Roads in rural new England are most often publicly funded, and are connected into a network of roads and are for transit, so rural roads are in fact a public transit network. I get that you mean trains and buses, though.

Rural roads are just expensive, period. Putting electric cars on them would additionally shorten their lifespan, so I fail to see how either public transit or electric cars are supposed to help. Plus, rural folks are not major emitters, so it doesn’t really make much sense to even try to find meaningful emission savings there.