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.
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.
Yes, but mine probably doesn’t match with yours.
Rural america is not like rural Britain. Rural Britain is probably more like the outer undeveloped suburbs of a city in america. In rural america, you can go a hundred miles on a highway without seeing a single house.
I like the bike lanes and footpaths idea for rural places just as much as anywhere. I don’t hate cars like a lot of the people here, but I dislike them a lot and understand why you’d want cities not designed around them, and in rural areas, other options. Busses or trains between population centers, even small ones, are great but in rural america you’re not even getting to the train station without a car, and more stops doesn’t solve that problem because it’s so spread out and disorganized. Even 100 years ago, cities built subways and what not, rural people rode horses or if they got on a train they were going pretty far away. Public transport in places like that doesn’t make any sense and didn’t even before cars.
Yeah, fair enough! I was thinking of places in the UK (and other areas of Western Europe I’m familiar with) where even ‘isolated’ houses are usually less than five miles away from a larger settlement. I’ve been in plenty of places where I’d just walk across or around a field to get to the nearest shop - which was more direct than taking the road!
In terms of the rural US, I think you’re probably right that solving these problems with human-powered vehicles and public transport is, basically, too hard, and that cars are the best available solution. That said, it’s probably still worth building the infrastructure so people have the option of not using a car for the whole of every single journey.
@frankPodmore @betwixthewires Here’s a map of what the train network used to look like across rural Victoria (in Australia) in 1927: https://everythingismaps.github.io/img/historicvicrailmaps/1927%20Victorian%20rail%20map.PNG
And here’s rural NSW in 1933: https://www.nswrail.net/maps/nsw-1933.php
And here’s a video that @nerd4cities recently uploaded about the destruction of intercity train networks in the US: https://youtu.be/svao4PZ4bGs?si=K7zrMlZ4bvfmiRcC
So yes, many rural areas and small towns in the US, Australia, and Canada used to have access to frequent and reliable train services back in the first half of the 20th century.
Those train systems in many cases were privately run, so no direct taxpayer subsidies. At a time when overall populations were smaller.
So what changed? Car-centric government policies.
What else has changed? Cars became available and roads were easier to build than tracks.
I’m not against trains, I love them, especially the prospect of using them for long distance travel between rural areas. But people in rural areas use cars because there was a natural incentive to use cars: they’re faster than horses and trains and the roads were already there, bonus they can be used for work on the land as machinery. Car centric government policies really are an effect of the widespread use of cars. They entrench the current way things work and create inertia in moving forward from it, but they didn’t create it, at least not in the middle of nowhere.
@betwixthewires Cars faster than trains? If that’s the case in your country, then you have a serious underinvestment in rail.
(Seriously, even V/Line trains in Victoria go faster than the 100 KP/h speed limit, and by world standards V/Line ain’t a great train service.)
What happened in the US, Australia, and Canada was a massive investment in rural highway infrastructure by national and state/provincial governments after World War 2.
In the US, that was Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956
In Australia, it was Gough Whitlam’s National Roads Act of 1974: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_(Australia)
Many towns in the rural western US were railway towns. They were quite literally built around a train station.
But after WW2, the US spent the equivalent of US$193 billion (adjusted for inflation) in just 10 years building new interstate highways.
At the same time, the extensive already-existing network of rural railways saw service cuts, was run down, and had privately-owned lines become freight-only.
Again, similar story in the other former British colonies.
That was a choice by government. And the result of that choice is many people in those railway towns responded by buying a car.
It didn’t have to be that way.
In many parts of Europe and Asia, where leaders have invested in rail, you can live quite comfortably in many small towns without a car.
I meant when the development of transportation infrastructure started, cars were certainly faster than trains.