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I can comprehend this better than the parking wasteland in the city. Here the land was cheap.
Where even the train stations are literally surrounded by highways and parking lots. The amount of valuable easily reachable space wasted for parking infrastructure blows my mind.
OP doesn’t understand how “the country” works, and thinks people are driving out of towns/cities to eat here instead of understanding this is likely a closer drive for rural people than traveling to a town/city.
I’d have assumed this was a pit stop on a long road between two towns/cities. Like, it’s not someplace you drive to by itself, it’s someplace you stop at while driving to somewhere else.
Yeah, the only weird thing with the picture is that in Europe it would be a gas station.
That’s the misunderstanding right there…that space isnt THAT valuable. The US is far more spread out that even the least populated areas of the EU. We take up all that space for parking lots because we have it to spare.
This is also why public transport doesnt make economic or environmental sense for most of the US, we dont have a dense enough population for it replace cars.
Well then you don’t understand how humans work. No offense.
But I ain’t going to take the train if I have to walk five miles across a barren wasteland of concrete across multiple highways just to get to the train station.
That land IS extremely valuable that’s why the properties in the rare areas where mixed zoning without parking lot requirements have such a high value.
The us doesn’t build like this because it’s desired, it’s build this way because it is required by law. And it makes the areas unliveable for humans.
Oh and by the way, it ruins the neighborhood financially too.
Having to build wide and long streets just to accommodate for the bonkers amount of parking space comes with massive infrastructure cost.
That simple answer has undeniable emotional appeal, but it’s wrong. The Great Lakes region has a higher population density than Spain, for example, yet Spain has public transport, and we don’t.
What? Eating grade f meat on a road trip and blasting diarrhea all over a soybean field?
Just returning the soybeans to their habitat
Nope, care to explain?
The US being so car-centric that it’s profitable to put a taco bell in the middle of a very rural area because people will drive to go there.
Do you not know how rural areas work?
It might be 5-10 miles to the nearest neighbor. A single fast food place “in the middle of nowhere” is likely just in a center location to all those rural people. Which would mean people might only have to drive 15 minutes for fast food compared to an hour to the nearest place. So this saves gas.
Have you never visited actual rural areas before?
No, they haven’t
So many people never even drive the 20 minutes it takes to get into the semi rural, let alone deep enough to understand something like OPs pic
Looking at the pic again, there’s even a lamp post for another lot between between where the picture is taken and the taco bell, and it looks like it’s from an elevated position.
Probably a hotel next to an interstate and there’s more civilization not in frame.
Like, I guess OPs problem is there’s just a silo (maybe water tower?) in the background and not a city?
It’s like the opposite of that reddit repost where the camera angle makes it look like urban hell, but it was really just a couple gas stations and a fast food place with nothing else for miles except greenery.
We get it, the joke is that Europeans can’t imagine this lack of density
We do have plenty of American fast food restaurants that are barely accessible by other means than cars.
We could put things close together so we don’t have to drive everywhere, but why would we do that when we can force everyone to buy a car? Good ole climate change will take care of that soon enough.
