Comic Strips

Look dude it's awesome that you like your rural town and the big truck you probably take to grab a big mac from the nearest McDonald's and all and there is nothing wrong with you personally liking that, but I like big cities. I like having everything I need, plenty of diverse entertainment and new friends to make, all within a 15 minute walk from me; being able to hop on a bike, tram or train to get anywhere further than that; the livelihood of living amongst other walking, talking, living, breathing humans; living amongst green spaces that people actually use and that I don't have to personally maintain, that exist for a reason other than being a non-location that you pass through and don't really think about on your way from a to b. I currently can't have that at a reasonable quality without either having a damn near million dollar salary, moving several states away from my friends and family, and/ or just leaving the country altogether.

Nobody is saying towns that need cars to get around can't exist, we are saying that walkable cities and towns are actually really good for our society and small business and the fucking tax revenue keeping your beloved money-pit suburbs and rural towns afloat. We are saying that there should be more places where humans come before cars, made available for the people that want them; just as badly as you want your free space between every home; rather than owning a home and a car in a bleak patchwork of corn fields, manicured bluegrass, and crumbling asphalt being the only real option for the vast majority of the country.

Heck, I'm honestly not even asking for big cities or any crazy amount of density. Americans have a hard time conceptualizing this before they travel and see it for themselves, god knows I did, but I'm not talking Manhattan. Literally just take any historical district of 1-over-1 or 3-over-1 mixed-use buildings in an American town (usually all that remains is a single block but they do still dot the country and are beloved places of commerce and leisure), expand that by a radius of 10 or so blocks, slap a tram, a couple buses, plenty of bike lanes, and a pedestrian-only zone or two in the middle of it, and boom you have yourself the lively and functional cross between a suburban town and a densely populated city that worked in America long before everyone was convinced they needed a car, and has adapted well to cars in Europe.

You see, we deliberately killed our cities when we flattened huge swaths of them to build freeways, parking lots, and arterial roads through them in order for whites to move somewhere that blacks were priced and redlined out of. We cut off our nose to spite our face and as a result, a lot of the issues we see in this country today are symptomatic of that era of government subsidized suburbanization.

This is not the natural order of things, we did not get here by suburbia and rural towns with their car-dependent lifestyles simply being superior in some way to cities and moderately dense towns, and we won't go back by forcing people out of their homes and into tenements and taking their cars away. We simply have to fix what was destroyed and give people a choice and if they want to, they will move on their own. Many of those people will likely find that a car just isn't worth the investment anymore. I would bet my life savings that a good chunk of people would choose that over the suburban sprawl that is currently the default.