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.

  • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
    4·
    1 year ago

    While I agree cars/trucks make sense in rural areas, your great grandparents likely lived in rural extremely rural conditions without a car. It has been done for the majority of human existence, and the Amish still do it today.

    • kingludd@lemmy.basedcount.comOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      They had feed mills in carting distance, and they had hundreds of acres to grow their own food. With more people on earth, we usually have dozens of acres, at best, and one feed mill in the county, at best.

      • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        I actually want to know more about this. It sounds like you know what you’re talking about. If you’ve got any good YouTube videos or links (or feel compelled to talk about it yourself); I grew up in rural areas and simple farms, but I don’t know the first think about feed mills and industrial agriculture.

        A while ago I explored a rabbit hole about farming without ammonium nitrate and I was shocked how basically the whole world (minus the island of Java) depends on ammonium nitrate for food.