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UncleCustard t1_j2t7n1s wrote

I don't fully agree with the globe. But I agree the needs also aren't met of the people. No high speed internet, some towns don't have a anyone you can easily call to deal with basic issues (trash pickup, taxes, etc). The one thing I will say, while everyone was head over heals about issues with the T (as it should be). Some towns don't have an Uber, taxi, public bus, or anyone reasonable transportation outside their own. Literally 0 options.

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commentsOnPizza t1_j2u7sib wrote

I think one issue that doesn't get talked a lot is that rural areas make it hard to offer a modern standard of living.

Ok, a place wants high speed internet, but the company is going to have to lay 500-1,000 feet of wiring per home instead of 20-50 feet. That's going to cost a lot more, but people think it's unfair for things to cost more. Trash pickup: in a rural area, it's going to mean a lot more miles driven per resident which increases time and fuel usage. Someone to call about issues: if the town has only 1,000 people, how many staffers can they have to take your calls? If you want a staff of 5 people, that's basically $500,000/year including benefits and office space, possibly more. Assuming around 300-400 households, that would be $1,250-$1,667 per household in taxes needed.

The US already subsidizes fuel which makes driving $3,000/year cheaper. The US puts a universal service fee (it'll likely be around 9% of your wireless bill) on telecommunications to pour billions into rural phone and internet service - a 9% tax to fund rural telecom. We mandate that the postal service deliver to all addresses for the same price - so urban people pay much higher postal rates and higher prices for goods shipped to them since the USPS needs to charge extra for their shipping to subsidize rural delivery.

I agree that the needs of rural people often aren't being met, but it's often due to the fact that rural life is expensive and the more advanced we get as a society, the more heavily we'll need to subsidize rural life to keep it up to a modern standard.

150 years ago, rural life wasn't missing out on much. You couldn't have a cathedral or a theater, but there wasn't electricity or internet or trash pickup. Today, there's so much stuff that just costs a lot more to offer rural (and suburban) areas.

Part of this might be solved by reconstituting counties or creating regional authorities. Instead of having each town deal with tax collection, maybe the county should do that. That way, they can hire people who know what they're doing and spread that cost among hundreds of thousands of people instead of between a few thousand people. I know that Massachusetts has a big history of independent towns with self-rule and this doesn't need to throw that away, but it probably makes sense to start sharing certain administrative costs. Each town trying to run its own website, tax collection, etc. seems a bit much in many cases. If you're Mount Washington, you have 36 families in your town and 5 people for emergency services (police/fire/etc.). You have an animal inspector, building inspector, Board of Assessors, Board of Health, Tax Collector, Town Clerk, Town Office Manager, Treasurer, Tree Warden, Webmaster, Electrical Inspector, etc. I'd have to guess that most of these are part-time jobs that they do on the side of another job. It probably makes a lot more sense to have a larger body (like a county) handle a lot of that. You're not going to be able to offer a full-time person to call about tax stuff in a place with 36 families.

Other things are harder to overcome. It's simply going to cost more money to provide trash pickup in rural areas. It's going to be harder to convince doctors to want to live/work in rural areas where there might not be enough patients to keep them busy enough - and lead to lower earnings.

Rural life is going to have trade-offs and some of those are going to get worse over time. A lot of infrastructure just becomes really expensive when supporting rural areas and we don't just want to subside off the land anymore - we want all the advancements of the past 150 years of human progress.

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itsgreater9000 t1_j2umzmt wrote

I've always wondered: many rural communities in NE (and honestly some not-so-rural communities) have shared school districts. Why not just go ahead and merge the towns? Or, at least, offer all of their services together.

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UncleCustard t1_j2utner wrote

As someone who grew up in a town with 3 schools coming to our schools. Trust me. You don't wanna merge these towns together. You'd be stretching resources thin and sometimes those towns can take an hour to get to. One kid in my school got picked up at 5:45 for a 7:39 start time.

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itsgreater9000 t1_j2v3xvr wrote

while I understand the situation, I wouldn't apply it to every school district equally. But that, to me, sounds like a reasonable argument for delaying the start time and ending the day a bit later. I am mostly thinking of schools like Hampshire Regional, which have 5 towns that flow into one school and they are definitely far apart. I think there might be a compromise that could be had about minimizing bus travel time for school kids (or better yet, get some friggin train system out there that might be a good way to help speed up the transit! think about it: public train systems for bringing kids to school :D). That might be redirecting towns to larger/closer places (e.g. instead of Southampton kids being brought to Hampshire Regional in Westhampton, send them to Westfield or Northampton, whichever is closer, and set up the regional high school in Chesterfield). Although the reality is that when everyone is so spaced out, the minimum travel distance is going to hurt somebody somewhere. But the current school systems are mostly local towns just saying "hey, let's merge together!" without real thought about what the best regional merges would be. Just what local towns feel like at some point in time.

That being said, eastern mass has some of this too (sadly). The METCO program requires most of the kids being taken from Boston to the outer suburbs to get a 5:30am start, which was terrible for those kids. I honestly felt bad because they were definitely trying to stay awake, but just couldn't some days.

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wgc123 t1_j2tonhp wrote

Uber is a private company so really doesn’t count. Taxis are a private use of government granted monopoly so might, depending on where the shortage is caused.

Bus or other public service is firmly in the hands of local government

I don’t know enough about rural MA but in other places an underlying issue is lack of a town center. If it’s entirely rural, there’s just no way to effectively provide transit. However even the smallest towns can have a center, a cluster of destinations or higher density living. Could that be a pre-requisite?

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a_Malevolent_Bee t1_j2uoe1q wrote

I moved to the North Berkshires and while I literally have to drive 20 minutes to get just a loaf of bread, at least I don't have to listen to traffic. It seems to me the local governments get what they pay for and like it this way.

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UncleCustard t1_j2u4an9 wrote

I know Uber is a private company. But it would help the situation. I could be content with a private option instead of nothing. As far as the pre requisite goes, I understand why there is a lack of funding. But maybe we could offer some financial or tax reduction for those with no options. Rural MA is a different life than Springfield, Worcester and Boston. That's what I think the article is getting at. We need a different type of Assisi stance. Representation is the wrong word. It's what we get out of our representation that needs to be different.

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GreatAndPowerfulNixy t1_j2v64ze wrote

It's true that there aren't many options in a lot of places, but PVTA and BRTA are both damn good for how small their budgets are. Massachusetts' regional transit authorities are really impressive.

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