I wrote out a whole rant in this comment detailing why they are horrible, but honestly, everybody knows at this point. The real problem is convincing people that they don't need cars or to drive everywhere. (You don't, by the way. No, cars are not essential even where you, the reader, live).
That is really such a dumb, shortsighted comment. I've lived in a rural area where the closest highway was a 45 minutes drive and where the closest village (not town, village) was a 10 minutes drive.
No, you're not ordering food there to then have people from fourth-world country (on ebikes, driving on sidewalks, modified so that they don't need to cycle, which is illegal btw for they're closer to motorcylce than bicycle at that point) at all delivering food at your doorstep there.
Now, granted, you can kinda sorta live with Amazon deliveries (which wasn't an option in the past). A visit to the hardware store is one hour of driving (30 minutes both ways): you better buy everything you need or it's two hours of driving.
This insane delusion from city-dwellers that "nobody needs a car" is really crazy.
A friend of mine is a plumber. Another an electrician. Another a cardiologist who regularly has emergency for he needs to install stents. They live in cities.
And, yes, they all do need cars.
People who grow the vegetables and fruits and raise the animals that you eat all need cars.
Your problem is that you cannot imagine a society with functional transit, because you have not left your bubble to see what that looks like.
Did you know that humans existed before cars? Or am I really dumb and short-sighted for believing that could have ever happened?
> "Within rural America, though, most people are not extremely far from stores. USDA data found that the median rural resident was only about 3–4 miles from the nearest supermarket and 90–95% lived within 10 miles"
I live a half an hour drive from the closest grocery store. That's a long bike ride, bud.
I don't think Europeans really understand how rural most of America is compared to Europe.
What I think you don't understand is just how far our infrastructure has crumbled since the introduction of cars. At the risk of mildly doxxing myself, the town that I grew up in is literally the exact same size as yours, and had a train station, that is now unoperated.
https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/wm10Q2N_Train_Station_Ne...
https://relocationgenius.net/location/New-Woodstock/NY/
We can support transit. We choose not to, because we expect it to have constant occupancy (unlike the roads we maintain and the cars people drive for near zero occupancy most of the time).
Outside of a handful of legacy pre-war metros / urban cores, North American development has continued to double down on the automobile. While at the same time, the costs to carry a car have exploded.
Young people today are being stranded in an environment that physically requires an automobile while also economically locking them out of even owning one.
scruple•1h ago