askchapo

I live in a rural farming town, population has always been <1k people, flyover state, about an hour by car to the nearest city. Everything is walkable. We used to have passenger rail service before they dug up the tracks, and there's rail lines still operating near by that wouldn't be too hard to hook up to. Having rail infrastructure is good in general since quite a lot of food is grown here and needs to be distributed out either way. Seems not-terribly-complicated to use the same rail infrastructure to bring goods in and move people to/from the city.

In order to make the town more appealing so people didn't need or want to leave it as frequently (thereby reducing carbon footprints here), you'd need to add healthcare (doctor, dentist, optometrist, pharmacist, etc or one person who can do the basics of most/all of it plus some staff to support them), re-open the school that got shut down by libertarian experiments so kids didn't need to go to a neighboring town for education every day, and reduce the cost of groceries in town (which is literally 2x as expensive as in the city). Some version of a food truck schedule or other rotating restaurant situation would be good too for more variety (the only place that serves food is the bar which only does artery-clogging fried stuff and meat). You'd also need to add more stuff to do and places to hang out besides churches — there's a park and a walking trail and a basketball court, but it's pretty boring otherwise.