this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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I did a bicycle+light rail for a year and it took me about 2x the time to get everywhere I needed to go, but I could do it in a car centric city. You can't expect rural folks to have access to public transportation though. Suburbs are a stretch too in some areas.
Why can't we expect rural areas to have some form of mass transit? Having at least a bus system that services a rural area absolutely should be the expectation.
Because a bus that serves a town of 500 people will come once an hour, at most. Also, many people can't walk far to/from the one bus stop. Busses do not solve a problem in small towns, because there is no traffic and plenty of parking.
Switzerland has rail that serves small towns and it’s pretty frequent: https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc
@KevonLooney@lemm.ee, @Blamemeta@lemmy.world, @bob_wiley@lemmy.world
It seems that you're all only thinking about servicing just the small town itself, and not a larger bus line that services multiple smaller towns to get them to a larger city area and back, or to each other.
The usefulness is not in traversing the rural town. It's to get the fuck out of one.
The larger city area will often be hundreds of miles away with not enough population in between to have more than one or two people at most in any given bus even stopping at multiple small towns. Mass transit it great in cities, but it desperately needs population density to be efficient.
How large is large? How are people getting goods at all living hundreds of miles away from a population center? It doesn't have to be a giant metropolitan like LA or NYC.
The same idea @DrAnthony@lemmy.world is putting into words better.
Gosh, I think you'd have to be in the REAL middle of nowhere to be even 100 miles from a population center. Maybe out west in either of the Dakotas or Wyoming or something, but I imagine even then it's quite rare and represents a fraction of a percentage point of the population. "Never let perfect be the enemy of good"
Usually you consolidate all your errands into one trip every week or two where you buy everything you need at the larger town of a few tens of thousands of people.
My grandmother lived in rural Kansas, and her town had a grocery store and a gas station. Anything else was a 3 hour drive to buy.
That's...not a place I'd want to spend my life at
Ironically, in some ways it's actually a lot better place to live now than it was back then purely because of ecommerce, but the jobs issue is even worse now that it was back then, because all the farm work is now controlled by megacorps instead of individual families.
The final mile is always the killer. And the greater the number of destinations, the more complex and impractical a mass transit system becomes. This is the fly in the ointment that nobody ever seems to want to address directly.
Yes, a car is inefficient in terms of number of ass cheeks moved per square footage taken up. However, every single one of those cars can (and probably is) delivering its occupant to a different destination, and in most cases practically directly to it. A train cannot do this. A bus cannot do this. Trains are excellent at moving a large number of people from a relatively small high concentration geographical area to another single location with a high demand destination nearby. A bus is decent at moving a moderate number of people along a predefined corridor, provided the passengers do not have particularly specific requirements of when they leave or arrive. But the more stops you add for the bus or train, the slower and slower it gets. If you compensate for this by adding more routes, the number of connections a passenger must make to get from one specific destination to another makes the amount of time taken pretty much totally nonviable once you reach 4 or 5.
Single or limited destination mass transit methods can never be a total replacement for individual transportation. However, that individual transportation doesn't necessarily need to be a car. Bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles are more space efficient per number of passengers, especially if only 1 or 2 passengers need to travel at a time (see also: Southeast Asia).
All of these methods need to coexist to create a functional and balanced transit system. There is no silver bullet, and the issue is much more complex than a single smarmy bar graph.
Putting in even a single stop at a rural town could easily add 30 minutes each way to the route. Probably more, getting from a hub city to these rural towns is a good amount of driving with not much of anything between. A bus that stops at a rural 500 person town once every hour or so isn't moving enough people to be more efficient than cars. Now you want to do that for every town surrounding a hub city? The economy of scale simply doesn't exist for rural areas. Even suburbs stretch that a bit.
So basically, they would drive to a bus station, just to get on a bus? How often do you expect them to need to into the city? And they already have a car at this point, why would they get on a bus?
Are you for real with this? Have you even ever seen a functioning bus line like this before? No. That's not basically it at all.
You have a couple stops in the small town direct from the hub/city to pick up and ferry people to the larger area. From there they can walk/take another bus or other form of transport like a train. It's similar to light rail, but with roads and busses instead of tracks and trains.
It'd be a lot easier for some people to find jobs who can't afford their own car if they could actually get to the city where the jobs are. So every day.
Well, yeah. If you have your own car, then there is no reason to use a bus. The only reason to use a bus is if you don't have a car, like you got multiple DUIs or you just totaled your car, but even then you would probably just get a taxi or uber.
Nobody was arguing that, though, so it's irrelevant to the conversation.
Your town underinvested in transit because everyone has a car, and they sprawled the architecture because everyone has a car. People got by in rural areas with trains just fine before cars were invented
I would love a better bus or LR in my town, but that shit ain't happening in my life time.
The bus comes every hour, if that, and doesn't really go to many places.
If I went full public transit, I'd have to schedule the county transportation via state health insurance and schedule the whole week in advance just to even get to a bus stop..and that's if I even have medicaid.
I try not to drive as much as possible, make my errands all at once, or while en route to and from work. Me and partner car pool. We have one hybrid vehicle.
The other people round here LOVE their coal rollers.
Why don't you join the transit movement and push for light rail in your town? You could make some persuasive arguments to the local government. Strong transit systems lead to higher GDP and more tax revenue
I don't mean to be a doomer...but that would probably just be me yelling at clouds to a bunch of out of touch backwoods gangsters. However its worth a look into what is going on in my area. Also worth noting we do have a bus line for commuting into NYC once a day real early AM. So it's not all doom and gloom I suppose.
Having grown up in a rural area, here's what I think the solution would look like.
Why can't people in a 500 person town walk to the bus station? How is there traffic in them?? WHO IS PLANNING THIS
It's all a bit chicken-and-egg. The more people that use a public transport network, the more economic it becomes to put on more frequent services and additional routes. A town of 100k people is more than enough to sustain a pretty comprehensive public transport network, if most of them are using it. But obviously if most people don't use it, those that do are stuck with whatever can be made to work.
I live in a much larger city and this is true. I can drive my car to work in about 12-15 mins or it would take roughly 1.5-2 hours to walk or take a bus. When traffic was low due to Covid I nearly bought an e-bike because I could get to work in about 30 mins. If I tried that now I would certainly be hit by a car in a month or less.
And the trains/busses absolutely have to show up at these intervals to make them attractive and viable for most people, which means that for significant portions of the day they're basically going around empty.
+1 to this. Buses might not be the best mode for most in rural areas, but they are an essential lifeline for those who can't or can't afford to drive.
Because at that point you're just running buses for individuals at best, but mostly running empty. You'd have to stop at every house.. It would create more emissions that it saves.
Ideally, you would be running a train instead of a bus. The train stops in the middle of town, which is a thriving mixed use area of medium density residences, corner stores, and restaurants. Everyone can walk to the train station.
You expect people to walk to a train station? Have you seen how far apart everything is in rural areas?
Hi, yes please, Id like to walk two hours to get on a train, and I like to walk two hours to get back home when do. And thats assuming you live fairly close to town, within 5 or 6 miles or so.
People have been walking through rural areas for 12,000 years. Because that's how long ago agriculture was invented.
Except you know, horses.
Also, we have cars now.
And its not 12,000 years ago.
There is zero point in getting in walking two hours to a train station when you can just drive there.
One of those options emits carbon and drives humanity closer to extinction and one doesn't. Do you prefer the time saving convenient genocide, or walking?
Mate, so long as we ship plastic across the pacific, cruises still exist, and execs fly private planes, thats a non-starter.
Further more, those buses would run empty most of the time, causing more emissions than if people just drove. Have you even been to rural America?
That's why we should have electric trains going to every rural community
Electric trains still have emissions. Not just power, but maintence as well. Overhead lines go down, pantographs leave metal dust everywhere, hell even just normal rail maintence.
Theres a reason why all the American passenger lines went bankrupt, and why Amtrak is funded by the government and still struggling.
And the best part is you'd spend a trillion dollars running lines everywhere, and almost no one would ride it.
Edit: its costs 75,000 dollars per year per mile to maintain electric track. Its completely unfeasible. http://rockymountainrail.org/documents/RMRABP_CH7_OperatingCosts_03.2010.pdf
Did your dumb ass really just pull numbers from the Rocky Mountain Rail Authority, a rail planning committee trying to figure out how to make a train from Denver to Vail and say their numbers are equal to what the rest of the country would experience?
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve read and I’ve read several other comments of yours that are close to it.
Its the first one i found that gave actual numbers.
Have you looked at a voting map recently? They would never go for it, not in America at least.
Now I can only speak for the US, but most major cities have ring roads or some sort of bypass that would be perfect for a hub and spoke sort of setup alongside them. Maybe it's just the fact that the university I went to famously has a light rail system and the concept is just embedded in me, but I'd imagine the uptake of a park and ride approach with stations out in the burbs (certainly not all of them, but laid out so that you don't need to go more than a burb or two over to reach a station) would be high enough to be worth it. Putting in some shops at the stations like an airport foodcourt would help offset building costs and whatnot to a degree over time as well. Then you could tie the hubs into other major cities in the state and you've got yourself a compelling transit system, doubly so if those cities have subways.
A benefit of starting with a park-and-ride setup is, if you have good protected bike lanes and secure bike parking, you can encourage a lot of bike and ebike trips to the transit hubs. If every suburb isn't too far from a transit hub, that makes a compelling case for bikes and ebikes as first- and last-mile solutions for a lot of people. Maybe not everyone, and maybe not overnight, but definitely for a lot of people. And any improvement is still improvement.
I understand what it means, but "last mile" is a really funny term because walking a mile is apparently inconceivable to the average american
Man, I'm fat as fuck and I still regularly walk 2 miles to go get junk food. 1 mile there, 1 mile back. Once walked 5 miles cuz I got lost on a hiking trail and that sucked. But mostly due to being lost in the god damn woods.
You know, the bike wrinkle is something I hadn't even considered. That's an awesome point and all the more reason why we need to build a better transit system.
Multimodal transport is amazing. Ride bike to station - ride a fast train - ride from station to destination.
When I switched to riding my bike to work the commute was almost identical. However, I was riding in traffic and after my second close call with a car door I called it quits.
If we had dedicated bike lanes where I live I would 100% still be riding to work.
That's why we need to build trains and trams in rural and suburban areas to save time and money