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That same photo of Breezewood PA that everyone uses.
Yes the US is ugly but that photo is of an extremely unique situation. This is the only place in a 2000-mile-long freeway where there are traffic lights, so of course businesses have taken advantage of that. It's not a town, it's basically a truck stop.
Breezewood is just an extreme example of places like it all over the country. Theres at least two areas like that within 15 minutes of me and they're fucking hellscapes
That type of place just is the place everywhere in the south. Outside of the major cities, every single main stretch of "stroad" looks like that. And if you want to buy something from a physical store, it's attached to a stroad.
This makes Breezewood is one of the worst case examples of this kind of development. When explaining something it helps to use an extreme example, so I'm not saying people shouldn't use the photo, but it's worth keeping the perspective that that image is literally as bad as it gets.
I will say it is the worst place to be a pedestrian that I have personally experienced. Four lanes of constant heavy traffic with no sidewalks or pedestrian crossings.
The photo was taken near 39.998760,-78.242210 if you want to look it up on your map of choice.
I think that image is more meant to represent a feeling then an actual place, the feeling of an overwhelming amount of cars, lights, signs, and wires. And it's slightly exadurated in comparison to most cases to emphasize it
Is anyone surprised?
Like most countries there are small parts of the U.S. that are ugly. But majority of the U.S. is absolutely beautiful.
Most of the beautiful places in the US are either places nobody lives, or Northeastern cities (and mostly rich parts, even if the ugly parts aren't due to car dependency.) Now, the US isn't densely populated, so "places nobody lives" is a lot. But there's still a problem when so much of the built environment is ugly
Most of the US population centers (which is different than where most people live) are an ugly stroad. Obviously there's natural beauty, and the US national parks program and the national forest service are amazing at preserving this, but most of the built US is ugly, by area.
This is addressed in the first ~20 seconds of the video.