Fuck Cars

I had a friend who was killed by a motorist while walking on a country road, so I've given this some thought. The key principle for safety is to keep cars away from more vulnerable road users.

So, there are the same basic options: better public transport infrastructure, and well-signposted, properly maintained footpaths and bike lanes are the most obvious.

As for driving from the countryside into urban areas, you can have 'Park and ride' schemes, which are common in parts of the UK. You drive your car to a bus station at the edge of the town, and the bus takes you the rest of the way in. That minimises miles driven and keeps cars out of urban areas, where they're especially inefficient.

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.

I don't think cars are a problem in rural areas, where you have very low population density.

Aside from the emissions.

Rural Towns Don't Have To Suck

Rural as in small but compact towns or as in homesteads?

In case 1, we will still need motorized agricultural equipment (good discussion how to decarbonize it). Tractors can be used for short haul transport as well. Walking for everyday getting around.

For traveling between towns a robust bus system does wonders. For example hourly bus to the nearest city also visiting a couple of other towns. And maybe another line not centered on a city. If you're lucky to be on a major route, a train.

Case 2 is harder. Horse and bicycle are some options. But basically you will need a motor vehicle of some kind. Best bet is combining multiple uses in one vehicle, so a van basically. You can carry stuff, people, animals ...

On isolated, super rural areas where you're the only person on a dirt road for miles, I think it might be unavoidable during parts of the year or if the road is really intensive to bike (steep, sharp curves for example) BUT that's where you should be able to drive to your village or town center and pick up the 15-30 minute regional train.

Likewise that would mean the people closer to town who might already be walking to the barber or liquor store would also be able to walk to the station if they needed to go farther.

Older rural areas are actually typically much more walkable than American cities. Keep in mind, rural towns were very common before cars existed. They're typically structured to have a small center, sometimes basically just a "main street", with all the places you need to regularly visit, and houses surrounding them, and the farmland surrounding that. This way the people are all relatively close, and the farmland is not between you and others. These towns are all about self sufficiency within the community, but ofc if you keep a car for when you need to travel somewhere else that's fine, and no one is begrudging you for using gas powered farm equipment on your farm. The main point is you don't have a daily commute that requires a car, because it's either your farm or one of the lose shops that are close to everyone.

And for what it's worth, a lot of train networks used to go to these rural towns as well, and it'd be awesome to see those return for Intercity travel.

I like seeing this discussion. I live in rural Ireland and so has my family for generations.

Expecting people in our situation to completely ditch cars overnight is unrealistic. The priority should be on making towns and cities car free because pedestrianization, cycling infrastructure and public transport makes so more more sense there.

Amish style - bicycle, buggy, horse, walk

In the US? You'll probably need access to a car for a lot of things, but let's assume the political leanings of your town are open to things like collective ownership and bike infrastructure. Let's also assume we're talking about a rural town that has a dense, but small downtown surrounded by farmland (fairly common).

Your community could set up a ride share service for the town that is locally and communally owned. They could also run a car loan service. With bike infrastructure, cargo bikes and electric bikes can replace a lot of car trips. Living in a small house or apartment near the center of town will cut out the need for cars for lots of trips, too.

If there is a bus network in your county or state, you could also lobby to get a bus to come to your town to more easily connect you to other areas without a car, but I don't know how feasible something like that would be.

Ask yourself: If I didn't have a car, would I still live here?

Cars encourage sprawl, and living far away from the things we need everyday. This is a bad thing. This, not emissions, and not safety, are my main gripe with personal automotives. You're asking, "how do we keep the worse, most selfish parts of car ownership if we get rid of cars?" We fucking don't. That's the point.

Just mentioning 'carpooling' because no one did yet.

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.

Rural UK. Nearest food shop is a 15 minute drive away, through narrow lanes and big hills. There is no alternative to a car for shopping, commuting or just life.

I live near to a small village. It's up a 25% hill in a very narrow hollow winding lane (say, eight feet wide? Cars and vans ok, but need to reverse for up to 1/4 mile if they meet,) If a lorry is foolish enough to come this way, they'll get stuck. We had one stuck for four days last year when it ripped an airtank off on a rock and completely blocked the road.

Bicycles are not great because of the hills. I have an ebike and that does make it doable, but carrying capacity limited. I have horses, but steep hills on tarmac would make that dangerous, if at all possible, to take a cart. We do ride them, and you might carry a fair bit in saddlebags but our village has no shops, and it's too far to get food by horse. Walking to a food shop would be something ike a four hour round trip.

There's no trains nearby, but the village does have a small bus. One bus. A day. So if you want to go to the town and back, it's going to be a two day trip. No problem getting a seat though, because it's always empty as nobody uses it. Must be the loneliest bus driver around.

So, it's cars. There is no viable alternative.

How rural are we talking about? Miles and miles of farmland between every home? Some sort of personal vehicle would be fine in my opinion when the density of the population is this low. But you could still conceivably have a single train going through the middle with lots of stops. Then you only have to bike or walk a short distance and take a train of some kind the rest of the way.

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.