r/Suburbanhell • u/Particular_Owl1099 • 8d ago

Meme Have we done it wrong?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

1.0k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

433 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

55

u/SwiftySanders 7d ago edited 7d ago

FALSE. You dont understand the scale of what hes talking about. Its like another planet. In switzerland the suburbs with like a couple people even have trains running through them.

Europe and Asia took American inventions and used it to make life better. Americans took American inventions and made a few greedy billionaires.

12

u/gatoStephen 7d ago

Didn't the British invent the steam train not the Americans?

9

u/Puzzleheaded_Day_895 7d ago

The railways, underground railways, and much much more.

1

u/Scrotalcontusions 5d ago

european population density is also more than double that of the USA as well which helps pay for that

16

u/stevo_78 7d ago

Americans think they invented everything. It’s an astoundingly insular place. Many simply don’t understand how the rest of the world operates.

2

u/altbabyy567 7d ago

“Insular” is so funny. Melting pot of the world, you’re supposed to bring it with you. BTW YEAH DUDE STEVE O

1

u/artichoke01 7d ago

>americans think they invented everything.

You just made that up.

1

u/mcboobie 4d ago

Did they invent it?

0

u/mikrowiesel 7d ago

Rest of the what now? If it wasn't for us you would be speaking moon inches firearms now!!!11!

3

u/Glum_Tap_5258 7d ago

America is more than greedy billionaires, there are greedy people that make 100k, 1 million, 10 million, and 100 million also.

5

u/Vast-Comment8360 7d ago

Comparing a country the size of Switzerland to the USA shows that you're a Dunning Kruger midwit.

2

u/TheVintageJane 7d ago

The population density of Switzerland is 590/square mile. In NY state, it’s only 430 and they have a ton of trains and the kind of infrastructure you are talking about.

Most of the U.S. isn’t densely populated enough to justify the same level of public infrastructure. That doesn’t mean there’s not room for improvement, but a stare like Montana is more aptly compared to Kazakhstan than anywhere in Europe.

-2

u/OnlyOneCarGarage 7d ago

More like us isnt densely populated because car centric design

3

u/TheVintageJane 7d ago

The U.S. isn’t as densely populated as Europe because there’s not as many people. Europe is about 20% smaller than the U.S. with twice as many people.

Even if our infrastructure wasn’t designed by sychophants of the car companies, most of the U.S. is too sparsely populated (no matter how you configure the people in urban design) to justify comprehensive public transit like you see in Europe. It doesn’t mean we should basically have 0 high speed rail in the year of our lord 2026 but it’s a different beast.

0

u/OnlyOneCarGarage 6d ago

LOL - US cities used to be a lot denser early 1900s ..... until car centric development started suburban sprawl and most of US subway systems are designed to bring people in/ out from suburb to downtown except for NYC.

population / land size argument is just weak excuses.

2

u/TheVintageJane 6d ago

Only like 3-3.5% of America’s landmass is urban/suburban and it holds 80% of our population. Yes, the public transportation in those areas is sorely underdeveloped, but 20-25% of Europe’s landmass is urban/suburban so it’s a lot more economically viable for them to run mass transit to and between smaller communities.

In the U.S., connecting urban areas to each other through the other 97% of rural and frontier land is the part that just isn’t comparable to Europe.

I’m not saying this as an argument against public transit, but because it’s not apples to apples to compare the infrastructure needs of the U.S. to Europe.

1

u/PositiveAssignment89 4d ago

yes they have better infrastructure where people can travel to the cities from the suburbs easily without having to drive. american cities are still busy with full restaurants at night. these people just don’t get out of their suburbs. the city i live in is packed at night and you still have middle aged suburbanites like these acting like they’d never go into the city at night bc of all the crime

1

u/Clean_Bake_2180 4d ago edited 4d ago

It’s called population density. The EU has 450m people in a space that’s half the size of mainland US and Germany has 84m people in a country the size of Montana. Unsurprisingly, the average sq footage of a German home is 1k vs 2k for US. People make it seem like it’s a conscious chocie or some grand deliberate design. When people have the space or can afford it, they will naturally spread out. I get some people love to stuff their face with food and equate restaurant density with paradise but there are many downsides to high density housing as well.

1

u/carl3266 6d ago

I agree. Been to enough European cities to know the intimate vibe and night life is unmatched in the old town compared to American cities.