No. I think humanity should aim for absolutely every single human in every country in every single region, urban or rural could have a level of life quality comparable to what's consider middle-high income level in USA/Europe.
If we cannot achieve that we'd better give up as an intelligent species and leave room for que squids to try.
This seems interesting because they did some research in the actual mechanism that could create a cause-effect relation. Still need to be repeated to justify legal changes but that's a good start.
Much better than these "correlation" studies that say nothing. Like the ones saying "people who doesn't drink any alcohol die sooner that people who drink a cup of wine each day", that's totally faulty for a lot of evident reasons. And until now most artificial sweeteners studies were like that "people who use artificial sweeteners tend to have more health issues", like with the drink is reasonable to assume and consider that people who do such dietary changes is more likely to already have an underlying health issue that they are trying to cope with and it's obviously more in risk that healthy people that doesn't feel the need to control their diet.
As I said this study seems a little more promising as they did research on the actual mechanisms on which the health issues may happen. I hope it gets repeated enough times and, if needed, the product would be banned or properly labeled.
Probably you hear more of those stories because if you have a bad experience you tell everyone, while if you have a good one you don't tell ot that much.
I had a good experience doing therapy. The psychologist was a professional that applied modern psychology techniques for my case and they worked within what's expected.
Surely there's a way of having people living rural, a totally valid life choice and also must needed for agriculture, having a good life, and not having a planet wide global extinction.
I get that in the US and some other countries one of the biggest divisions in voting is rural/urban, thus some people really feel vindicated on hating people that live rural and wanting to impose some penalties on them.
But if we cannot find an economic system that would lead to every person having a good life, regardless on where they live... Do we really want to have a future as a species?
Netherlands has crazy population density. The whole country is like a big city. Also I remember using a tram in Netherlands in the 2010s I don't know if they really got rid of them.
Anyway buses have a lot of advantages in rural areas. They respond better to a variable demand, they need less infrastructure, you can change routes all you want, you can get rotatory routes without going broke with the infrastructure. A tram would most likely need a bigger population density to be justified. Even then. Modern buses are quite good. Don't get me wrong I love a smooth tram travel and the looks of it, but it is more expensive than a bus. Here buses are 100% accessible for all people, flat floors, and automatic ramps for people with mobility issues.
I've always have been advocating for car reduction. Since forever, I've not changed my ming here. And precisely it's really hard to make people understand that we could achieve better living standards and that they will still be able to use a car when needed when there's people around telling them that they will not be allowed to use a car at all. It makes the struggle for traffic reduction harder.
I think selling the idea of, "you can have a car but we are going to make it so you will only need to use it a couple times a month, because you won't need it more" is way friendlier then "we are going to take away your car".
Also we are talking about countries with massive urban population. In a world context many countries could not adopt this model because they can be 80% rural or more.
We got rid of trams last century because there were better engineering solutions. Buses got more efficient, larger and more comfortable than they used to. Also within a city metro is much better and faster. They are also electric now. No need for investing in tram infrastructure for most cases nowadays.
Also when talking about rural I don't think if we are talking really about trams, more like low distance trains, at least that's what we call them here. They use full train infrastructure. Trams are more for cities.
What I don't get is why some people cannot be happy with a 70% traffic reduction in cities ? That would be a great objective that would get rid of tons of emissions and problems without that much fuss because it's easy to provide not only the same but better life quality with that objective. But some people feel the need to push to really hard extremes that, imho, only make people to push back over any attempt on traffic reduction. We could do a lot with proper demand control instead of trying to push a lot of restrictions on people and wanting to take away rights and life quality.
I live in Europe (Spain for reference). I think my country is the second one in the world in ultraspeed train network only behind china (or it used to).
People in rural areas still needs cars. In fact people in rural areas doesn't even use trains for the most part. Buses work better. Still, living there without a car is a big drop in life quality.
We fund trains with public money to make them cheaper. Some trains are even FREE to the public, free as in you can hop in without paying. Still people don't use trains in rural areas unless they have not access to a car. Because it's imposible to have a network with enough frequency and travel time to match people expectations on transport. The infrastructure needed for it would be impossible.
Sorry to break your great manipulation revealing that I do not live in the US.
Next revelation is that I don't even live in rural areas, but I know plenty of people who does.
You lack imagination. Plenty of ways to not kill people without having to recede to Palaeolithic levels of life quality.
I don't want to live like people lived two thousands years ago, thanks.
What about people not living in cities?
Public transport for low density areas is terrible. So or you are forcing people to live in cities (where public transport can be good) or you are forcing people to endure terrible public transport.
Also forcing dietary changes on people, something as big as preventing people to eat or use animal products...
I just don't think forcing that on people would be clever. I know how I would react if anyone were to impose that way of living to me, and I can only assume that many people would react the same way. Specially if I would have to endure all that only to accommodate a growing population when we could just try to aim for a lower stable number of total human population (a number that will need to be reached regardless at some point. Infinite growth is unfeasible).
I said in other comment. I'm not in the US, I'm in europe we have one of the best train networks of the world. Public transport is funded by the government so is cheaper, even completely free in some cases.
People living in rural areas still chose cars while they have the free will to do so.
If as a species we cannot find the way to make that work there's no incentive for us to keep trying. Luckily I'm sure it's possible, that people say it's not just because propaganda (as I said mostly because the voting split rural/urban). We have achieve harder things as a species. Surely we can have people in rural areas still using cars (electric cars for instance) without dooming humankind to extinction.