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Comment by DarkNova6 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, it depends on where you are living. While cars in urban areas are a definite luxury, not having a car is the luxury outside of cities.

No amount of incentives and enhancements of public transportation will ever fix this issue for sparsely populated areas. You can try to reduce exhausts and travel distances with car, but you can't fight car ownership.

My parents live in such an area and they can commute to work and back fully electric. They charge overnight and always fall back to combustion for larger routes, such as the next airport.

If you ignore the needs of those people, you only strengthen political forces who also support big oil. There needs to be a middle ground.

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Living in a sparsely populated area is the luxury here. You can live somewhere rural, somewhere small, but still within biking distance of everything you need daily and within train or bus of weekly needs.

I'm afraid missing the nuances of people's livelihood is exactly the point I tried to make:

> If you ignore the needs of those people, you only strengthen political forces who also support big oil. There needs to be a middle ground.

How are you even transporting your weekly groceries without a car? What if you have family? And do you also use your bike during heavy rain/winter/strong heat? It just doesn't work in practice.

Virtually nobody moves to rural areas. People have been living there for generations. You can't expect them to mass-migrate somewhere else you must address their needs. If people have the impression that nobody supports them, you get extremists.

> How are you even transporting your weekly groceries without a car?

My bicycle rear rack is rated for 25KG and I have 2 70L bags, my Wald front basket can handle some additionnal load and I converted my old kids trailer to carry groceries too. I can carry enough.

But you don't have to buy a week worth of groceries in a single day.

Also we are in 2024. Supermarkets do deliveries.

> What if you have family?

There are seats for toddlers and cargo bikes and trailers for those that need to carry more than one. After that kids love cycling. We are constantly saying humans have a way too sedentary life and people need to exercise in order to be healthy. You have here a solution much cheaper both in term of time and money than going to the gym.

> And do you also use your bike during heavy rain/winter/strong heat?

You just deal with it the same way you do when you have to walk from your car in that huge parking lot to the place you are actually going to.

The only limiter is climbs. But if I was limited by my climbing capacity while loaded I would use an e-bike.

I don't get these kinds of arguments. Even if rural areas still use cars, reducing pollution in urban areas (the ones, you know, most populated) still brings massive improvements to everyone (if nothing else, the ruralites aren't stuck in traffic as much when they inevitably commute into cities) and has very measureable health benefits for everyone in the cities.

Where does this silly idea that "let's use more public transport in cities" requires rural areas to not use cars come from?

"Urban" in the US doesn't mean a dense city where mass transit makes sense. Loads of areas in the US are "urban" but due to design are practically entirely car dependent. Houses are in seas of single family homes with large lots. Stores are islands separated by massive parking lots. Bolting on a bus service to those designs means driving tons of empty busses (lots of different routes because things are everywhere) and long walks (everything is an island) to connect to things.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do mass transit. I like it, I want to see more of it. But thinking it's just a matter of buying more busses isn't reality for a lot of the US. We pretty much need to redesign our cities and towns for transit to be successful. Rug-pulling people by building out transit-unfriendly cities and then banning cars isn't going to go over well.

To be posts like yours sound like you actually are saying you shouldn't do mass transit - they're always full of excuses and reasons to delay, avoid and not move on it. You seem to reduce someone saying "let's do mass transit" to "let's buy more busses" and then argue against it.

No, I agree, we should do mass transit. I want more of it. I use what's already there when it makes sense. I'd love to massively reduce my VMT.

But take for example my neighborbood. There's bus lines on the north edge going east-west, bus lines on the west edge going north-south. I'm lucky, I live at the west edge of my neighborhood near one of the entrances so the north line stop is just outside my door. The south bound stop is across six lanes of 40+mph traffic with the nearest crosswalk over a quarter mile. It's a half-mile walk from my house to the east-west stop on the north edge of my neighborhood. And I'm in the middle-west edge of my neighborhood, if you're in the south-east of the neighborhood you've got about a mile walk to get to a bus stop. And my neighborhood isn't even a very big one for DFW.

It doesn't make sense to snake the busses all throughout the neighborhoods, you'll spend all the bus travel time going up and down residential streets. Nobody wants to ride on a bus slowly crawling through the maze of residences.

And even then, once I get on the bus half the travel time is just going past one development of houses after another. And I'm in a generally denser and more mixed part of the city than a lot of these places. Lots of my friends live in neighborhoods where it's at least a 5-10min drive to leave their neighborhood. Then they pass by a few neighborhoods before they get to the first small smatterings of retail, but chances are it doesn't have the stop they're interested in.

Transit really just can't function with this design. We need to redesign this to make it work. Cut up these massive residential only blocks, mix in some retail, densify things, etc. I'm not saying this to suggest we can't do it, I'm just being realistic to the challenges at hand. Burying your head in the sand acting like it's just a matter of another train line or more bus service or adding bike lanes isn't going to solve the systemic design issues we have in a lot of US cities and towns.

>Where does this silly idea that "let's use more public transport in cities" requires rural areas to not use cars come from?

From the politicians pushing it. There's only one size fits all solutions. There's never an acceptance that people can have different circumstances.

by talking to politician from Urban areas. (This is just my real life experience). I live in an urban area, also talk to people from car friendly places and they complain about lack of parking areas which is no surprise in a city (and stupid to build more) Politicians from Urban areas otherwise hate cars and want to forbid everywhere including rural areas. I just wonder why people cant understand that different places need different stuff.

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