• KevonLooney@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    arrow-down
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    Because a bus that serves a town of 500 people will come once an hour, at most. Also, many people can’t walk far to/from the one bus stop. Busses do not solve a problem in small towns, because there is no traffic and plenty of parking.

    • HardlightCereal@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Your town underinvested in transit because everyone has a car, and they sprawled the architecture because everyone has a car. People got by in rural areas with trains just fine before cars were invented

      • MiddleWeigh@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I would love a better bus or LR in my town, but that shit ain’t happening in my life time.

        The bus comes every hour, if that, and doesn’t really go to many places.

        If I went full public transit, I’d have to schedule the county transportation via state health insurance and schedule the whole week in advance just to even get to a bus stop…and that’s if I even have medicaid.

        I try not to drive as much as possible, make my errands all at once, or while en route to and from work. Me and partner car pool. We have one hybrid vehicle.

        The other people round here LOVE their coal rollers.

    • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Having grown up in a rural area, here’s what I think the solution would look like.

      1. streetcars within towns
      2. Roads dedicated to cars that pass next to towns, and moving the bulk of parking to a ramp just within the town limits
      3. “Frequent” (think once every hour) bus stops from town to town
      4. A train hub for the local area to desirable areas like cities
      • mothringer@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        7
        ·
        1 year ago

        The larger city area will often be hundreds of miles away with not enough population in between to have more than one or two people at most in any given bus even stopping at multiple small towns. Mass transit it great in cities, but it desperately needs population density to be efficient.

          • DrAnthony@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Gosh, I think you’d have to be in the REAL middle of nowhere to be even 100 miles from a population center. Maybe out west in either of the Dakotas or Wyoming or something, but I imagine even then it’s quite rare and represents a fraction of a percentage point of the population. “Never let perfect be the enemy of good”

          • mothringer@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            How large is large? How are people getting goods at all living hundreds of miles away from a population center?

            Usually you consolidate all your errands into one trip every week or two where you buy everything you need at the larger town of a few tens of thousands of people.

            My grandmother lived in rural Kansas, and her town had a grocery store and a gas station. Anything else was a 3 hour drive to buy.

              • mothringer@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Ironically, in some ways it’s actually a lot better place to live now than it was back then purely because of ecommerce, but the jobs issue is even worse now that it was back then, because all the farm work is now controlled by megacorps instead of individual families.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          The final mile is always the killer. And the greater the number of destinations, the more complex and impractical a mass transit system becomes. This is the fly in the ointment that nobody ever seems to want to address directly.

          Yes, a car is inefficient in terms of number of ass cheeks moved per square footage taken up. However, every single one of those cars can (and probably is) delivering its occupant to a different destination, and in most cases practically directly to it. A train cannot do this. A bus cannot do this. Trains are excellent at moving a large number of people from a relatively small high concentration geographical area to another single location with a high demand destination nearby. A bus is decent at moving a moderate number of people along a predefined corridor, provided the passengers do not have particularly specific requirements of when they leave or arrive. But the more stops you add for the bus or train, the slower and slower it gets. If you compensate for this by adding more routes, the number of connections a passenger must make to get from one specific destination to another makes the amount of time taken pretty much totally nonviable once you reach 4 or 5.

          Single or limited destination mass transit methods can never be a total replacement for individual transportation. However, that individual transportation doesn’t necessarily need to be a car. Bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles are more space efficient per number of passengers, especially if only 1 or 2 passengers need to travel at a time (see also: Southeast Asia).

          All of these methods need to coexist to create a functional and balanced transit system. There is no silver bullet, and the issue is much more complex than a single smarmy bar graph.

      • PlatinumPangolin@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        Putting in even a single stop at a rural town could easily add 30 minutes each way to the route. Probably more, getting from a hub city to these rural towns is a good amount of driving with not much of anything between. A bus that stops at a rural 500 person town once every hour or so isn’t moving enough people to be more efficient than cars. Now you want to do that for every town surrounding a hub city? The economy of scale simply doesn’t exist for rural areas. Even suburbs stretch that a bit.

      • Blamemeta@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        So basically, they would drive to a bus station, just to get on a bus? How often do you expect them to need to into the city? And they already have a car at this point, why would they get on a bus?

        • 🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          So basically, they would drive to a bus station, just to get on a bus?

          Are you for real with this? Have you even ever seen a functioning bus line like this before? No. That’s not basically it at all.

          You have a couple stops in the small town direct from the hub/city to pick up and ferry people to the larger area. From there they can walk/take another bus or other form of transport like a train. It’s similar to light rail, but with roads and busses instead of tracks and trains.

          how often do you expect people to need to go into the city?

          It’d be a lot easier for some people to find jobs who can’t afford their own car if they could actually get to the city where the jobs are. So every day.

          • Blamemeta@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            11
            ·
            1 year ago

            Well, yeah. If you have your own car, then there is no reason to use a bus. The only reason to use a bus is if you don’t have a car, like you got multiple DUIs or you just totaled your car, but even then you would probably just get a taxi or uber.

    • Patapon Enjoyer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Why can’t people in a 500 person town walk to the bus station? How is there traffic in them?? WHO IS PLANNING THIS