This is clarifying of rural life. Thank you!
I think you make a lot of assumptions of what I believe here.
Large family owned farms constitute about half of total farm area. It’s not really clear to me what qualifies as “family owned” here: I imagine most still have a number of workers.
I’m also not sure if farms are the primary driver of rural economies. They certainly occupy most of the area. Rural areas appear to take the form of vast swaths of nothing but farms surrounding tiny suburb-density towns. I think there’s a good chance that without the subsidy and with more direct infrastructure burden, the tiny towns (which seem to be most of the rural population) would significantly shrink in population.
That said, I admit (electric? micro?) cars or motorcycles seem like a perfectly reasonable transport system for the remaining rural population. Farmers might need higher clearance for field roads. PRT would likely work for small towns and inter-town transport, but not for farms, and wouldn’t have been possible until recently. If highways are much cheaper with smaller vehicles and without trucks, I imagine rail would be a good alternative for farmers to ship produce.
The main point I was making is that rural areas have significantly more road, utility cost, and transport cost per capita. Owning a car is expensive, and unnecessary in many cities.
You’re not wrong that NYC is a bit insane (and I don’t think “a hundredth” is out of the question in many cities), but the added value seems to generally outweigh the increased waste of most cities even today. Pollution can be mitigated with incentives, and I’d be surprised if rural areas don’t pollute more per capita.
Jerry-rigging everything is a compromise you don’t need to make in many cities! I’d argue that that sort of thing is just a market inefficiency, and actually more wasteful. If you wouldn’t jerry-rig in a city, it’s probably because paying someone is actually a better deal overall, ignoring regulations.
No, just that the following doesn’t make sense if people have more kids as a result:
I suppose this is fuzzy, but you could also argue no one you know would be alive in such a counterfactual because all their genes and experiences would be different as well.
This is pretty much pedantry, but you could’ve phrased it just as “there’s been a huge reduction in childhood death”.