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.
As for driving from the countryside into urban areas, you can have ‘Park and ride’ schemes
Which only works as long as the P&R placed don’t just alter between “full” and “closed”. Another common fallacy is to put them so far out of town that the only line to the city center and more central traffic hubs is a tram that has 20+ stops between P&R and Main Station.
Yes. Again, there are good and bad ways of implementing these things. I was also just thinking that having hire bikes at P&Rs would be a good idea, to give people more options, and that train stations bordering rural and urban areas should also be effectively P&Rs.
Keep in mind that there are more than enough people in this world for whom a bike is not a solution.