Really? You mean when people in rural areas had to stay overnight if they went to town for supplies because the trip there took so long? And that’s before a century of planning around the convenience of cars.
Yeah, I mean then. Some people got used to driving their SUV 200km into town to get a haircut and buy out of season fruit every saturday. And that lifestyle relies on unsustainable and dangerous technologies that we can’t afford to keep running. It was never going to be permanent. If you want metropolitan conveniences, you’re going to have to live in a metropolitan area. This isn’t difficult logic.
Let’s say you need a plumber to come fix a leak. How does he get his tools and supplies there? On his mule and cart?
For this example I’ll use the US average commute of 27.6 miles (44.4 km) one way. Based on what I looked up, a donkey pulling a cart is ~4.5 mp/h (7.2 km/h). That’s 12 hours of travel time there and back. Help me understand how this is reasonable.
He loads up his hand cart with his tools, he walks 500m to the train station, he travels 43.4 km on the train, and then he walks 500m to my house.
Again, sufficiency and resilience. If you live in a rural space, you learn to fix shit yourself. Famously: tractors.
If you believe that rural just means “own a house in a village or next to a town”, that’s not it, that’s tourism. That’s like owning a cabin in the woods or like the car-dependent suburbia. What makes you a rural dweller is participation in the rural economy or subsistence living. If you live like a guest, you are a guest.
Most traffic is neither freight nor service teams with their turnout kit.