Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
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Explain to me how you solve the mass transportation issue in non metro areas. I live in Montana, where cities are an hour or three apart by vehicle, but even in said cities, outside of the main commercial areas, people are spread out. Like, really spread out. There is a single bus stop eight blocks from my house, with exactly four scheduled pickup/dropoff times. My kids go to school with other kids who live twenty miles away. Commercial rail doesn't exist, except for a single cross-country Amtrak line with a station four hours away from here.
Images like this are illustrative, but they completely ignore the physical reality of how vast swathes of the US are laid out. You can't just flip a switch and have bus stops on every corner and rail lines connecting your major cities and residential areas. That's a massive undertaking that would cost way more in up front infrastructure than maintaining and augmenting existing highway program already does.
How do you change the culture away from cars where there is literally no realistic way to do it for 99% of people in areas like this? And how do you push for infrastructure change when there is no anti-car culture? It's a chicken and egg problem where you have no chickens and you have no eggs.
Hey fellow Montanan! Check out Big Sky Rail Authority's arguments for implementing a southern passanger rail service, or think of the benefits of increased bus service connecting the larger Montana cities. We have main travel corridors across the state that could be greatly improved by a public transportation network, linking rural communities and connecting them to larger city centers. Combine that with local bus service, walkable communities, and biking infrastructure in places where it can be supported like Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, etc can improve traffic and livability of the towns. Also, think of the improvement to traffic conditions for people coming into town from surrounding rural communities if you can divert a good portion of traffic to public options. In a rural state like ours, there's always going to be some need for personal vehicles, but there's still lots of places where having more public transportation options could improve our communities and lessen our climate impacts. Sure, it's going to look different than in other parts of the country, but still a lot of room for improvement around here.