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.
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.
Just going to add that it’s absolutely your Canadian showing.
Y’all got some massively sprawling suburbs that most of the world, US included, only has in a few sparing locations.
If I start driving West, East, or South from the city I live in, the last store or gas station for the next ~1 hour of driving is found 10 minutes away at the edge of the city.
About 30% of the city’s workforce commutes from outside to get here. Without cars, or significant reforms in zoning, taxes, housing availability, and infrastructure, this city would economically crumble overnight.
I hate cars. I hate driving. I’ve lived in places where I didn’t enter a car for months on end, and I’ve lived over an hour from the nearest city. Sometimes they are 100% necessary. Sometimes they’re not. Realistically, even if public sentiment changed to the anti-car view right now, it would take decades to get the infrastructure completely in place.
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.
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.