A Former Farm Kid's Thoughts on the Anti-Car Movement 

All of these towns are pre-war towns. That's why they're walkable. Any town that was built with an actual main street was built before cars became rampant and people needed to be able to get to work and back home with just their legs or a streetcar. I've been saying for awhile now that all of the old steel mill towns along the rivers surrounding Pittsburgh (where I'm from) are ripe for transit expansion and transit oriented development. They're all old pre-war towns with tighter housing lots and main streets with old business districts and most of them were all built around streetcars and rail to take people to Pittsburgh and back to their suburb. We just ripped out all the street cars. Put them back (or an equal or better equivalent) and all these towns function again the way they were built to.

My rural family: I hate 15 minute cities! You better get used to it. You're living in one.

You hit the nail. I’ve been a long time advocate for normal speed/long distance passenger rail, especially for rural areas. I went to college in a small town in the north that had Amtrak service in the middle of the night. It saved my butt lots of money and headache getting to and from school and home. It was too expensive to fly and winter driving long distance was just unpleasant. Most only focus on adding trains between major cities, but we need them in rural areas too. You create economies of scale that way, which is what rail needs to run.

I honestly agree. Cars have their benefits which often go ignored, but hearing pro urbanist points come from someone not raised in an urban environment is insanely valuable.

Having grown up in a small town, I can tell you that if you live in a small town and don't have a car, you're stranded in that town. You may be home, but you're stranded there. Terribly limited job opportunites, which can enforce the lack of a car as they're expensive to buy, operate and own and the local pay scale is down. You can walk or bike all over town with no problem, but the only way elsewhere is by highway, where you can't safely walk or bike.

I used to drive a Ford F250 diesel. I bought it because I owned a business where I had to pull a 10,000 lbs trailer every day for work. One day, a young man was talking to me about my truck, and he mentioned that he would love to have a truck like mine. I said yeah they're great until you have to start paying for fuel and maintenance on them. Not to mention the insurance and personal property taxes. I told him that unless he really needed a truck like mine, not to bother. They're more trouble than they're really worth. I told him that he'd be better off with a small Toyota or Nissan pickup.

I live in a small town in western Canada. 35 years ago, we had reasonably good inter-city bus service from Greyhound. Over the years, the company cut back on the frequency of the service, and then cut it out altogether. Greyhound no longer offers service anywhere in Canada. The bus companies that replaced it don't service my community either. Passenger rail service ended in the 1950's, and the rails were completely removed in 2000. For those who support public transportation, we seem to be going in the wrong direction.

Cars are also tremendously expensive and their costs are routinely underestimated - making up a huge chunk of the bottom half of incomes' expenses (many thousands of dollars per year, in addition to surprise maintenance bills which can be especially hard to plan for), so if rural families could be a one-car household instead of two, or rent a car when making trips instead of owning one, there could be a huge boost in financial health and more money to be spent in local communities!

Your insight on rural living is appreciated. I don't think anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together was ever in danger of falling for "but ah need muh truck fer werk" excuse, though. It's pretty easy to spot the difference between a work truck and a cosplay truck, with the former really sticking out in suburbia because they're so rare.

the obsession with HSR is to beat out planes not cars. the idea is to take HSR between major cities and when you reach the closest city to the rural town you take normal rail from there.

I have the exact same experience in rural Australia. Once, I got off the plane in the city and decided to walk with my suitcase to the nearest motel (3.1miles, the way the crow flies) I thought, yeah simple enough, it's a city so walking should be better than the country... After walking 45 minutes through industrial areas with no shade I ended up with heat stroke. It was so bad i couldn't even put together a sentence at the mall when trying to buy something to drink. It's especially bad when you consider I am from the edge of the outback, someone who deals with some of the hottest temperatures on earth without AC and walks everywhere and the first time I nearly pass out from heat exhaustion isn't in the desert but instead a major coastal city.

Thanks for this video. I've always felt that rural communities get a lot of flak for no reason, when they're often more sustainable than most suburbs or even cities in general. What often frustrates me about these communities are the suburbanites who go and build a single family house on a half acre lot on an old farm that was subdivided, who then continue to commute into the city or suburbs for work. You do this enough times, and all of a sudden that rural farm community is just another suburb with massive arterials and low density sprawl, but none of the agricultural production that our society relies on. I think cities need to be stricter about how they rezone these farm communities; rather than prevent apartments and higher density from being built in the suburbs, we need to prevent single family zoning consuming agricultural areas and turning them into suburbs.

I live in an European village next to a bigger city. Because of this, the village basically became a pseudo-suburb. Most people who live here drive every day to the city for work. There is like 2 or 3 damn cars in front of every house. The village was not made for cars in mind, so the streets are too narrow, so in some cases they've expanded them and left barely any space for pedestrians to walk on. In some cases there isn't even space for pedestrians to walk on, and in some cases cars are parked on the side-walk. Public transport is pathetic, and most people do not even consider it. There is constant god damn traffic in the residential/living areas, and some people drive waaaay to fast for this type of environment. At this point there are only a few places in the village where one can go to get away from cars. Depending on where one lives in the village, it might take 15 minutes to half an hour on foot to get to those places, which means having to walk through a bunch of stupid cars to get there. People's pets get run over all the time, usually cats because one can't fence them in. So you can't even have an outdoor cat in what used to be a rural/village environment. I can't even go on a walk most of the time without having to deal with dozens of cars driving past me, so I usually walk very late at night or very early in the morning. I'm starting to detest cars.

Growing up in the suburbs without a car really ruined my childhood. My life was better when we lived in a rural area prior to that. I just biked everywhere as a 8y/o.

Few thoughts rewatching my own video. 1. Should have included Wichita on that route map need something connecting them. 2. Also a "feature" of car dependency in rural America mixed with dry counties promotes a lot of drunk driving, not that the US does not promote it on the whole. Also if you want to look at a map of railways, this is a good map for doing it. www.openrailwaymap.org/

I live on the countryside in Europe. We have a bus every hour (night excluded), a train station and already sharrows. I don't know how my 3000 inhabitant village with the next city (13000 inhabitants with a huge pedestrian zone, lots of shops and restaurants and so on) being 50km away does offer a wider range of modes to choose from than even some American suburbs or sometimes even American city centers but it does. Besides that 80% of the village have a grocery store, a pharmacy, a doctor, 2 restaurants and a post office in walking distance and there are sidewalks everywhere. America definetly needs to change. My village grew a lot in the last 10 years.

Found your vid on the anti car collective discord. Its honestly pretty surprising how smaller towns can be much more walkable than suburbs, lol. In my area, theres a small town called Troy, Ohio that has one of the best downtowns that still exists. The bad part though I've seen in a lot of small towns in my area is the lack of grocery stores. In Troy, theres a fancy gormet one downtown, then a 20 minute walk to the nearest grocery store.

I wish we would build more small towns like before. A real Main St. with storefronts up against the sidewalks, people actually walking around, small aesthetic houses, rowhouses, small apartments, duplexes, etc. I'm tired of every place being a walmart surrounded by asphalt and sprawling low density suburbs.

This is 100 % correct. I live on the outskirts of a small rural town and I spend most of trips and time in it pulling a bike trailer full of kids or walking on the sidewalks. It's FAR easier and safer to use non-motor vehicle transportation here than in any of the cities I've lived in.

Car defenders don't present their arguments in bad faith, but also they haven't developed those arguments on their own. It's just the "common sense" speaking through their mouths, and I'm thankful for any effort to tear it down

I just stumbled across this channel and have been binge-watching your videos and was suprised to see this drop! And, its about a topic I love! Good stuff.

I wish more people would point out, like you have here, that rural communities live by what would be considered "progressive liberal" values. They just don't think about them that way because they've been told that the city folk are trying to tell them how to live.

my dad grew up in a town of 30000 in the Communist block at the time. he always mentions to us how pleasant it was for him to travel by bike all the time when he was young and how surprised he is that so many in the town drive now because it's so unnecessary and way less fun

This is exactly the type of infrastructure that I've been wanting to see in suburbs. You nailed it. We started building tons of suburbs instead of small towns. Just put more grocery stores and corner stores and cafes in the suburbs and *magic*, everyone will suddenly start walking more and driving less.

Yeah, very very few people at r/fuckcars want to ban all cars/trucks from all people for all uses. We just want LESS cars on the road. We want alternatives that are competitive with driving yourself somewhere. We want people to stop using their cars for trips of only 1, 2, or 3 miles. And most of us want to ban 90% of motor vehicles from URBAN (and semi-urban and suburban) areas.

Well said. I’m trying to advocate for walkablity in my suburban town (which is actually not too bad compared to many others), and I’m often told “if that’s what you you want, move to the city”.

I’ve often given thought about living in small town. I like the density and the ideas that you spoke about, being able to walk or bike safely. Maybe a college town would be better for this because you might have the possibility of an intercity bus. I wonder if someone in rural areas could create some dial a ride system or a shuttle bus that goes between the towns and takes everyone to the bigger city. Interesting point about the lack of car infrastructure improvements in these towns. I haven’t really thought about that.

Typically when people argue to reduce car dependency, they are only talking about in large cities, where the concentration of people makes everyone having a 2 ton metallic pollution machine much more of a problem.

i used to live at the intersection of two stroads, up in the northern suburbs of detroit, and it was absolute hell. i didn`t own a car at the time, or even have a license, and i honestly felt more isolated there than i did at any point during covid lockdown. every suburb should be razed.

Everyone should be in agreement on this; suburbs suck.

Appreciate your perspective and experience from a rural area and working on a farm. You are absolutely right: no one actually needs these big trucks. Trucks are simply status symbols. You can get farm work done using much smaller size trucks, and keeping the necessary big trucks on the job site. Urbanize is not limited to cities. Rural towns have as much to benefit from its principles.

I feel this on such a personal level. I grew up in Douglas, Wyoming, and functioned just fine without a car. I also lived without a car in Cody, Laramie, Buffalo, and Jackson, Wyoming and also Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Living in these small towns i rarely had any need to go awywhere that i couldn't walk or bike to. If i left town, i either took a bus or rode with a friend.

Hi! I'm a city council member in a close-in Kansas City suburb, and you are absolutely spot on. We are falling all over ourselves to replicate the kind of traditional, small scale, and/or mixed use development patterns that never left most of the small towns in Kansas. Our collective urban obsession with extending suburbs as far from the city center as possible for the last 8 decades has been devastating economically, ecologically, and psychologically. We have a lot of work to do to fix all this, but I'm glad to see people like you holding up another lens helping to reveal the silliness behind some of the regressive arguments out there.

A lot of towns in the Central Coast of California were either founded by the railroad or the Franciscan Spanish missionaries in the 18th centuries and they are very compact and very easy to walk around or ride your bikes. However a car is still a must to be able to go to other towns but they are served by Amtrak's Surfliner and can take the people there to Los Angeles.

as an european this video really opened my mind to an aspect of life in the US that I had never known about, Thanks for the great video

Until you get to the Rocky Mountains, Counties tended to be 20 miles north to south and east to west. That was done so that everyone in that county could walk to the county seat and back home in a day. Thus these rural areas are "walkable" in that most things people need is within walking districts if you define walking distance is anything within one to two hours. Further west the distances get to far but most people do not live in that part of the US until you get to West Coast. My point is most of "rural America" you can live without an automobile provided you accept the restrictions and work around it. The problem is most of the US is based on the assumption you will get around by automobiles thus the infrastructure to get around without an automobile no longer exists in most of the US.

I used to haul concrete countertops to renovation jobs in Philadelphia, and we used to always laugh at the people we saw in those terrible luxury trucks. We’d laugh especially at how stupidly hard it would be to lift things into the higher cabs.

A lot of genuine rural/agricultural towns were built well before cars, and like you said, never got the mid-century redevelopment money to tear up all the 19th century planning. The place I live in has my doctor, a grocery, schools, the library, and the beach all within walking distance. The core area around Main Street has had 2-3 story walkup apartments and mixed use buildings with storefronts on the ground floor and housing above pretty much since it was built in the 19th century.

It would be very easy to connect our entire country with train and bus service. I think we should make it a priority as voters.

YES! think you! Think you so much, to quote not just bikes “America was not built for the car, It was bulldozed for it” I live in a town of 2 thousand people and I guaranteed you the town could function just fine if people biked and used minivans instead of giant pick up trucks, it’s dangerous! all the roadkill is enough to make that point, it isolates people and I have no idea who my neighbors are, and it destroys the health and character of the town. Nobody is in shape, and barely anyone is nice, of course cars aren’t the only reason but I think it’s a problem that people just refuse to fix because it’s rural when rural American was built for walking and trains

Such a great argument for rural communities. Originally from Eastern Colorado so I sympathize with a lot of your experiences. Hot take though, cars are the worst thing to take hold in America.

I’m a car enthusiast against car dependency. Let the people who hate driving find another way to travel, so me and the lads can enjoy the roads in peace.

I’m a little concerned that some defensive major city urbanists maybe reading this video as a call for them to leave the big city for a small rural town to satiate their demand for walkable, safe, functional, accessible city infrastructure. It takes a while to get to the idea that You aren’t asking that of them because there are many reasons people are living in big cities (friends/family/work/recreation/entertainment) It seems like this is mostly for nimbys that think urbanists are trying to “push anti car propaganda” to rural communities, which is not the case.

I hate how car dependent even small communities have became, everyone in Hereford, Borger, and pampa in the Texas panhandle is convinced by their parents they need a car to get around when the cities are 30 blocks wide at most with grid layouts, I imagine just one or two bike lanes in these smaller cities could drastically change how people get around.

I’ve done a bit of scouting on Google Earth for tiny towns in the middle of West Texas, and there seems to be a trend. See, you have tiny collections of houses next to an interstate or some other highway, OR you have places that became a place before the automobile and look just like the old downtowns of big cities, just a lot smaller.

I'm always glad to hear discussions on this topic from the rural point of view. I've always lived in small towns here in the midwest and have a lot of thoughts on the topic, but I am happy just to boost engagement for now.

I live in a small city in northern Wisconsin and I would hate living in a big city too since there way too crowded and traffic is slow as shit there

As a "detached urbanite" I have strongly considered living in a rural area and may still end up in one someday. I also grew up in the suburbs and will never go back so long as they are egregiously car-dependent. They are the worst of both worlds.

When people respond to criticism of car dependency with "but what about rural areas", they clearly do not understand the discussion or criticism (either maliciously or out of naïvety). No one is saying "you cannot have a car". They are saying "you shouldn't NEED" a car. Even in rural areas, unless you live 10+ miles from anywhere else, NEEDING a car is a sign of bad infrastructure and bad policy decisions. And as you say, when talking about rural towns, they are (at least should be) easily great for avoiding car dependency.

I grew up in a small town in rural British Columbia in Canada where it is still possible to live day to day without a vehicle, compared cities in my province where you would need a car for everyday tasks. Lack of public transport makes going to the city only feasable with a car even though we have passenger rail and bus service. Also I love your argument against giant pickup trucks.

The biggest thing that is holding rural folks back from using public transit, is that it is not available -in cities. If they can walk to where they need to go in the small town, the reason they need to drive to big cities is because they need be able to drive IN big cities. Otherwise they could walk to the bus /train station and ride to the city. If you have a bus service to the city, but the bus doesn't run in the city, you are then stranded at the bus station when you get there. Connecting small towns to big cities can't be effective until cities fix their own public transit issues. Even those that live far enough outside the small town to have to drive into town to get to the amenities; they can park in one place and walk within the town to accomplish multiple tasks before driving back out home.

Atlanta is horrific sorry you had to go through that.

The reason Rural communities are targeted isn't because of the towns themselves... It's the extended community outside of town they are talking about. When you live on a farm 40 miles from the nearest town it's another problem entirely. After that you are correct again.. it's not the city itself it's the extended community of suburbian sprawl that has trouble with transportation in most cases.

I am also from a very rural area. I also understand where people in cities are coming from with their hatred of car dependency. I hate going to town and driving in traffic. For me, I have to haul hay and other materials, so getting rid of all my pickups is not realistic for me, but for many, not being completely dependent on cars would be beneficial for many.

Love this video! I especially like the fact that you talked about how rural towns were built pre WWII and thus had natural urbanism. Please continue making more videos, I love your work!

my issue with suburbs is zoning, and as you said, you have to walk kilometres just to get a bottle of milk.

i get irrationally attached to my vehicles, i loved my truck when i worked on a farm, its a 2500hd silverado duramax 2006, the IMO last year before chevy started going completely off the rails with truck size, hp, and cost and DEF. on the farm that truck is awesome, hauling equipment, welding gear, and tractor tires, so many tires, I was the assistant mechanic so i got to fix all the tires:) i loved it so much i decided to take it with me back home to my 30k people home town and it was great, moved all my stuff drove it 1000+ miles to Alaska without a sweat. but now that I'm here... driving it every day to work.... to school.... to the grocery store that's 10min drive or 1h walk away... IT SUCKS, it pains me to say this because i love my truck, but i want it to go back to that farm, it did good work there, cause i hate driving it here, its too wide, it takes a 12 point turn to do anything, the diesel is loud and obnoxious so you cant hold a conversation while its warming up in the cold, and just the sheer size and surface area to scrape ice off of in the winter takes me an hour. the ride on rough dirt roads and smooth highways is great but somehow its terrible and jolty on just average potholed streets, what ever magic chevy did to make this thing ride like a dream on the two extremes of highway and dirt washboards didn't does not apparently work on just a normal ass street that has a bit of broken pavement. with heavy heart I've finally decided to sell my beast recently, given that I'm not in a farming town i doubt it will ever do the work it used to, but i hope someone can put it back in its element, hauling heavy shit and making money. im going to replace it with a honda fit, and i hope i learn to love it just as much as my beast of a truck. im not even worried about front wheel drive only in Alaska, that truck was basically front wheel drive in the winter cause there is no weight or brake pressure over the back wheels when its unloaded. just gonna mount some blissaks and call it a day, i don't even want a subaru, too big. side note I could do the same trucks are too big and expensive rant but with ATV's. i could use one here to plow the neighborhoods 200+ inches of snow we get every year but all the new ones are like 10k$+ even on the used market, I just want a full size 125cc 4x4 for

Good to hear this perspective. I'm also from a rural area and yes, you needed a car or horse to get to the nearest store(it was about 12 miles to the closest grocery), but we were pretty self-sufficient, so we rarely needed to go anywhere. Most travel was by foot...to get from 1 part of the farm to another.

Interesting thoughts. Why I'm pro-car: 1. I live in X. Mom lives in Y, a hundred miles away. Repeat for any other relative you want to visit. 2. Where it can snow 6" or gets down to -40F in the winter. Good luck. Although our family has gone down to ONE car. If I have to, I can walk to work.

I love my car and love sports cars in general but I’d love it even more if I only had to drive it on a track and didn’t need it for daily transport. Traffic sucks, racking up miles sucks, paying insurance and maintenance because of daily use sucks. We need better public transport for sure!

I love the content and honest, ovjective take herein. I grew up in Salina and Emporia. Your observation about princess pickups (as I call them) is 100% accurate!

I totally agree! I was from a small town and my bike was so practical there, both for around the entire town as well as jobs out in the fields around the town, or even for going to the next town (about 10 miles away). Walking worked just fine too. Even my grandma that was out on a ranch outside of town was perfectly reachable on a bike, and biked there several times. I biked to all my first jobs (many in agriculture of various sorts out of city limits). I never felt threatened from cars as there wasn't much traffic. I could walk to the grocery store just fine. Many countries without a lot of cars simply end up with more convenience stores or small grocery stores placed all over the place. Then I moved to Denver, with my bike, and I felt like I was going to ran over while trying to get anywhere. Where I live now, I've know many people who have been hit or hit and killed by vehicles. All of them were hit by pickups or SUV's. Trucks and SUV's are way too huge today. I think they need to make it a law that you need a commercial driver's license to drive a vehicle of a certain size or that have a large hood that blocks the view of childeren that could be in front of them. I like having the option of owning a car. In many ways cars are cool. But it is getting to the point that owning a car is becoming more of a hassel than it's worth. They are becoming too expensive. Used cars are no longer worth it at all. You risk buying a $10,000 used car and then have the transmission go out 6 months later and cost $9,000 to repair. I know someone that that happened to them. Getting cars fixed is becoming a nightmare. You can no longer do it yourself with a tool box full of wrenches. And I for one cannot find a mechanic that is trustworthy. This makes buying an old beater not worth it. You used to be able to get a car for under $1,000 that at least ran and you could go fixing up little by little. Not any more. Brand new cars are too expensive too. There are now basically only three cars under $20,000, and there are rumors that two of those are going away (the Mitsubishi Mirage and Kia Rio. The Nissan Versa may be the only "affordable" car next year or the year after unless they stop selling those too). With houses too expensive to buy, rent skyrocketing and groceries getting more expensive, owning a car is like adding even more straws to the camel's back. Well, I can't eat my car, so it's starting to go the way of buying a new phone: not worth it. Food, house and clothing matter more than a shiny new car.

My priorities when it comes to public transit would be 1. Access - can I get there on foot in a sensible amount of time? A foot journey longer than 30 minutes or so is unviable, I'll use my bike but many people aren't in good enough health to do it. 2. Reliability - how easy is it to remember and rely on the bus? If it goes on the first Saturday, second Wednesday and fourth Friday of the month chances are I won't care to remember. Make it simple - every monday. Every friday. 3. Frequency - how often does it come? Can I feasibly use it in minor emergencies (needing something for tomorrow etc) or do I have to plan around it? Everyday is sufficient, preferably departing early and returning late - I'd rather wait 4 hours than miss the last bus home by 1. 4. Connections - can I get to a longer range solution? A sleeper train, a train that just stops less often etc. 5. Only now, speed. Can I get there fast?

Illinois has a good network of rural trains, basically connecting the entire state to Chicago. Those trains are used heavily, too. I often use the station in Princeton, Illinois, which gets two regional trains in each direction daily, plus two long-distance Amtrak trains. It's typical to have thirty or more people get on or off the cross-state trains in a town of about 5,000. They have similar usage in small towns all over the state. I wish other states would make the commitment Illinois has to providing transportation to their rural areas.

Great points made here. Nice to hear someone from a rural area voicing their opinion on cars and urbanism.

I get to be a hipster for being on the kei truck train before anyone else. I know I was talking about them before fuck cars became part of the zeitgeist. In 100% going to get one someday. So yeah I'm glad you mentioned them.

As someone living in a rural area in southern Germany, I like that someone speaks out on the problem that is not a city dweller. One thing that is also driving me crazy are suburbanites talking about living rural. I think the big culprit when talking about "rural areas" is that there is a lot of nuance. Some people live in a small town and have everything within town and cycling distance. Others live in villages of varying sizes that do not have any supermarket or similar. Some people might live on an active or abandoned farm in the middle of nowhere. For everyone, the situation is very different. And it also makes a huge difference whether someone is working locally or not.

I also grew up in a small town. 2000 people. My walkable town experience is the opposite - even at 2000 people, the town was designed to be car dependent, with all the homes up on a hill and a 10+ minute walk from the edge of the housing down to where all the businesses were. Most homes not being right on the edge of course. The churches, school, and hospital were up on the hill, but my home was a 15 minute walk to the grocery store and 15 minute walk to the other end of the residential. So those people were 30 minutes away by foot, with a 25m height between them and the grocer. There was absolutely nothing about "well cities are so big, you just have to live with it" about the town I grew up in. Our town planners chose to keep all the houses away from everything, and assume everyone had a car. Of course, my town was also a company town where 1/2 the housing stock was made by the oil patch companies in town for their own employees. And the closest workplace for their employees was already a defacto 20 minute drive out of town because nobody wants their town built next to an oil and gas refinery. A lot of the businesses catered to the highway traffic. It makes sense to put those next to the highway, and maybe move the housing a bit further away. But it would have been a trivial decision to put the grocery store and the post office and a single restaurant next to the hospital, for example, and the whole town would have instantly been walkable instead of car dependent. Yea, 15-30 minutes is not that bad, even with the hill. But it was definitely enough to see most households with multiple cars. Sometimes multiple cars AND a work truck. Before moving to the city as an adult, I did live on an acreage for a little while. That was a 7-10 minute walk to the nearest neighbour. But because of the hill and the assumption of car dependence in my old town, it was barely noticeable that it was less walkable. Now THAT was rural. And it had plenty of justification. I also have living relatives who homesteaded in the countryside near where I grew up, that still live out there. They used horses for errands because cars weren't out there yet. Now I live in a city of almost 100,000, as part of a metro area of almost 2,500,000. Listening to my neighbours say we are "rural" drives me up the wall. There are wooded areas and a few horse ranches and we can't leave our bins out because bears and other wildlife will wander into town and make a mess. But there is nothing rural about it for 75,000 of the residents. It's exactly like you said: suburban sprawl confused for rural living. I'm not saying because the people in my city have no connection to homesteading that they can't reach the bar of rural. I'm saying that their connection to it is so tenuous that their definition of rural is "most people live in single family homes or townhomes".

You could build narrow gauge railways to connect towns like this, freight and passenger, you could even have freight lines going past areas with farms, then you could extend a trunk into your farm for loading produce. Then in the largest town a yard with a main freight line converges with your small feeder lines and a station with regular speed trains to connect you to urban areas, sure people would still need to use roads to get to the farms to work (you could replace the car with a motorbike) but you could still connect these small towns, with the money spent on roads and the space they take up, this is do-able and is actually more efficient and practical, instead of loading trucks slowly, you can fill an entire train as long as you can accomodate/is necessary and reduce fuel use. Journeys will still take a long time, but they already do anyway. For large metropolitan areas, you connect them with metros, commuter lines, intercity exresses and high-speed regional and interstate railways as is practical based on population.

As a note on using smaller cars for towing they have limits on what can be pulled even with the smallest hitch. This is likely why anyone who wants to tow brought bigger cars which due to gas being cheaper (like 1/2 of what I've seen in Europe) wasn't an issue. Plus it's a lot easier to tow with a more powerful vehicle. I know this as I am one of the few people with a compact car that actually has a hitch on it. Europe is a different in that a lot more compacts actually have a hitches on them.

My friend got a job in a small town in the middle of nowhere. She can't drive, but luckily she found an apartment walkable to her job. The grocery store was also within a 5 minute walk. (Even though it sucks having to carry a bunch of bags.) She lived on the same block as a pharmacy so she could easily pick up her life saving medication. When she had to, she used a bike or had stuff delivered. The only real issue was when she had to *leave* town. There's no trains, no buses, and obviously no airports. She had to rely on me and others who could drive her at least an hour away. Seeing all these abandoned train stations make me sad because the demand is there but it's not considered necessary or profitable by the standards of big city capitalists.

Great video! I also grew up in a rural town but wasn't fortunate enough to have a supermarket (they got rid of the one real supermarket in town and replaced it with a dollar general)or anything much within walking distance. The good thing was whenever we did drive there was no traffic and we'd get to places in the same amount of time, consistently. Now, living in urban hell, that's not the case. I do ride a lot more now to get to places and I prefer that because it's more consistent and beats out traffic. I also resonate with a lot of your other points about rural communities. There was a train station to NYC where I lived though! Which was cool

Car Dependency also hurts drivers alot, they have to put alot more wear and tear on the car. Back before the car, people used horse and buggies, and when we use cars similarly to how horses and buggies were used, they aren't much of a problem

The Anti-Car Collective Discord is an alright place and I hang out there from time to time. discord.gg/anticar Also I think some people have said "well i wouldn't want to move to a small town because there is no jobs there" well i am not advocating you do, I live in Kansas City these days because I want a job, but my point is more that there is more things in common between needs and how downtowns are between rural towns and very urban areas

YOU got this nailed 💯. Excellent commentary/analysis! Canada and US are a: Restrictive Euclidean Hellscape of Stroads and Super Huge Vehicles, nightmare! I own a base model 2000 4Runner with a 5speed. Beautiful, small utilitarian vehicle. 2wheel drive. A station wagon is really what it is!

I go to university in a amall town in Scotland, and yeah this summarises how small towns should work perfectly. I can walk from literally one edge of town to the other in 40 minutes, the shop, my classes etc is all within 20 minutes. For long distance travel, there are busses every 15 minutes through the night to Dundee, around 30 mins away and long distance busses to Edinburgh and Glasgow which take around 1hr 30 and 2hr 30 respectively. Theres no train station, due to it being on the end of a peninsula, but there is one at Leuchars, 5 minutes bus away, with trains to Edinburgh (and Glasgow from there), Dundee and Aberdeen in the northeast. You genuinely can live without a car here, as I do.

This is so important. And this is why I think we need to get back to providing regional rail services. Small towns are some of the most walkable places, and it's so sad to see so many of them slowly dying. If people had access to the resources of larger cities and the walkability of small towns, car free life in small towns would be incredibly doable.

Lots of great points. If I made a list of every point you hit on that I liked, this would be a very long comment, so I'll just leave it at this video is chock-full of great points from start to finish and should be seen by people both on the fuckcars side and on the "but what about rural communities" side.

I live in a rural scottish town, just off a highway about an hour from a city during covid we closed the roads into town, to all non residents dropped the speed limit, and the local store started running an order collection service, the town was covered in bikes we needed a half dozen new bike racks we had more bike parking than car parking. in the centre. The local authorities put a stop to it all eventually apparently we didn't have the power to change speed limits, or close roads to through traffic...

I still remember when back in 90's some people in the villages around my small town here in Poland used to drive horse carts to transport stuff. Heck I just saw one last winter filled with lumber.

Very strong arguments in favor of removing car dependency. Great work

Watching this while walking home from work, spending multiple hours along side a 50 mph road with little protection and no other way to really get around effectively without a car.

I grew up in farm country just outside a town of about 5,000 in NE Ohio and now live in an outer suburb of Cleveland. The little town I grew up next to has way more density and is way more pleasant to walk in than where I live, though I am walking distance to Walmart and several other stores. It would be so easy to have bus and rail service there and make it super convenient for everyone in town to walk to, while I am surrounded by seas of parking and a giant freeway in the suburbs. I always hated the argument “what about rural areas!” and I’m so glad to hear someone who still lives and works there say, “well what about them?” Small towns across the country by and large are less car-dependent and more urban than the outer suburbs of major cities. Only the people living and working on the farms miles and miles outside of town actually _need_ cars to get there, while everyone in the small towns could benefit majorly from even the simplest of public transportation. Kansas has some fantastic little towns too! Go somewhere East of the Mississippi though, and the density of small towns goes even higher…even though most are loaded with single family homes. You’re absolutely right this whole argument about rural areas is silly.

I have to say I really like the anti-hivemind attitude that exists in the urbanist community. People really are not afraid to criticize what some people are saying, and it makes sense if you want things to actually get done (which most of us are watching our government fail at doing). I'm from eastern South Dakota. I lived in a smaller town the last three years but I'm moving to Sioux Falls shortly and I have to say that trains between towns would probably benefit the state (especially a route like Huron to Watertown or Sioux Falls to Madison, which a driving route is very indirect).

The thing is most rural people don't live inside a town boundary. Vehicles are absolutely necessary

Thank you for making this video. One of the largest hurdles I face when discussing car-centric development at work (I work for the state of NC) is how 'rural' most of NC is. It's a square I can't really circle because I've always lived in one of the major cities here and I don't have much personal experience which for some reason car-brains value more than actual evidence. Usually when I bring up that rural downtowns were historically more walkable and accessible by train I get scoffed at and told that just wouldn't be feasible to run a train to every small town.

as someone who was raised in the suburbs but has spent a significant amount of time at my grand mothers house in the country the town they lived in and was pretty easily navigable once you got to the town proper.

As a rural folk myself, I am totally in favor of detatched urbanites having less access to cars.

What I dont get is why all of a sudden over the last 4 years everyone and their mother thinks they are an expert city planner.

I understand and agree with your points, but as someone living in rural Arkansas (Greers Ferry), I don't think your Kansas analogy works well at all for where I live. I would love to see trains, busses, and sidewalks in my town, but I've been struggling to find a solution. I live in a mountainous region with no rail lines anywhere in our county. The nearest grocery store to where I live is at least a 10 minute drive, actual town is a 20 minute drive. Plus our town was built in the 60s and has no real downtown due to the car dependent design. Besides the easy addition of sidewalks to our 'town', there's not much we can do. Even cyclists would have to traverse windey and steep roads for hours to get to their destination. Busses would have to have routes far and wide to access all of the rural mountain backroads in which our county's population lives. Very few people live in my town, most people live in secluded areas and commute 10-30 minutes to school or work. I am so eager to present better transportation alternatives to my town because I believe I have a high chance of convincing our current town cabinet to make change. However I simply can not find a practical solution and I'm worried my town will always be car-only with zero pedestrians. Advice (from anybody)?

Yes!! I love going back to visit my small town where I feel safe walking and biking; the problem is getting to cities and transit hubs. Trains would be great, but even thrice-weekly shuttles to the nearest few cities would be a GAME CHANGER. It would make college a bit more accessible, and might even boost tourism.

I always ask those people how am I going to two my tractor or skid steer without my truck? The Fed's constant inflation along with outsourcing has kept wages artificially low in purchasing power, made up with debt. Believe it or not it is more energy efficient to be on a farm than in a city. A really good friend of mine is homosexual and moved from Miami to rural Minnesota. He has a partner he met in the year 2000. As carnivores they almost never have to go grocery shopping but go straight to the rancher and buy the whole animal. The nearest town is as you described, full of trees and everything close together. You just drive a long traffic free distance to town, then get out and walk. If you like fruits and veggies you can grow your own. As my friend said, he was unable to find a quality partner in the big city, but found exactly what he wanted in the country. The closest thing we had to a small town here was Homestead. It is now a developed nightmare.

The only people who should truly need a car are people who live on farms. And even then, many people with smaller properties could get to downtown easily by bike. Source: I grew up on a large farm a 20 minute drive from a 2,500 person small town.

What I'm afraid of is that with all this talk about how bad cars are, one day I'm not going to be able to own a car even if I want to.

There's a distinction that should be made between micropolitan small towns, and *rural* rural living. Small towns can be very walkable, particularly historic ones. A farm 30 miles from the nearest town inherently isn't. Although it's useful to keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of people in the US live in a city, suburb or small town.

I live in Brooklyn and born and raised in NYC. I only learn to drive in college when I was in Jersey. I became ill and continued to drive after I moved to New York. I didn't realize how bad traffic was until I visited family in Boston. The GPS said from one point to the next point was 32 miles. So I budget 2 and a half hours for travel. I got there in 20 minutes😅. It took me 3 days to process that. I could be traveling 5 miles in New York City and be in traffic for an hour. no the trains and buses aren't better. The only difference between driving in New York City and taking the train is how much you're exposed and finding parking.

about the grocery prep thing, THANK YOU. i constantly have food waste because the quantity grocery stores sell is too much for me and things go bad. like just recently my grocery store started stocking pint bottles of milk (which is still too much for me, but it’s way better) and it helps me manage how much food i’m actually utilizing. i live in downtown dallas where we have a disappointing lack of grocery stores, so while i can do multiple trips a week to take a train and then walk to a grocery store, the walk in 110f heat is unbearable, so i only go once a week. meanwhile my sister basically lives off costco, and it’s so bewildering to me the sheer quantity of food they buy.

For the "Regional Rail" Issue: Look at Victoria, Australia. They have a pretty decent network of medium to long distance regional (intrastate) rail lines that operate between Melbourne and various rural towns and smaller cities around the state of Victoria. It's actually quite nice. And the areas that don't have rail have coach service. While the frequency on these lines isn't great (a few times per day or week) it's still pretty useful. I think the USA could re-introduce a lot of rural/intrastate services if they learnt from other countries and got diesel multiple units (basically a train that doesn't require a locomotive because the engines are built into the carriages) since they can be cheaper to operate, have better performance, and provide a similar quality of service. The UK's "Sprinter" family of DMUs was designed for this exact purpose- to serve rural branch lines.

This is a lovely piece, I appreciate these prices that realty check people who are still ignorant about transit issues outside of an insulated urban dialogue, it's great to imagine the future where bus routes patch together passenger rail connectivity across rural areas. Thank you!

I live in a small Western Kansas town. My car only moves on a weekly shopping trip and when I go out of town (once a month or so). I am able to ride my bicycle to work and near anywhere else I need to go.