I don’t mean to be callous but when I talk about walkability/transit and someone says “what about people who live out in the country” I’m like yeah, what about them? What does that have to do with how people in cities get around?
I have a post very explicitly about pedestrian fatalities in disenfranchised neighborhoods and how people who can’t afford cars are treated as second class citizens and someone commented “tell me y'all don’t live 20 miles from the nearest town without telling me.” I’ve had an IRL conversation where the guy interjected “well there are starving people in remote West Virginia, that’s the REAL poverty.” And it’s worth asking, why do you valorize and sympathize with rural poverty but not urban poverty? JK, I know why.
you know everyone, in addition to what rthko is saying, in countries with functional transit, the people in rural areas ALSO can walk on to buses and trains. because the public transit goes to those places. walkability also means you can live in a farming community and catch a train to the city on the weekend. this is the reality in many places in europe and japan. a long time ago i accompanied my boyfriend-at-the-time to a series of techno festivals all over germany without a car and it was fine. the trains just went everywhere, even the smaller towns. for less dense areas there was a lot of support for biking as well.
I live in a city of 300,000 people in the US. We have one passenger train per day and it leaves at 1 am (if you’re lucky). Public buses are back in the barn at 8 pm – after two years of Covid cuts when they were done by 6. Nothing runs on Sundays.
