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.
The park and ride is a cool idea, and that might be an option. About 5 miles from my place there’s a sort of gravel lot that people sometimes park in when carpooling into town. Not sure about hauling loads of feed sacks, though. It’s too much for a bike.
Loads of feed sacks? Either you’re running a commercial operation, in which case: fine; or your scale is smaller, at which point, if you’re close enough to town, an electric bakfiets might be able to do what you need.
Thanks for the introduction, those bakfiets are really cool and I’d never heard of them before. I can imagine lots of scenarios where that would be useful. I might be able to take a load of groceries to and from a carpool with it.
Anyone who has animals, commercial or not, needs to haul more than that. For context, one cow eats around 50lbs a day in the winter. I only have three right now, but it takes maybe 5 to feed ourselves and the handful of houses around us.
I guess anyone who hauls feed for livestock needs a truck, unfortunately.