> Paved roads and sewage are probably least important to me. What's wrong with a septic system?
I am getting older.
I was born in 1987 so I am already 30+.
With my sedentary lifestyle, I am pretty much guaranteed to have health problems well before I am eligible for Medicare and there is no sign that we will have medicare for all in my lifetime.
Therefore, I can only afford healthcare as long as I work.
Long story short, I cannot afford to be airlifted out of the middle of nowhere when (not if) I have a major health crisis in the next thirty years.
If we can use a septic tank for sewage, we can also use solar (and batteries) for electricity, a state of the art in-ground heat pump for heating (and cooling) the house, satellite Internet for remote work. We can do all that but we still need paved roads.
I think (please don't quote me on this) this is the thing that the stronger towns dude keeps saying. We can probably afford to build sparsely populated suburbia and rural utopia ONCE where everyone has half an acre of backyard and where you aren't woken up in the middle of the night because your neighbor decided to do laundry at 3 AM on a Tuesday. However, who is paying to keep up all these roads?
> for example, a representative cost in 2014 for reconstructing an existing lane of [...] a collector street in a small urban area would have set you back $1.5 million per mile
Unpaved roads are really no problem at all if you have a suitable vehicle. My basic old 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee has never failed to take on any road I've thrown at it.
I don't see any issue with state tax subsidizing roads a little anyway, especially for the farmers we depend on. Not sure about railroad costs but it would be great if passenger rail was invested in more again.
I am getting older. I was born in 1987 so I am already 30+. With my sedentary lifestyle, I am pretty much guaranteed to have health problems well before I am eligible for Medicare and there is no sign that we will have medicare for all in my lifetime. Therefore, I can only afford healthcare as long as I work. Long story short, I cannot afford to be airlifted out of the middle of nowhere when (not if) I have a major health crisis in the next thirty years.
If we can use a septic tank for sewage, we can also use solar (and batteries) for electricity, a state of the art in-ground heat pump for heating (and cooling) the house, satellite Internet for remote work. We can do all that but we still need paved roads.
I think (please don't quote me on this) this is the thing that the stronger towns dude keeps saying. We can probably afford to build sparsely populated suburbia and rural utopia ONCE where everyone has half an acre of backyard and where you aren't woken up in the middle of the night because your neighbor decided to do laundry at 3 AM on a Tuesday. However, who is paying to keep up all these roads?
> for example, a representative cost in 2014 for reconstructing an existing lane of [...] a collector street in a small urban area would have set you back $1.5 million per mile
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...
I wonder if building out railroads would be cheaper than building out paved roads to everywhere. Thoughts?