824
Fuck your existing lanes and fuck your 1.5-tonne beasts. Make some space, it won't fucking kill you.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Yeah, I'm just scratching my head because all the roads in my rural town are one lane in each direction, with heavy industrial farming traffic. There's not even shoulders, its just the road, a ditch, and a field.
I'd take better public transit over bike lanes.
Why not both?
The problem with transit for rural areas is that you're covering such a small number of people over such a large area that it costs more to run the service than it could possibly ever hope to earn as a service. So it would always be operating at a loss. That's unacceptable under capitalism.
For any major city or Metro area, yes, public transit should be given the highest priority, and it should primarily be run using renewable energy sources. Not only would renewable energy generally be less costly for daily operations, but it would reduce the climate impact of the service.
The problem with bike lanes in most North American areas is that it's an afterthought. So your only viable option is to pull from whatever is there to build the bike lanes, usually causing the bike lanes to run in-line with vehicular traffic, and that's usually not ideal for anyone. Even with good boundaries between bikes and other road users, there's always the chance that a 2 tonne truck barrels through whatever boundary is there and flattens someone using the bike lane. That's not really a risk if you planned for cycling infrastructure as part of the original design of a city, where you can fully separate road users and cyclists.
I recognize that roads are still needed, for deliveries and commercial purposes, but almost everyone else can take transit or ride a bike.
In rural areas, not so much.
I'm not sure what you're saying? I think that if you really want to decrease car usage, you need to focus more on interurban transit and let bikes be for last-mile.
The local metro area is very walkable, low traffic speed, and has (shitty) bike lanes. The outlying areas are two lane highways without shoulders that is much more dangerous to bike than city roads. I tried it once, got run off the road by a semi and nearly went into the blackberry bramble. I was picking gravel out of my skin for days, and haven't been on a bike since.
A huge problem I have is that America uses transit for greenwashing and we don't use it as a service. The only reason I got a car is because the bus comes by five times a day. The last bus home leaves the station at 6pm, so that seriously restricts job opportunities. The local neolibs love to argue that us rural folk are against transit, but ignore that it's popular enough that the last bus (that hurtles down bumpy 50mph highways) is packed with standing riders and feels super unsafe.
It's infuriating that the answer to "I want decent transit" is "pay 2.5x rent to live in the city".
Your experience with rural bike riding is very familiar. I've heard it before.
I would argue that there's no good answer to rural "mass transit". At least not currently. So if you live in a rural area, you're pretty much going to need a motor vehicle, likely a car, as a minimum to maintain mobility beyond your immediate neighbourhood.
In my rural community, we have a bank branch or two, a couple of pizza shops, one grocery store, and a handful of other stores including a dollar store, a few pharmacies, etc. Not a lot, but enough for the essentials. Anything beyond that for work or shopping, you're leaving the local town and driving at least 10-15 minutes through farmland to the next town over.
It's just impractical to live in this kind of place and not own a vehicle. Not if you need to work somewhere that isn't directly in town.
There's a hundred+ other places just like where I live, in my country and it's not changing. Not quickly at least.
Covering the massive distances with public/mass transit options just isn't feasible.
Inside any Metro, or any city with 100k+ people, yeah, it works, but out where I am with our relatively densely populated town (compared to the surrounding areas), having less than 10k people.... It doesn't work so well.
IDK. I do everything in my power to ensure the safety of cyclists when I see them, but it's rare to see any cyclists out this far.