Again, it doesn’t have to be more difficult, if most people don’t own a car there will be a lot more demand for public transport, and the services can be expanded to accommodate this much more easily. I can go hiking and usually not worry about getting home because the trains are hourly at the worst and connections are easy. It’s only more difficult because we’ve built a world around making things as convenient as possible for cars.
Flat terrain makes it much easier to build fast rail. If there’s another city on the way you could have a high speed rail connection, or a sleeper train.
I live in Switzerland, and I go hiking almost every weekend without using a car. There’s plenty of places to do so accessable by public transport, and still the vast majority of journeys here are done by car. If even a quarter of those car journeys were instead taken by public transport, that would mean a doubling of public transport usage and justify huge expansions. That’s with Switzerland’s already comparatively high public transport usage, elsewhere the shift from cars wouldn’t need to be as large to multiply public transport usage.
If you’re at the point of worrying about how much wear on the roads your buses are doing, it’s time to lay down some rails.
Where do you live that actually taxes fuel enough to cover the entire cost of the externalities of cars? A study shows it doesn’t in Massachusets, and this shows it doesn’t in Europe
Lots of people in this thread seem to be missing this. With no cars it makes sense to build a lot more public transport, cycling is suddenly nice and safe, and car oriented places don’t make any sense to build anymore.
That’s true now because 1. Most people in these areas drive and 2. Roads and driving are heavily subsidised. You’re not going to have the same service in small towns as in big cities, but you could certainly provide something useful.
If people use public transport instead of driving, there would need to be many many more services and it suddenly becomes a lot more convenient, even outside cities.
They could’ve instead free up a lot of space at the existing airports by finally building that high speed rail line between Melbourne and Sydney that they’ve been talking about for 30 years.