With work hours being what they are, you don’t have set times where everyone needs to be at work or go home at the same time. It rural areas, having public transport so often that “you don’t need to check a schedule” would mean empty busses and trails most of the time.
For me, I can tell that I have lived in a city where this was the case. It was great! But where I live now, this isn’t possible. The narrative now is, that people should move into towns, to make this more effective. There is a very fine balance between effectiveness though, and industrialization of living conditions.
Yeah, they put busses into my exurb and they hardly have anyone riding them because they just connect one shopping center to a different shopping center to the library to the bus depot to &c. (never any residential). Only busses that stop in residential are schoolbusses. Now they wonder why no one uses the local bus. Or not.
Do you know how many cities are out there that have completely useless public transit? I don’t think anyone’s suggesting we build a train out to every farmer’s front door so they can get into town without a car.
There’s plenty of areas where additional bus routes and train lines would be a huge benefit, but the entire budget is being spent on car infrastructure.
(Like the Premier of Ontario who wants to build a tunnel for cars under Toronto instead of finishing the light rail projects that have been under construction for over a decade)
I mean, you are correct that building an entire rail line to a single farm to take the farmer’s kids to school would be extremely inefficient. We need farms, and farmers, and those farmers need to be able to get around, and the way for them to get around is personal automobiles.
But the argument “farmers need cars so we still need cars” is not really an argument in favor of auto-intensive infrastructure. It is a edge case, and we should design cities around the needs of the average person and make allowances for edge cases, not the other way around.
The meme is specifically about cities, so when you said “thinly populated,” that should have been about thinly populated areas of cities.
If you’re actually talking about rural areas and not cities, then you’d want to start with buses. Speaking of living in places with good public transit, I used to live in Japan, and I was surprised by how much buses get used in rural areas. They can get pretty full.
![[meme] choochoo](https://quokk.au/static/media/posts/8L/4e/8L4eFCNmnx9NzyK.webp){kind=link}
That’s weird. I thought it was everyone driving their own cars all the time that was a huge waste of resources.
With work hours being what they are, you don’t have set times where everyone needs to be at work or go home at the same time. It rural areas, having public transport so often that “you don’t need to check a schedule” would mean empty busses and trails most of the time.
For me, I can tell that I have lived in a city where this was the case. It was great! But where I live now, this isn’t possible. The narrative now is, that people should move into towns, to make this more effective. There is a very fine balance between effectiveness though, and industrialization of living conditions.
Yeah, they put busses into my exurb and they hardly have anyone riding them because they just connect one shopping center to a different shopping center to the library to the bus depot to &c. (never any residential). Only busses that stop in residential are schoolbusses. Now they wonder why no one uses the local bus. Or not.
Do you know how many cities are out there that have completely useless public transit? I don’t think anyone’s suggesting we build a train out to every farmer’s front door so they can get into town without a car.
There’s plenty of areas where additional bus routes and train lines would be a huge benefit, but the entire budget is being spent on car infrastructure.
(Like the Premier of Ontario who wants to build a tunnel for cars under Toronto instead of finishing the light rail projects that have been under construction for over a decade)
I mean, you are correct that building an entire rail line to a single farm to take the farmer’s kids to school would be extremely inefficient. We need farms, and farmers, and those farmers need to be able to get around, and the way for them to get around is personal automobiles.
But the argument “farmers need cars so we still need cars” is not really an argument in favor of auto-intensive infrastructure. It is a edge case, and we should design cities around the needs of the average person and make allowances for edge cases, not the other way around.
The meme is specifically about cities, so when you said “thinly populated,” that should have been about thinly populated areas of cities.
If you’re actually talking about rural areas and not cities, then you’d want to start with buses. Speaking of living in places with good public transit, I used to live in Japan, and I was surprised by how much buses get used in rural areas. They can get pretty full.
You can get almost anywhere by train in Japan. And anywhere you can’t get by train, you can get by bus. It’s lovely.