I was not giving this thread my full attention yesterday, so coming back to this.
Rural areas are more difficult than urban of course. So I think effort should be focused on urban areas first, as they are also where most people live. Change will gradually filter outwards to increasingly lower density areas.
I think it would be possible to eliminate private car ownership via a version of the car club concept where you would not own the car but maybe it would be parked in your driveway for much of the time. I have previously suggested a version of this system and you can look at
this thread if you are interested. That proposal seems too radical even for 99% of urban75 readers so I don't expect it to come to pass unless I become transport minister under some form of dictatorship. However, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that in 10 or 20 years a version of what I suggest would no longer be seen as completely nuts.
So, on a more pragmatic basis, things I would propose for rural areas.
I think that the feasibility of providing bus services in relatively sparsely populated areas is often underestimated. The assumption is that there are too few people wanting to travel on the same, linear routes to make it work. It's true that there will be many journeys made by rural dwellers that can't realistically be provided for by a bus network. However, it's often the case that there are certain linear routes, generally leading to the nearest large town, which pass by a fair chunk of population, and that a large proportion of those people's journeys are along that route. Often bus services are provided on these routes, but they run largely empty and this is used as an argument that they are not useful to people. One reason that people don't use them is that they are too infrequent and too expensive. More people would use them if they were affordable and more frequent, ideally to the extent where you get into a virtuous circle where they become more financially sustainable because of increased patronage and this allows further increases in frequency.
However, and this I think is very important, and a fact that is wilfully ignored, the other reason people don't use rural buses is that they already have a car. They've already paid for the car and their insurance and everything else, and the marginal extra cost of using it for a journey into town is small. And for this reason, you could provide the most excellent bus services possible and people would still stay in their cars. So, just like in urban areas you have to look at disincentivising the car use as well as providing alternatives (the other option is to change that marginal-cost calculation, which is what my nationalised car system is all about, but anyway). It's quite difficult to work out methods of disincentivising car use in rural areas if you are not going for zero private car use strategy, because you are accepting that there are still some journeys that will be done by car, and you only want to target the ones where there are genuine alternatives.
I think there are a number of things you can do though, and a lot of that can take advantage of the fact that most rural dwellers now don't really "live in the country" - they live in an extended suburbia. They likely still work in a town and/or make frequent journeys to a town for services and shopping. So, you can focus on what happens at the "town" end of their journeys - which are likely to be (a) one of their most frequently made journeys and (b) journeys which can potentially be served by public transport. In addition to that, much of the urban congestion in towns is caused not by people living in the town, but people driving there from the surrounding rural areas. Park & ride is one approach to this and maybe there are places where it's the best solution but it's not one I'm entirely enthusiastic about. You are still generating a large number of car trips to the P&R and (importantly) it's of no use to any rural dwellers who don't have a car, or can't drive. I would prefer to see people taking the bus from as close to their home as possible.
So you provide the bus services and then in parallel you make it increasingly difficult for people to eg. find parking spaces in town. Maybe you think about a kind of distributed park and ride where you don't have a giant car park 5 miles out of town but you have strategically located parking in villages along bus routes.
There's lots of planning policy stuff to do as well. For example STOP BUILDING OUT OF TOWN SUPERMARKETS. These are entirely designed around convenience for car owners. They actively encourage car use in rural areas. There's no good using a token bus service to claim that they serve others. Have planning policy which encourages more local shops, just like good planning in urban areas encourages. Have shops co-located with public transport hubs and networks.
Also on planning policy - I would like to see a bit more emphasis on transport availability when deciding on planning permission for new housing. So discouraging scattered development, and encouraging new houses to be built close to transport routes or ideally within walking distance to a local centre.
A quite small village can sustain several shops/services if their customers aren't habitually driving miles away instead. Having active villages like this isn't just good from a transport point of view - it's good for community cohesion and all that stuff too.
As I mentioned the other post about country lanes, I think there should be a review of rural speed limits too. One reason is to increase safety for pedestrians (just like in urban areas) and encourage people to walk to local centres. It shouldn't be the case that it's often actually harder to walk somewhere in the countryside than it is in a city. If as a side effect this increases certain journey times, then that isn't necessarily a bad thing, and might also help tip the balance in favour of public transport alternatives. In most rural areas there's a cake-and-eat-it attitude to travel times where people want to live somewhere quiet and remote and at the same time want to be able to get to places as quickly as possible. If you want to get to town quickly, live closer to town. There's a constant pressure to make roads faster and faster and I find it nonsensical. A lot of old arguments about increasing the economic fortunes of rural areas don't apply any more - we mostly no longer have a "working" countryside in the way we used to. Increasing road connectivity is not letting poverty stricken rural basket makers and apple growers get their products to town - it's now about letting remote-working accountants get their amazon order delivered more quickly, or shortening the commute of people who work in town but want to live somewhere with a big garden and less air pollution. I exaggerate of course but some of these arguments need to be called out and we need to be realistic about what the countryside actually is now.
I think technological changes will very likely have impact on what's possible for rural transport. If self-driving vehicles ever appear (and like others have said, it may still be many years away) then quite potentially they can become part of a public transport network - replacing parts of bus networks but also acting as feeders for a bus network - I can see that a well-designed combination of autonomous taxis and buses could be highly effective and achieve the holy grail of giving everyone access to public transport from their doorstep.
And I think that the car club concept should be expanded, with some level of subsidy perhaps, into rural areas. For example, providing car share cars at all rural rail stations could tip the balance on a lot of people's travel decision making - so, if you need to get somewhere that's 5 miles from a train station, you only drive that 5 miles instead of doing the whole journey by car.
