Where I live is right now considered by many to be the fastest growing part of America, Will County. It's South of Chicago and it's where boats, trains, trucks, and planes can all meet to exchange their cargo. My town is Lockport, look it up and you'll see that it's best known for the I & M canal, a High School that's
"in the top 5% of the nation", LOTS of ghost stories, lots of recent teenage deaths and suicides, school referendums that never pass, gang violence spread from Joliet, growing population where soy bean and corn fields are being torn down for white suburbs...and Johnny Depp was here not that long ago for the filming of "Public Enemies" which is due next year
Anyways, the new suburbs have sidewalks within them, but no one come out because the roads outside the suburbs have speed limits of 45 or so MPH and are still heavily used, even more now that the I-355 extension is complete. Areas are calmed down in small pieces, but not all together, so there's really no possibility of traveling long distances by bicycle or walking on a safe path.
As far as busses and trains go, the trains will get you from any major town to another, but not from part of one town to another part of the same town. There's a lot of empty fields in between that will probably be developed into more suburbs within the next couple decades. There are only school busses. Public transportation bus systems wouldn't work because of the large area that they would have to cover, everything is far away, it's not setup like a city should be because it's expanding too quickly and in an odd way of being spread out in spurts.
People who live in downtown Lockport can get by without owning or using cars, they can walk to most places they need to go to other than a post office, but a lot of them will carpool out of there every night because it's not a safe place to be, during the day it looks like a ghost town because there's nobody on the streets or in restaurants or businesses, but the streets are packed with cars going down Main street to get to other towns.
It's really being poorly developed.
And yes, I've been to Chicago and driven there, I enjoy it much more and would actually feel safer parking my car at a meter there than on the side of a street anywhere in my own town. I love going to Chicago because it only
requires that I drive a couple miles to a train station, from there I can take the train for an hour which is lots of fun (not kidding, two story trains with colourful windows and usually fun people), and then once you get into Chicago you can walk to anywhere, take a bus, or take another train. A friend of mine lived in NYC and then moved to Chicago, he just got his license when he turned 35 because for the first time ever he got a job that required him to leave the major city that he lives in, until then he had never driven a car and rarely been in one.
If anyone could find a solution to the problems with transportation in my area that anybody would take seriously, that would be amazing. We can't get school referendums passed because everyone is uptight about tax raises, yet their properties are worth more now that the area is developing and could be worth even more if they helped contribute to our high school that's supposedly good. It's a confusing place to live in. My family came here to escape the city and raise me and my siblings, but Chicago has always been a major part of our lives. My dad goes there daily, my brother goes there for college, I go there for fun, etc. Now, 18 years later, it's turning into all the bad things from Chicago and none of the good things. Kids my age hangout at Wal-Mart, do drugs, party, and drive around shitfaced. It's one of those places that births a few intelligent individuals with a lot of potential who grow up waiting to escape and it's sad to see it when they don't.
