đźš› sam fox starshine 
Kaj of the Creek@starshine While I agree with this in spirit (and used the trains with glee while living in the UK), it’s difficult to imagine making trains accessible in America where there is so much more land and so much more rural living. The population density just doesn’t exist to make trains useful for a kid like me who lived 20 min by car from the nearest town (population 3,000) and 45 min to the nearest city with bus & train hubs. Not to say we shouldn’t use them more where possible
wb x64@SpeedOfHuman @starshine unless you live in the rural Midwest (and maybe even then) I encourage you to look at the history of trains, trolleys, and streetcars in your area. There was an electric railway from San Francisco to Sebastopol and back (two branches!) over a hundred years ago. People walked and got rides to stations. Horses existed. But the idea of lots of people commuting in individual vehicles along a path from home to work every day? Insanity.
@SpeedOfHuman @starshine the most likely scenario for the truly remote would be a bus stop of course, which rural Japan is full of (as one example of a highly transit oriented country.) And yeah if your job is to transport stuff around because you're an actual farmer then fine have a modern horseless carriage, but for average commuters individual car ownership has been one long planet-destroying mistake.
@wilbr @starshine I now live in Portland, OR; rich history of rail & other public transportation. It’s the most reliable public transport I’ve experienced in the US, & I lived here happily carless until the pandemic. When health issues stopped me from cycling to get my groceries, sadly I had to get a car again.
I DID grow up in rural IL, and while Chicago has great rail hist, it was 1.5 hr drive to the train station to the city (an X-mas family tradition).
@wilbr @starshine I rode a bus 1.5 hrs each way to school every day. A three hr commute barely got me to and from a smal town. This is exactly the type of scenario where public transport doesn’t work well here in the US. I agree w/ your sentiment tho re: cars for sure!
@SpeedOfHuman @starshine one has to wonder why you'd be living that far out in the boonies in the first place, like sure the kids of miners and loggers and farmers might be way out there but that's the long tail of transit, we can solve for 99% of the rest of the population before trying to get a train line out to Nowhere, Midwest