The future is to light and flexible, composable and fast.
The future is to light and flexible, composable and fast.
There's definately shades of gray, but any time you get high density or high throughput you're going to want infrastructure that leans more towards the "fixed" end of things. But with battery vehicles (from skateboards up) and automonous driving coming in, it'll make less sense in the middle areas.
To me that doesn't look dystopian, it looks practical :shrug:
Not sure if you mean trams or branch lines by local railways, but at least Germany has also been keen on reactivating old branch lines, often to resounding success and exceeding expectations (and few failures, although there are many hurdles that reactivation projects much pass to avoid that fate). S-Bahn networks with many infill stops are also popular.
Many S-Bahn stops also rely on walking for the last mile, which works well. There are also of-course people that come by bus or bike, but both seem like a smaller portion to me. There are efforts to try to get more bike&ride traffic to expand the station reach, but it's doesn't seem to me like it has increased a huge amount. There are also always efforts to expand park&ride, but the share of passengers using it is tiny [1]. The portion of people using E-Scooters and taking them into the train has noticeably increased, but not (yet) enough to be a significant portion (I'd guess 1-2% at most). In places where E-Scooter rentals are available, the trams, subways, busses, walking and personal bikes are usually cheaper (30ct/min) and guaranteed to be available. I'd guess few people use rentals for their daily routine, but more for fun and rare trips.
A few german transport associations have tried implementing on-demand ridepooling, but I haven't heard of any large success stories yet. It's more of a complement for off-peak service due to the waiting times (if it takes 20 min for the vehicle to get to you, that's 20 minutes of waiting and you can't rely on a timetable), hassle (having to use an app and ordering it) and price.
[1]: Park&Ride is very limited anyways. You can't retrofit a lot of parking to existing stations, because they're in the middle of (sometimes small) towns and would discourage denser development. If you want enough ridership to sustain an additional stop, there'd have to be a huge amount of parking (necessitating expensive parking garages) and enough demand to take the train for part of the trip and not a car for the whole trip. There usually isn't (with some exceptions, like greenfield HSR stations that the french like).