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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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I'd argue it's not as extreme as you might think it is. I live just down the road from a town that only exists and grows, because it's next to a major interstate. Population less than 17,000 but I swear there's enough fast food places that the whole population could go out to eat at the same time. They all complain about not being able to find help yet there's always at least one fast food place under construction. There's a suburban sized mall sitting empty because all the businesses moved to strip malls. Two Super Walmart buildings; one of them is a megachurch now. There's empty strip malls too but they keep building more. There's almost zero effort put into efficient traffic flow. Then you go past the interstate retail hellscape and it's a weird mix of people in houses that look like upper middle class suburbanites, and single wide trailers whose owners look like they're one car repair expense on their Kia from being homeless.
The town I grew up in is like that, too.
Just stop anywhere that has a bunch of restaurants listed on the interstate signs, it's the same story in all of them. Faceless corporations dumping food places where they can.
And that doesn't even get into the TIF scam all these towns are using. One local town declared an area full of well-kept lawyers' offices as "blighted" and was going to let the lawyers use TIF to
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The I-78 photo there looks even worse IMHO
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Is anyone surprised?
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Like most countries there are small parts of the U.S. that are ugly. But majority of the U.S. is absolutely beautiful.
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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.
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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
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This is addressed in the first ~20 seconds of the video.
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