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.
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.