To be perfectly honest, local isn’t any better as far as pests. There’s never been a rat free grain or corn silo. Presumably you could get pretty close to clean if you refined the sugar out of beets, But they grow in the ground in the dirt with all the insects and pests…
I want a better distribution of walkable white collar work and more work-from-home jobs.
I used to live within easy walking distance to the light rail, and work was easy walking distance from the other stop. The stops were 20 miles apart through the center of the city.
I could drive there, around the beltway, around the whole damn west side in 30 minutes.
The train was over an hour on a good day.
I tried it:
Day one, there was some mid day stuff happening in town, the train was PACKED and spent 10m at every stop, that day was 2 hours.
Had a few decent days, then they hit a car. We were forced to stay on the train for an hour in summer heat, no AC.
Some days the train was every 10. Some days every 30, some days 2 in a row. It was supposed to change frequency with time, it changed rather randomly.
By the end of my first month, there was an outage, so they did a bus bridge. That trip home was 4 hours.
I know that the light rail here was just substandard. but that didn’t make it any easier.
Trains need a specific ecosystem and population density to thrive. In the US, we seem to have an issue that installing train stops connecting suburbs to significant cities brings crime to the suburbs and pushes out boutique shops from the stops. Is there any of that in other countries, or does the train increase commerce in an area?