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).
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.
It's about damn time. This burden has been on us millennials for too long now.
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 with near zero occupancy most of the time).
My area still has functioning train station and it ain't getting me anywhere but to another train station.
Yes, I would take transit to the grocery store if I needed to get somewhere that I could not reasonably walk or bike. You can actually leave the station once you get there, and even come back later. Perhaps with more than when you arrived.
I live on a road that started as a literal horse path by the original settlers. I am surrounded by 750k acres of National Forest. I live here to not be close to town. There is no situation in which public transit could reasonably service my area, which is fine! Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
There is absolutely no reason there couldn't be a small shuttle that runs every half hour from the closest thing to a "main street" near you, to the nearest town / city that people depend on to survive. It doesn't have to be filled every pass. It can even be empty for most trips, as is evident if you go look out at your road right now, which probably goes most hours entirely unused. What matters is that it is reliable, accessible, and frequent enough to avoid needing to schedule your live around it.
This opens up the world to people who can't or won't drive near you. Which, like it or not, kids, disabled, and elderly people exist. Your town should be accessible to them too, and we (America) have the resources to make it happen.
Some kids in my area have bus rides of over an hour each way. There are dozens of school buses for the school. It's a huge tax cost.
You are out of your mind if you think this would be acceptable or even feasible for the average person, let alone the disabled or elderly.
Fast-forward to 2015, and I was moving in to a new place. It is also between two LRT stations. In fact, the properties right next to the stations are new, and they demand a premium. Nevertheless, the LRT is now quite convenient for me to board. But are there grocery stores?
Well, there's a pan-Asian grocery 2 miles away. There's a Fry's 4 miles away. I don't shop at Fry's. There's a Food City that is 7+ miles away, but I don't shop there, either.
It's really kind of laughable how limited the choices are, in terms of grocery stores right along our LRT line. If I go about a mile and I'm willing to walk (steep incline) there's a Trader Joe's, which is great. I usually do that, but I also take a Waymo home, due to the weight of the burdens.
There's a Whole Foods a few miles away, too. It's possible to take the LRT, transfer to the Street Car, and get dropped off one block away. Then, to go home, I could reverse that. But if I purchased significant groceries, I cannot. The Whole Foods is situated in a multi-story parking garage, and this makes it a veritable nightmare for Waymo or any rideshare pickups. Therefore, Whole Foods is on my "Do Not Shop" list, because I can't bring anything home. (Oh, and on delivery they will send me expired foods.)
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.
> "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"
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?
Yeah, I'm not going back to horse and buggy.