[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.