[tourmalinetaco]

While it’s true we own more cars because we can afford them, a large percentage of Americans require them.

Tiny remote communities rarely make enough for transport entities to care. For instance, without vehicles, in the village I live in, we’d probably be connected via bus to the nearby town, where you can do some shopping from a dollar store and get something to eat at restaurants, but to be connected to the various cities? They may have daily shuttles, but the population (<300) may not make this worth it. And as established in the thread public transport sucks and would make running errands impossible.

This doesn’t even compare to the truly remote individuals who live in the country miles out.

Honestly I feel like people who live in cities really lose their sense of scale for how large the US really is and how small a large percentage of communities are. I mean almost 1/3rd of the US population is crammed into less than 1% of the total surface of the USA. Using the 333 most populace cities in the USA gives an average population density of ~3,150/square mile. Out in the country where I live, we’re maybe 50/sqm, and further out that can drop to .25/sqm or lower.

Not to mention the fact that the reason public school buses work is because for the better part of the year the destinations are ironed out and rarely change. Little Æ is going from home to school and back 90% of the time. That simply doesn’t reflect an adult’s lifestyle, because while every child in a given area goes to a single school, jobs are much less localized. Not to mention errands, hobbies, visiting friends.

A bus schedule simply cannot replace the flexibility of a car to a large percentage of America.

[prmoustache]

> While it’s true we own more cars because we can afford them, a large percentage of Americans require them.

If people stopped buying cars, and stopped voting for people promoting zoning and a car shaped country, shared transports (bus, be they public or private) would take over. The thing is as long as people keep buying and using cars, there is no market for the shared transport. And US people tend to have difficulty to grasp the concept of a non profitability focused public service.

[Retric]

The way it used to work is if your job was in a different town, you moved to that town. Cars are a relatively recent phenomenon and yes in your example they are more convenient, but that’s my point.

I grew up next to farms and a school bus showed up 4x a day to take kids to k-6, or 7-12. It was a long and inconvenient trip, but that’s because we were living in the middle of nowhere.

[tourmalinetaco]

Cars may be recent, but the idea of private transport has existed since the taming of horses.

Farmers are a perfect example of why some globalized public transport is impossible and why private transport is required for society to function.

[Retric]

Historically the majority of farmers globally didn’t own horses. They require quite a lot of effort and food while only being partially useful a few times a year.

[tourmalinetaco]

I wasn’t necessarily drawing a connection between horses and farmers, as I was tackling each point separately and meant modern farmers.

For one, the mere existence of horses and their relatives were mostly in Africa and Asia, meaning that for a lot of unrecorded and a decent chunk of recorded history whether you had one or not was location dependent. And while yes, horses were expensive, renting them when needed was comparatively cheap.

Additionally, especially in feudalist societies, land was especially difficult to own, and an entire village would work on the land surrounding them. Meaning you rarely had need for any sort of transport that wasn’t your legs, as everything you needed was located in your village.

Contrast all of that to modern farmers, who regularly live on hundreds of acres, miles away from the nearest pocket of civilization. Without private transport they’d be stranded.

[Retric]

Modern farmers still generally live within a days walk of hundreds of other people. 1 million acres is a mega farm and still fits in a 1.6 X 1.6 square mile box while needed several people to operate.

It’s again wealth that allows for the modern system of roads and private vehicles rather than inherent necessity. Remember the post office is sending vehicles to every single one of these properties 6 days a week on the cheap. A bus doing the same would be really inconvenient, but also quite cheap.