'Anything short of banning cars will just be pissing in the wind, and you’re never going to be able to ban cars.';

'It depends on what you mean by "rural". Cumberland County NJ? Delmarva Peninsula? The Berkshires? I think places like that could benefit from some local rail links to population centers and maybe more frequent bus service, because they are near enough to civilization where you get supercommuters and stuff like that in addition to people with summer homes and so on.

The shitposting about bullet trains between Memphis and Chattanooga is just shitposting though. Those places are beyond redemption. Same goes for Texas, Florida, Arizona, and all the rest.';

'>>1981778
OP here, I'm from Western Kansas. I'm thinking of bus routes from Denver to Kansas City stopping in little towns along the way like we used to have.';

'>>1981780
why bother when everyone will use cars anyway';

'>>1981780
I would probably focus your limited political capital on preserving Essential Air Service for a situation like that. I know people in flyover states have a pretty high tolerance for insane drives, I've got some relatives in places like that, but enhanced land transport isn't doing anyone much good when you still need a cage to get out of the transport terminal. Back when buses were a thing people actually lived in those shitty little towns, now they try to get as far away as possible so they can, I dunno, shoot their machine guns in the air while drunk or something. So you're not going to get anyone walking from the town bus stop and if you are, they're likely to get shot at.';

'>>1981784
Seething urbanoid "knows" what rural America is like';

'>>1981788
You going to try to tell me that people in the flyover states would balk at driving 6 hours to run a simple errand or see a doctor? Because I know for a fact they don't';

'drop the speed limit
the strong will survive';

'>>1981791
What do you define as a flyover state?';

'>>1981778
>Texas
Connecting the Texas Triangle cities would be the easiest transit win ever if the cities themselves weren't intolerable car hellscapes. Large cities in the 100-300mi range are perfect for high speed rail.';

'>>1982136
Anything that isn’t Brooklyn';

'>>1981773
>politicians, key people in companies like Greyhound

No. No serious American politician gives a shit about transit for middle America. I'm not going to waste your time with "muh economic feasibility" - a trillion dollar defense budget isn't economically feasible either and yet we pass it with a bipartisan majority every year - but nobody really cares enough about it to make it happen. We can barely pass the budget as-is. Congress just doesn't have the time or the will.

I'll also say that driving outside of most major population centers in America is kind of a dream -completely different experience than your average New Jersey-ite commuting to work. So you're asking constituents who don't really give a shit about infrastructure to embrace an "inferior" transit option when the current system works fine for them as it is.';

'>>1982141
texas should be MIRVed

>>1982162
brooklyn is flyover land though';

'>>1981780

I wouldn't rely on Greyhound for shit, the krauts bought them and they're busy stripping the dead body for the real estate and the 1/4 of their routes that were profitable.

>>1981784 is onto the best political strategy, EAS is popular and has other interests that also want to support it. WKS has a lot of EAS airports, but the list has a lot of churn over a long time span so let your reps know you appreciate EAS near your city. Also actually use it, the prices can be very good in the cheapest fare buckets.

I've never seen rural transit service try to connect travelers to EAS airports, but depending on your town maybe there's a sliver of demand for connecting a lot of rural towns, a couple airports, and one of the I-70 cities that Greyhound still serves. Are there any tribes in western Kansas? I've seen them run more rural bus lines where I'm from. It's hard to get small towns to coordinate on anything.

Each stop needs to be a main street/town square with a "third place" cafe/bar/etc that people can wait around in an hour or two before/after the pickup time.';

'Electric interurbans in the early 20th century connected rural areas to urban centers and not only carried passengers but also freight, and even picked up milk from farmers. They made a lot of local stops but could also quickly accelerate to 60-70 mph. They were cheaper to build and operate than steam railroads and filled in a lot of paid on the map where railroads didn’t run. Shaky finances and automobiles doomed them and most died by the 1930s, and in the current crisis economy we’ll never see this Edwardian utopia again.';

'>>1982230
I clicked this picture thinking it was East Anglia.';

'>>1982177
>I'm not going to waste your time with "muh economic feasibility" - a trillion dollar defense budget isn't economically feasible either and yet we pass it with a bipartisan majority every year - but nobody really cares enough about it to make it happen.
The economic feasibility sets the bar, though. Yeah sure you hold up defense spending as a straw man but that's just a stupid distraction. Military spending is notoriously hard to analyze because the risks and rewards(or penalties) are so extreme.

More economically feasible usually means more politically feasible. There are exceptions of course our systems are full of cruft, corruption, partisanship and just plain stupidity but that doesn't mean the general principle doesn't hold.';

'>>1981773
>My little town lost passenger rail service after WW2 and inter-city bus service in the 1980s.

That's because once the personal automobile became ubiquitous, the need for trains to random towns and villages ceased. Why would any train operator or government think it would make sense to have trains servicing a town of 500 or 5000 people? The only people that would utilize that would be poorfags and cucks who are too anxious to drive a car.';

'>>1981780

Me >>1982225 again here, I spent an hour on the clock playing around with this idea and I think a 3x/week route like Amarillo-Liberal-Garden City-Goodland with some small town stops in between would pencil out if you could get people to pay around $30-$40 a ticket.';

'Clockface scheduling --- Taktfahrplan
You can use it to provide good service at low frequencies, so that the infrequent buses converge at hubs at the same time.
The book Transport for Suburbia talks about this.
The key is predictable frequency and connectivity. If the bus is hourly it doesn't come at 8:01, 8:58 and 10:03. this seems simple but many cities struggle with it. And a small infrequent bus feeds into a hub or a larger more frequent line.
At the hub it is key that all routs come in at the same time an leave at the same time.

rm transit had a (bad) video about this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOqWObjftI4';

'>>1981782
Inshallah, the cars will be melted into flat discs';

'Coach busses. Unironically Greyhound was one of the best public transit systems in the country during its heyday. Still could be.
>US has tons of street vehicle infrastructure going to every one-road town
>Bus stops can be incredibly inexpensive to put in place
>Effectively zero disruption to existing towns
I'd argue that there should be a hierarchy of systems in place; counties should manage service to incorporated (and larger unincorporated) communities, and states should manage a regional network to county seats and population centers. Routes could be expanded/shrunk organically based on ridership.';

'>>1983845
I think inter-city buses are absolutely underrated, but having a Greyhound stop in a small town does seem to increase the bum population noticeably.';

'>>1981773
This is the best viable solution. It works GREAT. My grandma uses it 3 times weekly. Its a short bus that you order 48 hours early and they give you door to door service. You can also just tell them your work schedule if you are disabled.

Missouri is red and 90 percent rural. This works. It keeps getting more funding bc it works.

https://www.oatstransit.org/schedules?gad_source=1';

'Build high-speed rail';

'We need to focus on restoring transit service in our cities first.';

'>>1984149
yeah it turns out all of the "urbanism" spam comes from some lolbertarian in texas, hence all the shit takes on pretty much everything. all the "high speed rail between tulsa and jonesboro when!?!??!" threads are from the same guy. likely also the 10 spam threads every time there's a crime on the subway. it's a shame hiroshima can't range ban IP addresses that aren't from an area with a population density over 20k people per square mile';

'>>1984151
Not true, but the guy spamming about “”urbanism” spam” is just one guy.';

'>>1981773
no point. focus on where you get the most bang for your buck, IE dense population centers. no point wasting a limited transit budget where it won't be used. if you want ruralites to get off cars just make gas more expensive, since they're all poorfaggots they'll be getting their obese redneck asses on bikes when gas hits double digits. american ruralites are a disgrace. fat, trashy, uneducated, lazy, sucking on welfare's teat while shitting out 20 kids. they have more in common with bangladeshis than with actual white people. as far as i'm concerned, kill them all and turn the land into wildlife refuges. almost everyone in rural areas is on meth, fent, or h. that is, between all the cigs and piss beer they suck down. i really wish we could just eradicate them.

focus on things that matter, like banning cars from the florida keys to save those cute little mini deer.';

'Just let rural areas stay rural and car-dependent, and keep building up cities be more walkable and transit-friendly.';

'>>1984309
>t.';

'>>1981773
It takes significant money to buy and operate a car.
It acts as a selection against the poors.
No philios, no unity, no cohesiveness and public confidence, no public transit.
You know who to blame.';

'>>1984781
Cars are now fighting communism and i'm all for it.';

'>>1981773
>how do we force inferior mode of transportation?
You don't.';

'>>1984781
Ergo make everyone poor!
BTW it's very easy to do!
Making society rich is a challenge. Making poor? Let me regulate taxes and next day you all wake up broken poor and not be able to afford car.';

'>>1983966
I know this is a meme but this is actually a huge contributing factor. Everyone points to how absurd it is that a city as big as Little Rock has ZERO intercity bus connections, but the fact of the matter is that's because the city and the adjacent cities KICKED OUT greyhound, because none of them wanted stops in their cities for this exact reason. As service gets worse the people who take it are more and more desperate which makes the service less and less attractive. National intercity bus service is in a death spiral it will never leave from. I think the best bet is small, regional, public intercity systems and just hoping to god that some small towns overlap between two systems and you can transfer between them there.';

'Seems smarter to just build up the currently built cities so you can get transit ridership easily';

'>>1981773
>Pioter, zamieniliśmy się z matką w dysneje, pomóż rodzicom dobrym acz animowanym';

'>>1985895
kurwa';

'>>1985033
why don't they put the bus stop next to a police station (in bigger cities)';

'>>1986138
I can smell your naïveté though the screen.';

'>>1981776
they dont need to be banned they just need to not always be the single priority
which will also never happen because the us gov runs on oil';

'>>1982230
based';

'Yeah I agree with the other posters, it's probably better to just focus on the urban areas since those are where most of the population is concentrated and where cars make the least sense.
Particularly in America but more generally you'd need to reorganize from the ground up how people and services are located in rural areas, in order to make public transit make sense and that's just a non-starter unless you're willing to go through collectivisation.';