Ahh yes, thank you for being so generous to locate your power plants and waste treatment facilities out here and being so gracious to let us ride on your pipes and wires, while we generate the electricity you consume and clean the water you dirty. NIMBY right?

However, since my comment was about the need for automobiles in rural areas because the distances between services are not supportive of mass transit and reasonable walkable distances. Folks that live in urban areas seem to forget that the bulk of this earth doesn’t have the luxury of a bus stop or train station a block away from their home and place of employment.

You do understand that we are talking completely different things here.

Obviously farmland is not the right place to put power plants (unless their emissions can be used to benefit crops - think reusing clean CO2 to feed crops in greenhouses) or waste treatment facilities (unless they produce fertilizers that can be used to increase crop yield).

Nobody is proposing to ban cars where they are actually needed - and there are a lot of good use cases for cars, but densely populated cities ARE NOT one of them. Also, banning cars from rural areas would probably not make a dent in avoidable pedestrian deaths, as most of them happen in more densely populated areas (such as suburbs, which are kind of in the middle between rural and urban). I'd be totally fine with banning manual driving in suburban areas as soon as self-driving cars prove safer than humans.

Furthermore, we could extend the mass-transit system with self-driving cars and trucks - no need to walk to the bus stop if you can have one pick you up by your door upon request. And, since it's per request, it doesn't even need to be a bus. Many short-term car-rental companies are looking for self-driving cars to remove the issue of having to pick up and return the car at a specified spot.

For a long time I didn't have a bus stop near my door - what I did was drive (a 15-minute drive) to the subway station parking building and use my tax-deducted park+ride year-long pass to get to my office.

You do understand that you are arguing a point I didn’t make, but rather taking issue with a sarcastic remark I made because the other commenter went off to left field.

My point was, originally, that arguing for solutions that might work in a high density urban environment doesn’t work in rural communities. Mass transit needs “mass”, by definition rural communities don’t provide that.

BTW, when self driving cars are an actual thing, feel free to propose them as a solution. I suspect jet packs would also be a great way to get to the bus stop as well.

Jet packs will certainly kill fewer pedestrians in rural areas because a falling jet pack will have a much harder time finding a pedestrian to hit. Win-win scenario!