Posted on 10/28/2007 3:20:06 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Shouldn’t the colors on that map be reversed?
My point is that most ‘highway funding’ goes for most anything but highways.
Secession has not always been offensive to me...
I’ve seen roads in other states that are way more gnarly than a lot of roads in Texas...
So I am ok with a few bumps and chipped windshields...Nothing is perfect...I just don’t want this “near paradise” to be ruined by companies and former elected officials making money off of this, and not make it any better...
“Standing pat is not an option!”
Without illegals here in Houston, traffic would decrease signifigantly, and at least 50% of all accidents would never occur.
I disagree with your statement, FRiend. The white voter base is forced to move further into the fringes in order to maintain their standard of living, keep their families safe, and avoid the icky ghetto people that ruin the quality of life for everybody.
I have nothing against people who want to live in the country. What I object to is people who want to live in the country but who insist on dragging the city with them, plowing under zillions of acres of beautiful farm and wilderness land and replacing them with ugly housing developments, strip malls, and concrete deserts. If people would move to the country and live a country lifestyle, that would be fine, but to destroy the little natural beauty we have left in the name of sprawl is a waste and a crime.
The cycle of sprawl is well-established. Like a plague of locusts, white-flighters abandon their city to the ferals, descending upon some country town where the people are too poor to turn down the developers' money. They then transform the town into a wasteland of concrete, with acres and acres of cheaply-built "homes", big-box retailers, and fast-food joints held together by rivers of asphalt. They then raise one generation of alienated kids in this environment of isolation, sell their now-shabby homes to those who can afford them, then abandon the whole thing in place. As they leave, the suburb is taken over by feral humans, completing the transformation of a once-beautiful country town into a slum. The rings of decaying 1950s-1990s suburbs around every major city in America are the result. Meanwhile, the kids of the white-flighters, now adults, are invading the next little country town, 20 miles further out, to begin the process again.
Read Aristotle. Man is a social animal, meant to live in cities, not isolated strip-burgs connected by freeways. The very word "civilization" is based upon "civitas"; no cities, no civilization. Suburban sprawl is bad for the human race because it goes against these core ideas of civilization. It is also ruining the land and bankrupting the public coffers.
Fortunately, it is also economically unsustainable over the long term. Fifty years hence, God willing, the suburbs will be gone, the countrysides will once again be the sole province of farmers, ranchers, and wild animals, and the money we as a society now waste on running away from the problems of living together will instead be spent on solving those problems.
Don’t ask me. The entire concept is based on just about everybody commuting between city jobs and suburban homes, a traffic flow pattern that doesn’t really exist anymore.
In Jacksonville, the light rail “system” I’m most familiar with, it winds up costing something like $20 per passenger mile, besides burning more fuel per passenger mile than transporting the same number of people in a car. Quite often it runs completely empty. Very bizarre.
OTOH, in Sacramento it works fairly well, but provides only limited alternatives to auto transport.
What about people who already lived in the country? Do you think they like the idea of *civilization creeping towards them?
An unfortunate aspect is living in country but, having to commute to cities to carry on your business (we aren’t ranchers although we are farmers in a sense). You can’t wait to get home.
It’s definitely a conundrum.
The Detroit ‘People Mover’ light rail is a total failure. Runs a loop in downtown only, around the abandoned buildings. 80% Fed built and maintained.
Here in the DC metro area, people sprawl all the way to the regional shooting ranges—then lobby to shut them down because they are too loud, same with small airports.
As I said, I have no problem with people who choose country life over city life. What I object to is the rape of the landscape by city people who move to the country while insisting upon city conveniences. If people want to get away from the smelly crowds, let them accept well water, septic tanks, general stores, clotheslines, and slow driving on two-lane roads in return.
In retrospect, the smart thing to do would have been to change land-use laws back during the ‘50s, when the Interstates were built. Instead of allowing white-flighters to infest and consume the towns on the periphery of the cities using the Interstates, we should have made it a federal mandate that a fifty-mile-wide belt around the corporate limits of each Interstate-served city be zoned “No New Contstruction”. New construction and renovation building permits would have been limited to only those living in the greenbelts already, and all land in the greenbelt could be used only for genuine farming, ranching, and wildlife preserve. That would have prevented the hollowing-out of our cities while preserving the logistical and national security benefits of the Interstate system.
As it is, the only limit to Sprawl is the retail price of gasoline. (The cost of new roads is no limit; the Sprawlsters will insist that the rest of us pay for their big, expensive commuter freeways.) As soon as gasoline reaches the $6-$10/gal. level, the Sprawl will begin to die. Once the era of Cheap Gas is over, people will return to the cities. My guess is that the abandoned sprawlscapes will become “surface mines” to be stripped of usable materials and returned to nature by city-based teams of reclamation workers. The debuilding of Sprawl will be a lucrative industry for future generations.
Precisely what I mean. They want to escape the city, but they insist on bringing “the city” with them. It’s just insane.
Seems like a *rat in a cage* scenario.
Since most of the people who work downtown sit in a cubicle all day, the solution might be for them to work from home, limiting the amount of cars that commute each day.
Before the red/blue map became so iconic (to the point of labelling certain regions “red-state America”— or, more amusingly, “Jesusland”, would it were so), the incumbent (or the candidate from the ineligible incumbent’s party) was always indicated by blue and the challenger by red regardless of party.
It seems simple enough to me: if one wants the conveniences of living in a city (24-hour grocery, dry cleaning, access to entertainment), one must be prepared to accept the limitations of city life (high-rise housing, noise level, occasional contact with undesirables). If one wants the benefits of country living (detached housing, quiet, solitide), one should be prepared to live with the limitations of country life (no shopping, services, or entertainment destinations).
In the case of Austin, it’s too late. People move there because they “love Austin”, but they refuse to live with the limitations and inconveniences that are part of Austin life. They want the charm, quirkiness, and natural beauty of Austin without giving up the fast-food lifestyle of Dallas or Houston. The result: suburbanization. The entire county north of 183 is being strip-mined, bulldozed, and plowed under already in order to build locust-hive suburbs. In the process of “loving Austin”, its residents are destroying everything that made it special; ten years from now, the Austin area will be just another version of Dallas/Fort Worth, with strip malls and subdivisions stretching from the city limits to Pflugerville and beyond. Twenty years from now it’ll be a decaying core surrounded by a ring of shabby suburban slums. Meanwhile, the nouveaux riche locust plague will be strip-mining and plowing under Lampasas. Forget the creeks, the wildflowers, the red-tailed hawks, the little farms and ranches make way for an endless desert of Tyvek dwelling-boxes, six-car garages, and a SuperMegaHyper-Mart on every corner.
Unless, of course, gas goes up to $10 a gallon, or becomes rationed, or becomes “for national defense and emergency use only”.
Which it will, sooner or later.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.