Also, quite a lot of "but public transport don't work in rural areas!"
Loo, I grew up in a rural area. I could literally watch sheep grazing on a hill less than 50m from my parent's house kitchen window. My town was around 4k people.
Still, we had a bus going to the nearby (and similarly-sized) towns every 15 minutes. Two buses per hour to the provincial capital, and one to the other "big" (around 200k people) city of my province. A train to the capital and another to the 'big city' every hour. My town was in the bottom of a valley, and around it had maybe 20-30 hamlets (10-100 people each) between 2 and 10 km away from town, mostly in the surronding mountains, and every day several buses go through them to pick the kids who live there and take them to school/high school in my town and back.
Hell, these are some of the stops in the train line that took me to the province capital, the one I used to take every day to go to college:
Public transport in rural areas is perfectly possible. You just need to remember that it is a SERVICE and not a BUSINESS.
RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9tyu0e45u123b8ao
@javi Right, but Europe and America have a slightly different population density and size. Our rural towns are much further apart, with neighbors living miles apart from each other. Public transit doesn't work as well without the economies of scale.
@javi Believe it or not, there are a number of places in America where people need a car to get their mail. Whether it's because they have to go all the way to the post office, or because their mailbox is at the end of their miles-long driveway, or because the mail is delivered to a shared multi-box at the end of the miles-long street at the end of the miles-long driveway.
And while I agree that the public transit network doesn't need to make a direct fiscal profit, it does still need to balance the books in overall cost vs good to society. Paying for services that are too sparse and inconvenient for anyone to actually use is a waste of everyone's money, and that's before you get to the massive infrastructure costs for more advanced things like trains.
We would all love to have universal public transit that works. But right now, the collective cost/benefit ratio just isn't good enough (nor as good as it is in Europe) for it to be an actionable priority in most places.
oh of course, there are places that it's just not feasible to get public transport to. In the US and everywhere else. But those are rare and covers only a small percentage of the population. Let's say that 90% of the population of a country could, or should, be covered by a decent public transit network. There's always going to be a small percentage of population that lives too far away from population centers to be covered. But again, that's a small minority and that doesn't mean that the other 90% of the country shouldn't have it.
I disagree that the cost/benefit ratio is any different. Here, we pay for it. It's a cost. It's not supposed to make money. Those nice high speed trains we have here? A money sink, massively subsidiced by the state, won't exist without those subsidies.
And they are a great money sink to have, if you ask me.
I just shared pictures of train stops with literally no houses around. The population density of most of the central areas of Spain (excluding the provinces of Madrid & Zaragoza) is about the same as Iowa's.
And still, there is public transport network. Worse than the one in densely populated areas, of course, but it's there.
Economies of scale only matter if you want to make a business out of your public transport network. If mail gets daily to a place, a bus can get to that place several times a day too. It only needs to be considered a service people have rights to.