Even if it is only 20% that live in more rural environments than that, that is quite a large minority. This is the area where food production mainly occurs
So what? That's more reason to provide the services that were slashed in the wake of motorisation. Motorisation killed the rural transport connection services.
This is just a other form of "what about disabled blind emergency services who need to move a fridge full of tools." Motorists sit on an obscene share of this country's fiscal pot and it's a disgrace. Cars have been a disaster for everyone. The sooner they are banned the better.
I don't think you really have any concept of how things work outside the urban environment.
Before mechanical transport arrived, much more of the population lived in the country because agricultural production was labour-intensive, and supply chains were necessarily short. The industrial revolution brought both depopulation of the countryside as people moved to work in the new-fangled factories, and greater access to markets as railways increased both the available speed and range of agricultural products. Railways also allowed more people from the countryside to access towns for work and shopping, but the effect was limited as the market for each station was restricted by the lack of supply mechanism - ie people had to basically walk to get a train. Railways did, however, provide the impetus for country towns to grow as both import and export of goods became much easier and cheaper.
The introduction of motor vehicles (mainly buses and lorries) impacted railways obviously, but it also enabled more efficient production from agriculture, with the result that people lost their jobs on farms and moved to towns to work. That process basically continued until property prices made it ever more difficult for country people to move into towns, and so, as vehicles got cheaper, they began commuting. And people from towns started moving further out so they could afford the now-cheap houses that better suited their needs. Production of all factory-made products (including cars) got cheaper as efficiencies came along, and the big towns got bigger and more expensive.
As more and more people became mobile, buses got less and less economical to provide in the countryside, to the extent that country bus services are now in danger of extinction. The population movement that started to bring people out to the country has stalled as commutes have become more difficult and people realise that they lose their place on the property gravy-train by leaving expensive towns for the cheap countryside (and even in the Cotswolds it's cheap compared to London). Meantime, those of us who never left the countryside (in my case because of a family history of military service, not agriculture) are pretty much trapped here by property prices. You want to seal the trap by taking away personal transport. As I said many pages ago, 'from my cold, dead hands'. However, you help me reduce the amount of driving in our country towns by making it easier to walk and ride, and reduce the amount of car commuting to big towns by improving public transport (when we can use it again), and I'm your man. We need to shift the balance, not eliminate any part of the mix.
