rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it.
How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses?
What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these lakes in the middle of nowhere?
What about hauling larger personal watercraft? Just don't do that? Store it at the body of water you've chosen to exclusively use your boat/jetski on?
Rely on Amazon to handle the logistics of shipping hay for your livestock?
Maybe these are all just cultural things that need to disappear and be replaced by magical super-efficient factory farms or not replaced at all. But there are other ways of life than just living in an apartment and commuting to an office.
No offense, but this conversation is not for you or your family. The car is the second best thing that ever happened to rural life, after the tractor, and nothing is going to change that.
There’s no reason for rural America to act like these ideas are crazy, nor for urban America to act like these problems are universal. So often these two sides act in opposition to each other when they really have no conflict with each other - except perhaps that both side has a hard time relating to the other lifestyle.
FWIW those 62% live in "incorporated paces" or cites, which would include my town (as long as I'm understanding that correctly.) Down under "new incorporated places" it mentions Sandy Point, TX, population 200. It's crazy that even including little towns like that you're still only talking about 3.5% of the land.
I think it also speaks to how relatively solvable some of the urban problems are in the sense that we could be intentionally building new cities (not just attached suburbs) if we wanted to, and that would - if it worked - take some of the pressure off the places that are struggling right now.
For whatever reason America just stopped doing that after WW2. Maybe it’s time to start again?
The really meaty space of "cool impactful stuff we can do now" are all organizational problems, not engineering. How do you organize 10k people to build a new city, get them to agree upon a basic design and location, and then get them to actually go do it? There's nothing really stopping you.
Of course there are going to be wide swaths of the United States where passenger rail and bus service isn't going to make much of a dent for local transportation.
Regional transportation is an entirely different question. Is there a rail line running through the small town in Texas where you grew up? I bet there is, and I bet there is the remnants of a passenger station too. What would it mean to your small town if people could easily commute by rail to the bigger city 45 minutes away? I bet people would be more interested in living in that small town.
There is a rail line, but no passenger station. Realistically there would be 1 train per day max to the big city and you'd have to spend the night instead of making a day or half day trip. (I currently live in Durham and I can catch a morning train to Charlotte and back in the evening according to the schedule, as long as I can fit my business in between the arrival time of the morning train and the departure time of the evening train, and that is servicing two much larger populations.)
And that is just going to the nearest larger city... What if you want to go to a different city? Or a smaller town? Or a random place that doesn't have a bus station?
For a data point on this, I'm in the Waterloo region, about an hour's drive into Toronto when traffic is good, or 2-2.5 hours when it's not. The government regional rail (GO Transit) operates four commuter trains into the city on weekday mornings, and four back again in the evening.
Despite being slow and expensive, those trains are packed, day after day, with commuters who would rather live out of the city, and not spend 15-20 hours of their week sitting in traffic on the 401. They recently extended two of the trains with additional carriages to handle the capacity.
We've been clamouring for hourly bidirectional service for over a decade and it's only in recent years that the relevant authorities have finally gotten their act together to build out the necessary infrastructure to make it possible (twinning a bunch of track sections, building a bypass for US-bound freight, and electrification).
We're talking about commute and long-distance travel. In most scenarios, you don't carry that much luggage. You don't carry your horses and kayaks when you go to work or travel overseas.
How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses?
What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these lakes in the middle of nowhere?
What about hauling larger personal watercraft? Just don't do that? Store it at the body of water you've chosen to exclusively use your boat/jetski on?
Rely on Amazon to handle the logistics of shipping hay for your livestock?
Maybe these are all just cultural things that need to disappear and be replaced by magical super-efficient factory farms or not replaced at all. But there are other ways of life than just living in an apartment and commuting to an office.