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.
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?
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
Not a single person here has said or even implied this. Everyone here has suggested several different kinds of transport, including but not limited to bicycles. Not only that, but nearly every comment has acknowledged that some car use in the countryside is probably necessary. I recommend actually reading the comments here rather than assuming you know what they say and getting angry about it.
Yeah, I was surprised how many responses didn’t consider hauling at all. I really don’t need to commute anywhere at all. I’m happy just staying home. But I do have to haul hay bales, feed sacks, and 50lb sacks of groceries.
Cars make sense if you have to haul a lot of stuff. Craftsmen in the city, firetrucks, ambulances, police, farmers,… The right car for the right job is not the problem of our car dependency and doesn’t need a solution.
We (or at least I) are not telling those people to not drive in conditions like you described, we say that there should be more busses so not driving as often would even be possible, and that if they drive that they don’t demand that they have a right to park right in front of everywhere they go in the city and get there by freeways that are built for rush hour traffic and sit mostly empty during the rest of the day (and scarring the city the whole time, while they can escape to their quaint countryside).
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.
Of course there are always scenarios where a person needs a car. If you have to live 30 km away from the next city and public transportation isn’t an option (maybe a dial-a-bus kinda system) you probably have to take a car.
If you live ‘rural’ like me, 4 km away from the next city, there is barely anything you have to take the car for. And if you need to haul something you could rent a car in the city (if you don’t have a own car). Still nearly all my neighbours own one car per person, at least two per household.
People like you amaze me. You take it for granted that everyone is able to afford and maintain a safe car and is able to park it wherever they want to. This is the narrowminded worldview of old, saggy village-dwellers.
Don’t take it too personal, but your and many other peoples inability to understand that there can be a systematic problem with too much car dependency without attacking your individual way of living is quite annoying.
I definitely should have been more specific. I wouldn’t think of 4km from groceries as being rural at all-- like you said, I think that car problem can be solved with normal urban solutions.
Renting a car to haul is just… not even close to viable. That would approximately double my annual expenses. Besides, I can’t rent a car with no credit history and no way to get to the city to rent a car.
Hauling really does seem to be the sticking point. If you have to haul you’re kind of stuck with a car.
Does it matter if I am Canadian or not? The problem is the same all over the world. But yes, the USA and Canada seem especially fucked.
Feels like you are repeating what i wrote. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. We need to reduce car dependency everywhere. In some places it will be harder/nearly impossible, in other places it will be easier.
And I also like what someone else wrote in this thread: we are discussing if we should keep the most terrible consequences of car dependencies. I vote we do not.
It’s worth considering the possibility of “rural” meaning villages. And in a village, most urbanist concepts work. Keep the main road outside the village, either horizontally (ring road) or vertically (tunnel). Put the places people need to go to in places where you can walk, mode separation & disentangling, all that jazz. And of course, with a village it absolutely makes sense to have a bus line go through it. Or maybe something heavier & faster if it happens to be there. Doesn’t have to be a bus line to the village, said village may exist between two larger towns, so a bus line from town to town, that happens to go via village. Maybe an extra peak hour bus for high schoolers if the village is small enough to warrant bussing kids to high school out of town.
As for the areas further out, for those who live a bit further into the boonies, I’d say the Park&Ride idea makes sense. Especially if most parking facilities are for bicycles. That can bump the catchment radius of a P&R bus stop from a few hundred metres to a few thousand metres.
The park and ride is a cool idea, and that might be an option. About 5 miles from my place there’s a sort of gravel lot that people sometimes park in when carpooling into town. Not sure about hauling loads of feed sacks, though. It’s too much for a bike.
Loads of feed sacks? Either you’re running a commercial operation, in which case: fine; or your scale is smaller, at which point, if you’re close enough to town, an electric bakfiets might be able to do what you need.
Thanks for the introduction, those bakfiets are really cool and I’d never heard of them before. I can imagine lots of scenarios where that would be useful. I might be able to take a load of groceries to and from a carpool with it.
Anyone who has animals, commercial or not, needs to haul more than that. For context, one cow eats around 50lbs a day in the winter. I only have three right now, but it takes maybe 5 to feed ourselves and the handful of houses around us.
I guess anyone who hauls feed for livestock needs a truck, unfortunately.
Ring roads are what kills villages, though. A lot of them, like the one I live in, don’t have enough population for businesses to survive on their own. We need that road that goes through it to bring customers to the businesses. If a ring road was built, all the businesses would just move there. You see this all over America; town centers dying while these big ugly “power centers” with more parking than actual stores proliferate near the highways.
As it is, with a rather touristy road going through it, my village fares pretty well. There are all the necessary businesses (grocery store, pharmacy, bank, etc.), plus a couple seasonal restaurants, and it’s still walkable with a nice sidewalk for the whole length of the village. Said sidewalk actually sees a lot of use, and it’s kept clear of snow during the winter. Would it be nicer if there were fewer cars? Sure. But I wouldn’t want it becoming a ghost town.
Let’s slap a very Dutch solution onto that:
Ban any construction on the side of a through road, except for anything that strictly must serve cars, e.g. gas stations, EV fast chargers, stuff like that. If you want to build any other business near town, it has to be off the main road, closer to town.
Besides, make the village small enough, especially compared to the through road, and a through road through the village becomes more of an obstacle than a lifeline.
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 don’t want everyone to live in cities. What my gripe is, is sprawl, the city bleeding out into the countryside. The countryside should be full of people who actually live there; who work there, and get their food there, and spend their time there. Why should someone who spends four-fifths of her waking time in a city center be driving all the way out of the city to sleep?
We’ve made this option artificially cheap by subsidizing the automobile and passing the many, many externalities onto the public purse.
How rural are we talking about? Miles and miles of farmland between every home? Some sort of personal vehicle would be fine in my opinion when the density of the population is this low. But you could still conceivably have a single train going through the middle with lots of stops. Then you only have to bike or walk a short distance and take a train of some kind the rest of the way.
Rural UK. Nearest food shop is a 15 minute drive away, through narrow lanes and big hills. There is no alternative to a car for shopping, commuting or just life.
I live near to a small village. It’s up a 25% hill in a very narrow hollow winding lane (say, eight feet wide? Cars and vans ok, but need to reverse for up to 1/4 mile if they meet,) If a lorry is foolish enough to come this way, they’ll get stuck. We had one stuck for four days last year when it ripped an airtank off on a rock and completely blocked the road.
Bicycles are not great because of the hills. I have an ebike and that does make it doable, but carrying capacity limited. I have horses, but steep hills on tarmac would make that dangerous, if at all possible, to take a cart. We do ride them, and you might carry a fair bit in saddlebags but our village has no shops, and it’s too far to get food by horse. Walking to a food shop would be something ike a four hour round trip.
There’s no trains nearby, but the village does have a small bus. One bus. A day. So if you want to go to the town and back, it’s going to be a two day trip. No problem getting a seat though, because it’s always empty as nobody uses it. Must be the loneliest bus driver around.
So, it’s cars. There is no viable alternative.