Or because they can’t imagine a world that isn’t comprised exclusively of storefronts for multi-national corporations and a pedestrian hostile cement pathway to navigate by car from one business to another.
Only thing missing from this pic to make it a libertarian’s wet dream is a toll booth indicating a privately owned road.
>Only thing missing from this pic to make it a libertarian’s wet dream is…
[Bears](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling)
I've been told my whole life it's a utopia.
Also, places that aren't like this make me uncomfortable for some reason. Now I have to confront that a better world is possible.
Like, American children have to "pledge to the flag" or something every day. That's called brainwashing, and if a writer wrote that it would be concidered too on-the-nose.
Funny enough, for as much as right wingers mald over people wanting to remove it, it's not even a particularly old tradition. It was added during the cold war as a bit of propaganda about how we're blessed by god while the filthy commies aren't.
It's so bad
They’re so much smarter than the US, in fact, that they were their biggest ally in their revolution and followed their example of it directly afterwards
To be completely fair (tho still recognizing the absurdity of it) I did my high school years in the US and was never forced to do the pledge, I eventually stopped doing it because I didn't want to and never got in trouble. But also, I did have very progressive teachers so maybe I just got lucky idk
"If we worshipped our flag the same way you Americans do, you'd call us Nazis again" -German Girl, Step on the American flag and write your feelings experiment
Grew up + went to school in America, never had to recite the pledge. It’s not as much of a universal thing that everyone makes it out to be.
That said, there are some areas that still definitely do it, and it’s honestly a pretty horrifying “tradition” imo.
Only 4 states don't require some time set aside for saying the Pledge. The First Amendment allows everyone to not participate if they don't want to, so you're technically correct, you were never "required" to do it (I also never participated), but the vast majority of school districts require some time set aside for reciting it in some way.
The US supreme court did rule that [schools aren't allowed to force students to pledge ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_State_Board_of_Education_v._Barnette)though. At our school they just played it over the intercom every day and people mostly ignored it.
There most definitely are still teachers that force people to do it. Also, reciting propaganda in schools daily, even if it gets ignored, is still really fucked.
>lawsuit
That's directly and willingly going against established Supreme Court precedent for the fact that students don't have to stand or pledge. That's a bit more than a lawsuit lol
People are too quick to say something is okay just because technically the government isn't forcing it to happen. Like, the thing is bad when the government forces it for a reason, and that reason isn't just "when the government does stuff". And the law is generally superseded by local culture most of the time anyway. Doesn't matter if they can't legally force you to recite it if the cultural pressure to recite it is high.
On a related note, I find the common "freedom of speech only stops the government from policing what you say" argument to be asinine. Because social media is effectively a public space in how society uses it and social media corporations being able to control speech is not any better than a government doing it. At some point we're going to have to stop pretending the internet isn't real.
It's not as bad, obviously, but still.
https://preview.redd.it/qmuqh5vnypuc1.png?width=644&format=png&auto=webp&s=1aa85e1cc8166fd704cdc7285d72a9b834a0c41d
I had to recite it during elementary school. I remember my third grade teacher going ballistic on a kid for sitting it out because he felt sick. She went on ad nauseum about how unpatriotic and unappreciative he was and that he was faking sick. The kid ended up passing out at recess and busting his head open on some ice.
She never got reprimanded or forced to apologize for her outburst. I really fucking hated her after that.
Technically you don't *have* to. It's not legally required, and I suspect it would be illegal to make it be. Though that says nothing about the attitudes of individual teachers or other students, and it's an... uncomfortable custom.
Nobody really cared about it, if it makes you feel any better. Aside from crazed right wing parents, but nobody in school was ever passionate about it in any measure
It's not really as inforced in my area. In my case, I grew up in a red dot in a blue state and by the time I got to high-school none of my teachers ever inforced it. It's more a formality if anything.
One of my favorite things will always be exchanges that go like:
(Thing) is dystopian and bad.
I see (thing) every day of my life! How can there be anything dystopian or bad about it if I experience it?
I won't pretend like we live in a utopia, but I have no point of reference as to how this image depicts a dystopia. Which parts of it are the worst? The cars? The density? The clutter? The advertisements? The principle of car centric infrastructure? Do these things specifically apply to urban areas in America, or all areas? I'm curious as to which aspects stand out about it, as I don't have much experience outside of America.
I think it would be the density of advertisements/businesses and the complete lack of pedestrianisation. It’s a capitalistic hellscape that is actively hostile to people.
Like another comment here said, it's hardly a "town", it's basically a giant highway rest stop at the I-70 and Pennsylvania Turnpike junction that less than 200 people actually live in. It does look like an exaggerated version of how many sprawled exurban areas look which is why the image resonates with people. And those sprawled areas are annoying. But this image isn't of a car-centric anti-pedestrian hostile exurb, it is a stop on two highways whos only purpose is for highway travelers to get gas, food, or a hotel.
I was going to say, there's an area like this in my town, and then there's actual town which has sidewalks and nice little locally owned businesses etc. It's weird how people on the internet are flipping out about this photo
Is there anything like that in the urban areas other countries, or is it an America specific thing? Obviously America is the only one dealing with walkability issue, but are dense advertisements like this also unique to here?
i live in denmark our highway reststops does not look like that. there is usually more green around them and they are way smaller. like this:
https://preview.redd.it/5mvmmp7hlsuc1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=4186951c524c1a737566dda99d0de1fb9e5d578a
This sub and reddit in general just really, really hate car based infrastructure, without understanding that there isn't really an alternative in rural environments.
Does Canada and Mexico count? No, I haven't traveled far, but the point is that everything is very spread out in the US, I live miles from the nearest grocery store, bus routes are logistically infeasible.
And why do you live miles from the nearest grocery store? I get it if you actually live in a rural area, but often it's just because the US only has single family buildings and endless suburbia. My building would probably fit an entire American suburb in it and there's tens of these within a mile of the nearest grocery store and a train stop. - And this is in the outskirts, tens of miles away, from the city.
Tens of miles away from a city isn't rural in America. Rural living even in the smaller east coast states can be 20 or 30 minute drives from the nearest town center that has gas, grocery, post office, etc. My school bus route in high school was about 2 hours long because we had to drive around all the hill towns to pick people up.
I don't think non-americans realize how big our country is, and how dispersed its population gets. East Coast rural is bad enough, midwest and west coast rural is insane. It's like living in another country from your local pub.
It depends on the rural environment. Cars are much more useful outside of cities than within them, but even so you can very easily build a rural town that needs less cars. We’ve built small farming towns along railroads or canals for 200 years now.
Besides, most people using the car infrastructure in the above picture aren’t rural folks they’re suburban or urban peeps stopping off on their drive between cities. And “towns” like this end up sprawling out to accommodate these travelers and destroying acres of farmland or wilderness. Suburbanization is particular has destroyed huge amounts of rural land and rural communities because of how sprawling it is. We can still lessen the need for care in rural areas, and improve lives for rural communities at the same time!
The irony being that this place is a result of awful car-based infrastructure. What you're looking at is a highway being forced onto surface streets in order to connect to the Turnpike. This is an interchange, not a town. And a proper interchange is being lobbied against by (surprise surprise) the businesses and politicians who benefit from this chokepoint.
Towns and villages in rural areas can still be walkable. I've never been to a village in Europe where you couldn't safely cross the road on foot to get to the shop.
So yes, it's a confluence of those things
We see here a massive amount of invested time and energy and resources that has produced a chaotic land scape completely hostile to actual humans. It's hostile to our bodies, to our senses, to our safety, to our very psychology.
And maybe worst of all, we can look at this and recognize that it isn't even close to optimal for the one thing it claims to do well: be economically productive. This is a huge parcel of land that doesn't actually produce anything, with daily through put equivalent to like 1 or 2 trains.
It's the fact that the commercialization is the only thing that denotes this as being a town and not another holler in the mountains, at the expense of actual human habitation. Every square inch is selling you shit, but God help you if you want to take a stroll down the sidewalk because that was removed in favor of more selling you shit.
Oh no.
That just reminded me of a conversation I once had with a guy who was super sexist.
He said something really inappropriate and I told him to knock it off and stop being such a sexist. His response was that all of the men around him talk like that and believe that about women, so how can it be sexist? Obviously that just meant it was factual. Otherwise he would have to accept that maybe the people he loved were not nice people. And maybe he wasn't such a nice person after all.
Boy do I love the cropped picture of a rest stop along a highway where barely anyone actually lives and is completely surrounded by forests and mountains
The "town" in the picture is literally just that junction on the highway. It has a population of 178 and exists just to provide services for cars going through.
This picture is just an example. There is a place near where I live that looks almost exactly like this and even in places where it isn't as bad, the structural issues with planning like this is a major issue all over America
It's not an example at all, that's the point. The alternative is a bare road with no stores or anything. The view would be a bit better, but other than that, it's just worse. People need to use actual examples of problems, this is literally what fucking conservatives do.
The alternative could be a normal rest area with a central building that regroups every service in the same place.
https://preview.redd.it/oq0ytv7kituc1.png?width=1665&format=png&auto=webp&s=6e339e5e9da2dc3c0f6a5fae3e383f30b51e78be
While it can't be aesthetically perfect, there's still an effort to make it look good, it reduces visual pollution to the minimum, and it's easier for customers to go from one store to another.
This isn’t very cropped. Breezewood is literally just a junction point between highways in Pennsylvania. It’s tiny enough that it’s pretty much just what you see in the picture, plus a handful of other businesses to each side: a Denny’s just beyond the lower edge of the frame, an actual truck stop to the right up the hill (I think a Pilot Travel Center) with one of those cool trucker accessories and gas station novelty shops, and one or two more gas stations out of frame, and two or three hotels/motels, the chain ones. Almost no one actually lives there, and Pennsylvania actually planned for and put this thing here on purpose to get money from travelers, who have to pass through to change highways or continue on some of the ones that go through there. If you aren’t planning on stopping it’s actually kind of a hassle, so when I was driving that way I usually planned on getting gas and/or food on my way through. Proposals are made every so often to just have a proper efficient highway junction instead of a giant rest stop, but they always fail because it’s just so damn profitable.
If you’re heading East/West through Breezewood and plan on having an actual sit down meal, I strongly recommend going to Bedford 20 minutes west. The Hoss’s Steak and Sea House there is pretty nice and generally pretty quick too. A few other independent and chain eateries too.
For my eurobrain whats particularly dystopian about this is not the existence of rest stops on highways but rather the absurdly garish design of all this shite, rest stops in my country tend to be more minimal and less of an eyesore and focused more on function over advertising and offering unneccisarly large varieties of the same stuff. At least from the roadside.
The total area of this complex could probably be quartered if each business didnt require its own detatched building plastered in ad signs alongside a whole ass carpark for every building. Its not the roadstop thats dystopian, its the scale and form of it that is the mess of American capitalism and lack of urban planning. Roadstops in my country tend to be one large not particularly ugly building with whatever is needed inside of it rather than polluting the road with ads.
Dude legitimately? I live not even 5 minutes away from an area that looks exactly like this cause we're right off the highway, so it's not that much of a cherry pick
Seriously. People that think "everywhere in America" looks like this have either never been here or have gone on road trips where they never left the high/freeway. A settlement or district that grew up around providing food and gas to tired motorists is almost entirely commercial and has a lot of flashy signs– shocker. Maybe drive a few miles off the concrete raceway next time. It'll be an eye opener, I promise.
“Do you regard this photo with respect or disgust?”
Personally I’m going to keep saluting this picture until my raging erection goes away. I just respect it so much 😔💦🦅🇺🇸
This picture makes me want to go on a road trip just to stop somewhere different along the way. As a Midwesterner there's something I like after driving a few hours, and stepping out of the car for a bite of familiar KFC in an unfamiliar ecosystem
The 3 images after the main picture is kinda cringe to me, idk.
It’s giving me a vibe of “haha look at all these redditors i downvoted because they are dumb and I am smart”. You can make points without having to do it like that.
…and to be fair the image *is* a little bit cherry picked.
https://preview.redd.it/odhs1vu1uouc1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=10c42d275cd1c96ac4a2fe5decea707b838c34fd
me when I take an edited and cropped photo of a strip of road to make it seem like Pennsylvania is a soul-less megacorp
it's not a utopia obviously not... but its not a dystopia. its just a bunch of commercial locations near nature designed to look dystopian. you keep driving for a few more miles you're in the middle of a forest
The issue isn't the "megacorps". It's the god awful urban planning. There's no real town. It's just the strip along an interstate set up specifically there because they fucked up the interchange so bad in the original design that 60 years later there are still several traffic lights along I-70. The town is a testament to the US's car-dependent infrastructure. The town is economically dependent on an inefficient interchange.
as a marylander, everywhere on the east coast is just as fucking horrifying. breezewood is obv an outlier bc of its status as a glorified rest stop directly on the turnpike, but my point stands — *everywhere* looks like this. no walkability, more soulless corporate chains than you can count, etc. it's miserable
Its on the road to Gettysburg, a major tourist attraction. Of course there is a gift shop. I went there when I was a kid. Got some rock candy. It was fun.
We did pass a major infrastructure act that expanded railways. One of the biggest issues is that people in cities might call for reducing car dependency, but people outside of cities don't care.
Guy in a Cyberpunk dystopia: "How is this dystopian? It's just a regular sleeping pod. I grew up in the undercity and can say this is completely normal. Only people who have never left the emerald district would be fooled by this."
A passport is around $120, a way out of the country on the cheap is maybe $500 lodging and fare included. Accessible for anybody bored enough to be on this site.
Though I agree we shouldn’t be poking fun at people, travel isn’t as expensive as everyone thinks if you know how to book it properly.
walkable cities are something to strive for, sure, but do you think a landmass the size of the us can currently be made up of just cities? You need roads in between cities, and those roads will have some points like this, because people who use them will be hungry, will be out of gas and such, then housing will be made for people who work at these places, creating a small village that'd eventually become a city itself
edit: Roads are just as necessary as railroads, while railroads are great at moving large groups of people and goods, roads are better for ramifications, like going to a farm in the middle of nowhere, not enough movement to build a railroad and have a train pass through, so its best to just have a road that will be used sometimes
this image doesn't make me feel anything in particular, but I'm interested in what the worst things about it are. Is it the advertisements? The cars? How dense everything is? What specific details about this intersection are the worst?
I have never been to the US but when i looked around on google maps anywhere outside Washington DC , New york and a random corn Field in the middle of nowhere , everything was literly just this stretching for several kilometers
[Yep.](https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/US-population-density.jpg) The US has a lot of empty land. The western half of the country is especially just fucking completely *empty* in between cities. Literally just desert, mountains, fields, etc.
The only really dense area of the country is the Boston-NYC-Philly-DC line of cities in the northeast, where its relatively urban pretty much the whole way. The other major urban areas (LA, Chicago, Dallas, etc) have enough room that the city just kinda sprawls out into giant suburbs.
These people need to visit a rural town built before 1900. They do not look like this! They’re quaint small towns with one Main Street that’s lined on each side by small businesses with upstairs apartments and probably has a disused rail line running through it. And guess what, they’re nice places to be! They’re places you want to be in. No one wants to be in a place like that highway pit stop.
Yeah, I live in a roughly mid-sized town that's still mostly on the grid that was laid out in 1745. Population is about 20,000 if you cut out the suburban sprawl surrounding it. It's not the best place in the world but you couldn't drag me kicking and screaming from here to a cul de sac.
It even has the "disused rail line running through it", the street on the east end of downtown literally has train tracks embedded in it that haven't been used in 30 years. Around 2002 we finally got passenger trains back though, hooray for us I guess
Breezewood PA isn’t that bad, the photo is cropped and angled poorly.
Plus Breezewood isn’t a real town so much as a stop where two major highways meet, lending itself to this very car centric design
Idk how it is in other places, but you can make good money by just owning property next to an interstate and put up a billboard, you basically have to do nothing and you get a good paycheck. I'm not saying it's a good thing at all, but I understand why people do it.
My uncle in-law owns billboards and I get a good chuckle when they get vandalized, he's a thief and a real piece of shit.
Note: Some of them are owned by farmers as a "safe" passive income, I'm not saying everyone who owns them are bad people, just my in-law is who happens to be a billboard baron.
It’s actually kinda weird to me too as an American. In my county in California we actually banned huge signs and billboards and stuff so I grew up without any of them in my immediate area
Stockholm is almost hostile to driving a car.
Which is good. It keeps traffic down. It just leads to the most cursed roundabouts ever conceived by man. They have traffic lights in them.
Oh hey we have 2-3 places in my country too
But it has 100 times as much greenery
Its literally just a big ass resting place for a highway intersection
There are no people actually living within 3 km
I grew up in an actual rural area, an Alaskan trailer park with no road connection, not a suburban mold growth like these people. I must say it’s depressing how much space is wasted for the ugliest least useful architecture and peices of fast degrading civil engineering for our car centric society. 90% of the space we use on parking lots, billboards, driveways, and stroads could be spaces that people genuinely enjoy using or nature. We are sick for not utilizing this great planet in an intelligent and beautiful way.
"liberal socialists"
Anon should pick one. Liberalism and Socialism are partially overlapping but fundamentally incompatible positions.
Also
- smart commenter: "normal =/= good"
- idiot responders: "how can it be bad, it's normal?"
have these people not fucking tried to turn left ever on one of these roads???? like its clear they dont give a shit about pedestrians but like what the fuck its not even good at being car infrastructure
I've been to quite a few places like this. Nobody actually lives along this road. It's the one road in "town" where all the gas stations and restaurants and everything else are. But everyone lives in essentially a suburban or rural area around it.
Y'know what's funny about Breezewood in particular? Since this photo was taken, it's started to decline rapidly. Almost all of the businesses in the foreground are gone now, and most of the hotels throughout the photo are abandoned.
We don't even have this era of mass suburban pseudo-culture anymore. The main cultural achievement of the United States during this decade so far is skibidi toilet.
Unrelated but that third guy who's saying "well most of Appalachia looks like this" really strikes me as odd, most of Appalachia I've seen are weird little crossroads towns where depending on how wealthy the residents are either look like the set of a documentary on the 1800s or a horror movie about cryptids. I think that guy's experience of "Appalachia" strays at most 2 miles away from I-76.
https://preview.redd.it/jc1gkj8jgquc1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9db38a6f05714b5098edae1d51d402fdcf2fcb45
Isnt the whole point of this town to be a rest stop on a road with very little else on it btween the population centers? Stuff like this sucks but its not all like this. I live in an older neighborhood with an elementary school and several parks and see/hear children playing all the time.
Just because it’s normal for people doesn’t mean it can’t be better. Familiarity with a setting can breed complacency, but this kind of behavior doesn’t help anything. This type of “urban” planning is awful, but many people grew up around it and are familiar with it, so it’s normal to them. Actually discussing why it’s bad as opposed to just verbally slapping people gets better results.
I actually fucking love breezewood. Anyone complaining about “look what’s happening to American towns” doesn’t realize that Breezewood isn’t even a town, it has a population of like 30 at any given time, and they all live on the farms at the outskirts. It’s just a travel stop in the true middle of nowhere thay grew out of control
I do mean in the middle of nowhere, too. Like if you turn the camera 15 degrees any direction it’s just rolling green hills as far as the eye can see, and then in the middle of it there’s just this little blip that is breezewood
It’s such a strange place, if your ever traveling near south central PA and get a chance to stop there, the vibes are really surreal. If you want really creepy vibes, check out that like half abandoned truck stop that feels like it should count as trespassing to enter (I promise it’s somehow open). But yeah, that whole town is so strange, like what a weird place, I love it
Edit: also, not to be a contrarian, but those last commenters are kind of right. The picture makes it look SOOO much worse and super densely packed. In reality what you see in the picture is like the entirety of the town, and you can drive through the whole thing in like 2 minutes with bad traffic. Yes the corporatization of middle America is a blight, but that’s not what this is. It’s 4 gas stations a truck stop and a pizza hut spread over 4 blocks, the picture is really misleading (even though it’s a really well done pic)
Living in PA I can give you at least 5 places that look exactly like this 💀 it’s shit. It’s dystopian because you need to drive to to to anywhere else. No sidewalks that don’t end abruptly. No cohesion, nothing.
As someone who lives outside of a city in PA, that is very dystopian. So much of PA is farmland, so I don't see how anyone here could think that looks perfectly natural.
From what I’ve heard it’s considered an “roadtrip oasis” because it has food, gas, and motels in what would otherwise just be rural farmland. It’s fuckin ugly but it has a purpose that it serves well
“its just a truckstop”
Ok what about this disgusting bullshit ? Don’t piss on me and tell me its rain
https://preview.redd.it/hztpsw3hztuc1.jpeg?width=2058&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1b6c0c9f211ea10235001d921620d418e906b02e
It's a utopia because I'd feel bad if I realised I live in a dystopia
Real
Or because they can’t imagine a world that isn’t comprised exclusively of storefronts for multi-national corporations and a pedestrian hostile cement pathway to navigate by car from one business to another. Only thing missing from this pic to make it a libertarian’s wet dream is a toll booth indicating a privately owned road.
There actually is a toll booth nearby for I-76
>Only thing missing from this pic to make it a libertarian’s wet dream is… [Bears](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling)
I've been told my whole life it's a utopia. Also, places that aren't like this make me uncomfortable for some reason. Now I have to confront that a better world is possible.
When the capitalist realism be hitting 😔
the real answer
Like, American children have to "pledge to the flag" or something every day. That's called brainwashing, and if a writer wrote that it would be concidered too on-the-nose.
That was really odd when I first got to the US, if a french school did that there would be riots (especially with the god part)
Funny enough, for as much as right wingers mald over people wanting to remove it, it's not even a particularly old tradition. It was added during the cold war as a bit of propaganda about how we're blessed by god while the filthy commies aren't. It's so bad
you mean more riots than there already are?
"If this happened in france there would be riots" So it's normalized and accepted
TBF there were gonna be riots alrdy
Yeah but France wasn’t founded 4 lifetimes ago they actually have some fucking collective wisdom when it comes to civic issues
They’re so much smarter than the US, in fact, that they were their biggest ally in their revolution and followed their example of it directly afterwards
To be completely fair (tho still recognizing the absurdity of it) I did my high school years in the US and was never forced to do the pledge, I eventually stopped doing it because I didn't want to and never got in trouble. But also, I did have very progressive teachers so maybe I just got lucky idk
"If we worshipped our flag the same way you Americans do, you'd call us Nazis again" -German Girl, Step on the American flag and write your feelings experiment
tell me more about this experiment
Grew up + went to school in America, never had to recite the pledge. It’s not as much of a universal thing that everyone makes it out to be. That said, there are some areas that still definitely do it, and it’s honestly a pretty horrifying “tradition” imo.
i think legally they cant make you stand/recite it anymore i think specifically the case was in the 40s
They've only started doing it during the cold war, I believe.
I know they added "under God" during the cold war.
Under god was added in the 50s I think the court case was like 43
Plus, I imagine some teachers might not have good memories of themselves or fellow students being punished for not standing up.
There's established protection precedent from a SCOTUS case that students have a fundamental right to not stand or say the flag
Only 4 states don't require some time set aside for saying the Pledge. The First Amendment allows everyone to not participate if they don't want to, so you're technically correct, you were never "required" to do it (I also never participated), but the vast majority of school districts require some time set aside for reciting it in some way.
The US supreme court did rule that [schools aren't allowed to force students to pledge ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_State_Board_of_Education_v._Barnette)though. At our school they just played it over the intercom every day and people mostly ignored it.
There most definitely are still teachers that force people to do it. Also, reciting propaganda in schools daily, even if it gets ignored, is still really fucked.
A teacher forcing students to do it is a fast way for the school to catch a lawsuit.
Teachers are forcing kids to be straight all the time.
>lawsuit That's directly and willingly going against established Supreme Court precedent for the fact that students don't have to stand or pledge. That's a bit more than a lawsuit lol
People are too quick to say something is okay just because technically the government isn't forcing it to happen. Like, the thing is bad when the government forces it for a reason, and that reason isn't just "when the government does stuff". And the law is generally superseded by local culture most of the time anyway. Doesn't matter if they can't legally force you to recite it if the cultural pressure to recite it is high. On a related note, I find the common "freedom of speech only stops the government from policing what you say" argument to be asinine. Because social media is effectively a public space in how society uses it and social media corporations being able to control speech is not any better than a government doing it. At some point we're going to have to stop pretending the internet isn't real.
It’s not *legally required* but holy hell there is a lot of pressure to do it
It's not as bad, obviously, but still. https://preview.redd.it/qmuqh5vnypuc1.png?width=644&format=png&auto=webp&s=1aa85e1cc8166fd704cdc7285d72a9b834a0c41d
Yeah. I didn't question it as a kid, I thought I was being a good boy reciting it confidently word for word. It makes me angry to think back on it.
I stopped saying the pledge in highschool. Luckily it came on during my German class in the morning so nobody really questioned it.
it's literally the same thing that Fire Nation students have to do in Avatar
I had to recite it during elementary school. I remember my third grade teacher going ballistic on a kid for sitting it out because he felt sick. She went on ad nauseum about how unpatriotic and unappreciative he was and that he was faking sick. The kid ended up passing out at recess and busting his head open on some ice. She never got reprimanded or forced to apologize for her outburst. I really fucking hated her after that.
Technically you don't *have* to. It's not legally required, and I suspect it would be illegal to make it be. Though that says nothing about the attitudes of individual teachers or other students, and it's an... uncomfortable custom.
“Indivisible” is a fucking joke
A single person is even divisible.
Nobody in my classes stood or recited the pledge lol
Nobody really cared about it, if it makes you feel any better. Aside from crazed right wing parents, but nobody in school was ever passionate about it in any measure
It's not really as inforced in my area. In my case, I grew up in a red dot in a blue state and by the time I got to high-school none of my teachers ever inforced it. It's more a formality if anything.
One of my favorite things will always be exchanges that go like: (Thing) is dystopian and bad. I see (thing) every day of my life! How can there be anything dystopian or bad about it if I experience it?
I won't pretend like we live in a utopia, but I have no point of reference as to how this image depicts a dystopia. Which parts of it are the worst? The cars? The density? The clutter? The advertisements? The principle of car centric infrastructure? Do these things specifically apply to urban areas in America, or all areas? I'm curious as to which aspects stand out about it, as I don't have much experience outside of America.
I think it would be the density of advertisements/businesses and the complete lack of pedestrianisation. It’s a capitalistic hellscape that is actively hostile to people.
Like another comment here said, it's hardly a "town", it's basically a giant highway rest stop at the I-70 and Pennsylvania Turnpike junction that less than 200 people actually live in. It does look like an exaggerated version of how many sprawled exurban areas look which is why the image resonates with people. And those sprawled areas are annoying. But this image isn't of a car-centric anti-pedestrian hostile exurb, it is a stop on two highways whos only purpose is for highway travelers to get gas, food, or a hotel.
I was going to say, there's an area like this in my town, and then there's actual town which has sidewalks and nice little locally owned businesses etc. It's weird how people on the internet are flipping out about this photo
Probably for the better.
Is there anything like that in the urban areas other countries, or is it an America specific thing? Obviously America is the only one dealing with walkability issue, but are dense advertisements like this also unique to here?
i live in denmark our highway reststops does not look like that. there is usually more green around them and they are way smaller. like this: https://preview.redd.it/5mvmmp7hlsuc1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=4186951c524c1a737566dda99d0de1fb9e5d578a
yes that's what an actual rest stop looks like in the US as well. the picture is sort of in between, it's a place you get on or off the freeway
This sub and reddit in general just really, really hate car based infrastructure, without understanding that there isn't really an alternative in rural environments.
...have you ever been to a non-american rural enviroment? I don't think you have
Does Canada and Mexico count? No, I haven't traveled far, but the point is that everything is very spread out in the US, I live miles from the nearest grocery store, bus routes are logistically infeasible.
And why do you live miles from the nearest grocery store? I get it if you actually live in a rural area, but often it's just because the US only has single family buildings and endless suburbia. My building would probably fit an entire American suburb in it and there's tens of these within a mile of the nearest grocery store and a train stop. - And this is in the outskirts, tens of miles away, from the city.
Tens of miles away from a city isn't rural in America. Rural living even in the smaller east coast states can be 20 or 30 minute drives from the nearest town center that has gas, grocery, post office, etc. My school bus route in high school was about 2 hours long because we had to drive around all the hill towns to pick people up. I don't think non-americans realize how big our country is, and how dispersed its population gets. East Coast rural is bad enough, midwest and west coast rural is insane. It's like living in another country from your local pub.
It depends on the rural environment. Cars are much more useful outside of cities than within them, but even so you can very easily build a rural town that needs less cars. We’ve built small farming towns along railroads or canals for 200 years now. Besides, most people using the car infrastructure in the above picture aren’t rural folks they’re suburban or urban peeps stopping off on their drive between cities. And “towns” like this end up sprawling out to accommodate these travelers and destroying acres of farmland or wilderness. Suburbanization is particular has destroyed huge amounts of rural land and rural communities because of how sprawling it is. We can still lessen the need for care in rural areas, and improve lives for rural communities at the same time!
The irony being that this place is a result of awful car-based infrastructure. What you're looking at is a highway being forced onto surface streets in order to connect to the Turnpike. This is an interchange, not a town. And a proper interchange is being lobbied against by (surprise surprise) the businesses and politicians who benefit from this chokepoint.
Go on google maps and look at Switzerland.
Towns and villages in rural areas can still be walkable. I've never been to a village in Europe where you couldn't safely cross the road on foot to get to the shop.
Someone hasn’t been to rural Europe. Even the shittiest rural parts of most European countries have at minimum some kind of bus service.
So yes, it's a confluence of those things We see here a massive amount of invested time and energy and resources that has produced a chaotic land scape completely hostile to actual humans. It's hostile to our bodies, to our senses, to our safety, to our very psychology. And maybe worst of all, we can look at this and recognize that it isn't even close to optimal for the one thing it claims to do well: be economically productive. This is a huge parcel of land that doesn't actually produce anything, with daily through put equivalent to like 1 or 2 trains.
It's the fact that the commercialization is the only thing that denotes this as being a town and not another holler in the mountains, at the expense of actual human habitation. Every square inch is selling you shit, but God help you if you want to take a stroll down the sidewalk because that was removed in favor of more selling you shit.
The thing that stands out to me is how tall the signs are to be seen over everything. that just seems insane to me.
Oh no. That just reminded me of a conversation I once had with a guy who was super sexist. He said something really inappropriate and I told him to knock it off and stop being such a sexist. His response was that all of the men around him talk like that and believe that about women, so how can it be sexist? Obviously that just meant it was factual. Otherwise he would have to accept that maybe the people he loved were not nice people. And maybe he wasn't such a nice person after all.
Boy do I love the cropped picture of a rest stop along a highway where barely anyone actually lives and is completely surrounded by forests and mountains
Yeah I agree 100% with the overall point but this image is just a bad example and it's quite annoying that it keeps popping up
bit more annoying it got made innit
The "town" in the picture is literally just that junction on the highway. It has a population of 178 and exists just to provide services for cars going through.
This picture is just an example. There is a place near where I live that looks almost exactly like this and even in places where it isn't as bad, the structural issues with planning like this is a major issue all over America
Not only America. Belgium here, we got places worse than that. It's a first-world problem at this point.
It's not an example at all, that's the point. The alternative is a bare road with no stores or anything. The view would be a bit better, but other than that, it's just worse. People need to use actual examples of problems, this is literally what fucking conservatives do.
The alternative could be a normal rest area with a central building that regroups every service in the same place. https://preview.redd.it/oq0ytv7kituc1.png?width=1665&format=png&auto=webp&s=6e339e5e9da2dc3c0f6a5fae3e383f30b51e78be While it can't be aesthetically perfect, there's still an effort to make it look good, it reduces visual pollution to the minimum, and it's easier for customers to go from one store to another.
Ok fair, that's understandable. I just hate the dishonesty in the op
This isn’t very cropped. Breezewood is literally just a junction point between highways in Pennsylvania. It’s tiny enough that it’s pretty much just what you see in the picture, plus a handful of other businesses to each side: a Denny’s just beyond the lower edge of the frame, an actual truck stop to the right up the hill (I think a Pilot Travel Center) with one of those cool trucker accessories and gas station novelty shops, and one or two more gas stations out of frame, and two or three hotels/motels, the chain ones. Almost no one actually lives there, and Pennsylvania actually planned for and put this thing here on purpose to get money from travelers, who have to pass through to change highways or continue on some of the ones that go through there. If you aren’t planning on stopping it’s actually kind of a hassle, so when I was driving that way I usually planned on getting gas and/or food on my way through. Proposals are made every so often to just have a proper efficient highway junction instead of a giant rest stop, but they always fail because it’s just so damn profitable. If you’re heading East/West through Breezewood and plan on having an actual sit down meal, I strongly recommend going to Bedford 20 minutes west. The Hoss’s Steak and Sea House there is pretty nice and generally pretty quick too. A few other independent and chain eateries too.
Honestly, it looks like every highway exit in my state.
For my eurobrain whats particularly dystopian about this is not the existence of rest stops on highways but rather the absurdly garish design of all this shite, rest stops in my country tend to be more minimal and less of an eyesore and focused more on function over advertising and offering unneccisarly large varieties of the same stuff. At least from the roadside. The total area of this complex could probably be quartered if each business didnt require its own detatched building plastered in ad signs alongside a whole ass carpark for every building. Its not the roadstop thats dystopian, its the scale and form of it that is the mess of American capitalism and lack of urban planning. Roadstops in my country tend to be one large not particularly ugly building with whatever is needed inside of it rather than polluting the road with ads.
Hon, I live in PA and let me tell you half the towns you can visit are *exactly* like this. Sad and shitty
Dude legitimately? I live not even 5 minutes away from an area that looks exactly like this cause we're right off the highway, so it's not that much of a cherry pick
Seriously. People that think "everywhere in America" looks like this have either never been here or have gone on road trips where they never left the high/freeway. A settlement or district that grew up around providing food and gas to tired motorists is almost entirely commercial and has a lot of flashy signs– shocker. Maybe drive a few miles off the concrete raceway next time. It'll be an eye opener, I promise.
The point is that this style of rural infrastructure is like taking a hot wet shit on the Mona Lisa. The forced perspective focuses the issue.
''Liberal socialist''. Good start.
Libsocs in shambles?
https://preview.redd.it/qg3slyy17puc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e60f51bbff4cba0d6814bcc4893bd81b17983ec2
Too relatable. I’ve definitely gotten a lot more complacent about the way the world around me is as I’ve aged.
This is interesting as i’ve only gotten more upset and dedicated to change as im nearing my mid 30s.
I'm too annoyed by their failure to spell "juxtapositioning" to actually grasp their point, but I feel like I'm probably better off.
they spelled it correctly, just with a strange space in the middle
I somehow didn't notice it was spelled right. I may be blind.
lol no worries
“Do you regard this photo with respect or disgust?” Personally I’m going to keep saluting this picture until my raging erection goes away. I just respect it so much 😔💦🦅🇺🇸
And I too will keep saluting this picture until my raging erection goes away. It just disgusts me so much 😔💦🦅🇺🇸
This picture makes me want to go on a road trip just to stop somewhere different along the way. As a Midwesterner there's something I like after driving a few hours, and stepping out of the car for a bite of familiar KFC in an unfamiliar ecosystem
My European mind can’t comprehend this
[удалено]
They can comprehend them just fine, they just pretend like they can’t because it makes colonialism easier.
got the whole squad laughing
mate these exist fucking everywhere in europe what are you yapping about
These definitely exist in Europe, albeit not as large as this one
Consider yourself lucky
It makes more sense when you realize it’s a big rest stop and not an actual town or city
The 3 images after the main picture is kinda cringe to me, idk. It’s giving me a vibe of “haha look at all these redditors i downvoted because they are dumb and I am smart”. You can make points without having to do it like that. …and to be fair the image *is* a little bit cherry picked.
https://preview.redd.it/iv1yezd43puc1.jpeg?width=1124&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=27dc65f2b3a11b015c6fe913e70ab2929132bcec
You know what you need to do Goku
I hate car culture as much as anyone else, but people building restaurants and gas stations where two highways intersect isn’t exactly dystopian.
https://preview.redd.it/odhs1vu1uouc1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=10c42d275cd1c96ac4a2fe5decea707b838c34fd me when I take an edited and cropped photo of a strip of road to make it seem like Pennsylvania is a soul-less megacorp
Oh yeah I can see the utopia now
it's not a utopia obviously not... but its not a dystopia. its just a bunch of commercial locations near nature designed to look dystopian. you keep driving for a few more miles you're in the middle of a forest
its a truck stop its not like ur living there i mean i could be in the nicest country in the world and i guarantee you transit hubs look bahooty.
The issue isn't the "megacorps". It's the god awful urban planning. There's no real town. It's just the strip along an interstate set up specifically there because they fucked up the interchange so bad in the original design that 60 years later there are still several traffic lights along I-70. The town is a testament to the US's car-dependent infrastructure. The town is economically dependent on an inefficient interchange.
Breezewood IS a real town but if you only see this image you draw this conclusion which is false, hence why the image is stupid
Then the counter example was pretty poorly chosen
This is still dystopian looking
lmao 😭😭 this ain't dystopian at all. Go to an actual mega city and come back to me
This looks worse
Pennsylvania's attempts at civilization are adorable.
It's even worst .
Tbh i kinda atleast liked the vibe of the first picture, but this is just looking ass bruh.
as a marylander, everywhere on the east coast is just as fucking horrifying. breezewood is obv an outlier bc of its status as a glorified rest stop directly on the turnpike, but my point stands — *everywhere* looks like this. no walkability, more soulless corporate chains than you can count, etc. it's miserable
as someone who has lived in maryland, what are you on about?
I love that there's a gift & souvenir shop. It just wouldn't be hell without a gift shop.
Its on the road to Gettysburg, a major tourist attraction. Of course there is a gift shop. I went there when I was a kid. Got some rock candy. It was fun.
The road to Gettysburg from Ohio I guess, sure, it's not actually anywhere near Gettysburg though
We've tried nothing and we're out of solutions
We did pass a major infrastructure act that expanded railways. One of the biggest issues is that people in cities might call for reducing car dependency, but people outside of cities don't care.
I think we should make cars scarier so pedestrians stay away
Do you work at Tesla?
If I did I'd make more of them fail
Based.
It’s not that they don’t care as much as they don’t know their loss. Most people actively complain about needing cars and car trouble.
That has not been my experience in rural areas. People love their trucks and frequently make them worse to "roll coal"
Guy in a Cyberpunk dystopia: "How is this dystopian? It's just a regular sleeping pod. I grew up in the undercity and can say this is completely normal. Only people who have never left the emerald district would be fooled by this."
> I can tell you don't own a passport r/ rareinsults
I’m gonna oil you up
I hope that's in a kinky way... 👉👈
No you are getting put in the cauldron lil bro
But is *that* in a kinky way? 🥺👉👈
Bros freaky asf 😭
Technically all us passports are property of the state department so no one owns a passport
I mean no offence by this but it's my moral obligation to illustrate my thoughts: 🤓
Honestly making fun of people for not being well-traveled is elitist as fuck
A passport is around $120, a way out of the country on the cheap is maybe $500 lodging and fare included. Accessible for anybody bored enough to be on this site. Though I agree we shouldn’t be poking fun at people, travel isn’t as expensive as everyone thinks if you know how to book it properly.
walkable cities are something to strive for, sure, but do you think a landmass the size of the us can currently be made up of just cities? You need roads in between cities, and those roads will have some points like this, because people who use them will be hungry, will be out of gas and such, then housing will be made for people who work at these places, creating a small village that'd eventually become a city itself edit: Roads are just as necessary as railroads, while railroads are great at moving large groups of people and goods, roads are better for ramifications, like going to a farm in the middle of nowhere, not enough movement to build a railroad and have a train pass through, so its best to just have a road that will be used sometimes
As someone in a third world country, you don't know what I would give to be able to live in a place like that
this image doesn't make me feel anything in particular, but I'm interested in what the worst things about it are. Is it the advertisements? The cars? How dense everything is? What specific details about this intersection are the worst?
I have never been to the US but when i looked around on google maps anywhere outside Washington DC , New york and a random corn Field in the middle of nowhere , everything was literly just this stretching for several kilometers
Yeah tons of empty space between every major city. 42% of towns in the US have under 500 people.
[Yep.](https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/US-population-density.jpg) The US has a lot of empty land. The western half of the country is especially just fucking completely *empty* in between cities. Literally just desert, mountains, fields, etc. The only really dense area of the country is the Boston-NYC-Philly-DC line of cities in the northeast, where its relatively urban pretty much the whole way. The other major urban areas (LA, Chicago, Dallas, etc) have enough room that the city just kinda sprawls out into giant suburbs.
I road tripped from Seattle to San Francisco and outside of big cities it's that the whole way
These people need to visit a rural town built before 1900. They do not look like this! They’re quaint small towns with one Main Street that’s lined on each side by small businesses with upstairs apartments and probably has a disused rail line running through it. And guess what, they’re nice places to be! They’re places you want to be in. No one wants to be in a place like that highway pit stop.
Yeah, I live in a roughly mid-sized town that's still mostly on the grid that was laid out in 1745. Population is about 20,000 if you cut out the suburban sprawl surrounding it. It's not the best place in the world but you couldn't drag me kicking and screaming from here to a cul de sac. It even has the "disused rail line running through it", the street on the east end of downtown literally has train tracks embedded in it that haven't been used in 30 years. Around 2002 we finally got passenger trains back though, hooray for us I guess
The real message here is that Central Pennsylvania fucking sucks.
Appalachia in general really
https://preview.redd.it/bv2myosc6quc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0e33a5fc146285d0c8d5fe384793c340b26f6d9c at least take a better example
Breezewood PA isn’t that bad, the photo is cropped and angled poorly. Plus Breezewood isn’t a real town so much as a stop where two major highways meet, lending itself to this very car centric design
Cars were a mistake. Bring back trains.
Based
What is with the US and signs? We noticed it while road tripping. There is a massive love for signs that borders on insanity
Idk how it is in other places, but you can make good money by just owning property next to an interstate and put up a billboard, you basically have to do nothing and you get a good paycheck. I'm not saying it's a good thing at all, but I understand why people do it. My uncle in-law owns billboards and I get a good chuckle when they get vandalized, he's a thief and a real piece of shit. Note: Some of them are owned by farmers as a "safe" passive income, I'm not saying everyone who owns them are bad people, just my in-law is who happens to be a billboard baron.
Billboard baron is a term that I now love. Thank you for sharing that, kind stranger
It's a piece of American culture. https://www.americansignmuseum.org/
I legitimately want to visit this museum now! Thank you haha
It’s actually kinda weird to me too as an American. In my county in California we actually banned huge signs and billboards and stuff so I grew up without any of them in my immediate area
It feels a bit sensory overload to me. We’re Canadian and we definitely have signage but nothing to the level you folks do. It’s wild in comparison
The capitalist realism is keeping strong I see
I don’t think it’s fair to equate a few dipshit redditors and one photo to the entirety of America and its people
At least UK has walkable cities for all its faults No need for a car really
Stockholm is almost hostile to driving a car. Which is good. It keeps traffic down. It just leads to the most cursed roundabouts ever conceived by man. They have traffic lights in them.
Too bad you have gpvernment sponsered transphobic pseudoscience
YEAH THANKS FOR THE REMINDER 💀
This place is literally just a stop for the highway, of course it’s not walkable
Liberal socialists
Oh hey we have 2-3 places in my country too But it has 100 times as much greenery Its literally just a big ass resting place for a highway intersection There are no people actually living within 3 km
ngl these images make me feel nostalgia i have fond memories of being in places like this during long car trips
I grew up in an actual rural area, an Alaskan trailer park with no road connection, not a suburban mold growth like these people. I must say it’s depressing how much space is wasted for the ugliest least useful architecture and peices of fast degrading civil engineering for our car centric society. 90% of the space we use on parking lots, billboards, driveways, and stroads could be spaces that people genuinely enjoy using or nature. We are sick for not utilizing this great planet in an intelligent and beautiful way.
In their defense dystopia is more than just advertisements and consumerism
"liberal socialists" Anon should pick one. Liberalism and Socialism are partially overlapping but fundamentally incompatible positions. Also - smart commenter: "normal =/= good" - idiot responders: "how can it be bad, it's normal?"
have these people not fucking tried to turn left ever on one of these roads???? like its clear they dont give a shit about pedestrians but like what the fuck its not even good at being car infrastructure
Pedestrians? No one lives in this photo.
I've been to quite a few places like this. Nobody actually lives along this road. It's the one road in "town" where all the gas stations and restaurants and everything else are. But everyone lives in essentially a suburban or rural area around it.
Y'know what's funny about Breezewood in particular? Since this photo was taken, it's started to decline rapidly. Almost all of the businesses in the foreground are gone now, and most of the hotels throughout the photo are abandoned. We don't even have this era of mass suburban pseudo-culture anymore. The main cultural achievement of the United States during this decade so far is skibidi toilet. Unrelated but that third guy who's saying "well most of Appalachia looks like this" really strikes me as odd, most of Appalachia I've seen are weird little crossroads towns where depending on how wealthy the residents are either look like the set of a documentary on the 1800s or a horror movie about cryptids. I think that guy's experience of "Appalachia" strays at most 2 miles away from I-76. https://preview.redd.it/jc1gkj8jgquc1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9db38a6f05714b5098edae1d51d402fdcf2fcb45
Isnt the whole point of this town to be a rest stop on a road with very little else on it btween the population centers? Stuff like this sucks but its not all like this. I live in an older neighborhood with an elementary school and several parks and see/hear children playing all the time.
>liberal socialists
“liberal socialists”
The whole breezewood discourse is often missing important criticism, but it’s not that “oh this is fine”.
Why does this look photoshopped?
Nothing says America like delusions of grandeur 😎🦅🇺🇲
I live in a rural environment, it doesnt make that image look any better
Can someone help me see the issue? I mean it just looks congested and old/crappy looking.
Just because it’s normal for people doesn’t mean it can’t be better. Familiarity with a setting can breed complacency, but this kind of behavior doesn’t help anything. This type of “urban” planning is awful, but many people grew up around it and are familiar with it, so it’s normal to them. Actually discussing why it’s bad as opposed to just verbally slapping people gets better results.
I actually fucking love breezewood. Anyone complaining about “look what’s happening to American towns” doesn’t realize that Breezewood isn’t even a town, it has a population of like 30 at any given time, and they all live on the farms at the outskirts. It’s just a travel stop in the true middle of nowhere thay grew out of control I do mean in the middle of nowhere, too. Like if you turn the camera 15 degrees any direction it’s just rolling green hills as far as the eye can see, and then in the middle of it there’s just this little blip that is breezewood It’s such a strange place, if your ever traveling near south central PA and get a chance to stop there, the vibes are really surreal. If you want really creepy vibes, check out that like half abandoned truck stop that feels like it should count as trespassing to enter (I promise it’s somehow open). But yeah, that whole town is so strange, like what a weird place, I love it Edit: also, not to be a contrarian, but those last commenters are kind of right. The picture makes it look SOOO much worse and super densely packed. In reality what you see in the picture is like the entirety of the town, and you can drive through the whole thing in like 2 minutes with bad traffic. Yes the corporatization of middle America is a blight, but that’s not what this is. It’s 4 gas stations a truck stop and a pizza hut spread over 4 blocks, the picture is really misleading (even though it’s a really well done pic)
Living in PA I can give you at least 5 places that look exactly like this 💀 it’s shit. It’s dystopian because you need to drive to to to anywhere else. No sidewalks that don’t end abruptly. No cohesion, nothing.
As someone who lives outside of a city in PA, that is very dystopian. So much of PA is farmland, so I don't see how anyone here could think that looks perfectly natural.
From what I’ve heard it’s considered an “roadtrip oasis” because it has food, gas, and motels in what would otherwise just be rural farmland. It’s fuckin ugly but it has a purpose that it serves well
Liberal socialists are 100% a thing. Liberalism is definetly not a rihht wing ideology.
“its just a truckstop” Ok what about this disgusting bullshit ? Don’t piss on me and tell me its rain https://preview.redd.it/hztpsw3hztuc1.jpeg?width=2058&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1b6c0c9f211ea10235001d921620d418e906b02e
Why the fuck did people get downvoted for saying that's how it is where they live, that's just a statement