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.
In a lot of places trains connect even small towns to larger cities. Not just a couple trains each week or each day, but coming often enough that you don’t really need to check a schedule.
A big part of the anti-car movement is being pro-infrastructure.
Agreed. And where it’s not really worth it to link with trains they just do it with buses instead, between the smallest villages and the mid sized towns where trains do arrive.
Then if you have to link something that’s even smaller than villages, people can just walk to the nearest village (in Europe this usually means walking 20-30 minutes at most) and take the bus there.
But more importantly, villages and rural places are an area where I can tolerate cars, because they aren’t as unnecessary or replaceable as they are in cities.