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.

  • AJ Sadauskas
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    01 year ago

    @betwixthewires Cars faster than trains? If that’s the case in your country, then you have a serious underinvestment in rail.

    (Seriously, even V/Line trains in Victoria go faster than the 100 KP/h speed limit, and by world standards V/Line ain’t a great train service.)

    What happened in the US, Australia, and Canada was a massive investment in rural highway infrastructure by national and state/provincial governments after World War 2.

    In the US, that was Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956

    In Australia, it was Gough Whitlam’s National Roads Act of 1974: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_(Australia)

    Many towns in the rural western US were railway towns. They were quite literally built around a train station.

    But after WW2, the US spent the equivalent of US$193 billion (adjusted for inflation) in just 10 years building new interstate highways.

    At the same time, the extensive already-existing network of rural railways saw service cuts, was run down, and had privately-owned lines become freight-only.

    Again, similar story in the other former British colonies.

    That was a choice by government. And the result of that choice is many people in those railway towns responded by buying a car.

    It didn’t have to be that way.

    In many parts of Europe and Asia, where leaders have invested in rail, you can live quite comfortably in many small towns without a car.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      I meant when the development of transportation infrastructure started, cars were certainly faster than trains.