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.
It’s worth considering the possibility of “rural” meaning villages. And in a village, most urbanist concepts work. Keep the main road outside the village, either horizontally (ring road) or vertically (tunnel). Put the places people need to go to in places where you can walk, mode separation & disentangling, all that jazz. And of course, with a village it absolutely makes sense to have a bus line go through it. Or maybe something heavier & faster if it happens to be there. Doesn’t have to be a bus line to the village, said village may exist between two larger towns, so a bus line from town to town, that happens to go via village. Maybe an extra peak hour bus for high schoolers if the village is small enough to warrant bussing kids to high school out of town.
As for the areas further out, for those who live a bit further into the boonies, I’d say the Park&Ride idea makes sense. Especially if most parking facilities are for bicycles. That can bump the catchment radius of a P&R bus stop from a few hundred metres to a few thousand metres.
Ring roads are what kills villages, though. A lot of them, like the one I live in, don’t have enough population for businesses to survive on their own. We need that road that goes through it to bring customers to the businesses. If a ring road was built, all the businesses would just move there. You see this all over America; town centers dying while these big ugly “power centers” with more parking than actual stores proliferate near the highways.
As it is, with a rather touristy road going through it, my village fares pretty well. There are all the necessary businesses (grocery store, pharmacy, bank, etc.), plus a couple seasonal restaurants, and it’s still walkable with a nice sidewalk for the whole length of the village. Said sidewalk actually sees a lot of use, and it’s kept clear of snow during the winter. Would it be nicer if there were fewer cars? Sure. But I wouldn’t want it becoming a ghost town.
Let’s slap a very Dutch solution onto that:
Ban any construction on the side of a through road, except for anything that strictly must serve cars, e.g. gas stations, EV fast chargers, stuff like that. If you want to build any other business near town, it has to be off the main road, closer to town.
Besides, make the village small enough, especially compared to the through road, and a through road through the village becomes more of an obstacle than a lifeline.
The park and ride is a cool idea, and that might be an option. About 5 miles from my place there’s a sort of gravel lot that people sometimes park in when carpooling into town. Not sure about hauling loads of feed sacks, though. It’s too much for a bike.
Loads of feed sacks? Either you’re running a commercial operation, in which case: fine; or your scale is smaller, at which point, if you’re close enough to town, an electric bakfiets might be able to do what you need.
Thanks for the introduction, those bakfiets are really cool and I’d never heard of them before. I can imagine lots of scenarios where that would be useful. I might be able to take a load of groceries to and from a carpool with it.
Anyone who has animals, commercial or not, needs to haul more than that. For context, one cow eats around 50lbs a day in the winter. I only have three right now, but it takes maybe 5 to feed ourselves and the handful of houses around us.
I guess anyone who hauls feed for livestock needs a truck, unfortunately.