Ultimately, use the right tool for the task. Public transit is great for living ihe city, but if you work in servicing or out in the sticks, you're going to need a vehicle that carries stuff. Also, good luck getting fridge/freezer perishables home in time if you have a long walk/ride
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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Cooler bag. It helps when the transit is more frequent too.
I think the most important thing to remember is that even if 100% of rural folks drive, that's still only 20% of the total population. The notion that transit doesn't work for them does not excuse failing to provide it for the other 80% that it would work for.
Saying "but whatabout my special-snowflake rural lifestyle" to attack transit in general is always dishonest concern trolling.
Not only that, but how many "rural lifestyle" people are actually living an urban lifestyle from a house in the countryside, enabled by heavily-subsidized roads into the city for all of their daily activities?
That was certainly the case for the county road that my parents lived on for years. They, and their neighbors, would drive into the city every day for work, shopping, entertainment, et cetera. While it was a free county, why should we subsidize that choice?
This is truly the problem. Just the amount of waste being created by antisocial people who fetishize the idea of "living in the countryside".
Rural suburbia is a plague.
antisocial
That triggered the memory of my parents' friends who live in an exurb some miles away, where residents there post to NextDoor that they saw a bl*ck person in the neighborhood, and where every loud noise is probably gunshots. A plague, indeed.
To be fair, my parents live in an exurb, and nearly every loud noise is a gunshot. Rural people like shooting things, whether it's coyotes or beer bottles.
This is varies a lot by country.
Utter tripe.
Where I live it's dozens of little villages scattered about here and there, with four sizable towns.
Weaving public transport through all of those places is impractical.
I can't function using public transport that'll take me an hour or two to get between appointments in different places when it's a fifteen minute drive.
To get close to that you need so many buses running empty and so many routes it's insane.
Maybe let local people decide what's right for them instead of making blanket proclamations for everyone and every place?
You don't need to bring car usage to zero. It's a win to bring it down.
Maybe let local people decide what’s right for them instead of making blanket proclamations for everyone and every place?
Local, non-expert, people are famously wrong. You'd have everything paved over for more parking if you listened to them.
So, basically, you're living in a geographic area that's incompatible with your lifestyle, and it only works with taxpayer subsidies for the roads.
If you didn't pay for roads, but you wanted public transit, I don't see how that works.
There's plenty of room to improve cities without having to bemoan that rural people are living wrong. About the only place I could see is making rural people switch over to intra-city transit instead of trying to have the cars wiork to get within a block of any given destination. That's probably about as far I think to inconvenience rural people to meaningfully improve things.
Mass transit is only efficient if you have a density of people going the same way at the same time. A bus is only better when you have significant occupancy, and that's not going to happen in very low density living.
Nah, lifestyle is well suited to the area.
We have roads here older than every American country and traditions even older.
The land and the people are one.
Then get rid of everything with an internal combustion engine and live like your ancestors did on that land, don't expect modernity to be delivered to you by truck while you live your stupid medieval peasant fantasy
Yeah we don't have trucks here. Except for a few industrial people so you're not making sense.
Hands up anyone who thinks my ancestors had public transport?!
Ok, that was definitely the point of what I was saying and you aren't being disingenuous at all.
How many of those ancestors wound up marrying their cousins, do you think?
You're getting downvoted because it's a fuckcars com, but you're not exactly wrong. Plus, I don't see how we could effectively get rid of cars without making everyone move to the cities.
Plus, I don't see how we could effectively get rid of cars without making everyone move to the cities.
80% already did, and the other 20% can be ignored.
If they could run more busses with fewer stops, it wouldn't be a choice between driving yourself and getting to work on time. The only way they would or could run more busses is if people demand more public transit and public transit received more funding.
It's a god damn catch-22. Public transit kinda sucks because it doesn't get enough funding, and it doesn't get enough funding because people think it sucks.
That's very true.
I think it's a failure of imagination that the people running things believe public transport should turn a profit.
If it's run well, the economic benefits cover the costs indirectly.
And still, there will be places where it isn't the right answer, that an optimised and popular public transport system can not cover enough for people to be done with cars.
If we taxed private car use enough to make that break even, we could easily afford to have great public transit.
I think it's a failure of imagination that the people running things believe public transport should turn a profit.
It's not a failure of imagination, it's deliberate sabotage. They don't want transit to work because they're classist and transit is egalitarian.
Im not sure about this. I live near a city with incredible public transit. metro trains run often and its a grid system with plenty of buses and the artierials run often connecting lines. Its affordable and a monthly pass costs less than mandatory liability insurance for a car. Lots of people do take it but lots of people also still have cars. Even in poor neighborhoods. There is just a wierd car brain in the us. My wife feels a car is freedom but all I see is a ball and chain around the ankle with costs and possibility of breakdown at any time. If im on a bus and it breaks down you get out and catch the next bus. public transit to me is the ultimate feeling of freedom.
I agree.
Rural public transport could absolutely be way better, especially if it was viewed as a public service, not a business.
There's plenty of places where even an optimised solution would mean cars aren't needed.
Question is to cover rural communities as-is, do you and up practically replacing every car on the road with a bus? Bus is generally only better if you have significantly fewer of them to scale.
You can definitely do public transit out in the country, but isn't the Netherlands one of the most densely-populated countries in the world?
No, you can only do public transit in rural places inthe Netherlands if you go to a big hub city. If you have to go 3 towns over, you have to take a car, or be prepared to double or triple your travel time.
Linking towns to nearby cities sounds like the job of an interurban (Short one or two car length light rail / trolly that makes one stop per town, traveling the countryside between each at grade and at relatively high speed), but almost nowhere has those anymore.
If you have to go three towns over in rural NL the car may be the best option, but going by bike is a very close second.
The busses in the NL are often mainly for transporting you to and from the city, though some provinces also offer halfway decent local connections.
Even within a city, bus travel is usually much slower than a car. Because you have to wait to get on the bus, and then the bus is making many stops along the way to load and unload. And it probably also isn't going directly to where you need to go and probably doesn't stop directly in front of where you live, so you need to add walking/bike riding to the beginning and end of the trip.
I'm a big proponent of bus travel, but let's not kid ourselves here -- choosing the bus can easily make a 30 minute car ride into a 2 hour bus ride overall.
- Walking can take you nearly anywhere, but it's slow
- Biking can take you somewhat fewer places and is faster
- Driving further restricts your access and improves speed
- Buses restrict your access again, but without improving speed. They have other benefits, but if your only concerns are versatility and speed, they aren't in the natural progression.
- Trains, however, can be a lot faster than cars, at the usual cost of going fewer places.
The solution, as it often is, is to use more trains. Also, walking and bike tunnels. Weather is often a reason why I don't walk or bike.
Switzerland also manages it in rural areas.
Yes, but the service isn't always sufficient in the countryside. If you live outside the city you still often own a car. But you can easily travel and visit any place in the countryside with a bit of time.
I grew up in county town Australia. I definitely noticed the lack of car, but I also got by fine without one.
Western Australia i'm guessing?