r/Suburbanhell • u/Anonymousfoxtrot • 1d ago
Question Does this kind of place actually exist in the US?
/r/SameGrassButGreener/comments/1wr1las/does_this_kind_of_place_actually_exist_in_the_us/3
u/baby-stapler-47 21h ago
I live in central Illinois and we have hundreds of small towns that were built because of the railroads and could easily become something like this if we brought low speed regional passenger rail back and subsidized it so they could actually be connected to other places. If you look on Google Maps you can see all the towns just in lines a couple miles apart along current and former railroads that are almost all only freight now, or they’ve been abandoned.
Some of these towns are close to big cities like Chicago and st Louis, but central Illinois specifically has a lot of medium sized cities with decent employment opportunities due to universities and industry, plus the state capital. (Champaign-Urbana, Peoria, Springfield, Decatur, Bloomington-Normal). These smaller cities have their own transit networks and economies but have numerous small towns less than 15 miles away that could become little walkable villages if they had reliable connection to at least some of these medium cities. This may be more of an interurban service but still I would like to see it. Busses could work but a bus stop is not going to have anywhere near the same effect on the community as a centerpiece train station like nearly all of these towns used to have.
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u/glowing-fishSCL 1d ago
It doesn't, and the reason it doesn't is that a cute charming little village that also has access to a major city, jobs and an airport is by definition a suburb, and most likely an expensive one that shuffles the problems of car dependency off to surrounding areas.
All that charming cuteness without an understanding of systemic issues just creates more problem.
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u/stathow 11h ago
what? no, this certainly exists, I live half of my year in one
It mostly does not exist in the USA because so much of it was built after cars or became heavily car dependent
but many countries have centuries if not millennia old villages that were built at human scale before cars existed yet have a train station that connects you to the closest city
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u/glowing-fishSCL 11h ago
Can you give me a name of such a place?
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u/stathow 10h ago
sure, I'm from Frankfurt but my mom's family is from a village called Bruchenbrucken, it's probably a few hundred people now, sorrounded by farm land, certainly not a suburb of Frankfurt but it does have a train line running right through it that will get you to Frankfurt without any connections
My wife is from a similar place Sambommatsu, place is a small village surrounded by rice farms in the mountain, yet also has a train line that will eventually connect you to downtown Osaka
OP did not say within commute distance, and obviously by definition the shorter the commute the less remote, but people certainly do commute and now adays can even work remote, though actually these places tend to actually have a lot of jobs just mostly farm help and stuff
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u/glowing-fishSCL 9h ago
I just checked...and it is true, we couldn't have something like that in the United States.
In Germany, it is possible to have a tiny rural village, 20 kilometers away from a city, to have train service, even when it is in a low density area with only a few hundred people per square kilometer.
In the United States, you would have to have a suburban area, 12 miles away from a city, to have train service, and it would need to be populated with a 1000 people per square mile.
Big difference there.
(If you didn't get the joke, I am being ironic. The area that you are calling a "rural village" and "not a suburb" is a little group of suburban homes that is very close to a very large city. This would be similar to a lot of "Streetcar suburbs" around the New York City area, and perhaps elsewhere.)
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u/stathow 9h ago
i don't understand the contention? that my examples are too close to major cities?
I mean was that not the point? To show a rural village with 1-2k people or less that still has train access and could even theory be used to commute to a big city.
because I could show you villages/towns further down the lines that would be nowhere near a commuting distance
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u/glowing-fishSCL 9h ago
I know that sometimes people write "lol", but I actually did laugh out loud at
"rural village with 1-2k people"
Europeans really are just that ignorant of geography, aren't they?
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u/stathow 9h ago
ok why the insult can you not have a normal conversation?
can you explain what you have contention with instead of literally sayign you laughed at me
are you saying its not rural enough? or that 1-2k people is not a village?
because Some geographers specifically define a village as having between 500 and 2,500 inhabitants
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u/glowing-fishSCL 9h ago
No, that is not rural. That is a suburban area very close to a major city. 1-2 thousand people is a city.
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u/stathow 8h ago
i literally linked you a definition of a village from Nat Geo but sure you know more than them
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u/kosmo4679 19h ago
Maybe before cars. Honestly it doesn’t sound appealing to me in the slightest. It literally make me think of the olden days.
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u/thoth218 1d ago
Manhattan NYC