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.
Heyyy rural 19th century small “historic” town here.
Historically, my town was in lumber and you’d literally have building materials moved down the river and sold at their equivalent of home depot but on the water.
Streetcars connected the very center of town.
A rail line splits the center of town, so goods never needed a highway to reach here!
In current day, there is a highway built next to a road, and that road is ripe for a bike lane. Downtown is safe for cyclists and pedestrians during the day, but at night its dark and there’s parking on both sides of the streets FULL for people to visit restaurants and bars.
A lot of small policy changes could fix all this mess, but alas it will probably not happen so I am going to move next year.
It sucks that my area is so clearly set up for the highway to be this main line connecting towns. And if it were a 30 mile long LRT, everyone in a massive rural/suburban/small city area could ditch cars entirely. But with new money coming in from federal and state government, everyplace is actually building the worst car-dependent and pedestrian unfriendly infrastructure for the first time! Shit that has been proven by studies over decades to not work.