But that is rural reality. Even a reasonable town of a few thousand people only has one bus stop. To get to the next town over might take half an hour, 9 of which are actually spent on the bus.

Great if you have a Brompton, but those are expensive and not everybody cycles.

It would be good if it was at least vaguely practical to get anywhere by PT for those who don't drive, even if it takes longer.

But the "last mile" problem is real in those places, and depending on details might well be a few miles walk from the nearest bus line.

There's a reason a lot of small towns go for a sort of on-call bus instead.

It is why the US is so fucked when it comes to public transport though. Their suburbia is pretty much Dutch rural. You can't run a bus service against that kind of density, so they're stuck with their cars.

It can probably be better than it is now, absolutely. But I still think you're looking at PT possible, not PT practical enough to get around to ditch the family car.

I still think things could be improved in the rural areas by packing the houses in villages rather than spreading them out three to a kilometer. And make the trip to the village center bikeable.
@meeoo @quixoticgeek

Once you get away from trains though, it goes downhill pretty quickly.

I don't see it happening, for good reason.

Which I still wouldn't take, because that hour of door to door will be spent entirely on the last few miles getting to/from the station with no time left for the actual train.

That's just the reality of public transport. With few exceptions, it runs from where you aren't to where you don't want to go, and making up the difference takes so much time.

The thing is that these musings tend to easily tip over into "all cars must go" type absolutism, and they are just too damn useful to not have them at all.

Is it efficient use of resources? Nah, probably not. Of time? Yep. Is that shortsighted? Up to a point, but not entirely.

I could take the bus to work, but it would take me 2 hours. Car's 40 minutes. So I drive.

Were that a one hour train trip door to door I'd take the train. Unless it's loaded to capacity, because ick people.

But having everybody be their own personal transport driver is not efficient either

Pet rant here:
Low carbon energy will be a scarce resource for the foreeeable future. If something is powered by renewables, that means something else is *not* being powered by renewables - hence it is still not OK to waste energy just because it comes from (say) a wind farm.

Personally I'm more sympathetic to this line when it comes to public transport than when, for example, I used to hear it from Bitcoin enthusiasts, but a cost/benefit calculation still applies.

Back to your core post, I agree that rural public transport could get dramatically better, but I think it will require more innovation than just running mostly-empty busses around. And I don't think that waiting for that to get that figured out is a good reason to hold up improvement in less rural areas.

Re NL-ticket and capacity: Do NS have enough rolling stock that they are choosing not to run? Or is there a huge investment required to support an increase in demand?

I mean, you could, but those buses would run empty most of the time, which only takes one VVDer crying waste before it's all over again, and even then they'd be worse than having your own transport.

Cars don't scale when the density gets too high. PT doesn't scale when the density gets too low.

Shifting to (e-)bicycles is of course also part of the solution - but I hear the Netherlands have already done a lot in that regard?