I am all for more public transportation in this country, but it wouldn’t help me personally. I live outside of city limits- the closest bus line is two miles away. My work is even further outside city limits, a 10-minute drive south of me down a four-lane highway, past farm fields and into an industrial park.
There’s just no way public transportation is going to help me there. And even if I didn’t have to do it down a highway, there’s no way I’m riding a bike there in the middle of winter.
So do please make public transport more available and expansive. Just know that it still won’t be a universal solution. Individual transport is needed by some of us.
I plan to get an electric (not a Tesla) for my next car. I currently drive a hybrid.
“More public transport wouldn’t help me, because there’s no transit access here” seems tautological but ok.
Countries with similar layouts but working public transit would simply build a train line into your industrial park and place bus stops a reasonable distance away from where you live.
At what point is it too rural for that to make sense? I’m surrounded by cornfields.
Lots of people in fuck cars communities are black and white about it. They’re very unwilling to even discuss compromise. They’ll say the city needs to build a subway system under all the farmland.
You tell me; your community was likely first built by having a train line drawn out to it in the frontier era, and later had the tracks scuttled due to obsolescence and overt state support for the motor vehicle alternative.
Rural rail has been done and is still done in pretty much every country that’s not the USA. If you’re a farmer, there’s a lot of rationale to having rail built out to whatever market terminal you sell your product at. It’s not unheard of for farmers to build out small private rail lines across the farm to transport goods, equipment, themselves, etc.
Public transport only really works in crowded areas. Pretty sure you can easily ditch your car and get around fine in NYC, but in Bumfuck, North Dakota, you are lucky to get a bus once a day.
The reasons for this include a high upfront set-up cost and mistakes in the past.
When public transport was planned out, the population was smaller and the roads were more empty. The current systems might have been sufficiently expansible at that time, but there is just so much traffic and overloaded infrastructure nowadays. In IT fields, you’d say that you have technical debt: you favored an easier solution without thinking about long-term maintainabilty and are now stuck at trying to refactor the mess you made.
And today, public transport also needs to be profitable, of course, which is nigh Impossible. The only way to solve it would be a public transport tax and theb you’ll see most of the vocal supporterd fall.
Anecdotal point in case: I live in a rural area in Germany and a friend’s dad always complained about how awful public transport is here. At one point, a party put up the suggestion to have a “tax” of 20 bucks per quarter, so public transport could be expanded and free to use for everyone. Friend’s dad was furious about that suggestion because “I’m not using public transport, so why should I pay for everyone who does”. People just like to complain, not solve the issue they’re aggravated about.
Public transport only really works in crowded areas
You have this backwards. Areas become dense due to the presence of public transport, not the other way around. Infrastructure comes before population, not afterwards. This remains true even in car-world, because even drivers won’t really travel where there’s no meaningful roads to do so.
Bumfuck, North Dakota is Bumfuck, North Dakota specifically because of the lack of investment in transport, not because it “doesn’t work”. If Bumfuck convinced someone to pull a spur off of the old Great Northern Line that runs through northern ND, it might grow into something much larger.
Where I grew up there is zero chance anyone is willing to invest in a rail system. They would never make the money back and the local government would not be able to afford it. This is just ridiculous.
People who make this argument never seem concerned about how their local government can afford to maintain its suburban stroads and all the supporting infrastructure they require, which is all ludicrously more expensive per person than the same infrastructure in walkable/transit-oriented development. Not to mention the cost imposed on people living there who would not have to own a car, even in small rural towns and villages, if the development patterns were different.
Said development also can be, was always historically, and in many places still is, compact and transit-connected. Switzerland has an incredible train system connecting all of its tiny mountain villages with its cities, but even America used to have the same thing before the auto and oil industries hijacked the government. There’s even a rail museum in Sacramento where you can learn about that history, and there’s documentation of the compact, walkable downtowns we used to have before we bulldozed them to build parking lots.
You’re probably right about the state of things in your hometown, as that is how things currently are in most of America, but your assumption that it has to be that way and would be more expensive if it was otherwise is ahistorical, contrary to economics, and defeatist.
I am all for more public transportation in this country
In which country? Sorry, couldn’t tell from the context.
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?(lemmy.world)](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}