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Comment by PH95VuimJjqBqy | Hacker News Reader

quick, someone tell that small rural community of 600 people they need public transportation!

When people express opinions like this you immediately know they live in the city and think everyone else does too.

What percentage of Americans live in a community with 600 or fewer people?

There are very few policy decisions that will be universally good for everyone. That doesn't automatically make them bad policies.

The real question you're asking is what percentage of people live in areas where public transportation isn't reasonable.

it's a lot larger than you think, especially if you're a city dweller.

Most Americans are city dwellers. It's not even close. And the trend has been consistently towards increased urbanization since the country's founding.

I'm not arguing we should ignore rural communities, just that we shouldn't rule out ideas that work in cities because they don't work outside cities.

most people are not disabled, and yet somehow catering to the disabled is written into law.

this is not an argument for why we should be ignoring EV's in lieu of transportation, which is what I originally responded to.

Doesn't exactly answer your question, but 20% of the US population is living in settlements with no more than 5000 inhabitants. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...

This discussion is about public EV charging. If you live somewhere rural or suburban and can afford a car, you can probably afford a garage for it. The push for public EV charging is in more urban places, where public transit would be a better investment.

the thread is about EV charging, this particular branch of the discussion is about public transportation.

In my experience in Canada, small rural communities typically do have public transportation. Small rural communities generally have a lot of elderly people, so most small towns provide a wheelchair accessible taxi-like service.

while retirement communities exist, that certainly isn't what I was describing.

I'm not talking about retirement communities. I'm talking about normal small towns where >50% of the kids move to the cities where the jobs are.

ooooh, you're not talking about retirement communities.

One wonders how the hay gets baled if most of the population is elderly people.

you don't actually understand what a rural community is.

In my experience, farmers don't live in rural communities. They live on farms. And 90% of them are over the age of 50.

Unless it's a Hutterite colony, in which case your point is entirely moot because they have 0 private transport.

now you're getting it. they drive into town because these areas don't have the density that cities do and the towns themselves aren't large enough to justify public transportation, especially considering that even the non-farmers typically will live many miles from where they purchase their groceries, etc.

My home town has public transport, called the Handi-Van.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redvers,_Saskatchewan

Population 1,000.

https://sk.211.ca/services/town-office-43/handi-van-transit/

> Eligibility

> Elderly individuals and those with special needs.

which is what I expected when I went looking, calling that public transportation is against the spirit of what we're discussing here.

My further guess is that the majority of the people in this town are elderly (retirement community).

So the town can afford dedicated transport for people who don't produce anything and your assumption is that it isn't feasible for those who do produce economic value? And it is somehow more feasible for each of those individuals to privately pay the costs?

old people pay taxes, try again.

Rural New Yorker here, we also have low intensity public transportation (contract taxis, bus lines). As a busy professional, it would be too inconvenient for me to use, but as a busy professional I can afford to drive.

Walkable cities sounds nice, but I like having space. At this point of my life, living in a suburban community is desirable.

Unless you look back 70 years and realize that many small towns only existed because they had rail (passenger and goods). (and/or private bus service). Turns out, getting your goods to market before every person had a car was a requirement.

is this a serious response?

before they had cars people used horses.

I think that puts the cart before the horse. Why build a railroad to no-where? Surely the small towns pre-existed the railroad.

The two end stations existed, and enough in between the make the railway feasible. Then the existence of paths to two big cities made some villages grow, and grow, and grow.

the two end stations exist because people were already there, they didn't build that railway across the US before these areas were settled.

What you're arguing is that there are towns that would pop up around these railways after the fact, and while that's true, they would also pop up around water, gold, and other natural resources.

It turns out there's lots of reasons why communities form, but one thing we know for sure is that railways require demand FIRST, not second.

The USA has several many towns and cities which were built because of railways.

Railways induce demand, both for work for the railway (moving trains, moving goods between trains, services for passengers), and for the excellent transport connections they provide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_towns_in_the_U...

please re-read my post, you misunderstood it.

Some demand has to be present first, sure. But "not second" doesn't follow. No law prevents the planners from expecting demand to grow, and basing their decision to build on that.

yeah, because second doesn't necessarily come after first!

From one big town on a navigable waterway to another big town on a navigable waterway. The small towns in the middle came later.

Exactly! People say, "rural communities need cars". And sure, new sprawl does need cars, like whatever shat itself over the Front Range. But a lot of old towns had trains. Or stage coaches. Or, later, busses. You see this all over the Old West, and New England, and the Rust Belt. These little towns grew up before there were cars.

You still see this in rural Europe. There will be some little village in the middle of nowhere. But the shops and (now I'm picturing the north of England) a pub will all be in a cluster, and there are country lanes that you can actually walk on, and in that village center there's a bus stop, from which you can get to Carlisle or Newcastle and thence to Durham, or wherever.

Some developing countries too actually. You couldn't backpack around these places if they didn't have busses. The "third world" is often a better place to be a pedestrian than America is. Because everybody else is a pedestrian too.

America's problem is that all the private investment in railroads has been displaced by public investment in highways. It's Eisenhower's fault. It makes sense that the US would invest in dual use technologies for mechanized warfare, but it sucks to have to live with.

And now -- I like bike paths, but -- rails-to-trails efforts are just an admission of defeat. But they're what we're getting instead now.

> These little towns grew up before there were cars.

they used horses...

I think it's hilarious how people are trying to argue that a single train stop in a town is somehow public transportation for the citizens of that town to get around said town.

It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Your comment reminds me of this cartoon: https://i.imgur.com/aVpP0t6.png

It's interesting how quickly we forget about how things used to be. My grandparents were subsistence farmers in my lifetime, and they did not use horses to get around town. I don't think they ever owned a horse.

For regular everyday travel, they walked.

They'd sometimes need to go work out in a field. On those days, they'd hitch up the cows to the wagon and spend the day working there. This is a slow process, so they'd need to have enough work to spend the whole day there.

Horses were never a transportation method, except for the extremely rich. They were agricultural tools. Looking at France, because data is easy to get there, the population of France was about 40 million in 1900[2]. Around that time, France also had about 3 million horses, or about a horse for every 13 people. Of these 3 million horses, 2.5 million were "draft horses" used for pulling plows.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-horse-p... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France#Histori...

oh yeah, that's why saddle's weren't invented.

Autonomous vehicles will obsolete passenger rail. The highway network is expansive, interconnected, and hyper-local in a way that railways can never reproduce. Rapid transit in EVs is conceivable in the near future as Autonomy takes over more safety critical processes. As safety critical processes are automated the speed limits can be lifted, allowing very inexpensive travel on-demand.

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