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Comment by jmknoll | Hacker News Reader

For sure rural jobs aren’t a great fit for public transportation. But most people commuting to work by car are commuting to offices, retail stores, restaurants, and other places in semi-densely populated areas that could be better served by public transit.

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OK, then how do people commute to their jobs (restaurants, shoe stores, or schools) in the small towns that support farms, mines, factories or mills?

At human speeds: walk, bike, tractor, hitch a ride on a lorry (max speed 45mph), horse. Trains are useful for connecting longer distances at specific times of the day (commuting). Highways create an artificial monopoly on travel. You cannot easily travel along them, or cross them if you can't drive over 45mph. This speed is only getting higher.

There are studies showing that travel has actually gone down in areas like Mexico with the addition of modern Highways. The poor just can't participate.

nanomonkey says>"There are studies showing that travel has actually gone down in areas like Mexico with the addition of modern Highways. The poor just can't participate."<

More likely the poor used the highway once - to get out of the country and to the city. It isn't that they "can't participate", it's that they are gone.

I didn't mention small towns. My concern is primarily with the large cities in the United States that have functionally useless or second-class public transportation systems. Places like Phoenix, Houston, and Los Angeles that collectively house tens of millions of people in sufficient density for public transit, but lack effective systems due to poor planning, corruption, and lack of creative problem solving.

Of course there are use-cases for cars, nobody suggested that there aren't. The problem is that the United States in particular has assumed that every transportation issue is best solved with cars.

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