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?
I think there hasn't been that much study on how to design rural spaces because they have already been mostly designed; we are just dealing with the affects of the local cultural design decisions. The last time that there seemed to be an interest in the actual design was a century ago as railroads opened up arable land.
Likely, the rural town would be preferred to living on the farm for various reasons including community cohesion and the interface of businesses to non-farming activities.
The communities should have local paths to allow for non-car traffic, including various bicycles or motorcycles. Trucks should be more like Japan's small type then the USA's big ones.
The town should have some public transit access. Rail was the preferred option, but you are probably only going to get an intercity bus nowadays. This will likely be some sort of park and ride, mainly geared to provide non-car connectivity to an urban area.