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.
In a lot of places trains connect even small towns to larger cities. Not just a couple trains each week or each day, but coming often enough that you don’t really need to check a schedule.
A big part of the anti-car movement is being pro-infrastructure.
Agreed. And where it’s not really worth it to link with trains they just do it with buses instead, between the smallest villages and the mid sized towns where trains do arrive.
Then if you have to link something that’s even smaller than villages, people can just walk to the nearest village (in Europe this usually means walking 20-30 minutes at most) and take the bus there.
But more importantly, villages and rural places are an area where I can tolerate cars, because they aren’t as unnecessary or replaceable as they are in cities.
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.
I live in a place where what you are describing is already implemented, and it does make a lot of sens, but there is still some issues:
- Since most people work in the same time period of the day, public transports are a nightmare in the morning and at the end of the day.
- Country side bus exists, but in my town there is 3 per day. So you need to spend the day at the city if you use it.
So there is still a lot of people that prefer to use their car to go to work or simply to go to the city, which causes insane congestions on the main road around the urban area at some points in the day.
I agree, those are obviously issues in many areas. But infrequent, unreliable, overcrowded public transport is a result of political decisions, whereas the car congestion is a result of geometry!
I also think it would be good if more places of work had staggered or flexible hours. So that, e.g., some staff work 8-4, others 9-5 and others 10-6. That would spread out the single hypothetical ‘rush hour’ into three busy hours. I’m not sure how exactly you could implement that at scale, granted. Possibly if governments started to do it, it would catch on in the rest of the world of work.
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.
I don’t think cars are a problem in rural areas, where you have very low population density.
Aside from the emissions.
@kier @kingludd there’s a cultural harm that you’re not a real man/'Murican/Christian/conservative/etc if you aren’t living a life of the non-cosmopolitan by riding a bike or interested in anything else other than car-dependency and all the ancillary things that come with that, since that starts to bleed into the suburbs and even urban areas. There’s white-collar workers doing their morning commute in full-size pickups telling themselves that mass transit is for dirty poor people not therm
Rural as in small but compact towns or as in homesteads?
In case 1, we will still need motorized agricultural equipment (good discussion how to decarbonize it). Tractors can be used for short haul transport as well. Walking for everyday getting around.
For traveling between towns a robust bus system does wonders. For example hourly bus to the nearest city also visiting a couple of other towns. And maybe another line not centered on a city. If you’re lucky to be on a major route, a train.
Case 2 is harder. Horse and bicycle are some options. But basically you will need a motor vehicle of some kind. Best bet is combining multiple uses in one vehicle, so a van basically. You can carry stuff, people, animals …
This is a good point. I should have been more specific; I wasn’t thinking of towns and villages as being rural, but most people do. Really the alternatives need to be organized by use-case rather than geographic location.
I use a little truck as the all-purpose vehicle that can haul whatever and it works, but it sure ould be nice not to need it.