So suppose we don’t like cars and want to not need them. What are the transportation alternatives for rural areas? Are there viable options?
Edit:
Thank you all for interesting comments. I should certainly have been more specific-- obviously the term “rural” means different things to different people. Most of you assumed commuting; I should have specified that I meant more for hauling bulk groceries, animal feed, hay bales, etc. For that application I really see no alternative to cars, unfortunately. Maybe horse and buggy in a town or village scenrio.
For posterity and any country dwellers who try to ditch cars in the future, here are the suggestions:
Train infrastructure, and busses where trains aren’t possible
Park and rides, hopefully with associated bike infrastructure
No real alternative and/or not really a problem at this scale
Bikes, ebikes, dirtbikes
Horse and buggy
Ride share and carpooling
Don’t live in the country
Walkable towns and villages
Our greatgrandparents and the amish did it
A lot of you gave similar suggestions, so I won’t copy/paste answers, but just respond to a few comments individually.
I had a friend who was killed by a motorist while walking on a country road, so I’ve given this some thought. The key principle for safety is to keep cars away from more vulnerable road users.
So, there are the same basic options: better public transport infrastructure, and well-signposted, properly maintained footpaths and bike lanes are the most obvious.
As for driving from the countryside into urban areas, you can have ‘Park and ride’ schemes, which are common in parts of the UK. You drive your car to a bus station at the edge of the town, and the bus takes you the rest of the way in. That minimises miles driven and keeps cars out of urban areas, where they’re especially inefficient.
Public transportation in a rural area lol have you ever been to a rural area?
The rest of your ideas are great. I’ve done the park and ride thing, it was great.
Yes, of course. My point is that you can have good public transport in rural areas. The fact that in most places we currently don’t is the exact problem!
I noticed that in poorer countries where many people can’t afford personal cars, the public transport in rural areas is often much better. This has led me to believe that contrary to my initial intuition, widespread car ownership is the reason rather than the result of poor public transport in rural areas.
I can’t think of how. Rural areas are areas with little organization, very little infrastructure, people are largely self sufficient. Would it be busses? Minivans? How would you organize such a system? Where would it even take people, Walmart? To each other’s doorstep? I just don’t see how you’d build something like that, or even really why. I get it in the city, I get trains for long distances, but rural areas getting people around, I just don’t see it.
Are you speaking from experience of rural areals? Because if so, it doesn’t match with mine!
Most rural areas I know of are heavily dependent on neighbouring areas, whether other villages or larger towns. So the public transport option which works best is buses: Usually they connect a chain or ring of smaller villages with each other or with a large town. Having bike lanes or footpaths (separate from roads) to connect the villages works, too. And the UK, historically, had many small train lines, including single track routes, that did a similar job to the buses.
In the US? You’ll probably need access to a car for a lot of things, but let’s assume the political leanings of your town are open to things like collective ownership and bike infrastructure. Let’s also assume we’re talking about a rural town that has a dense, but small downtown surrounded by farmland (fairly common).
Your community could set up a ride share service for the town that is locally and communally owned. They could also run a car loan service. With bike infrastructure, cargo bikes and electric bikes can replace a lot of car trips. Living in a small house or apartment near the center of town will cut out the need for cars for lots of trips, too.
If there is a bus network in your county or state, you could also lobby to get a bus to come to your town to more easily connect you to other areas without a car, but I don’t know how feasible something like that would be.
There are a number of things that amaze me in this group. Like you all take it for granted that everyone is capable to ride a bike from here to sunset, and that the same bike is sufficient to haul whatever it is to be hauled. This is the narrowminded worldview of young, single city-dwellers that can reach all necessary places easily by public transport or bike or even foot within a few minutes.
I’ve lived in the country where there was (and probably still is) “the morning bus” and “the evening bus”, and the next city was 30+km away. And you are really telling those people not to use cars?
While I agree cars/trucks make sense in rural areas, your great grandparents likely lived in rural extremely rural conditions without a car. It has been done for the majority of human existence, and the Amish still do it today.
They had feed mills in carting distance, and they had hundreds of acres to grow their own food. With more people on earth, we usually have dozens of acres, at best, and one feed mill in the county, at best.
I actually want to know more about this. It sounds like you know what you’re talking about. If you’ve got any good YouTube videos or links (or feel compelled to talk about it yourself); I grew up in rural areas and simple farms, but I don’t know the first think about feed mills and industrial agriculture.
A while ago I explored a rabbit hole about farming without ammonium nitrate and I was shocked how basically the whole world (minus the island of Java) depends on ammonium nitrate for food.
Ask yourself: If I didn’t have a car, would I still live here?
Cars encourage sprawl, and living far away from the things we need everyday. This is a bad thing. This, not emissions, and not safety, are my main gripe with personal automotives. You’re asking, “how do we keep the worse, most selfish parts of car ownership if we get rid of cars?” We fucking don’t. That’s the point.
I honestly really have a problem with this mentality. I would like to try to find common ground with you around the things we both think are problems, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
See, to me, it’s just the opposite. It’s all the cities where peopke are mashed in together like a factory chicken farm-- that’s where the problem comes from. If we could just have fewer people living further apart I think a lot of the problems with society would more or less solve themselves.
I’m not here to pick a fight, and I am listening to you. But how can you think that more bigger cities is an improvement? I really don’t understand.
We can both agree the solution is not larger cities! Its about more frequent smaller cities (villages/towns).
- Smaller schools that spread out instead of busing everyone within a 50mile radius
- Changing zoning rules so grocery stores, small hardware shops, etc can be near houses
Hey! We do have common ground! More frequent small towns/villages would definitely be a good thing. Idyllic, even. I don’t know how to get there from here though.
In my area it’s not really zoning laws; it’s just economics of scale. There used to be a convenience store/hardware/feed store just like 5 miles from my place. It went out of business 30 years ago when they put walmart and lowes in the city. If it were back, i could probably get by with a horse and buggy.
I once lived in a small village (population 160). You could still see the former school building, the former grocery shop. Both had been closed when everyone got a car. The only infrastructure left was a pub.
Cars killed infrastructure in rural communities. First, it was nice to be able to shop in the cheaper shops in the city by car. Then the local shop closed and the car became a necessity.
