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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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K. I want you to look at somewhere like rural WV and imagine what public transit infrastructure or bike infrastructure that would actually be useful would look like. Preferably that wouldn't cost more than the entire state budget to run and would be useful for people to use to get to work and to at least one major grocery store and one place to get appliances or furniture.
Say, Powelton, WV. Or Dry Branch, WV. Or Webster Springs, WV. Or Amma, WV. And these aren't even the hardest examples in the state, but they're ones I know well enough to likely be able to comment on your answers.
It's not that difficult? I'm over here in rural Washington along long beach, raymond, Aberdeen and Pacific Transit is quite viable for getting to work grocery stores and whatever else you need. I know because I'm a driver for them, I'm currently doing from Ilwaco to Aberdeen.
From my first stop to my second stop is a half hour, then an hour to the next stop, then a couple quick stops in town, then another half hour to Aberdeen. And yet I still service about 30 people a day, people rely on me to get to work, to do shopping, to go see the doctor. We also have a service where people can call upon us for very specific needs that aren't covered by our routes. Three of them actually
We have a Dial-A-Ride service where you can request that we pick you up and drop you off at specific places or the nearest other bus stop in smaller shuttle buses (prioritizes ada passengers if demand is high)
We have a shopper shuttle service that literally just runs between a big pile of different stores and restaurants that people like to go to and they make connections with most of our other routes
And then we have the veteran connect service where we help make sure that veterans are able to get to their medical appointments as far out as Chehalis and Vancouver as there is unfortunately no VA hospitals near us.
Almost every furniture store in existence can deliver straight to your house now, even if you manage to find one that can't just go rent a U-Haul for the day it's not expensive. There's no reason for your daily driver to be a massive truck because you might need something big at some point doesn't matter whether your rural or not.
I definitely know what it's like to put some mileage on a car as I currently Drive a total round trip mileage of 160 miles per day for getting to/from work. But thankfully for my wallet I'm driving a smart fortwo which gets on average 43 miles to the gallon so that definitely helps. And the only reason I need to do that is because I'm the one driving the bus so I can't exactly take the bus to drive the bus unfortunately as much as I wish they would let me just take it home
I think the difference in geography makes a, well, difference. It's just a lot of people stuck in tiny towns that are several miles long in one direction and around 150 yards in the other, most of them up different hollows or branches of hollows. Mass transit that's actually workable would be difficult. Hell, I used to date a woman who was a social worker who did in home adult education and more than a few of her clients had directions to get to them that involved things like turning off the road to drive several miles up a creek bed, because neither federal, state, nor county considered it a place worth running a road to.
I kinda think running a ferry line that went up and down river and across, with each line going from one set of locks to the next with a shuttle to take you from one side of the locks to the other and local busing could work, but only for the places on the Kanawha. But even then going from where I used to live to Charleston would look something like bus->ferry->shuttle->ferry->bus. Going to be hard to make that look attractive compared to a 20 min drive.
And mind you I actually like mass transit. The times I've been to Boston I literally just grab a 7-day pass for the T and take it everywhere, but something like it just doesn't seem practical given the geography and population distribution here.