Yeah...it seems to be that way throughout Europe...or so I have heard. In Napoli a bus would come by every ten minutes. We took a train to Rome. It took about an hour...then we walked everywhere we wanted to go.
There is no public trans here that runs on a schedule. There is a service that you schedule when you will need transportation. It's $2 per trip. So, when people without cars, such as the elderly, have doctor appointments they can get there and back for $4 which is so reasonable. I personally am walking distance to a market, the library, a book store, a Chinese restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, a seafood/steak place, a butcher, a doughnut shop, a gun store and shooting range, several doctors offices, and an urgent care center. Oh yeah, and an engraving shop. So, if my car is in the shop, I've no need to rent one.
This post was edited by Thriftymaid at October 20, 2016 1:05 PM MDT
I don't need my car for many journeys, and in some cases it's easier and more economical to use the bus, after you account for convenience and the fuel and parking charges. I need to use it though for most of the driving supporting my social and leisure interests though, as they go far from public transport routes and times.
My local bus service is very frequent, and I live only a couple of miles from a main railway station with direct services to several towns and cities including London, to where would take about 3 hours I think - though I rarely go there!
I do need a car here in Florida. But I have been to a few places where I didn't need one, mostly South America. You also don't need a car in Paris. They have the best subway system in the world.
In the UK, a great number of people have moved from the cities and immediate surroundings to rural villages - creating problems of its own. Some do so to give themselves second homes, some for retirement, but many then find the countryside is not the idyll they'd imagined.
And one of its problems - partly an effect of such movements, partly an effect of such widespread use of the car - is the lack of public transport in very wide areas of the countryside.
I know one couple who have lived in a small village since buying their home some 40 years ago, and are now wondering about moving somewhere nearer a town. My friend said their village is no place to grow old. Why not? Reasons sadly typical of many British villages now:
One bus a week - many villages are nowhere near bus routes, let alone railway stations; and bus routes are being cut all over the place. No shops apart from a farm-shop (these tend to be good but expensive and naturally limited). No hairdresser., No Post Office, health-centre, dentist or public library... Virtually no employment outside of farming. It does still have a primary school, helping encourage young families to stay in the village; and like most such villages has an active social scene of its own. The local garage sells and services cars but no longer sells fuel. (A double tax makes the retailer's profit margin on petrol and diesel almost non-existent, and the supermarkets have commandeered much of the trade by selling from their own filling-stations at what must be near-loss prices compensated for by high prices in the filling-station's accompanying shop.) At least my friends' village still has a pub - we are losing these at a terrible rate. Finally - geography! It's on high ground that can be quite bleak in Winter although complete isolation by bad weather is very rare.
This is quite typical of living in the countryside today. Go less than 10 miles from my home near a town, and you need your car for even the necessities of life. Sadly, the near-universality of car ownership (and other factors like the crushing dominance of supermarkets and huge cuts in public-services for purely fiscal reasons) means the local services and trades are used less and less, so they are withdrawn or they close down. It becomes a decline, the farms continue sometimes disliked by the snootier incomers, but the villages atrophy into cosy retreats for the well-off.
JakobA the unAmerican. 