This post was originally sent in my newsletter, the Ian’s monthly review. If you also want to read posts first and get exclusive insides, subscribe to my newsletter. You can do it if you really want, and it’s free.
I fled the hot city this summer. Being in more rural areas made me experience one of the greatest drawbacks of the countryside. The lack of infrastructure. The second thing I realized is, how bad the situation is, highly depends on the local government, and you can do it if you really want.
To the Northern Sea
My first trip went from Vienna all the way up to a small Island in the Northern Sea. The journey was around 1,000 kilometers and I took only public transport. Night train, train and ferry.
The ten days on the island, I never needed a car. First, you could cycle around the whole island in about 3 hours, so everything was nearby, and you could easily get anywhere by bicycle or walking.
There was good biking infrastructure and those who don’t or can’t walk or bike, could use the bus. You could even take a shuttle to the beach. There was absolutely no need to use a car, but of course many did anyway and flooded the small parking lot at the grocery store, till it was full, and they had to park on the sidewalk.
No car needed
Nobody bought so much they needed a car to transport it and no ferry had arrived, which normally results in many cars coming in at the same time and could explain the wave of metal flooding the parking lot.
To get to the point. The local government wants to reduce car traffic and makes the island accessible for everyone, that’s why they build the infrastructure to reach this goal. Of course, it is not perfect and if I would include other infrastructure like internet or energy, it looks worse.
I can totally understand locals to have a car. Because if you need to leave the island regularly, you can’t rely on Deutsche Bahn on the mainland. That’s because the federal government doesn’t want the infrastructure to be accessible for everyone and climate friendly.
The reason for this is the liberal party, which is responsible for the traffic infrastructure, and is owned by the car industry. Well in Germany any party is owned by the car industry or Russia.
Into the woods
A few weeks later, I travelled to a small town around 100 kilometers from Vienna. I did most of the way by public transport, which took my 3:30 hours. To get to my final destination, I had to be picked up, because there wasn’t a bus station nearby.
The place I stayed is not a little hut in the woods, it is the biggest place and the biggest employer in town. Nearly everyday around the same time many people come to this place, but it is not accessible by public transport. Instead, they have a parking lot bigger than the actually buildings, where the cars of the guests stand for three weeks nearly unmoved.
There is no biking infrastructure. The sidewalks, if they exist anyway, are so narrow you can hardly walk there. The train line coming into town has been mostly torn down. The small rest is only used as museum railway.
In the last decades the conservative party, reigning this party of Austria, made public transport much worse. The local government, which is the same party, doesn’t even care about public transport and accessibility. Half of the town is just parking spaces, which make a decent looking town bad.
Island vs Small Town
For comparison, to the island connect several ferries from different directions every day, to the town in Austria there are only a few bus connections a day and on the weekend only three.
In this town live twice as much people than on the island. And yes many tourists use the infrastructure, but to the Austrian town also regularly come many guests.
Change can happen
It highly depends on the local and partly on the federal government how good the infrastructure is. And this is a good thing, because it shows, if you really want you can do great things. And changing a local government is way easier, because you often you do not need a lot of votes and the local problems are mostly less abstract and easier to address and to change.
Also, it is a perfect showcase, that the most impactful thing you can do to change the system is to vote. So use your voice wisely.
If you still want to read more of me, I wrote about if cities or rural areas are better for the climate a while ago.
My name is Ian DeBay.
I am the founder of iandebay.com. I am a content creator, blogger, podcast, YouTuber. This is my blog where I talk about system change, sustainability and other fun stuff.
Leave a Reply