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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Population 1,000.

> 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).

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

before they had cars people used horses.