/

          Roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States

          In 1790, only about one out of every twenty Americans (on average) lived in urban areas (cities), but this ratio had dramatically changed to one out of four by 1870, one out of two by 1920, two out of three in the 1960s, and four out of five in the 2000s.

          Y’ALL ARE CITY FOLK.

          • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Urban areas are based off of 2.5k people in an area…I own a 200+ acre farm and have to drive 30mins (17miles) to the nearest grocery store…I am included in this urban classification…thats how the census is based.

              • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,000 housing units or at least 5,000 people.

                They also base it off of 50k or more people, so if your county has 50k or more you’re considered urbanized. My county has 56k people and multiple areas of farmland that was converted into subdivisions. This has our area marked as urban. Most people around my state will call my county and location as rural, but the census bureau says we’re urban.