[RD] Daily Graphs and Charts

[Arwon]

Yeah but both things are true. Here's a remoteness map of Australia.

There's a fairly linear relationship between almost any measure of advantage or well-being, and how remote an area is. The pink and purple areas in the travel distance maps represent a +2 hr drive to any urban area over about 90k people and they do have towns in them.

And of course remote Indigenous communities are the most disadvantaged of all.

The real question is why remote areas are worse off. This study goes into trying to separate the "tyranny of distance" (remote areas are worse off, even with all other things being equal) from the "tyranny of disadvantage" (lower remote area well-being as simply a product of disadvantages which correlate but are not caused by distance). Turns out it's a mixture.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

There's a fairly linear relationship between almost any measure of advantage and well-being and how remote an area is. The pink and purple areas in the travel distance maps have towns in them. And of course remote Indigenous communities are the most disadvantaged of all.

Agreed. The question is, rather than 'areas,' how many actual people are disadvantaged? I don't know Australia, but I do know that you could build a superhighway through a lot of the blackout areas on that map of Saudi Arabia and they would "light up" as far as the travel distance map goes, but no lives would be changed because no one lives there to make the drive. Not just "hardly anyone," but literally no one.

 

[Arwon]

Ah, there's a lot of completely dark or dimly lit highway on the Australian map that still had towns in it. It's not like Saudi Arabia in that it's all one big desert. The bright spots are only urban areas with over 90,000 people. There's smaller towns in a lot of the pink and purple area and potentially a few hundred thousand scattered across the entirety of the 6 hour plus area.

For reference here's our major sealed highways. The speed limit is 110kph on nearly all of it and there's not a lot stopping you going faster.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Just because it's distracting me, is "sealed highways" a mistype, or an Australianism, or???? The term is unfamiliar to me, but that might very well be my lack of cosmopolitanism.

Anyway...

Now with three different views of transit in Australia we can see how they overlay, and while it doesn't support my possibility that it is the same effect that we see in the Saudi Arabia case exactly, it still seems that it might be close. I looked up Alice Springs, and found that it is a city of about 25,000. How many people are in the potential "outlying areas" that really would benefit from a better road? That is, that really want that badly to get to Alice Springs?

I'm not trying to put down central Australia or Alice Springs, just pointing out that as a population measure for an area reaches a certain level of sparseness roads reducing travel time doesn't change the fact that there really isn't much reason to go somewhere.

This might be a good discussion to move out of Daily Charts, because we've already probably gone on too long and it is really interesting, at least to me.

 

[Arwon]

Just because it's distracting me, is "sealed highways" a mistype, or an Australianism, or???? The term is unfamiliar to me, but that might very well be my lack of cosmopolitanism.

Anyway...

Now with three different views of transit in Australia we can see how they overlay, and while it doesn't support my possibility that it is the same effect that we see in the Saudi Arabia case exactly, it still seems that it might be close. I looked up Alice Springs, and found that it is a city of about 25,000. How many people are in the potential "outlying areas" that really would benefit from a better road? That is, that really want that badly to get to Alice Springs?

I'm not trying to put down central Australia or Alice Springs, just pointing out that as a population measure for an area reaches a certain level of sparseness roads reducing travel time doesn't change the fact that there really isn't much reason to go somewhere.

This might be a good discussion to move out of Daily Charts, because we've already probably gone on too long and it is really interesting, at least to me.

Sealed means paved. We have dirt (or worse) "highways" so you've gotta be clear when talking about the outback.

The roads for the towns are fine, as I say you can drive them very fast and there's no traffic congestion. Plus the Northern Territory part of the Sturt Highway from Alice Springs to Darwin and Adelaide mostly has no speed limit... I think we averaged about 140kph/85mph in my sister's Ford Laser up there. Single lane each way.

Disadvantage in remote areas comes via the impact that distance has on education and health access, poor telecommunications, higher priced or unavailable goods and services and utilities, all sorts of other amenities. Can't even get all the TV channels in some places.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Sealed means paved. We have dirt (or worse) "highways" so you've gotta be clear when talking about the outback.

The roads for the towns are fine, as I say you can drive them very fast and there's no traffic congestion. Plus the Northern Territory part of the Sturt Highway from Alice Springs to Darwin and Adelaide mostly has no speed limit... I think we averaged about 140kph/85mph in my sister's Ford Laser up there. Single lane each way.

Disadvantage in remote areas comes via the impact that distance has on education and health access, poor telecommunications, higher priced or unavailable goods and services and utilities, all sorts of other amenities. Can't even get all the TV channels in some places.

Thanks...I did think maybe that was Australian for paved, but "do you mean 'not dirt roads'" seemed a little too far towards ... something less than polite.

No doubt remote people are at a huge disadvantage in a myriad of ways. But it's hard to bring them the advantages of a city without providing a city worth of people, and a lot of people in remote areas don't want that at all. I hear about it all the time because I live in the city I grew up in (well, next city to it and only divided by a city limit down the middle of a fairly main street). Lancaster was about Alice Springs size and Palmdale was a four digit population bump on the side of it when the two lanes each way limited access "freeway to nowhere" connected us to the LA Metro area. Thirty years later the two cities between them plus adjacent unincorporated areas have a collective population of about half a million.

There is not a day that goes by for a politically active person like myself that there isn't someone yapping about "how great it was and how horrible it is." And "how great it was" as I remember it, was driving an hour to go see a movie, and even though we got all the networks we only did because we had a (just short of) military grade antenna on a pole that today would violate local ordinances as an air traffic hazard. Our neighbors didn't get some, most, or any, depending.

 

[Arwon]

It is a fairly concrete distributional problem. Universal access mandates, subsidies for essential goods, bonus pay to key staff for remote postings, those sorts of things can either be in place or not, and they can have varying levels of funding.

Modern efficiency logic and budget cuts often has often seen previous levels of remote services fall by the wayside... that would be reversible with the right political will.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

It is a fairly concrete distributional problem. Universal access mandates, subsidies for essential goods, bonus pay to key staff for remote postings, those sorts of things can either be in place or not, and they can have varying levels of funding.

Modern efficiency logic and budget cuts often has often seen previous levels of remote services fall by the wayside... that would be reversible with the right political will.

For some services, sure. Some services just have to have a sufficient population base.

I have a friend who has a florist shop. He makes a predawn run, every day, to the flower market in LA, which is the giant wholesale trading center. Would he like to have a wholesale flower market in either Lancaster or Palmdale? Of course. But there aren't enough florists to provide a sufficient market. Would there be in a city of half a million that wasn't so close to LA? Or would such a city just have florists that made a weekly run to a wholesale market and sold less fresh flowers? I genuinely do not have an answer for that. But I know that there is going to be some lower limit where there is just no way to provide a wholesale market for some goods.

I broke my leg once. I was under the care of "the best orthopedic surgeon in town," and felt fairly comfortable although the prognosis was not great. Then the Navy saw an opportunity and shipped me to a military hospital, nominally a 'regional' center if you define 'region' as 'continental US west of the Mississippi River.' Where I was operated on by a punk kid not much older than me...who repaired about thirty broken major bones a week. No political will, no efficiency logic, nothing was going to provide that level of experience in a doctor in the podunk city of Idaho Falls. The best orthopedic surgeon in town, in hindsight, was probably a semi-specialized general practitioner.

Couple off the top of my head examples, but I'm sure you get what I'm saying.

 

[The_J]

I'm not surprised that the NL is completely lit up.
I mean you're through this country in 2h (by car), there cannot by anything really remote ^^.

 

[warpus]

Which is funny, because every single image I have of my head of what Holland is like, is basically green fields full of cows, and windmills here and there.

Mind you that's only because I used to live maybe 60km from the Dutch border, and that's what everything looked like on the German side

 

[Hrothbern]

Which is funny, because every single image I have of my head of what Holland is like, is basically green fields full of cows, and windmills here and there.
Mind you that's only because I used to live maybe 60km from the Dutch border, and that's what everything looked like on the German side

Because our population density is so extreme high, and because of war time famines, we have a very strict policy on what locations houses are allowed to build, with as goal that the agricultural areas stay as big and undisturbed as possible.
Meaning compact cities, residential suburbs only allowed with relative small gardens, and no further house building along roads that connect villages (this was allowed up to WW2).

The net effect is that you can handle extreme population density, supply your own food needed, and have outside the cities almost immediately the feeling of green fields,etc.

 

[warpus]

You'd think The Netherlands would have some pretty impressive skyscraper disctricts in its major cities, but from what I've seen only Rotterdam really has such a thing, and the skyscrapers aren't very tall either. Not that I'm complaining, just an observation

 

[Hrothbern]

You'd think The Netherlands would have some pretty impressive skyscraper disctricts in its major cities, but from what I've seen only Rotterdam really has such a thing, and the skyscrapers aren't very tall either. Not that I'm complaining, just an observation

Correct observation.
The bulk of the housing capacity is a groundfloor with 4 floors on top. No elevator.
And any new building must be approved on her sky-line effect.
So far the consensus there is to avoid that the "beautiful" old centers of the cities get dominated by some very big untraditional building.

Rotterdam being an exception, because during WW2 the city centre was bombed.
A nice place to allow some bigger sized modern architecture

 

[Takhisis]

Rotterdam? Skyscrapers? Sounds like a Jackie Chan film.

Strip away all their titles and wealth and exile them to Argentina. Problem solved.

I'm sorry, but the Nazi branch of the family hasn't been on the throne for eight decades.

Well, if we're going knives-out for rich people, I could think of several dozen far more worthy candidates.

We're also getting off-topic, which is more charts!

And now Hrothbern gave us our 9,000th reply to the OP, and the readings are off the charts.

On the contrary, US elections are full of valuable learning experiences:

• don't let politicians draw their own electoral boundaries
• don't count votes for a president using a weird rurally malapportioned set of blocky sub-votes, no, shut up, I don't care if you're a federation, it's still a stupid idea, representing small jurisdictions is what the Upper House is for
• don't use first past the post voting
• don't have fifty different, often bureaucratically difficult methods of enrolling and being eligible to vote, also controlled by local politicians
• actually, strongly consider not having single member electorates, they're not worth it
• maybe vote on weekends?

‘Stop dicking around’ comes to mind.

 

[The_J]

Meaning compact cities, residential suburbs only allowed with relative small gardens, and no further house building along roads that connect villages (this was allowed up to WW2).

And the actual cities being also rather close together. Think the only place in Germany where you get that density is the Ruhr area.

Just to give some people an idea: Nijmegen (170k) is like 20 km away from Arnhem (150k), which is 50km away from Utrecht (350k), and in between are two small sized towns of 60k plus smaller inhabitations. There it's 30km to Amsterdam (850k), from there 30km to Leiden (120k), then 20km to Den Haag (500k), 10km to Delft (100k), and 10km to Rotterdam (600k).
I just took you through the whole country (east to west), which is les than 200km in this case, and passed through 8 major population centers.
Can only get more dense in the mini countries ^^.

 

[Takhisis]

As they say, in the Old World 100 km. is a long distance, in the New World 100 years is a long time.

 

[Hrothbern]

 

[really]

View attachment 485873

Any idea what the net of all those is?

Ireland suffered a falling population and lost generations in the past - it is sapping to a country.

 

[dutchfire]

I think it is pretty hard to predict population 30 years into the future, especially when the major factor influencing population in many of these countries is (economical) migration.

 

[Arakhor]

Demographic projections makes economics look like science.