Rural Towns don't have to Suck

I desperately wanted to talk about the D&H canal more.
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timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:52 Breezewood, PA
1:40 Bad Rural Planning
2:20 Hawley, PA
4:23 Strong Towns
5:31 Rural Planning rant
7:07 Outro

[@matt39581]

it's always bizarre to see people defending "traditional rural towns" that were built in the 60's to be car dependent but not "traditional rural towns" that were built in the 1890s around a train station and a courthouse

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

Traditional 1890s rural towns are just a part of cottagecore and I like that. We need more towns like that. Seriously we really do I can’t possibly think of any new towns being built like that. It’s all about the green paper and shoving people into smaller and more expensive boxes for these people

[@BS-vx8dg]

I have literally never once in my life heard anyone advocate the position you say is "bizarre". Never. Who says such a thing? Who says, "rural" towns built 50 years ago are better? In fact, name for me a half dozen "rural towns" that were built in the 1960s. Anywhere. Are you conflating "suburbs" and "rural towns"? Because they are very, very different animals.

[@atm1947]

@@BS-vx8dg the vast majority of Americans that live in and around those areas believe that the way their cities and towns are built means that car dependent development is the only option. Even though basically every economically productive neighborhood or city in the US was developed prior to WW2

[@BS-vx8dg]

@@atm1947 Sure, but the question is, now that they have been built the way that they are, can they be changed? Where will the billions of dollars come from? Who will decide what they will look like? We made really bad decisions from 1920-1970, but are they reversible? I just don't see how. I see lots of ideas, but without dollar figures, it's just talk.

[@horribleIRUKANDJI]

@@BS-vx8dg as a suggestion, they could start from revamping the zoning regulations and allow building more than a single-family house in single lot/parcel. People will figure out the rest.

[@CheapCharlieChronicles]

There are thousands of small towns like Hawley, PA across America. I think small town America is one of the most charming aspects of the country, as long as you avoid the sprawl lol.

[@sweetpeach3649]

Yeah I don't think Hawley is really that unique in Pennsylvania

[@craz5634]

I agree but most of them are concentrated in the Northeast

[@kyleappel2881]

@@craz5634 It's because of railroads and canals. These towns were all set up around those main points of infrastructure. West/Midwest were mostly developed in the age of the car, so their infrastructure is far more car centric. Newer northeastern suburbs and exurbs are the same. I live in a charming rural town with a downtown core, but everything new surrounding it is the same old suburban sprawl including a Walmart, 2 strip malls, and a massive cookie cutter development while the shops downtown go out of business.

[@CheapCharlieChronicles]

@@craz5634 there are substantially more in the Midwest than the Northeast.

[@CheapCharlieChronicles]

@@kyleappel2881 I think you mean the South and the West. The Midwest is small town and railroad central. I’ve walked many Rails to Trails in the Midwest and there are endless small towns that developed in the 19th and early 20th century along the railroads. The South and West has old towns too but due to their massive post world war 2 population growth, most of the landscape is auto oriented and sprawl. The Midwest, especially states like Iowa, Kansas, Indiana and Missouri, actually hasn’t increased much in population since WW2.

[@someone-pz4dg]

I live in an extremely small rural town and it breaks my heart to see the surrounding forests get torn down to make more ugly suburbs

[@orangeyewglad]

Seems like that's happening out in Western North Carolina, which is very sad because it's one of the most beautiful parts of the country.

[@hithere5553]

@@orangeyewgladnc is one of the worst when it comes to sprawl. Everything is so dependent on cars it’s on par with Texas

[@MickeyMouse-lm6zj]

not everyone wants to live in a city

[@hithere5553]

@@MickeyMouse-lm6zj and not everyone in a small town wants to drive to do anything.

[@jupitersky]

Same. Makes everyone who actually lives there and cares about the place upset too, it's terrible.

[@MikeBenko]

As an American (from rural upstate NY) who lives in Spain now...I'd just like to point out that "rural" is not an exclusively American concept. Hamlets, villages, small towns exist outside the US too. When Americans visit rural Europe they always find it "charming" and "quaint" and "lovely" like they are in some theme park. Those places aren't theme parks...normal people live normal lives there, they just refused to turn their homes into highway exits and truck stops.

[@isakaldazwulfazizsunus7564]

This. The fact that rural hamlets in the middle of nowhere have 4 FUCKING LANES and laughably narrow sidewalks is telling too. Europe tends to be car-centric too, but old villages maintain a layout identical to the one they had 1000 years ago, going along the same roads, and lots of those buildings are historical, so they're not as easily bulldozed. Also some of us are learning from the American urban sprawl and refuse to issue permits to build on land that's not already built.

[@Marquinhos1901]

Every intersection in upstate ny looks like breeze wood

[@MikeBenko]

@@Marquinhos1901 I know. It's an atrocity.

[@SmallTown_Studio]

Everywhere on the Iberian gauge lines, you’ll find stop-on-requests for tiny places you’ll have never heard of, but these places are walkable and maintain the traditional style of development, no matter what.

[@Marquinhos1901]

@@MikeBenko yeah upstate ny is a really nice place too wish it had better cities and more walkable towns :(

[@StuffWePlay]

There's a buddy of mine who moved to Japan as a teacher a few years back. Even though he HATED the semi-rural town in Texas we partially grew up in, he seems to be really thriving in rural Japan now. I think the biggest change is he feels comfortable without a car there!

[@SaveMoneySavethePlanet]

It’s amazing how nice life can feel when you don’t feel forced into living one very specific way! Glad your friend found something they like.

[@AshtonKish]

Stayed a couple months in the absolute Japanese boons. There was still a bus stop next to the place I was staying that was surrounded by two farms. Also I could walk to the train (~15 mins). Never needed a car for anything once and that place was definitely sprawling.

[@saturnvision170]

Oh hi Jamie!

[@drbeanut]

@@AshtonKish Ive been wanting to travel to Japan for a bit now, and hearing this adds fuel to my flaming desire to just get up and go

[@JustinParzik]

I also currently live in semi-rural Japan for University and we still have really great trains and busses. I can just tap my phone against the IC reader and walk right on up to the train. I love it here.

[@TheRuralUrbanist]

Another Rural Urbanist??? The best thing you said in this video was that once everyone lives in the wilderness, it isn't the wilderness anymore. That is one of the biggest reasons that I care so much about making and preserving towns like Hawley. Here in Germany, towns are walkable but there is almost always 'Die Natur' a short bike or walk away. Might be a topic for my next video...

[@darthwiizius]

Similar in my town in Hertfordshire mate, it was designed to feel rural so is built around having parks and green spaces in all the living areas(along with tree lined roads, we have a lot of trees here for an urban area) with the centre of the town mostly being the largest park stuck next to a much smaller town centre. For example I can walk 1/2 mile in one direction to the big park(it also has a bowling green, 50metre swimming pool and some tennis courts inside it along with a kids' play area) or walk 100 yards in the opposite direction to the small park(main green can easily accommodate 6 football pitches and has a kids' play area and a thriving bat colony) or continue on past it for 1/2 a mile into the agricultural countrside. The town is designed so that it is walkable from the housing areas to the centre without having to walk everywhere along polluted main traffic routes, though you can if you need to with the retail centre basically almost always being within 2 miles of distant housing, I live 1 mile from there so I always walk.

[@squawkthepenguin9492]

Rural German towns are lovely. I used to live in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, a town of about ~50,000 in southwestern Germany about an hour south of Frankfurt. I lived in a brand new apartment literally right next to the downtown, which was almost entirely made up of nice walking-only streets. The thing was, there were beautiful mountains (Haardt mountain range) ALSO right next to my apartment, with awesome biking, walking, and views. The thing with Neustadt that really got me were all the tiny little towns near it - dotted around the endless vinyards were a number of beautiful little towns. When I did a bikeride to France with a couple of friends, we passed through more than a dozen towns in just ~35-40km of biking, all of which were lovely old villages with a dense core, with several shops and the like. Small and medium sized towns can often be some of the most charming; a city doesn't need hundreds of thousands of people to still be a wonderful place

[@isaac6077]

Yah… thats why we dont want yer urbanist asholes moving in

[@ClaudiaNW]

I've been on holiday to some beautiful rural towns in Germany and Austria. Like Oberkirch and Oppenau in Baden-Wuerttemberg, and Schruns in Vorarlberg. And one nice thing in all these places is that they are served by regional S-Bahn trains (which took over existing rural lines and ran a better service on them). Germany and Austria have their faults, but they are good at walkability and mass transit. It's not a coincidence that people like to go on holiday to these places. I feel like a lot of the natural beauty in North America is squandered because of the crappy towns. (Edited to add: I'm British, and live in a relatively walkable town just outside London.)

[@Flamme-Sanabi]

I live in Bönen, Germany, I do agree. In my town, I can get pretty much anything within my town, such as a forest, which is like a 10 minute cycling away.

[@jrjubach]

"Not everyone can live out in the wilderness, because once everyone is out in the wilderness, it's not the wilderness anymore." LOL I love that.

[@jont2576]

even if the populations of urban centers were to spread out into the world, the population density in the unknown would still be far far lower than that of cities.....hell if the population of greater tokyo would to disperse out into japan, there would be less than 300 people per sqkm.....and japan is a very small country.

[@jrjubach]

@@jont2576 Yep, so true. Crazy to think about. We should all spread out and give each other space! lol

[@reuploadify]

It can still be the wilderness. We just have to return to monkey.

[@simbadooo9055]

@@jont2576 Japan is 330,000 Square Kilometers, that's larger than New Zealand and smaller than Germany, that's quite average.

[@jont2576]

@@simbadooo9055 imagine if u distribute all the big people in all the small countries and all the little people in all the ginormous countries equally. which is why china should annex australia instead of taiwan.

[@abberss]

Can confirm: Living in a rural town with a half-decent local govt and a walkable downtown is dank as fuck

[@MickeyMouse-lm6zj]

not everyoe wants to live in a city

[@PaulfromChicago]

So a college town

[@abberss]

@@MickeyMouse-lm6zj That's one of the great things about cities. You can choose whether or not you want to live in one!

[@peepeetrain8755]

my rural town has a dank pedestrian street. unfortunatley its a ghost town because the council upped the rent for the commerical places sky high that priced alot of the out and built a small shopping centre on the edge of the town centre which has chains basically cannibalised the local nan and pop shops :(

[@TheGreatWasian_]

My small town is actually pretty nice. Our walkable downtown isn’t huge, but still very nice. If it was like 10x bigger, it’d be amazing

[@m.f.3347]

I live in Ireland. The smallest villages are often the most walkable, because they were built at a time when almost everyone walked almost everywhere, and it was important to have community and amenities close by. I used to live in a beautiful seaside town called Bantry. You could cross the whole thing in half an hour on foot. Sadly a combination of suburban sprawl and lack of transport connections is making this go away, and the village centers of old are slowly dying out.

[@hermenegildoc3933]

Most towns in Spain can be crossed 5 min walk

[@magma440]

The biggest problem with Irish rural development is One-Off housing. Houses literally in the middle of nowhere. They are completely car dependent because there often isn't even another house within a 2km radius, never mind a shop or school. They contribute to car dependency, environmental degradation and the housing crisis outside of Dublin. The need to be banned immediately.

[@elbubson5600]

Whenever I go into the countryside in Ireland it feels like there's a single house every fify to a hundred yards, no real dense villages to be seen for the most part. As oppose to where my family comes from in Spain, where you have dense villages of a few hundred surrounded by miles and miles of open countryside, fields and forests. There are reasonably dense towns in Ireland sure, but at the village level, like my family's dense Spanish village of ~300, it's incredibly spread out ribbon development about 95% of the time and it feels you can't find true countryside without seeing another 1970s house on every hill

[@grahvis]

@@elbubson5600 . When I was at school in the UK in the middle 50s, we studied civics to a small degree. One thing I remember was learning that ribbon development was bad. There is no excuse for that sort of bad planning.

[@elitepauper7400]

@@hermenegildoc3933 i wouldnt wanna drive in most of spain anyways. Yall roads are worse then belgium ngl😂😂

[@famitory]

I think people mistake "rural towns" for the sort of "each house is 50km away from the next one and the roads are dirt and there is no downtown" image that, while it exists, is increasingly rare as exurbs expand and consume or subsume that land.

[@dandarr5035]

which is exactly why these particular ruralists should, logically, be in favor of densifying urban areas. It can also be paired with more land being reclaimed for the rural areas where the nearest neighbor is a mile and a half away. More of the kind of places they want, more of the kind of places urbanists want. Both can coexist.

[@davidty2006]

Normally when i think of rual towns i just think of a bunch of stone/brick buildings on a 2 lane road in the middle of nowhere.

[@famitory]

@@davidty2006 right, which is what this video is talking about. I suggest that might need different word for areas of extremely spread out farmhouses that may not even have phone service or a central water main. land that officially belongs to a town but is effectively unincorporated land.

[@zephyros256]

@@famitory I would say that that is truly rural, with anything above it generally being best described as a hamlet, village or town.

[@sweetpeach3649]

@@famitory In Europe it's different because 98% of homes are clustered into a village or town. Here in the United States there are houses all over the rural country side which are outside of the village or town boundaries.

[@cincinnati4391]

I am a resident of one of those “we have no downtown” areas, it used to be rail-centric with a restaurant where the old train depot used to be, but now most of it is dead since the economic collapse in 2008. Really sad to see that the one store we had died

[@sparklesparklesparkle6318]

Thanks Obama

[@eboyrl1825]

@@sparklesparklesparkle6318 he took office in 09

[@sparklesparklesparkle6318]

@@eboyrl1825 And his TARP program gave 700 BILLION dollars to corrupt capitalist corporations who still exploit your entire life to this day. He didn't fix anything but since he was a democrat you still worship him due to your misplaced love for Karl Marx. please explain to me your experience of living an entire life at 80 IQ

[@rigatoni144]

@@sparklesparklesparkle6318 You should avoid having political opinions if you genuinely think Obama caused the 2008 recession.

[@sparklesparklesparkle6318]

@@rigatoni144 He did nothing to fix the 2008 recession and his actions he made 13 years ago are exactly the cause of the current recession we are in today. He put a bandaid on an issue that has only grown worse over time. Thankfully I think Biden can fix all this. GO JOE!

[@carissarodriguez433]

Hi! I live in Hawley Pa, and it is so nice to see my home on display. (Seeing ledges hotel and the Main Street I pass every day was so strange haha) however, I will say Hawley has a huge flaw. The lack of residents makes it impossible for businesses to survive here. Most of the buildings on Main Street are vacant over the winter. New shops/restaurants/businesses can barely survive past the summer. The only things that survive are the antique stores/flea markets because the family has owned that spot for generations. Nothing new can survive and that keeps our town stuck in the past. Don’t get me wrong it’s a lovely place to visit, but over the winter it becomes incredibly depressing. It’s impossible to walk in the snow and our town is rarely plowed. Milford is a much better version of Hawley in all honesty.

[@alanthefisher]

A large reason why Hawley has to fight to survive is because sprawling developments like hidden lakes or the township have basically subsidized themselves with state and county funds, well Hawley (built in the correct/sustainable way) has to defend for itself. It's frustrating...

[@everettduncan7543]

@@alanthefisher and there's no laws prohibiting second homes in Hawley

[@everettduncan7543]

@@thesmartestmanintheworld2653 hypocrisy is not about parties.

[@thesmartestmanintheworld2653]

@@everettduncan7543 mmmm, yeah, it kinda is: Jan 6th False flag attack Russiagate Fast & Furious Panama Papers Big Tech Censorship Pizzagate Epstein & Pedo Island Weinstein & #metoo Fast&Furious Democrat manufactured collapse of the Border The fall of Afghanistan BLM riots Fentanyl Homelessness Hunter Biden’s pedophile compromat with China All out assault on freedom in university campuses. Rampant corruption at every level of the party Elections tampering Fake News All from the Uniparty of tolerance that thinks about the children. Nice cope though bro, keep telling yourself that.

[@cooltwittertag]

@@thesmartestmanintheworld2653 are you a bot?

[@titanicman9329]

Rural towns get screwed over the most by developers and other schmucks who come over and fuck things up with new developments and "bringing in jobs". It's honestly sad how fucked these people get.

[@mashdash]

It's not even the developers faults a lot of the time, a lot of cities/towns REQUIRE single family housing and don't allow developers to make what people actually want. Developers want money, and single family housing makes way less than apartment buildings, so if they could build that they definitely would

[@zippy3377]

Jeez, seems like America’s pretty bad to live in, unlike oz

[@crazyglue1337]

city planners are to blame just as much as the developers. developments need to be approved before they can be built. developers are good cause they will improve an area and put something there that wasnt or make it better, but they dont care what they build, thats where the city planning comes in to make sure what they build is the right thing

[@Novusod]

It is very common in Rural America for a big box store like a Wal-mart to set up shop a few miles outside of town and then all the little mom and pop stores in the downtown would go out of business. Then the town isn't even walkable anymore because the only place to go shopping is a few miles away and can only be accessed by car. It is the free market at work. Zoning boards are often powerless to stop it because the big box store will set up shop outside the city limits on unincorporated land. Rural America is totally different beast. Zoning boards don't have the power they do in the cities and suburbs because of all the unincorporated land.

[@linuxman7777]

Also government subsidized big box being built on the outskirts of town destroying all of the towns within a 20mi radius. The Neoliberal System is very cruel to Rural America.

[@tictacbergerac]

lived in a rural community for a bit and the options were "get in the car with the drunk guy at the wheel bc he's the only one who can drive manual" or "don't go home tonight." thank you for making this video.

[@yukko_parra]

imma... sleep in the car then. Don't sound so good when you actually think about it.

[@tictacbergerac]

@@yukko_parra yeah dude. the point is that the options suck, it teaches kids that driving drunk is okay as long as they're "careful," and we need to build better, safer rural towns.

[@aimxdy8680]

Why do Americans not know how to drive manual, is it because they are fat or too lazy?

[@matt39581]

@@yukko_parra especially since in a lot of places just being parked in the car with the keys is enough to catch a DUI charge

[@Drewsky840]

Or just learn how to drive a manual.... you'd seriously ride with a drunk driver rather just learn a simple skill?

[@natep6729]

This reminds me of Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls. My sister and i used to make fun of how "unrealistic" the show was because the characters would just walk anywhere. One minute they're in the house, the next in the town square, a quick grocery run and hangout at the diner all in one day! A lot of the scenes will happen around the town square and the sidewalks of the town. Now i realise the fictional world of gilmore girls is a walkable paradise we wish we had.

[@treytonketola6469]

Honestly the town seems totally normal looking as someone who has lived in NH and Vermont.

[@banana_junior_9000]

Mental health issues are on a steep incline for many reasons. In a properly design village, town or city, we get to know each other..support each other. I have lived in many suburbs. People can live there and never know their neighbors. Not always but my experience was always isolation. When we truly feel a part of a community, that's a positive for our mental health.

[@Miguel.L]

This! Having just returned to Mexico after living in the US for 10+ years I was so shocked by how much less negative thoughts I’ve been having ever since I got here. After living here for a year I realized just how isolated people sometimes are in the US since they always have to do everything by car and don’t get to interact with other humans as often as you would down here. Kinda makes you sad when you think of the fact that a huge portion of the US population lives like that without much of a choice since the whole country was designed around cars and not pedestrians. 😢

[@ianhomerpura8937]

It is also great for the children. Jane Jacobs also mentioned that same concept of "eyes on the street" where the entire community looks out and takes care of the children. Nowadays, intense contrasts are done: you're overprotected as a minor, with threats of Child Protection Services taking you away all because you were allowed to walk home from school, then when you turn 18 you get kicked out of the house and forced to be "independent" when you were never trained for it.

[@a-r]

@@ianhomerpura8937 Having spent half my childhood in a walkable area and the other half in a car-dependent area, the transition felt like being put on house arrest. For years. We should do better and stop raising our children in isolated places where they miss out on real life.

[@jty9631]

While I'm sure it's like that for some people, it doesn't represent the experience for everyone. Ed Edd N Eddy takes place in a suburban culdesac. My life as a child was like that minus the cartooniness. I knew all the kids and we would go out and play together every day. I would sometimes ride my bike throughout the huge housing development to meet my friends from school. My parents knew our neighbors and they would invite us over to their pool. During halloween we would all put up decorations, and people would walk around the housing development trick or treating. It's totally up to you to make the best of your situation.

[@banana_junior_9000]

@@jty9631 Statistically, life for kids in these areas is not like the way you describe...today. Children are driven everywhere. There no more "Be home when the street lights turn on".

[@scottanglim564]

When my great grandmother emigrated to the U.S., she settled in Hawley, where she spent her whole life. I'm from San Diego, a city with a population about 1,500x that of Hawley. This small rural gem has stronger urban bones than the 8th largest (mostly car-dependent) city in America.

[@LeeeroyJenkins]

Hawley is not rural. The definition of a rural town is less than 500 people per square mile. Hawley has more than that. There is a difference between small town and rural. Rural is farms. Small town is just that, a town with a small population. (Aka not rural)

[@bui3415]

@@LeeeroyJenkins Not sure that anyone really agrees with that definition, and for many organizations that gets changed a lot, us census has its own definition and its not that, they use minimum housing units in an area to qualify an urban space and unqualified are rural. They also have other classifications like urban clusters. Historically they never really considered density.

[@HxTurtle]

@@LeeeroyJenkins thank you for enlightening is with the definition nobody asked for. to me, rural is defined by how people uses it .. going off by that, talking to each other becomes just that tad easier, it's totally worth trying! 😉

[@maninblack3410]

@@HxTurtle I think the point is, without trying to say something “is” or “isn’t” without actually backing that up, is that there’s still a tremendous amount of the country that *is* rural in the way Leroy wants to define it as. Where I grew up if you wanted to walk to the nearest store you’d be gone several hours and then be laughed at when you got back… because why? I’ve never been to a “small town” that isn’t actually far more pleasant than most cities I’ve been to. Sure there are places he described that would be horrible to walk through, but those aren’t small towns, those are hubs that everyone who lives to far away drive to to get amenities. There probably is an argument for making those areas more walkable, but I don’t think it would make sense to enforce walkability like in cities when 95% of the people going there are driving from a distance. And if that many people are already driving, does it make sense to spend money on infrastructure most people won’t use? It’s a lot of ‘if’s and hypotheticals, maybe it would be worthwhile, but the problem in this discussion is (imo) is that the video calls out people for talking about super rural areas but doesn’t actually address car dependency for those areas, just “small towns.” Which is also fine, it’s just not the “get dunked on” the video initially appears to be. Honestly, as someone who believes “rural” areas can’t be car independent, I would love to see some potential solutions for people that live too far out to walk/bike/bus to the town center.

[@ChrisJones-rd4wb]

Slan Fisher doesn't understand what actual rural towns are. A rural town is like 20 houses close together and a general store. You honestly need roads if you live in the middle of nowhere, because the general store is like 20 miles away.

[@mattwalker5689]

What I think the car-brained “this is fine” folks don’t think about for rural areas is the impact the lack of walkability has on kids. I spent most of my years in elementary school in a small town in eastern Oregon that was fairly walkable, with the only real exception being the local grocery store (which was a Safeway that was just like that IGA in the video). Most of my friends were with in a 15 minute walk, and even the ones across town were like half an hour by bike (and I didn’t even have to brave crossing a stroad to get there). I was able to go do stuff with my friends every day. Moving to car-brain rural Michigan, friends were an hour plus away by bike, and that would require a good chunk of riding in the shoulder of a highway or a stroad. We had to be driven by one of our parents to be able to do anything. It absolutely killed my ability to hang out with friends until i got my license If I was considering having kids, I sure as heck would not want to raise them in a place like that.

[@yukko_parra]

the american dream, for helicopter parents.

[@Cynbel_Terreus]

Which is exactly what NJB mentioned in a recent video that you've likely already seen. kzbin.info/www/bejne/pXnPoaCugbmrptk Also from Michigan so yeah I get it completely, grew up in the suburbs, living back home currently though I'd like to actually get a place closer to work in Ann Arbor which is decently walkable and has good buses.

[@beej741]

As someone who grew up in rural Michigan, that’s 100% my experience. I was pretty much tethered to my house. I’d get so bored in the summer I’d often bike for hours to get to a gas station or library and risk crossing an incredibly busy street. It was also common to lose touch with friends over the summer because there was just no way to reach them. And in the winter, just forget about seeing anyone lol

[@IndustrialParrot2816]

my mom is from a rural town in southern ontario and its suprisingly walkible for how car brained some parts of southern ontario are

[@IndustrialParrot2816]

my mom is from a rural town in southern ontario and its suprisingly walkible for how car brained some parts of southern ontario are

[@joshmnky]

I live around Savannah and Pooler GA. The contrast between one of the most successful planned cities vs one of America's worst stroad hell holes is maddening. The new development where they put the Costco really makes you feel like the planners hate you personally.

[@strayedarticle2838]

Savannah is a great example of the perfect city, surrounded by hot garbage.

[@harveytheattorney]

Was just there, couldn't believe that there was so much sprawl around such a cute walkable town.

[@MindsetHalo]

Lmao I live in bluffton and I wish I lived in Savannah I fucking hate it here

[@jgesselberty]

Sadly, we had many wonderful small towns, and then the malls came in and sucked all the business out of them. Now, even the malls are failing to cyber shopping, and low and behold, people want those quaint little towns back.

[@janmelantu7490]

A lot of small towns would be easily bikeable if the chains hadn’t built everything on the outskirts of town with giant parking lots, and there was bike infrastructure to support it. Sure, there may be a Village market that’s a 10 minute bike ride from your house, but if the streets are full of 18-wheelers and the discount supermarket is a 10 minute drive, it’s not hard to see why people choose cars.

[@BS-vx8dg]

Thanks, Jan, for one of the more intelligent observations here. I used to ride my bike *everywhere* in my town of 8000 people, but from what I understand, Walmart came "to town" but did exactly as you describe; they are located several miles outside of the town proper and there's no safe way to bike there.

[@alexlowe2054]

This is actually the strategy of big chain businesses. They intentionally build far away from everything else of value, because it means they pay less to buy property. The Mcdonalds corporation actually makes more money from renting the property they buy than they do from franchise fees, and they've sold off nearly every actual resturatunt they own to the franchisees. Their main business is buying up cheap land far away from useful urban areas, and selling it to smucks for the purpose of building terrible parking lots that happen to also contain a mediocre burger joint. What's even worse is how these large companies roll into small towns, build a huge ecosystem around them, then suddenly back out without any warning. Walmart is especially malicious with how they rapidly pull out of any location that doesn't generate them enough profit.

[@ryanfraley7113]

@@alexlowe2054 In theory ring roads for rural areas would be great. In practice Walmart and McDonald’s would just build on the ring roads and they would be converted to stroads over time. That’s what happened in a lot of rural areas in Illinois and Missouri where bypasses were built.

[@the_gaucho_amigo]

I lived in Marquette, Michigan for a few years and it was frustrating just how close the town was to being bikeable and walkable. The core of town near the lakeshore was pretty dense as it had developed pre-automobile (even having a streetcar line at one point!), but as soon as you passed out of the city proper and into the township the sidewalks disappear, the businesses disappear to the side of a 4 lane highway, and everyone's driving trucks and SUVs too fast. The only groceries place in the town core was a co-op that was nice, but expensive -- for the places most people would go, they had to drive 10 minutes to the far outskirts where all the big box stores are. Sure, it's extremely snowy and cold in the winter there, but it's not like anyone's car actually got warm enough on those 10 minute drives to the big box grocery anyways... mine certainly didn't.

[@MrTim-ez2qd]

You know grocery stores need those big those big lots for their trucks right

[@andrewreed579]

I was ready to stop procrastinating at work but that will have to wait

[@seapeajones]

Brooo SAME

[@yukko_parra]

i was ready to go to bed now I'm ready to comment again

[@appalachianenthusiast9499]

I live in a rural town that desperately deserves public transportation. We only have 1,600 people in town and about 4,000 throughout the township, but we feature the headquarters of one of the largest gas station chains on the east coast, a cookie factory, a sauce factory, a trailer factory, and one of the largest mail printing establishments in the nation. We may be a small township, but the policies adopted by our municipal government brought in several large corporations to save our dying town. Now, property value is going up and people are moving back in! However, everyone commuting to these jobs is forced to use mediocre roadways and during rush hour they can become congested. At the very least, my town needs to look into a bus system to connect itself to a small city approximately 30 minutes north to bring more workers in.

[@yukko_parra]

and a great rebuttal for suburbs: when everyone is super, no one will be. When everyone gets wilderness, no one will get it.

[@chaos386]

Yup, you see this across huge swathes of the US. Areas somewhat near big cities that used to be mostly farmland get bought up and converted into residential developments full of big single-family houses, wide roads, and surprisingly small yards. Because of the space all that car infrastructure takes up, you need to destroy a LOT more farms and wilderness to build the same amount of housing+shops than if they built something along the lines of what was built in the US in the early 1900s.

[@michaelheuss6502]

And when every lane is a bike lane, no lane is a bike lane.

[@matthewgladback8905]

Yards. Are. Not. Wilderness. A few dozen trees does not a forest make; even the more open exurbs are not even remotely wild. The birds here are human-dependent. There are far too many bird feeders, too much lawn, and not enough native plants, especially of the kind that would produce seeds, fruit, or nectar to support birds. The grass gets cut too often, too, so even that isn't supporting insect life, such as grasshoppers. The squirrels mostly eat seed either directly out of the bird feeders or which have fallen out of them. The deer are obviously living on corn handouts. It's our *collective illusion of wildlife* to assure ourselves of the lie we told ourselves, "We're surrounded by nature."

[@Aenglaan]

Yep. Folks love nature so much that they’ll build development all over it.

[@blue_applesauce9990]

we live bye dnr so those rules don't apply

[@crimsonblad5]

I live in what people would call "rural" Japan. Not only does my town have two train lines. It has a thriving bus system that can get you around town too. I have my complaints about it but it's worth it. Even the town more north of me has a bus line and train connection.

[@laurie7689]

The train tracks that run through my small city in the USA are only used for freight. In the last 35 years of living here, I've only ever seen one passenger train come through here. I remember it because I had never seen one before and thought that it looked odd coming down the track. The freight trains stop on the tracks daily to load and unload at the industries along the tracks. My small city has a bunch of pit mines and they load up the materials onto the trains from them.

[@AssBlasster]

What is the population size of your "rural" town? I live near a 30,000 person college town that has a functional bus system, but I'm curious what is the population limit for a small japanese town to have a bus system.

[@anthropoceneclimatechange245]

@@laurie7689 That is because there is NO dedicated owned passenger rails. All Amtrak use freight train rails! I hate the us its public transportation and lack of high speed rail sucks.

[@laurie7689]

@@anthropoceneclimatechange245 Considering that the pit mine industries in my city have to constantly load the freight trains, I don't think that we could really ever have passenger trains going through my small city. They'd always be waiting on the freight trains to finish. We already have a problem with traffic getting stuck on the roads waiting on the trains. It's really bad when the ambulance needs to cross, but is stuck, too.

[@antianime-pfp3291]

toyama or fukui?

[@Thewoodsbob]

my town, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma put allot of effort and money into revitalizing the walkable downtown area like your example. They dubbed the are "The Rose District" and it is beloved. I have high hopes that more people will consider what makes a city enjoyable and safe. There is much room for improvement in terms of non car transportation.

[@stonecoldsteveaustin2095]

I’m from Moore, Oklahoma. It kinda sucks here, tbh

[@thatrandomguyontheinternet2477]

Me who lives in a small city that has no train station and has to bike to a town with less 500 people to take the train : ‘absolutely dumbfounded’

[@EliasEthernet]

I’m from a rural town where one end has a beautiful walkable downtown, and the other is a massive stroad with fast food restaurants, a pathetic Kroger and a Walmart. I almost shit myself when I saw bicentennial photos showing a streetcar downtown in the early 1900s. I feel robbed.

[@FreelanceGenie]

Don't worry. Your cute walkable downtown will eventually put those grocery stores and Wal-Mart out of business because they're more dense and walkable, and they have a higher cumulative value. Therefore they're more economically sustainable.

[@brandon9172]

You're not rural if you have kroger and walmart 😂

[@GrandGobboBarb]

@@brandon9172 huge swatchs of the country are rural and *only* have a kroger and a walmart.... maybe a taco bell and a mcdonalds

[@brandon9172]

@@GrandGobboBarb Again, those places aren't truly rural. Rural is a town with 500 people and MAYBE a small grocery store, either that or its an hour drive to the nearest store. The nearest store might be a walmart but it sure as shit isn't gonna be at the end of the road.

[@tylerhildebran3479]

@@FreelanceGenie sadly, the reason places like Walmart have continued to exist and thrive in the modern day is by coming into towns, providing WILDLY cheaper goods than the local places, and then once those places die, they get to hike up the price and monopolize the customer base of a city. They have enough money to sustain short to mid term losses for long term gains, whereas your local mom and pop shop has a solid business model and prices things exactly as they should to keep themselves afloat, so they can't afford to lose customers to big box stores like Walmart. It's one of the many reasons I shop local whenever possible.

[@himbourbanist]

thank you, THANK YOU for bringing up Drunk Driving vs. walking home from the pub. Walkability and building housing near pubs and commercial space would basically eradicate drunk driving altogether. I bring this up constantly to my friends who simply do not understand that being able to walk to the bar is safer than driving (also, big fan of the 10 minute drunk walk back home with buddies, great time for bonding lol).

[@chalk9630]

10 minutes would get me up my driveway and past 1-2 other driveways in the rural area I grew up. You could take a quad through the woods, not many people drove cars to the bar and it wasn't like you where going to meet new people unless you went 40 minutes towards the suburbs.

[@Jerald_Fitzjerald]

Seriously. I'm from a dry county with one city where alcohol is sold, and as such the nearest bar to me is half an hour away. There isn't even public transit within these towns, much less between them. How is someone supposed to get home if they have to drive 30 minutes just to get to the bar?

[@demoniack81]

OR you could avoid getting wasted all the time.

[@Jerald_Fitzjerald]

@@demoniack81 wow, what a useful contribution to the discourse. let's just do away with something humans have been living with for thousands of years, i'm sure that'll be easy.

[@demoniack81]

@@Jerald_Fitzjerald no darling, I never said to give up alcohol entirely. But the constant binge drinking and getting wasted every other night that is somehow considered acceptable and normal in the UK is disgusting and the fact that being close to pubs makes it easier to do is not in any way a good thing.

[@kendallium]

Holy shit, I was not expecting wallenpaupack and hawley to be talked about. Parents live there and it’s crazy to see so many familiar sites in a KZbin video.

[@CortezEspartaco2]

This is a sorely underrepresented topic on urbanism KZbin so props for that. I like making the point that the biggest differences between North American and European infrastructure aren't found in city-to-city comparisons. It's when you compare mid-size and especially small towns that you see the biggest gaps. There are so many good examples of towns with 10,000 to 30,000 people that are super walkable and vibrant, moreso than most small cities in the U.S. I've been to many where there's virtually no car traffic because people only drive to travel out of town and everything in town is within a 15 minute walk.

[@HxTurtle]

one objection, though: depending on the place you live in North America, it can actually even be illegal to just "walk" home from a bar/pub drunk; which is hilarious and certainly something not very well thought through, IMHO.

[@thebigmacd]

Canada too, every Province has laws against public intoxication.

[@HxTurtle]

@@thebigmacd yes, I'm aware. that's exactly why I wrote, "North America" to be (or sound, at least) "inclusive." 😅

[@laurie7689]

Not only is public intoxication illegal in my small US city, but there are laws that limit where bars can be located as they are not allowed anywhere near schools and churches.

[@heartache5742]

they just want to bring back the traditional inn don't go home

[@extrastuff9463]

Good old laws always being silly, it's illegal here in the Netherlands too "openbaar dronkenschap" (public intoxication). But I think it only applies when the person ends up being dangerous either for themselves or other traffic participants, generally being too much of a nuisance with noise or causing damage will count too. Is it treated the same there? technically illegal but as long as you're not causing trouble nobody will enforce it? We also have some local city laws specifically against the consumption of alcohol in public places, but that also seems to get the enforcement only when it causes trouble treatment. We've also got a whole riding a bicycle while drunk legal situation here that's kinda funny too: It's technically also illegal to ride a bicycle while drunk (on the same legal basis why it's not allowed to operate a vehicle like cars while under the influence of alcohol) but provided you're not misbehaving it's tolerated. They could however suspend your driving licence for it. In my experience it's still pretty safe with our mostly separated infrastructure, they are mostly a danger to themselves tbh with crashing into things or riding into a ditch (rural) or canal (cities). And we're used to that during the late night/early morning hours it's probably worth paying a bit more attention to those cyclists that don't always follow a straight line. Much better than having the same people driving a car when it comes to accident severity, but I wouldn't want to replicate it on the typical US share the road infrastructure.

[@lovemykids570mommyvlogger]

I grew up in a small college town in central Pennsylvania. My family was fleeing NYC from the ongoing gentrification in the early 2000's. I had so many good memories of the colonial style architecture, the courthouse with a clock tower and old churches, the town closing the one street on a steep hill on snow days so kids could sled, riding my bike or scooter around and going to the ice cream shop and pizzeria with my friends afterschool. The Children's Museum, Theater, and Library always had cultural events for kids and adults alike as well as classes. And the bike trail along the creek was so fun to ride in and we'd swim in the creek during the summer, and catch fireflies. There's a lot of small towns like this that are really hidden gems. I moved away now and I've heard the town has had some struggles with there being less and less students each year and the small businesses that cater to them struggling as well, but I hope that with the normalization of working from home small towns like this can see some life come back into them.

[@theappleboi3104]

Were you near the Cumberland Valley?

[@lovemykids570mommyvlogger]

@@theappleboi3104 North Central PA

[@brandon9172]

How is working from home going to help them? Is it because they'll have an influx of new residents from more populated areas? Because that'll almost certainly harm that community due to gentrification.

[@baltimorebjj]

@@brandon9172 The problem with these many of places is due to a changing economy, there really aren't many opportunities for work well paid work anymore. Remote work allows people to earn good salaries and live in areas like this. Nothing stopping the people who live in towns themselves from getting decently paid remote work.

[@theappleboi3104]

@@lovemykids570mommyvlogger average bloomsburg fan vs danville enjoyer

[@jrjubach]

I'm from Western PA. Been to/through Breezewood many many times. Breezewood is not really a town as much as it is a glorified pit stop/interchange for people who departed from the greater Pittsburgh area and are going to the Eastern shore on vacation, and this is where they'd get gas and something to eat. Breezewood is essentially a service interchange AND a system interchange in a spot where three major highways come together, so it would be the perfect spot for such a stop. No one lives there or spends any time there. Everyone is just passing through, which is probably why there's a high concentration of gas stations and fast food joints than seems normal. Alan Fisher does touch on the point I've made here, and he does say I'm right. I just wanted to provide more detail as to why Breezewood specifically exists. All that being said, I do agree with the points Alan Fisher makes in the video. Well done.

[@sweetpeach3649]

Yeah it's unfair to call it a "town"

[@412StepUp]

When I was a delivery driver. Breezewood was the stop we always made. We would meet up with another driver and unload our stuff onto his truck. I guess Breezewood is sort of the halfway point and the best place meet up.

[@Alchemeleon]

I used to live in Columbus OH, a place with a population of about half a million people at the time. After a few years there, I moved to a city of about 40,000 in the hills of Appalachia that had been built in the 19th century. I was surprised to find that the music and arts communities were much more vibrant. When people could walk from their house to the bar and then to a friend's place for an afterparty, you had a lot more opportunities for meeting people, exchanging ideas, forming bands, playing songs together, etc. And there would be more events more often since it was easy to attend them on weeknights. In Columbus, you had to convince your friends to drive to shows and they'd likely not stay too late or drink too much, or else they'd drive home drunk. More often than not, it was just too much of a hassle to go at all. It was and still is the largest city without a rail system. if I hadn't experienced that difference between a walkable less-populated town and a car-centric city, I never would have realized that infrastructure shapes culture a lot more than population size.

[@cameron7938]

There are so many people that say "rural" when they literally just mean small towns. Small town=/=rural. The amount of small villages and towns in other countries that aren't shitty stroad hellholes, like always, disprove this car-centric ideology.

[@BS-vx8dg]

Here's an early Christmas present for you: *≠* . Copy and paste it for future use.

[@Periwinkleaccount]

=/= ≠ ≠

[@ummmbye1228]

This exist ≠

[@brendanmatthys3788]

I'm from Australia, so I completely agree with you. Speaking to Americans, though, they think it's crazy you can drive for 30 minutes here and not drive through or past any township at all. So I suppose it's about perspective. When you're in a country as densely populated as the US, a township like that would be considered 'rural' by local standards

[@josephpbrown]

@Zaydan Naufal The UK is pretty much the same. Then again, many places here were built before cars (like "small town America")

[@etbadaboum]

You can hear in his voice that he is tired of fighting all of this

[@animatewithdermot]

Dimbulb pedants are exhausting. You end up having an internal circuit that has to anticipate their thickery. Total understandable exhaustion with the "I have an opinion / I have an asshole" brigade.

[@isaac6077]

Yer listening to a man whose claims to be a ruralist while all his point are just turn the place into an european city…. His headache is from his shit ideology and probably constantly seeing comments that he cant refute with anything but “why are you against progress”

[@chroma._.5986]

@@isaac6077 ratio + u prolly homeless 💀

[@peskypigeonx]

@@isaac6077 1. this whole video was about American small towns, so you have not watched the video even a single bit 2. European-inspired cities are better to live in 3. Being against densification is against progress, because from what (most) American cities and rural areas are like today, the people of the 60’s made an ignorant choice about our cities

[@mbrproductions160]

@@isaac6077 tell me you didn’t watch the video without saying you didn’t watch the video…

[@SFVYachtClub]

can confirm that having multiple bars within stumbling-home range is a godsend 🍻

[@sevendeadlysquids404]

“Rural towns don’t have to suck” Towns in Western Maryland: “allow us to introduce ourselves”

[@danielscalera6057]

I like how close knit the urban planning community on KZbin seems to be with channels referencing each other a lot. It feels like a real grass roots movement that knows exactly what it wants and how to get it. Very welcoming and non confrontational

[@johns.8220]

I KNOW and I want word to get out even further. I have never been a cause-joining kind of guy but the whole Strong Towns/urban planning movement is the first time I've come across anything that changed my outlook so profoundly. I legit think I've found a calling.

[@meowtherainbowx4163]

I’ve also seen a lot of other channels that usually talk about other topics mention urbanist talking points whenever they come up. LegalEagle recently shouted out Not Just Bikes. Ordinary Things’ videos about lawns and electric scooters briefly touch on related topics such as land use and pedestrian safety. There are more examples that I can’t remember off the top of my head. I think urbanist talking points are gradually becoming memes, not even necessarily ridiculous ones, and so far, that’s awesome.

[@Veilure]

This often happens with political niches -- you can find this happening in many other places.

[@danielscalera6057]

@@Veilure This is the best part: good urban planning is apolitical and some forums actively gatekeep political parties trying to make urban planning about politics. Whether I like Trump or Bernie should not be relevant to an appreciation for things that go choo-choo and a healthy hatred of traffic

[@Veilure]

@@danielscalera6057 While good urban planning is apolitical, examples of it are not. You will see endless discourse about which plans are good, which plans are bad, and even some arguments about the success of entire countries.

[@baccarah7010]

I live in a rural place in germany Its a small-ish town with a population of around 2000 people and its really just a drivethrough-town because one of the transport options between 2 bigger towns goes right through our town and you can really tell that by the main roads condition. Anyways. I have everything here I need to live except work. I have a place to go grocery shopping, there is a hair salon, multiple resturants and places to grab something to eat, a general doctor along with a pharmacy, a small gas station, a couple EV-charging stations, which is in a walkable area, if you live anywhere in this town you can get to that EV-spot within 5-7 minutes by foot, encouraging getting an EV and just walking this small distance. I work a couple towns over (14 miles) and I drive my bike there, during the colder months I use an e-bike. I have no need for a car and I dont plan on getting one because everything I need can be done on foot or one a bike, and I dont need to carry so much, even when I do, my ebike is equipped with bag mounts and I have a bike trailer.

[@honkhonk8009]

Texas alone is 2x bigger than Germany though. I understand the need for small towns to have good downtowns. Alot of them actually do. But alot of places really are just rest stops with no significant economic production. It would be impractical at best. Most of these small towns arent even proper towns, rather their just a group of people "living in the country". Their more so villages maybe? Biking would be suicide for these towns lol. You really do need a car. Especially cus of the weather and massive distances. Biking from San Francisco to Los Angeles is a larger distance as biking from Oslo to Stockholm. It puts things into perspective when we talk about just how rural these towns are. Before, it was canals that made em populated. Now its the interstate.

[@baccarah7010]

​@@honkhonk8009 So the obvious solution when it comes to transportation within the US would be to build walkable settlements or rebuild the existing ones to a point where transportation options are plentiful and non-car reliant within along with building a solid railway network between cities and towns on all that free barren land you have. Is there anyone in your goverment pushing for this?

[@dubstep_gurke999dubstep_gu8]

Dann hast du aber ganz schön viel Glück , ich leb auch an nem durchfahrts Ort hier ist aber wenigstens eine Bundesstraße, aber ohne Auto ist man hier verloren.

[@a-r]

@@honkhonk8009 "But [location] is bigger! It's more spread out!" Right, Texas is larger. But the cities and towns _within_ Texas can still be space-efficient (like the video explains), so that they're actually good places to be in and economically sustainable on their own. People don't drive across the state for their commute!

[@orangeyewglad]

@@honkhonk8009 This is the same idiotic viewpoint that tricks morons into thinking we can't have universal single payer healthcare or free public universities "We aren't Europe, we're just too big and *dIvErSe* to have those things even though we have a higher GDP and the majority of fortune 500 companies and billionaires....and honestly I think most people would rather pay less taxes than more taxes so it just doesn't work in this country sorry"

[@jacobkorducki6940]

Thanks for making this! I went to college in a smaller, more rural town in SW Wisconsin and it was definitely wayyyyyy more walkable than the suburban area I was from. It was so nice to have a downtown full of local and unique businesses as opposed to just strip malls of chain restaurants, and the fact that we could all walk to the bars was awesome

[@ds350]

Platteville?

[@timnewman1172]

I live 9 miles outside of a rural town that is also connected to an interstate... it is very walkable, my 86 year old father walks 3 miles every day!

[@timnewman1172]

One of the best things to make these places more connected is having accessability to light rail trains... if there still is some form of rail line nearby that isn't dominated by a Class 1 freight company, chances are good that it is feasable to operate there.

[@ianhomerpura8937]

@@timnewman1172 SEPTA is doing that, recently they reopened the line to Wawa. Hope they extend it all the way to West Chester.

[@youweremymuse]

The whole "I'm from a rural area like most Americans, we need our cars!" Thing is so dumb. I grew up on a farm where the closest store is a gas station an hour walk away. I am fully aware that people living on farms will always need cars. But when people comment stuff like this what they really mean is they live in a suburb that is either super far from it's city center or is connected to a small town. The small town closest to my farm is prewar, and has the bones to be perfectly walkable. Unfortunately all the development is being built a mile away from the city center with noting but grass in between for whatever reason, while the small town center with row shops are left empty

[@matt39581]

also when like 80% of americans live in an urban or suburban area

[@isaac6077]

Sounds like yer butthurt over a correct statement

[@Joesolo13]

@@matt39581 yep. The vast majority of "I'm from a rural area" people are either intentionally lying or clueless about what rural means

[@rileynicholson2322]

For real. People who think they live in rural America usually don't. I grew up on a farm that was about 3 miles from the co-op and town hall, then a 20 minute drive in a highway to the nearest city. Meanwhile people living within the city limits with a big yard think they are living a rural lifestyle when really they are just part of the sprawl.

[@hexidecimark]

They *do* need their cars, of course, there aren't any accessible alternative options for us.

[@stoweboarder720]

I went to school in PA and was amazed by how many towns had an older, dense downtown district with character and potential, and how many of those downtown cores were falling into disrepair while strip malls and sprawl got built. These towns are already economically depressed and they're leaning into infrastructure that will only increase their debt burden. Examples that come to mind are Mifflinburg, Selinsgrove, and Williamsport. State College and Lewisburg are less depressed thanks to universities but are arguably more upsetting because college towns should strive for walkability, and instead they're forcing students into cars to do most errands.

[@agentdiamond9211]

The reason they're denser is probably geography. Pennsylvania is mountainous.

[@lanceforney5321]

@@agentdiamond9211 I don't think that is what stowe is saying. They are developing out in the farm lands and not redeveloping the existing areas within the small towns. This forces all of the amenities out of the area where people live, then making urban sprawl worse because they then build stupid subdivisions around these areas that could never support jobs for the area. Everyone still has to drive 2 to 10 miles to get to the "big box stores", or into town if that makes sense.

[@agentdiamond9211]

@@lanceforney5321 oh, ok

[@papaicebreakerii8180]

It’s not even that most of the time. At least where I live in PA, after industry left is when it went to shit. I mean the development around rural areas isn’t helping but our town’s economies would still be bad. It’s getting better tho

[@everythingleftturns7782]

State College at least has a very sofisticated bus system that takes people anywhere they want by bus. I’d get to bus to and from work or school

[@fireblazenotbulgaria3053]

Tbf a lot of our rural towns actually don’t look all that bad, it’s just that the historic areas in town are slowly rotting away or abandoned already and whatever little business does exist is in once again slowly rotting away road areas with maybe like a Walmart and a barred up gas station that gets robbed semi regularly

[@anna-fleurfarnsworth104]

These videos are making me understand why so many people are such big fans of trains. Thanks for the lovely explanations!

[@maarchalk2840]

I love these examples of good towns in the US. These actually look like towns I'd love to visit if I ever travel to the US

[@bow-tiedengineer4453]

Another cool one I found out about in one of these urban planning videos is Pittman NJ. It's a suburb of Philadelphia, and while it does have a bit of modern sprawl, most of it's older housing are actually on pedestrian paths rather than the roads. I love these late 19th century towns. Early 20th century towns are great, but the late 19th century ones are my favorite.

[@mushroomsteve]

You could also check out Arcata on the northern California coast. There is not one big box store or chain (McDonalds, etc) anywhere in the entire town. Completely walkable, and right on the Pacific ocean.

[@cheef825]

Honestly they're everywhere if you look off the freeways, my hometown Port Townsend WA is a victorian era town with the same original architecture on our main commercial street. Around 20 percent of the land is actually a state park lmao

[@bearcubdaycare]

@@cheef825 This. My impression from the ones that I've been to, is that there are lots of them. But some people never get past the fast food area at the highway exit, and decide "that's what it's like everywhere".

[@_kommandant_3055]

There's an absolute ton of towns like the one in this video or even better in the US. It's why people like myself who live in these towns always wish people would visit more than just the city when coming to the US. But the towns are basically unknown to foreigners or even those who live in the city so it's not surprising that no one comes and visits them. If you want to see a cool example of one in my area search up "Galena Illinois".

[@dog-ez2nu]

Straight off the bat, most of the roads going through Hawley are VERY wide - you could easily fit bike lanes and a very generous sidewalk - probably even space for outside dining. This is actually the advantage US roads have over say, UK roads - because a lot of our urban areas are still built with medieval sized roads wide to enough to at least fit a horse, it's actually harder to retrofit some of them with things like bike lanes or bus lanes. So, you guys have no excuse in that department - squish those roads!

[@mau1353]

I thought the same thing. It’s better than most, but it definitely could be prettier. Cars really still seemed to dominate.

[@laurie7689]

The other issue with that is that many small towns don't want the growth. Making them transit friendly brings in unwanted growth.

[@dafff08]

as someone who has grown up in german high density cities, i find rural towns like these kinda fascinating. away from the hustling and bustling. just a simple life with grounded people and a cozy environment, rather than the hectic life and many shallow people everywhere.

[@royaldakat5833]

Thank you soo much for this video. I grew up in sykesville MD from 2004 to 2017. It is one of the coolest small towns in America, and it was beautiful to see what my childhood was like and to show people the beauty of a real small town!

[@Glenni91N]

It's the same story in Norway when it comes to towns like Hawley, there's several towns at or under 10 000 that have several bus routes, train routes, express boat routes if they're on the coast, etc. The core of the towns are often pretty densely built up, some even have 7-8 floor apartment buildings here and there.And even outside these towns there will be bus lines, and even sidewalks along the road for walking or cycling, even if it just goes to a small village of less than 50 people. And any of this can be miiiiiiiles away from any larger town, or city. If we can do it in modern times, there's absolutely no excuse for small American towns not to build better, too.

[@schnilos5481]

I don’t think you understand how much more complex and expensive it would be to do that in America

[@Glenni91N]

@@schnilos5481 you're kidding right? Norway is for the most part mountains, and otherwise rocky and difficult terrain. Yet, when we build new roads, they often include sidewalks even when between any town or village. And just like the US, towns can be spread faaaaar apart. It's not any more more difficult in the US. People are just unwilling to do anything about it. So don't lecture me about "how I don't understand how difficult that would be in the US" it's not. Y'all are just stuck in your ways.

[@correctionguy7632]

@@schnilos5481 Why would that be less feasible in the US? On a long term basis anyway.

[@honkhonk8009]

The distance from SanFran to Los Angeles is 500km. The distance from Oslo to Stockholm is 400km. You gotta be crazy to think its politically possible for these smaller rural towns to have that type of infrastructural support. Small towns in America are by nature are not very economically productive. It just aint possible without significant federal support.

[@Glenni91N]

@@honkhonk8009 how is any of that relevant? I'm not taking about sidewalks between Los Angeles and San Francisco, I'm talking about connecting smaller towns to other smaller towns that are nearby, building denser and more walkable in towns etc, and you can't even do that for the most part. It's always the same excuse from Americans. "Oh, it's not viable!", But somehow properties with a small store on a giant parking lot, that barely generates enough tax income for that small town is. It's not about making small towns huge players economically. It's about making them able to sustain themselves. Which especially the very spread out ones struggle with. Did you even watch the video? God damn.

[@aerob1033]

Love this. Absolutely no reason even a tiny town can't have a walkable center. And even if you think that every household in a rural area will still need an automobile to get to nearby areas, do you know how financially beneficial it is in places that are generally lower wage-earning to only own *one* car for your household instead of one for each adult?

[@BlueSatoshi]

I'd arguably rephrase that to "only _need_ one car"

[@jrock69]

don't tell people how to live

[@carbrained]

@@jrock69 why not? They clearly aren't trying to learn much by themselves, since we (city folk) have to subsidize their lifestyle.

[@matthewfires1458]

I grew up in a town like this. look up Duncannon, PA or Newport, PA. both have walk able centers but it only has so many jobs for people to work in those areas and not very good paying ones. Once you get outside of the towns limits there is nothing for miles. You need a car.

[@carbrained]

@@matthewfires1458 you might indeed need a car if you choose to live far from work, similar to cities. But for reasons that you've brought up, there must be reliable transit options that AT LEAST connect town centers where jobs are concentrated. I grew up in a small town on the border between Europe and Asia, neck of the woods. I knew people that commuted by bus to the neighboring towns over 20 miles away, and it worked for them. For most purposes, even in that corrupt and broken place a car is not required, why should it be here?

[@timmccabe4654]

As is noted in the video, one of the primary reasons the US has gas station/chain fast food/cigarette store, etc. “strip towns” is that they were built to serve the vehicle traffic that flows through them thanks to the rise of Interstate highways after WW 2 (giving us rural sprawl settlements) and reliance on autos in general (suburban sprawl). With vehicular freedom came access to the large quantities of affordable land on which to build single family home subdivisions. And, given a strong economy and growing population of consumers with good earnings, so was born a new ideal of “living the American dream”. And now we have multiple generations who see this as a norm and don’t know better that other community and commercial district configurations are in many ways preferable. Albeit, not in all ways. And from those multiple generations, we now have government leaders at all levels who also see strip commercial zones and housing sprawl as normal and are not inclined to better regulate and retrofit them. In Europe, the post war years saw a reduced and relatively poorer population and a conservative banking system that didn’t hand out mortgages like penny candy. So continued a primary reliance on the cities and towns that were in place - and now, multiple generations who see such settlements and associated transport infrastructure as the norm - and are not inclined to change it (much). But the bottom line for the US is that rural sprawl costs too much to support and, more importantly, is not environmentally sustainable. You can’t keep indiscriminately building over ecosystem and think that the balance of nature that enables the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat is going to continue to exist for future generations.

[@davidbukowski3463]

This is awesome! I'm from Huntingdon, PA, and it has all the signature aspects of a good rural town. There's so many 'hidden gems' of small towns across the state.

[@StarbornPhoenix]

God, those tiny old American towns are lovely! When I (a European) was visiting friends in Dayton a couple of months ago, we went on a day trip and happened to spend a couple hours in a town called Yellow Springs. Beautiful old settlement that reminds me a lot of what's shown of Hawley here. We decided to take a stroll through the town and had good lunch, checked out a bookshop, as well as some other local businesses. I think it says a lot that my memories of this tiny, 3000-souls town are much more vibrant and positive than my memories of all of Dayton. (Nothing against dayton in particular, but it's got the same "3 blocks of skyscrapers and dozens of miles of suburbia" issue that many American cities have. They are trying though, wish them all the best, heh)

[@davehaggerty3405]

In Yellow Springs there is a nature preserve called Glen Helen. It’s a scenic gorge. That is where the yellow spring is located. The rocks are yellow from the sulphur in the water. People fill their water bottles.

[@ThePcHelperdude]

funny thing about america is that there are 27 different places named Dayton. However it's easy to figure you probably mean Dayton, Ohio and Yellow Springs, Ohio.

[@honkhonk8009]

Damn. First time i heard smthing positive abt America lol

[@LauraJdogmom]

@@davehaggerty3405 John Bryan State Park is right there, too.

[@SaveMoneySavethePlanet]

A lot of people think that they live in rural areas when in fact they don’t. In order to be rural you need to have population density below 600 people/square mile…most people making this claim live in suburbs with larger pop density than that. And let’s get real: most suburbs are a couple miles down the road from 3 key destinations which people go to 80% of the time…sounds pretty ideal for a bus lane or light rail doesn’t it?

[@darthwiizius]

In the UK it's simple, below 9000 people and it's a village and at over it becomes a town.

[@teddysmith8725]

I live in a Phoenix suburb. It's certainly not rural, but the metro area is the 5th largest in America and has a population density of 330 per square mile. I think you underestimate how spread out cities are in America. We also have an extensive bus system in Phoenix (and most other metropolitan areas), but I guess that's beside the point.

[@steemlenn8797]

@@darthwiizius And if you don't pay your dues, you are no longer a city. England is funny.

[@steemlenn8797]

That part is not the problem. The suburb part with the big houses on even bigger lots with huge streets between (and often long ways from one point to the other because cul-da-sacs block ways) - that is the problem. Public tranport is expensive if you only have 1 or 2 people getting on per mile. Not even the building, but the rolling stock is expensive and the several guys on the front that are needed for every line. Just wages means a single line costs somewhere in the 6 figures per month.

[@pennyforyourthots]

@@username8644 that's still kind of reasonable for a bus or train. Especially if you give the bus a designated Lane so that it can bypass traffic, it would probably be like a 20-minute trip versus the 40 minutes that it might take in a car.

[@FreshTillDeath56]

It's so funny seeing memes of Breezewood PA cause, 1- I have fond childhood memories of breezewood on our trip north to our lakehouse in Michigan every year 2- The reason Breezewood is super shop-heavy with wide roads like that is because it's the on-ramp for the Pennsylvania turnpike for most people in Maryland. It's a great place to stop for breakfast or lunch and refuel your car, take a bathroom break, and commit to heading out onto the turnpike for the next 2.5 hours or whatever. That Halo meme is hysterical tho.

[@cosmic9511]

Car dependency has definitely set in culturally in the town I grew up in, but we've also had a lot of great improvements in our downtown in the past years, like redirecting some traffic to be one-way only around the schools and main park and redoing the square to turn parking into better space for pedestrians and local businesses. There's a way to go (we're suffering from a big box grocery store on the edge of town that no one can really walk to as well), but I think there's a lot of potential! Thank you for the video, it's always nice to see coverage on small and rural towns.

[@aspacelex]

I'm living in a literal village, can confirm the basic ideas of good urban planning still apply here.

[@robwhite3241]

Yeah same but I just walk in the middle of the road anyway. When me and my cow go on walks around town we just flip off anyone who's in there car trying to get through, where tf are they going anyway? Theres nothing here

[@aspacelex]

@@robwhite3241 No mate it's so literally a village there's just one road leading up to it that doesn't actually enter it. I was always curious, do cows poop whenever they wanna, like in the middle of a road, or is there some way to control that?

[@robwhite3241]

@@aspacelex You can put a plug in but I'd never do that. Just let it fall wherever.

[@kennethschlegel870]

I want Hawley, unfortunately I live in a clone of the other town (too hard to spell ) and the people here constantly defend THAT as the standard of what's rural and any attempt to be like Hawley is essentially "you want to turn this town into Manhattan" Meanwhile more and more suburban developments are built

[@dandarr5035]

oh boy, the classic "yOu WaNt To TuRn ThIs ToWn InTo MaNhAtTaN" bs... that shit pisses me off so much. I've even heard people say that about the notion of densifying a small city of 70,000 even a little bit. Seems like the number one indicator of terminal car-brain having set in: all nuance on density in a city or town is lost, and even the smallest, crummiest, most gimped downtown/main street is suddenly "too crowded", "too cramped", or my personal favorite, perpetually suffering from "not having enough parking". Holy shit, I'm seriously sick of this country sometimes.

[@CraftsmanOfAwsomenes]

My small town has like one neighborhood that's walkable somewhat around the old town center but has sprawled out so much that it's become more like the first town than Hawley.

[@kennethschlegel870]

@@dandarr5035 it's doubly infuriating because the people opposing it don't live in the part of town that would be the logically choice to densify, instead they've merely ensured when that part fills up with subdivisions they will eventually work their way down to where the people opposing density are

[@linuxman7777]

@@dandarr5035 Walkability is more of a funtion of mixed use than of density, many suburbs are very dense and have dense appartments, but people still have to drive to the big box store

[@isaac6077]

Bud… hes literally argueing for making the place more like manhatten… he is in no way a ruralist nor a primitivist… seethe

[@jaysenscroggins2588]

I love how casual he is playing Vulfpeck music in the background of this video. It was a very pleasant surprise to hear one of my favorite bands music in someone elses video

[@BLUEHOUNDZULU]

Legit question, how do you develop a small town like this from nothing? A lot of the pre-car ones are based arund some sort of natural resource. It could be a river access, or something like coal/iron. Both of these things wouldn't really drive people to move.

[@benharris7358]

The town government really needs to take the lead and designate a main drag area with shared car-pedestrian spaces and biking paths. If you build it they will come. Redesigning a 100m section of road should be within most towns budgets.

[@davidty2006]

In the era of transit. They just built a random station. And then the houses came. And with houses came buisness.

[@thecianinator]

@@benharris7358 "If you build it they will come" has literally never been true and is a catchphrase from a movie about a man magically making amends with his dead father by bankrupting himself

[@benharris7358]

@@thecianinator, ever hear about induced demand? It’s literally the definition of building in advance of demand.

[@thecianinator]

@@benharris7358 yeah I never believed in it. I fundamentally believe that induced demand is something that planners made up to trick out of touch politicians into not supporting stupid infrastructure projects. To me induced demand is just latent demand that either can't or won't be met. Now I've got one for you, ever heard of California City?

[@john3_14-17]

One of the problems with the traditional urban, suburb, exurb, rural classification is that it fails to delineate the difference between a big city, a small town, and just living in the countryside. There is no place for the small town that everyone will agree with on the scale. Some will say it’s urban, others will say it’s rural. This means that there are different definitions for the word ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ used by different people in this section of the net.

[@honkhonk8009]

Yup. This is litterally living in the country. Its impractical to have alot of infrastructure there. The bigger cities though have no excuse

[@asdfghyter]

@@honkhonk8009 Having a lot of infrastructure for a small town is certainly feasible and sustainable, but it is not for a lone house in the middle of nowhere. American style "suburbs" are more like the latter than the former.

[@seraphina985]

@@asdfghyter Doesn't necessarily need a lot a small town of 2.000 would probably be massively improved by even a single bus stop on main street with a route to the nearest city. For all traditional towns of that size that location is easily 5-10 minutes walk away from all destinations in town and surrounded with life and activity. But no many of them demolished that and put 2-3 strip malls or big boxes in the land that used to be occupied by dozens of bespoke local businesses each. It takes a lot of deliberate malplannig and regulation to somehow swell a population of just 2,000 over a land area large enough that the entire city is not walkable. That easily fits within a few hundred metre radius at low-medium density (Nothing bigger than a duplex) let alone if you actually permit some true medium density like low rise apartment blocks near main street.

[@joshuabaker6452]

@@seraphina985 The issue with that bus stop is that roughly half of the potential riders would have to get into their car and drive away from the city to then park somewhere around main street then ride the bus to the city. People like the guy in the video seem to think that rural towns work the same as cities. A city will have large numbers of jobs that don't exist just to serve the residents of said city. Think of large corporate headquarters, manufacturing facilities, etc. These jobs then bring residents to the city which then grows another type of business that exists solely to service those residents. These are the types of businesses he is showing in Hawley. They are restaurants, bars, theatres, etc. These types of businesses are absolutely not self sufficient. They require those other type of jobs to justify their existence since you cant sustain a grocery store, bar, restaurant, doctors office, etc if the only patrons to those businesses are the employees of the businesses themselves. A town like Hawley is only able to exist because of all the people that don't live in Hawley driving their cars to the town to do business at their quaint little downtown area. He uses the next little town down the road as an example without admitting that the neat little walkable downtown would be a desolate wasteland of boarded up old buildings if those people up the road didn't drive in. He also ignores that the small number of people who do live in this walkable area of Hawley also require cars since many things they need are only available at those big box stores down the road and likely do not work in the town itself.

[@jackmorris7755]

@@seraphina985 Don't forget the small-town blight of the dollar store. In southern Ohio there's at least one in every small town. In Lucasville, where I live, has a population of around 2,500 (including the terrible housing developments that the soccer moms call a good place to raise their kids while they day drink,) has three different dollar stores with another about ten minutes away by car, IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, on a rural highway

[@Sebman1113]

I definitely recommend looking into the railroad towns of the Midwest and west as they are both a great example of urbanism and also a part of the history of west word expansion.

[@ianhomerpura8937]

City Beautiful has a great video about these railroad towns.

[@isaac6077]

Glad at least one of you admit that all this git talked about was urban shit

[@lars1588]

Or the even-older canal towns and river towns that popped up in Indiana and Ohio that were even more dense and walkable than the already-dense-and-walkable railroad towns.

[@MrBirdnose]

A lot of those towns are dying because, with farm consolidation and manufacturing jobs leaving, there's really no reason for them to exist anymore.

[@griffinwagner8577]

Ngl, this is exactly the channel I have been looking for. Love your vids, thanks for the great content

[@phild8095]

I'm retired in small town Iowa. Two evenings ago while walking home 3/4 mile from a boy scout meeting I saw my new neighbor dragging a fallen tree branch. I asked him if he needed a chain saw and he said he was going to buy one, I said but would you like to borrow one in eight minutes? I walked three more blocks home, got my saw, gasoline and oil and went back to his home. In ten minutes everything was cut up, put away and we were saying goodnight. Maybe tonight the dog and I will walk a mile to get an ice cream for both of us. 98% of the streets have sidewalks, even the US numbered highway through town has sidewalks. We are on a 70 mile bike trail that connects to other trails. We have places to fish, play sports, a small town campground, several small restaurants, no chain restaurants, professionals including lawyers, doctors, dentists, electricians, plumbers, barbers, hairdressers, photographers, screen printers, some small manufacturing, an small office park, a grocery store, a greenhouse, a used car lot, a school system that is ranked in the top 2% of the US and the top 5% of Iowa. Elderly people walk around to get their exercise knowing that they are safe. There is very little litter on the streets. Local politics is polite and respected. Not only do we not have homeless defecating on the street, but people pick up the dog crap while walking their dogs. Our parks are clean and well maintained, our internet is fast, our utilities consistent, and our water supply always passes state and federal guidelines. Our local infrastructure, roads, water and sewer is well maintained. Our public safety, police, fire and ambulance services are well staffed and respected. 15 years ago when the river topped is banks we didn't get the national guard, we got ourselves and our neighbors filling sandbags along the edge of the flood plain to keep the rest of the town dry and it was a great party. Since that time we have added some berms along that flood plain to minimize the sandbagging required. There is some Mass Transit available for the disabled, and the people here take care of their neighbors and will bring them into the city if needed. And that's my small town story for today.

[@brandonm1708]

I recently visited Banff, Canada, a tourist town (it’s inside a national park) where the majority of people need to drive to get there. Yet most of the town consists of a mix of medium density housing, and the center of the town has this incredible looking pedestrian friendly street, where the cars always give right of way to pedestrians. They also have a multiple block fully pedestrian street in the summer, that they convert back to a road when it gets cold. There were also bikes everywhere. It’s been one of my first great examples that I’ve been to of a lively place to live and shop, and it came from a cold, small, tourist town. It really shows how easy it is to make places pedestrian friendly when a town that has everything working against it can be friendly to people

[@BS-vx8dg]

I've never been there Brandon; it sounds wonderful. But do you think that this town could be this way without the monies brought in by over a million tourists annually?

[@brandonm1708]

@@BS-vx8dg fair point, I assume that the amount of tourists makes it so they have the money to build such nice areas. My point was more that they have the space, or capacity to support pedestrianization, which is also the main purpose of the video. Not all towns have the money to instantly rebuild their centers this way, but it is something that can be supported spatially, and doesn’t need to stay so car-centric

[@BS-vx8dg]

@@brandonm1708 Yeah, I think that most towns, however they are now, simply would not have the financial resources to do the kind of change needed.

[@AssBlasster]

Banff sounds like a lot of the small mountain resort towns in Idaho, like McCall. Also like rich ski towns in Colorado that build this people friendly infrastructure to impress the rich skiers rather than making it a walkable city for visitors.

[@brandonm1708]

@@BS-vx8dg making infrastructure for people is cheaper than infrastructure for cars. It’s when you want to make it much more nice for people that it becomes expensive

[@tachyon7179]

I'm a life-long resident of New Jersey and have many family members in Upstate NY. Traveling back and forth between home and my relatives, I'm constantly passing through towns very much like Hawley, PA and I've always been struck by how lively and beautiful they are (I also want to claw my eyes out whenever I see the requisite abandoned train station and think about how much phenomenal infrastructure has been purposefully destroyed or left to decay). So glad to see someone highlighting these exceptional small towns! I would also note that at a time when the cost of living is rising to absurd levels, many of these places are still relatively affordable. Around Owego and Binghamton on the NY/PA border, there are 2 bedroom apartments for under $1k/month and entire, beautifully preserved pre-war, pre-car housese for ~$200k. You could probably also take a decent shot at living car free in some of these towns. Outside of the interstates that wind around them, the roads in these areas often have such low levels of car traffic that you can walk/ride a bike on the shoulder and even when a pickup truck speeds past you at 60+mph they've got so much room to go around you, you don't really notice it. Anyway I love these places and this is a great video. Keep up the awesome work!

[@katsenberg3036]

I've lived in Albany all my life and just moved near-ish to Binghamton. Cars definitely feel more necessary here, but it doesn't have to be that way.

[@tachyon7179]

@@katsenberg3036 oh yeah I mean the area is still car centric/ car dependent. I just meant the fact that some of the towns are pretty compact and have necessities within walking/biking distance coupled with low traffic gives me the impression it might be possible to do the absolute minimum without too much car use

[@isfahantour5675]

Hello my good friend...have you ever traveled to Isfahan?! Isfahan is famous for half the world..Isfahan is a must see

[@tachyon7179]

@@isfahantour5675 I have not but it sure sounds cool!

[@jamescozzens9423]

I knew that was Breezewood as soon as I saw the gateway sign. It brought back so many memories of passing through on my way to my Grandparents house. Good times. Thanks for bringing them back. Also love your videos.

[@dahorn100011]

This is a really interesting take. Having lots of small town like Hawley with small villages (clusters of houses) on the main routes between them would make things like bus lines much more viable option. Instead of drunk driving you get the bus to the nearest downtown, have you fill and go home. When you require a car to do anything, someone who is unable or barred from driving is really stuck. Especially if alcohol is involved.

[@ttopero]

This could be a great jumping off point for describing the difference between urban living (making one’s living, livelihood & income from a source not associated with the land one lives on) vs rural (remoteness, distance from services and neighbors, vehicle dependency) to illustrate that most people living in small cities, towns or villages are still living an urban, if not suburban lifestyle. The size of the town doesn’t dictate rural or urban, but how it’s lived & how it’s financially supported.

[@laurie7689]

I'm not sure about that. Some of the top industries in my small city of around 33,000 people are primarily land-based types: pit mining, cement manufacturing, sod production, etc. The railroad tracks that run through my city are used for the movement of freight and the trains stop daily to load materials from the mines. Our city is considered to be semi-rural as we have farmlands within our borders growing sod, nursery trees and nursey flowers, etc. Quite a few greenhouses. We're also over 30 minutes away from our State's 2nd largest city, so we're not really even in the metro area. A lot of our homes are suburban single family homes interspersed with apartments, trailer parks, and farmhouses set on acreage. Nothing here is walkable except in the very oldest part, but the city was never really meant to be a city. It was originally all land owned by some cotton mill back in the 1950's who also owned and operated the worker's housing and the company stores. It got built up and became a town and then city. Only the area around the original structures was made walkable, but most of those were destroyed in a tornado about a decade after they were built. People bought land from the original owners and built their own homes. Nothing was really planned at the outset. The city actually struggled to find and acquire the land to build the new high school when it outgrew the old one.

[@ttopero]

@@laurie7689 I knew someone would comment about the natural resource extraction industries & non-farm agriculture so I left that out. It certainly muddies the issue, but I argue that those employees lead a more (sub)urban lifestyle in terms of going to an employer location rather than using their own land and/or resources to produce an income. I see mining & these other jobs similarly to factory jobs in many small cities nd towns that are on the outskirts or a modest drive. It might *feel* rural due to the remoteness of a metro, but put it in or adjacent to the metro nd it’d be very similar to the burbs already there. There’s just more distance & fewer people in these “rural” ‘burbs. Walkability is nice but not a requirement for (sub)urban living.

[@jokermage]

I grew up in a New England college town that was largely saved from sprawl when I was growing up. The next town over not so much. Years later my parents moved to a small Missouri town. When I visited them I was surprised. The highway sprawl in the Missouri town looked like the sprawl in town next to my hometown. Same box stores and restaurant chains. The gas stations and oil change shops were regional brands but otherwise similar in layout and appearance. You could transplant sprawl from one rural NA town to another and it would just look like some stores were rebranded. So much for unique character.

[@petrfedor1851]

That sounds terribly depresing to me. Every village in 10km radius has it´s own character, sometimes more pronounce than othertimes but still.

[@memesthatmakeyouwannadie3133]

I worked in a small town in MO for a bit. It had a downtown, but most of it was boarded up or empty. What businesses there were were spread up and down the main highway over several miles and you had to have a car to navigate it.

[@caucasiafrosephfrostar6239]

I actually grew up in a small rural area. I lived in the "big city" in the area it had bout 6,000 people. You had to go about an 80 miles to get to anything much larger than that, and 20 miles to get to something roughly the same size. It is BECAUSE I grew up in that town that I understand how walkable a city can be. My home town had everything one would need, it was totally possible (if you wanted) to never leave that town and even get a college degree thanks to the community college. All of this was within about 3 miles max. There was a small bus service in town and bike path that ran north to south right off the downtown. As a kid/young adult I didn't even see the point of owning a car because everything I needed was within walking and biking distance. I know several friends that didn't get driver's licenses until well into their 20s because there really was no need. And this wasn't even an affluent community or anything, it was poor. Really poor, if a town like that can manage tobe walkable and bikable then anything can.

[@toastmantoasty]

In a town my parents live near, on the intersection of main street and a major avenue that marks the 'downtown' area, there's this hexagonal gazebo. It doesn't have curbs. It sits at street level. Because it was built back when cars were little more than toys for the business owners and such, and your only options for cross-town mobility were horse or walking. The town sat on a rail line, but that closed down shortly after WW2. And with it, the once happy town died a slow and painful death as businesses moved to the city. The gazebo is now surrounded by empty storefronts and a couple of overgrown lots. The businesses that are still around are those that provide a more or less essential service, like the gas station, or are niche enough to attract out-of-towners. It's saddening.

[@K0sm]

I live in France and there is also a real issue with our rail transportation network being centralized around Paris. This become really anoying if you want to travel/commute from west to east and you live in the center of France. There are also huge inequalities of services if you leave the big economic centers (Paris region, Strasbourg, Lyon and Marseille). We even give a name to this geograpical odity : "the empty diagonal".

[@petrfedor1851]

Basicly same in Czechia.

[@lars1588]

I've heard about that area before. Just about every country has a less-populated section that the government and peoplei n big cities don't care about. It's pretty unfortunate.

[@kirkginoabolafia3650]

Wallace, Idaho has

[@markbajek2541]

Wallace is an interesting town in the shadow of the hwy.

[@compdude100]

They actually made their entire downtown a historic district to prevent I-90 from being built straight through it, and instead the freeway got built more on the edge of town.

[@kirkginoabolafia3650]

@@compdude100 Can't believe I forgot to say that. Thank you.

[@richsit]

wasn't expecting so much Vulfpeck in a rural development video but I'm here for it. great vid mate.

[@bakubread9308]

I live in Northwest NJ, and it's EXACTLY like this. One moment you're in gas station and fast food central, maybe a Lowes or a Home Depot nearby, and suddenly you drive five minutes down the road and its a walkable much older town lined with local shops and restaurants. I live RIGHT outside of a town just like Hawley.

[@naturallyherb]

Always a great day when you upload something new! I think small European towns that have decent transit access are places to look towards. For instance, Innsbruck with about 150,000 people has several tram lines and over 300 intercity trains a day. Meanwhile London Ontario has 400,000 people, no rapid transit of any kind, and only a handful of trains every day. Not Just Bikes covers this so well.

[@yukko_parra]

300 intercity trains? Sydney Australia has... uhh at most 100 a day, for 5mil people. and the petrol cost for driving is nearly the same price as a ticket to the same place, if there is service.

[@naturallyherb]

@@yukko_parra That was mentioned in one of the most recent Not Just Bikes videos. I think he also meant 300 intercity and regional trains a day, that people use them to commute because Innsbruck and many other European towns are so people friendly and very walkable. I think that the power that America has, the very big downside to that is that it is exporting the toxic trend of car dependent development to so many countries, including almost all English speaking countries: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand especially. High speed rail would absolutely work for the Melbourne-Albury-Canberra-Sydney corridor, as well as Sydney-Brisbane, and so many other corridors. But instead of building trains, they build highways and car dependent sprawl, largely because of American car culture influence.

[@CharlesWillisBonsai]

I don't think 150,000 people counts as a small town. That's a city. A small town in the USA is like 10,000 people and might have a small bus line.

[@bubba842]

@@CharlesWillisBonsai I live on a city In Canada that only had 65,000 people. It's definitely a city. It has all the infrastructure and amenities that a city has.

[@josharden6793]

Currently studying abroad in Italy. I am living in a very nice rural village where everything is so walkable that the nearest grocery store or restaurant will never take more than five minutes to get to; often they are even within the same buildings as apartments. There is a cafe literally right below my apartment. and the community is very close knit. It's also a medieval town where nearly everything is made of stone. And there is a local train station easily accessible.

[@robotnikkkk001]

=DUDE,RURAL WALKABLE TOWN DOES MEAN THAT PEOPLE LIVING THERE CANNOT AFFORD TO HAVE OWN HOUSE OR CAR SO THEY'RE ACTUALLY ON THE VERGE OF POVERTY AND HUGELY DEPENDENT ON GOVERNMENT AS THEY CANNOT CARE FOR THEMSELVES ........THERE'S LOTS OF WALKABLE RURAL TOWNS IN 3RD WORLD COUNTRIES LIKE RUSSIA OR AFRICA,SO IT'S A BAD TREND

[@josharden6793]

@@robotnikkkk001 bro calm down with your narrow views. I love how you people think "government dependency" is some terrible thing while depending on things cars and single family homes (both are insanely inefficient and are also being largely funded by politicians being bribed by big corporations with so much money and power and influence) so people like you can be brainwashed into thinking walkable towns are some broke third world shithole nightmare meant for bums waiting to be "spoiled by big guvment" as you seem to look at it. Go to western Europe and check out the shit load of rural walkable towns like the one I'm in which aren't filled with bums; hell, I haven't even really seen almost any in my three weeks of living here. It's a lot better than several American rural towns (like the ones in the video) which often aren't walkable at all. But while you're at it, why don't you abolish the fire department and tell people to stop burning their homes down? Or advocate for shutting off the water supply and tell people to find their own water?

[@Lvcy1]

​@@robotnikkkk001 Yep! You're right! I'm from Brazil, that's true.

[@punkrockzoologist9449]

This reminds me of a lot of rural towns in Australia. At least the ones like where I live, that are on the outskirts of greater metro areas. The idea of dense housing still gives me the screaming heeby-jeebies, I want to live somewhere where my neighbours can't see into my house, but this is all still good ideas.

[@davidshepherd265]

Too right. Watching the part where he showed Wallenpaupack I thought to myself, "This could be any country town in regional QLD". Just a generic strip on the highway. That said we do have a few exceptions, such as say Parkes or Longreach.

[@Jarethenator]

There are absolutely great examples out there for small towns with low populations that have just as great service as the big ones. These are great examples. That said, the building of these towns and the retroactive refitting of towns that were built either off from the catering to reststops and other highway/roadside amenities and/or from vast tracts of low population, private land would be quite a challenge. It's the "yes, there is a better way, but there's already something here" problem. Add on the issue of whether something is incorporated yet or not, and you have a whole other hurdle, _and then_ there's the investment issue...it may be hard in some regions to convince landowners, the state, etc to invest into what they might only see as a pitstop or one big backyard for the more out of the way homes. Ultimately, past all the funding concerns and such, this is a marketing issue. There's a big "this is just the way it is," "we get by just fine," and "there's not enough folks here to make that worth it anyways" way of thinking in this matter. The investment into the small town and rural areas (which do not always constitute the same thing, but often overlap) can well fail in some cases; but, overall, would be a great boost to the viability of living in, I'd dare say, the majority of these areas. Getting this across may be better delivered through showing the benefits to the individual and the businesses of the region, though, as opposed to the chiding/deriding of folks who, more often than not, couldn't afford to make any decisions on the matter in the first place or simply have not lived any experience to the contrary. Some people see car dependance as mobility freedom and some people see even a small downtown as an encroachment of the city. Even if they may be fundamentally misunderstanding the situation, if the approach is coming from a place of any animosity, it is unlikely to get very far in these communities. Some folks may remain stubborn no matter how well you explain the upsides to these developments, but you would still have a greater rate of success with telegraphing targeted, personal benefits than with dismissal of whatever these communities may currently feel is better for their community...whether they are right or not.

[@feyelsbells7839]

well said!

[@universovoid8721]

This struck at the heart for me. I live in central, stereotypical ex urban rural Pennsylvania and I've seen so many places like this. I agree with the message you're sending.

[@michaelgalligan1187]

Lewisburg, PA has a university that my mom went to. She said she had everything she needed in walking distance. The downtown area there is very cute and it’s a rural town.

[@Drstrange3000]

It is one of the nicer towns I've been to. It has a lively downtown, nice area with plenty of shops and things to do. Things aren't as spread out. I live 20 mins from there and go a lot for various appointments. I wouldn't mind living there at all.

[@the.abhiram.r]

i was recently in hawley for labor day weekend and it was surprisingly different from the surrounding towns, it was a nice change of pace for us

[@masonlynch1793]

My town is exactly like Hawley, PA except it has slowly turned into suburbia (which annoys me beyond belief). The biggest difference is that our rail line has been decommissioned, torn up and replaced with a bike trail. And the train station has become a ice cream stand (they just restored it and modernized it (ac, heat, electricity, etc)

[@jnkerpol4211]

Keep on grinding, you've been popping off lately, fast growth 👏.

[@tristanridley1601]

We urbanists just don't waste our time arguing how to fix those when even our urban megacity cores are still broken. Also, there is a huge difference between being a farmer or forest hermit vs living in a rural TOWN. Farmers are gonna need a car. Townies might want one, so rural towns need to be built as a hybrid: dense enough to walk but also with parking. The good news is that the low total population means hybrid can work. It's our cities that need to be made car-free and suburbs that need to be completely remade/demolished.

[@I_am_somebody_1234]

Agree 100% Suburbs are the most retarded way of City planning. They need to go

[@honkhonk8009]

Suburbs have merit. I personally love the freedom having my own plot of land gives. But urbanized pedestrianized towns are also great.

[@tristanridley1601]

@@honkhonk8009 Not as we do them now. It's very common to have less freedom over your land uses in a North American suburb than a random owned apartment. It's not suburbs that give you that freedom, but ownership, and less/no condo/homeowners association rules.

[@EnjoyFirefighting]

Hawley is a great example for what I experienced in northern Norway, hundreds of miles north of the polar circle: places with like 3,000 to 3,500 inhabitants were an actual town which had anything from shops and restaurants to small malls, primary school to upper secondary school, doctor's offices, gym and multipurpose halls, bus terminal and an airport At least the downtown area is usually walkable, even though many places are designed car-centric these days. But at least you aren't depending on having a car up there in Norway, even if you live outside the town. Places with 10,000 inhabitants seemed like a large town already

[@anonymousanonymity2815]

As someone who travels through Breezewood pretty regularly I never realized it had this level of infamy, I have to take the Breezewood defenders side on it not being really representative of the sprawl issue, it’s not a town. It is in fact a rest stop off the Lincoln highway and the pa turnpike.

[@nathonizamboni875]

I live outside a village and bike into it frequently. It's a 20min bike ride (each way), and the town is small enough that there is a grocery store, hardware store, drug store, bank, and much more all within two 500ft blocks. The whole thing takes about as long as a suburban shopping trip, but I bike 5 miles (8km) 1/2 along a fully separated bike path and 1/2 along country roads where I might encounter two or three cars. One thing I really appreciate about the smaller stores is that It takes much less time to grab whatever I need and be on my way. A big box store takes half an hour to get one thing, and a little local store takes 5-10 mins. It's great. Never realized how nice this all was until I got into urbanism and realized what a gem my village is compared to basically everywhere else in the USA.

[@saoirseislive]

Hancock Maryland is very easy to bike in, most people have jobs in Hagerstown and the C&O canal bike path goes right there.

[@dittokyu]

I grew up in a small village in rural Ontario, Canada. The nearby towns do have walkable downtowns but often they were decimated when the towns began to sprawl into stroads and couldn't compete with things like Walmart. The nearest train station is a 40min drive from where I grew up, there are no buses, and no bike infrastructure. In contrast, I moved to a rural town in South Korea where the whole town is walkable and has every store and service you'd need for your everyday life. There is regular and punctual bus service to the large regional town, a nearby city, other towns/villages, and even a direct bus into Seoul. Currently the nearest train/subway station is about a 40min bus ride away, but a new subway line is being built through the large town which is a 15min bus ride away. My Korean coworkers commuted from cities and would ask me how I could live in such a small place, but compared to NA, that small grape-farming Korean town is practically a small city. Now I live in a dense city close to Seoul, but even then it's walkable, there are countless buses and multiple subway lines through the area. My coworker and her husband, who have lived in this city their entire adult lives, don't own and never have owned a car. NA is just...so inconvenient.

[@driley4381]

Rural Georgia is absolutely loaded with beautiful small towns like this, mostly built along or near rail lines (that once served a robust passenger rail network in GA but is now only Norfolk Southern freight.) These places could and should be thriving and lively.

[@simplesimon8255]

What are some towns?

[@halgreene9770]

Got to say, Wilkes-Barre up in Luzerne County matches this description to the letter. The downtown has recently been revitalized, so in addition to the walkability it’s super nice. But, everything outside of the downtown is disconnected.

[@evanwalker4672]

I love your stuff, really shedding light onto topics the vast majority of us never think about at all here in the US.

[@Thomas63r2]

I'll have to check out your videos for more of your picks and pans of different small towns.

[@RyanMinardovic]

Other rural towns that do not suck: Travelers Rest, SC Tryon, NC Landrum, SC Greer, SC Fountain Inn, SC Tryon, NC reminds me of the example you used (Hawley, PA). A very charming town! It is sort of between Spartanburg, Greenville, and Asheville. The greater Greenville SC area is great. Sure, we have some of those wide, open, run-down places as well. We also have walkable towns and cities, with lots to do, and places to live.

[@janvanhoyk8375]

Thanks for being a balanced and actually pragmatic content creator on this subject. Some "urbanists" tend to be very dogmatic, top-down, and insistent that everyone should live in cities... not realistic! Thank you for the "town" and "village" appreciation, but also mentioning the fact that not everyone can have a place out in the wilderness. We need forests, farmland, towns, and large cities all in the right balance, and to have a non-stupid built environment.