What's the environmentalist or progressive thinking on designing rural spaces?
I live on a farm and need my car/motorbike to get around.
Rural communities can't be served by trains because the small population doesn't justify the cost.
Are we supposed to have train stations every 30 miles, and park-and-ride everywhere? Should we be riding quad bikes instead of cars? Really my question is: is there a generally-agreed on set of principles for progressive rural design, like there seems to be for cities?
My opinion on cars etc is that they are fine if they're used for work. Work being last mile hauling, people who need to drive heavy tools around, farming, any sort of back country thing like maintaining wires or forests, etc.
I don't think anyone envisions a world without roads or cars. It's really more that probably 95% of what people use their cars for they don't need to use their cars for. Especially in cities. Outside of cities though cars and trucks especially make a lot more sense, mostly to get between cities or get out somewhere that it isn't feasible to build infrastructure for. Cars outside of cities and for work use only solves most of the problems with cars...it gets car infrastructure out of the way of people infrastructure, cuts down massively on noise and pollution, etc. A farmer isn't going to need to drive downtown unless they're making a delivery or setting up for a farmers market (last mile hauling) so farmers owning hauling vehicles makes a lot of sense.