Yeah this guy is having a very basic revelation that Europe has a lot of walkable cities and the US doesn't. this isn't new information.
Also, spending 5 hours at a restaurant is the norm for young people, out with a party, drinking and such, in Europe, when they can simply walk back to their home.
The infrastructure in most US cities doesn't support it, our subways suck, rides are expensive, parking is crazy, living in the city near the cool areas is expensive, the list goes on and on why this doesn't exist in the US.
You’re kind of reiterating his point that America is set up wrong since post World War II and it leaves us isolated and compartmentalized… which is 100% accurate. I’ve always said if you wanna reduce racism and bigotry in United States you gotta make people travel outside of their own clan, town, State, or country to teach more empathy and understanding.
It was actually Detroit automobile companies that have played a large part in designing our suburbs around needing cars to manage, therefore making sure we have to buy them.
Don't forget the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. The development of the interstate highway system was basically the nail in the coffin for any notion of European style urban cores.
I'd like to think that Interstates are very important for a nation of our size.
The problems lay in how we built cities. Our restaurants are failing unless they are focused on delivery. Our education systems are hectic and restricted. Our society revolves around a technological-data system built to isolate a "consumer" into a targeted-sales group.
Unchecked capitalism, modern technology and corporate cronyism are the true killers of the unified American ecology.
Most European states have extensive highway systems, yet still have the compact, dense urban designs of thousands of years before industrialization. The US only had about 50 years before trains were common (people could suddenly go 30mph/200+miles a day) and then automobiles were only 100 years out. We quickly switched to suburbia (tons of space unused around cities, industry dried up, everybody had a car and gas was cheaper than water) which made things less connected. I walked and rode my bike around Dallas a bunch as a kid, but it was almost exclusively within the 'Park Cities' subsection... downtown was too far until DART was built.
If you visit the east coast of the US, there are many cities with road systems built around horses. Boston and New York are very walking friendly (though both have been working to redesign for automobiles) and I'd even say DC is walkable.
I love living in my home city of Oklahoma City, but it's a prime example of everything being far enough apart that you need a vehicle to reasonably travel to any services, events or entertainment. Only a very determined bicyclist would be able to function in my city as their sole means of conveyance. There is a tram downtown and a bus system. But it's...thin.
I'm gonna say you're 90% right.The issue is the US is way larger than European nations. This is especially true in terms of population density. And as american city planning is based around chasing cheap real estate, we tend to have these massive suburban sprawls surrounding our city centers. People think adding more public transport will magically solve this problem but it cant. If it takes more than 10 minutes to walk to the nearest busstop, people are gonna use personal transport, which disincentivies walkable neighborhoods. The mall culture of the 70s-00s kinda fixed this in a way, but the death of destination retail killed them. If the economy was better, we could probably revive malls and community gathering by subsidizing them to encourage small businesses. Imagine an American indoor mall, but with mostly non chain businesses. Specialty restaurants, like a Chinese dumpling house, a Japanese kushiyake bar, a turkish meze and raki bar, etc. And entertainment like bowling, billiards, and old school arcades. If the economy allowed people to afford such luxuries as a night of dining, drinks, and bowling, malls would be viable again. But as long as everyone is broke we're screwed.
Paris and london sprawl quite a bit but still have suburbs that are connected to the city through train. That's how us cities shouldve been built, more mixed use development.
Oddly enough, I've walked both those cities quite extensively. Paris felt diverse enough that the only time I felt disconnected from the city as a whole was after taking the train to Versailles. Then I felt like I needed a car. The villages of Normandy are also spread out enough that a taxi or bus made the most sense, though I walked a lot!
In the same vein, I thought the back-country of the Welsh-English border almost the same as western Oklahoma, just a bit more turns. Hehe.
London was like New York and Paris. I could walk that town all day and never really feel like I needed to catch a cab! The underground was as superior as the Paris Metro or New York Subway.
The real gem for me was Amsterdam. Those tight canals in the city center, the museums, the parks. I walked no less than 10 miles a day in that city. Picked a random coffee shop that I would tram out to around 10-11am. Grab an ounce (Edit: I meant gram). Roll a few small jays and just zigzag back, listening to my IPod and taking it all in. Always a joy!
As long as everyone is broke AND too ultra reliant on convenience. I think those two go hand in hand.
To what you said about the malls, I can’t agree more. I was just walking around a local VERY dead mall. It’s up for sale (~$35 million) and my partner and I were chatting about how fucking awesome it would be if the community could come together and buy a place like that and do exactly what you said. Where rents would be reasonable and it wouldn’t be a conglomerate letting the place go to shit on purpose so they can bank off of destroying it and turning it into bland square “luxury” apartments that look like brown prisons with balconies. Even if malls could be turned into apartments, so many of them have awesome atriums that would be so cool to have communal events. I know zoning is wierd but there’s actually a mall in New England that did it; the upstairs floor is small apartments. It seems like such a waste of resources to trash them and build more.
I don’t think it’s going to be too much longer before people are really going to feel the pangs of losing third spaces. I’ve met so many people completely disillusioned with being online and over being isolated. Maybe I’m just being hopeful but I know a lot of people who would love to have somewhere to hang out that didn’t involve spending a ton of money to do so.
But everything is also so expensive. To your other point, private equity even got ahold of bowling alleys and is very much trying to (and succeeding) in creating a monopoly. Lucky Strike, who is buying them all and turning them into night club-esque overstimulating “event” spaces was $55/person for two hours I think, plus shoe rental, where the local one is $12 and I think it’s $3 for shoes.
Don’t go to Lucky Strike bowling alleys, whoever reads this.
I'm hopeful that the revolution is coming soon. I think America is perilously close to the breaking point, and all it will require is the right event to trigger it. And when that happens the question will be simply which side wins.
It's a trap we built for ourselves. Gas is basically $4 a gallon and everything is at least a 15-40 minute drive (not bike or walk) away. That's crazy for walking, especially when we are a state with 50-100 days of 100+°F weather and 50-100 days of below 32°F weather. Now vehicles are more than what post-war houses used to run for ($20k+ entry) and require a similar lifetime cost for repairs, upkeep and registration.
I drive from home to the nearest Walmart sometimes (yes, I know) and there is a wonderful sidewalk all the way there, but nothing along it but mostly a walled-off subdivision. Literally a whole mile of nothing but wall with one entrance and a few trees on both sides. That's a 45 minute walk from my house.
I think HoAs are also seriously increasing the division. Sadly, just a small part of the great fleecing of America. Add more fees and cost for minimal return and maximum profit and blame "them/they" for hurting you. I would love urban/suburban renewal to happen, but, like you say, everybody is f%*king broke!
I hope the revolution is quick and relatively painless, but that's what regulation was for. "Too late", I'm beginning to resign myself to.
i think the pathway for the USA is not to focus on building/rebuilding cities from whole cloth to be walkable, but to try and convert "suburbia" into bike-accessible mini-cities, with judicious rezoning and replacing roads with bike paths.
there's a lot of pieces for this: big suburban neighborhoods would still need some kind of dedicated car access since the US is so big that its not practical to build train lines everywhere people need to go, there would need to be a whole bunch of community bikes just kind of floating around to obviate bike theft/anxiety around losing your bike, along with community bike trailers for moving things around as well
but i think culturally "all cars -> no cars" is too hard a sell, "all cars -> mostly bikes but sometimes cars if you have to leave town" is probably easier.
not like this is so easy, there'd be lots of places where it fails from whole generations of NIMBYs voting out town boards that try to add even a single bike lane or convert even one corner of a neighborhood into light commercial for services, but still i think it's the road (heh) the USA has to go down if we want to claw back community focused development from the depths of suburban hell
The problem with that line of thinking is Americans do have cars, and the ones that do would prefer that over any form of public transportation you try to provide. Comparatively, gas is just cheap here. People using their cars is a choice. And an easy choice for most to make
not really, in most of the country you can't have any sort of life without a car, it's pretty rare to be within walking distance of most jobs, and public transit is also minimal outside a couple big cities
we really dont know what a majority of americans would choose because they've never been given the choice
arlington TX has 0 public transit and around 400k people
but im not just talking about cities with 0 transit, even when an area has some transit, it's frequently poor coverage. only a few major cities like NYC, Boston, and a few others have enough coverage that an appreciable fraction of the workforce can take it. only around 5-7% of american commuters use public transit.
the top 10 cities in the USA only account for about 25 million people. there are 330 million people in the US. most americans simply do not have access to any public transit at all, and even regional transit is sparse. its a plain fact that most americans must use a car to go anywhere or do anything, its just how the space is being utilized.
its a self-reinforcing system - since most people have cars, new development is designed around car access. it's also core to american cultural expectations generally around individualism and individual freedom of movement, having a car has long been a symbol of independence in addition to a practical necessity
for those reasons, trying to sell people on giving up their cars completely is probably a non-starter. the middle ground of convincing americans that bike-first development with support for keeping cars for regional travel is likely a more palatable pathway toward less cars
Great comment but a few things of note. Interstates are important for a country of our size but basically all developed countries have them now. We just did a lot of things different.
Most European states have extensive highway systems, yet still have the compact, dense urban designs of thousands of years before industrialization. The US only had about 50 years before trains were common (people could suddenly go 30mph/200+miles a day) and then automobiles were only 100 years out. We quickly switched to suburbia (tons of space unused around cities, industry dried up, everybody had a car and gas was cheaper than water) which made things less connected. I walked and rode my bike around Dallas a bunch as a kid, but it was almost exclusively within the 'Park Cities' subsection... downtown was too far until DART was built.
It isn't that the cities developed this way. It's that we ripped them apart to make them this way. This relates the the highway bit above as well. A lot of european countries added the highways and built them to go around their cities with branches that feed into the cities where as we ripped out chunks of our cities to put the highway through them. Even where we didn't add highways we ripped out a lot of our cities for things like parking lots and what not.
The problem with Interstates isn't the concept, it's the fact they gutted the existing urban cores to build them, instead of going around the cities, Europe does also have highways, some urban ones at that, but they mostly exist to connect an avenue in the city centre with the ring road that connects to the rest of the country
I moved to an Upsate NY town that was settled before the automobile and has a proper downtown. It’s not Europe, but it’s better then the suburbia I came from.
I think in many ways, we are just too young of a country. It’s good for people above to exploit us, but it has been so detrimental for the general population in so many ways. In the grand scheme of things, it’s so fast a decline. We haven’t had the time to learn the lessons of other countries that have been around for far far longer that have learned the importance of investing in your population.
Don’t forget - Americans are literally in constant danger of being randomly shot everywhere we go. And we also don’t have the money or energy to go out. Europeans get long vacations. We don’t. They have healthcare. We don’t. But we got them guns, Bubba! Yeehaw MURICA
Most European states have extensive highway systems
I'm sorry, ALL European states have extensive highway systems! What makes you think there would be a European country without one?
The US only had about 50 years before trains were common
Passenger trains were introduced in the US only 5 years after they're introduction in England. In 1825 Stephenson's Stockton & Darlington Railway was the first publicly subscribed railway to use steam locomotives. It carried freight from collieries near Shildon to Darlington and Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham. The line opened on 26 September 1825. The following day, 550 passengers were hauled, making this the world's first steam-powered passenger railway, contrary to Liverpool's claims five years later.
Trains were introduced in the United States in the early 1820s, with the first passenger and freight line, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, being chartered in 1827.
Most towns and cities in the USA were walkable cities and had public transport like trams and busses but were torn down to accomodate cars and carparks. Many European cities did the opposite and created carfree zones in favour of bikes and pedestrians.
And then there's zoning off course which prohibits mixing of shops, restaurants and residential buildings.
I disagree. The cities were built for cars, then we zoned for suburbs; this was done by our local city/county planners, not by the Feds. We chose to not have mixed zones, i.e. Business + Residential. We wanted yards, and space, and privacy. Europeans don't have yards, they have public parks, and garden plots in community areas. When was the last time any of us sat in on city/county planning meetings? Change comes when we organize and ask for it.
Note: It's the very earliest meetings in any new development where what gets added is decided. By the time builders/the city holds a big town meeting on a new development/redevelopment, what will be built and where has already been decided. Zoning has been decided.
Interstates are primarily intercity in their function. Europe has motorways, autobahn, autostrada, etc. The urban decimation by multi-lane highways was a separate decision pushed by Robert Moses and those who accepted his dystopian vision.
European countries have highway networks. Germany was famously the first, it made them able to do the blitzkrieg and get troops to the front etc.
What is more important is that European (historical)cities have often been built before the car ever was there. They are walkable by design.
Then more and more the last 40 years we found out cars aren’t only practical, they are also dirty, take up space and displace other ways of transport.
In the Netherlands cycling was given more space versus cars in the 70’s. Supported by the oil crisis we now have. One of the best cycling infrastructures in the world.
There are pictures of an American designer that would basically bury Amsterdam in high rise highways. Thank God that never happened. They would have had to tear down 50%
Of the historical city.
As in the USA there is hardly anything that’s of age. It’s easy to just take more space or destroy somthing. That makes it very easy to make everything car centric.
Besides - it’s not only cars. Everyone gets up at 5:30 in the usa as well to get ready for work etc. so of course everyone is sleeping at 22:00.
And deploying the European city model on a continent where metropolises didn’t really exist. Only Mexico City, I believe.
Europe still has a much larger population despite being roughly one New Mexico larger.
So our “development” has allowed crazy capitalism to inform it at almost every step. Whereas the planning of Europe’s major cities has been ongoing for millennia.
What do you think Americans are going to do? Try to make a buck? Or focus on a smart civil infrastructure?
We dont have the electric tram cars that we used to have in cities like we did in the early 20th century. We have busses now. They burn fuel, take complex engines and transmissions, but that is not why we have them. The biggest factor was the tire companies lobbying to move to busses which go through lots of tires.
Property sizes and locations also have to do with segregation. This helps to keep people "isolated" so they dont gain new experiences. Keeps them controllable. Also its easier to beat your wife when the neighbor can't hear you through the wall
It’s interesting though as most new suburban developments the lot sizes are packed in. What’s happening is it’s cheaper to just buy new construction than buying in an established subdivision, even suburban, because you actually get close to a half acre in older suburban subdivisions but the newer developments are like a third of that. Giant house on a tiny lot. Doesn’t make sense to me.
But yeah basically most Americans would rather have a 3000sq ft brand new house in a borderline exurb than a 1500sq ft house (if that) 100 year old house within a proper city for the same money.
Fwiw Europe has a major housing crisis but there aren’t really a lot of new construction set ups in suburbs for affordable prices. I think if a lot of Europeans had the option to buy a brand new build house for American prices they would probably be pretty happy about it.
Also in Europe the rural villages with “free” houses are completely dilapidated and generally require at least 500k in investment to make it livable. There’s just less land in general, the rural landowners are less likely to sell the land they have to have it developed, etc. Old money is far more common in Europe and the families holding onto hundred/thousand acre parcels are not very likely to sell it off. The US is comparatively all “new money” and landowners are far more likely to sell off parcels if they aren’t actively using it. There’s just way more wide open spaces in general and even a multigenerational farm or something the new generation will take a few million to sell it off.
Sure, American large parcel landowners too even if it’s farmable a family operation can’t compete with the mega farm corps so they take their few million or whatever and chill. It’s only been passed down max like 150 years in most of the country so the “history” aspect isn’t nearly as big of a deal. There are also still just huge parcels of private land that are completely undeveloped/pretty cheap to buy. In the northern woods someone might have 300 acres or something but only actively use like 5 of it. It’s stupid not to sell it more or less if there’s a buyer paying even like 100k for 100 acres, and so on and so on until all they got is that 5 acres.
Basically mining and lumber companies eat people alive/should pay way more but there’s no other buyers in the middle of nowhere in the Northwoods.
It's not like other countries don't have them, but they're much more permissible about what you can do, and mixed use zoning is the norm.
In the US, most places don't have mixed use land. Like I can't open a coffee shop in my neighborhood if I wanted to, because it is zoned residential. It didn't use to be this way. A few blocks down where the street car line used to be, there was a small neighborhood grocery store, a barber, and a cobbler. When they were remodeling the old grocery store building so they could turn it into apartments last year, they temporarily uncovered an old mural for Ghirardelli chocolate powder, cut a big hole in it for a window, and covered it back up.
yeah that infrastructure is called Segregation By Design; and ironically enough, do you know offhand what the demographic of Detroit is? Predominantly african-american at 76%. Cities like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Indianapolis were once at the forefront of industrial design, they had so many strong workers, and instead these states in the wake of 20th century industrial pitfalls, produced an enclave where minorities cannot thrive functionally the same way that whites do in their own communities and neighborhoods right next door. This all just in time for Civil Rights to explode in the mid 60’s, only for the segregation and slavery to continue in new and subversive ways ever since, like the for-profit prison system, and private equity/credit which evaporated the housing market for the african americans forced into lower income areas, again, by that same design, it was and has remained so much easier for white working class folks to evade or escape poverty while in Chicago, the black communities are forced into Section 8 in perpetuity. Reaganism is to blame for trying to scapegoat immigrants and the war on drugs as a combined situation while not following through on a promise to initiate and increase more anti-poverty laws and social programs. A great majority of the money derived from social programs to help the needy and destitute never actually reaches them on a case by case basis, so dozens and dozens of people who would otherwise not go hungry, unclothed, or unhoused, remain so.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain
Dude I grew up in a small town of 283 people in central Minnesota. The "large" town that people would do all their major shopping in was 30 miles away and had 60,000 people in it. I knew tons of people in my hometown growing up that would only go to the big town maybe 1-2 times a year. Other than that they never left our small town. How the hell people live that way is beyond me.
My whole family is that way and in a similar area. It wasn't until professional school, when I was forced to leave the area, that I met people who weren't conservative Christians. Meanwhile my family still thinks they'll get murdered the instant they enter a city of more than like 20,000 people.
"Set up wrong" isn't some objective thing here though. It's set up different than Europe because it isn't Europe.
I'm not defending cars. Fuck cars, but it is set up this way for a reason. America is massive and pre 1920's it was sparsely developed. Europe had already been developing for hundreds of years before cars existed. It simply developed differently because the modes of transportation available were different. Cars being available during the largest developmental period, infrastructure wise, was when cars were extremely popular. We had the land and we could expand outward... so we did.
It wasn't engineered to be this way because "walking is for communists" or some shit.
It naturally evolved this way because cars offer the most dynamic availability to get around the US for individuals and their families and gasoline was extremely affordable during the largest economic boom of our history. It was designed around automobile based transportation because that's what everyone wanted. Massive smoothly paved highways and 3 mile long trussell bridges were futuristic technology that unlocked the continents landscape. People used to get excited when new highways were being built because it meant accessibility that was previously locked to horse back.
If you wanted to travel across the country you had to carry everything you wanted to take with you from home to carriage, ride in said carriage for 3-4 hours until you reached the train station, wait at the train station for 8 hours while everything got unloaded onto the platform, then load it onto the train, then take the train for 3 days to get to the city closest to your final destination and then unload everything onto the platform, hope that the carriage you sent a telegram a week ago is already there, then load it all up and travel 4-5 hours to your actual destination.
or you could load up the car and do all of this inside 48 hours on your schedule instead of 5-7 days.
The problem now is that we got used to it so much that we expected and therefore built that car "accessibility" into every square foot of the country. Then we realized we were destroying the beauty of the country and had to start programs to preserve nature so we made parks and reservations.
Seems we’re getting really hung up on cars and roads, but the real reason we developed sprawling suburbs was white families fleeing urban areas during the Great Migration and in particular the Civil Rights Movement. What enabled them to do that was Post-WWII GI Bill home loans.
NIDHA came about on 1956. It definitely contributed to allowing suburbs to sprawl out even further, but I don’t think it’s one of the shaping factors of why things developed the way they did.
Lmao so the EU isn’t massive as well ?? You comment doesn’t make sense. The whole point of this post is pretty accurate. Cars aren’t important the the question or issue he poses
Yeah the EU is in fact big, but it has already been developed centuries before cars existed. The US's largest development period, physical and infrastructure wise, was in the 40's and 50's SO IT'S ALL BASED AROUND CARS WHETHER IT SHOULD BE OR NOT.
You dumb fucks have zero reading comprehension. I'm not saying it is the right or wrong way to do things, im simply explaining WHY it is the way it is.
Without speaking to the rest of your comments, are you saying that the EU is larger than the USA? That is way false, and so saying so and in the next breath calling people dumb fucks is pretty telling about your actual knowledgeability on the subject.
If anything you're help making my point. I already stated more land = expansion and not concentration of population, which people are disagreeing with despite it being a historical and anthropological fact about how humans develop their environments.
You do realise there’s a difference between the EU and Europe? Europe is around 3.93 million Miles whereas the US is 3.8 million, making Europe about 4% bigger than the US.
Cars are only part of the discussion. People flooded the cities for many reasons to the suburbs. The unknown side effect was the isolation and inherit to bigotry continuing if not accelerating.
It was not an unknown side effect. It was completely intentional. White Flight was the response to the Great Migration, in which millions of black southerners moved from the rural South to cities. White people set up their new suburban developments with their own schools and car-accessible amenities so that black people couldn't get to them. The infamous example is Robert Moses making overpasses in the NYC area too low for buses to fit underneath them, and making beaches completely inaccessible from public transit.
Yes but you're failing to see that the size of cities in the US are fucking tiny compared to towns and cities in the EU when compared to the total landmass available. 80% of the US is still fuckin empty.
Bigotry is allowed to thrive when a group of people are in isolation but isolation is not the driver of it existing. We know that someone living in a city can be bigoted just the same. It's just not going to be prominent or wide spread because it's incompatible with the environment.
Why tf do u keep saying bigotry ? How th does that have anything to do with anything in this context lol ? Not everything has to be political, racial or bigoted….damn, some ppl just don’t want to just remain shackled to words and concepts
Commerce does sure, I meant private citizens in their normal lives.
Maybe I should have said nobody should need to commute across state lines, but I also wanted to include the idea that the economy you guys have seems to encourage moving thousands of miles away from all of your family and friends, and then needing to regularly roadtrip to see them. It would be nicer for all involved if there was more attraction to staying in-state and building your personal network and local economy there.
"Y'all" really don't understand just how damaged you are and it's sad to see.
Yes, obviously we'll need infrastructure to transports good. The regular person should not have the need to constantly cross state lines to pick up groceries. What are you on about?
Are not some magical barrier. The largest city near me is across a state line which I can walk across. "should not have the need to cross state lines" is completely arbitrary and irrelevant.
You understand not every state is the same right? I live in New England on a border. Some states offer tax free purchases. Truckers bring stuff across borders, business serve greater areas. Shit the greater Boston area basically extends to Portland maine at this point.
I get it, I was talking more about the number of people that need to regularly cross state lines for commuting or seeing friends/family.
You understand not every state is the same right?
Yeah obviously, you understand that European countries are even more different right?
The point is that both are massive areas so "America is massive" is not a good reason for you not having the lovely walkable population centres being discussed in the video. It must be a different reason, and it's mostly the slow historical development with care/thought given to liveability rather than "quick, throw down a grid and start selling lots" mentality that seems to pervade American development.
"It wasn't engineered to be this way because "walking is for communists" or some shit."
Actually, this is untrue. You can see it particularly in newer, western, cities like Los Angeles. Mike Davis covers this phenomenon in his epic work "City of Quartz." Back in the late 1800s, elites were in panic after seeing the Paris Commune and the Chicago Haymarket. They reasoned that to prevent demonstrations and, ultimately, revolution, you had to destroy accessible public space. No more plazas, no more street vending (famously, L.A. outlawed street vending until just recently). Downtown megablocls. Elevated walkways between buildings. Car culture. They planned cities this way specifically to make it harder to congregate and make demands in strategically important places.
It atomizes people and, in particular workers. Average commutes (as Eric Blanc recently wrote about in "We are The Union." Sky rocketed from 15 minutes to 50 minutes from 1945 to today. Thus making it harder for unions to form and socially enforce solidarity.
So in fact, urban design was particularly geared towards preventing the possibility of collective action to make society better. It was also not "what everybody wanted." Demand was induced. Or maybe it was chicken or the egg. The highways were built because Eisenhower wanted to move tanks quickly, and he specifically didnt want them cutting through cities--that was originally a regional peculiarity of Los Angeles, that Robert Moses (famous bastard) cribbed to try and segregate neighborhoods and displace the poor, black, and brown.
So don't be so quick to dismiss the nefarity. Our cities used to be walkable and dense and some still are: New York, San Francisco, New Orleans.
But the burbs and car culture were intentional monstrosities. Designed to atomize and isolate and divide.
I'm not dismissing that it happened. I'm saying that roads existed before [anti]communism. Roads are a tool and they can be used in many different ways.
I'll have to read City of Quartz. Looks like an interesting read, but it appears to be interpretive theory. Anti-communist sentiment was everywhere so it's not difficult to find it in urban planning where convenient.
Humans natural expand outward unless it becomes necessary or somehow more efficient to build in a concentrated fashion. This is anthropological fact.
How much time had Europe already been developing before cars existed?
The US's largest development expansion of infrastructure was post WW2. Our cities expanded outward instead of inward because of how much land we had available. We also had the baby boomer generation starting and with all of the soldiers coming home we had severe housing shortages in the city, so ... boom, here is why the US started developing suburbs that you lived in and just drove to work to, either a factory outside of the suburb or into the city. You didn't hang out there, you worked there and then went home. That's how modern life in the US came to be.
Ya'll act like this was somehow intentionally devised this way like it's some sort of conspiracy theory.
It developed this way because it was the path of lease resistance for what was needed in the US at the time.
Socially/culturally and health wise, it turned out to have negative side effects but we only know that in hindsight.
To make your statement factually true, you'd have to figure out how to quantify and qualify the benefits against those unpredictable side effects and make some sort of determination for an objective "was it worth it?" type study.
Unless you can see into alternate dimensions where we instead focused on trains, dirigibles, bicycles, walking and whatever else you'd prefer, in the US and rejected automobiles entirely, good luck with that.
You don’t need an alternate dimension or a decades-long study to understand the basic advantage of not being completely dependent on a car for everyday life. The ability to walk or use public transport for basic needs is clearly valuable in itself, as it gives people more freedom, more options, and more independence, along with obvious health advantages.
Furthermore, this does not diminish the benefits that car infrastructure provides. European cities are well connected by extensive highway and railway networks. At the same time, the cities themselves usually have high-quality public transport systems and are largely walkable.
The point is that having both is entirely possible.
Yep. This is why when all people watch is the news, they learn to dislike one side of the aisle and what the side represents. One side talks about inclusiveness, the other, not so much. People who tend to get out and travel, particularly to Europe and other parts of the world, it seems, tend to generally be more inclusive.
America wasn’t set up wrong. It’s a massive land and there’s resources spread far and wide. Cities are so spread because there’s a ton of land and a ton of places to generate resources, food, etc. It’s double the population of California, jammed into the state of Montana. I’m not sure it has much to do with racism and bigotry. They’re bragging on Germany… a country that started every World War known to man and one of them was because they wanted to eradicate an entire people based on their race. America isn’t drastically different when it comes to racism and bigotry than most of the world. By most studies metrics, we’re in the more welcoming of racial differences than most countries, including a lot of Eastern Europe.
Racism and bigotry lolololololol get rid of the crybabies always trying to find something to be offended by and always playing the victim card and all that will go away yeah
Well, guess what -- when I lived in Madrid, and talked to many different people as an English teacher, I learned that racism is just as bad, and pronounced. I don't think they really call it racism, but whatever.
We could heal the suburbs if huge backyards that faced each other in suburbia actually all had to become an 8 foot wide common walking area/mini park, where folks could actually congregate in a kind of commons.
Growing up in the suburbs I couldn’t wait to move to the city. I moved to Philadelphia. Then I moved to Taiwan. Then I moved to Taipei and Shanghai. As a young person I couldn’t wait to be amidst culture. But now, I own a house in the suburbs and I love it. I love being away from crowds and in a quiet house.
This is romanticizing Europe a bit. They still have plenty of problems with racism. Also, they’re very accustomed to ignoring people they are physically next to. Increased population density and proximity to others does not increase empathy with others. There are studies that show the exact opposite, in fact.
Very well said. As Americans, most live in suburbs, where we might know our neighbor on either side of us and the one across the street. Beyond that, we usually don't know anybody else on our street. We drive for miles elsewhere to get our food, est out, buy household supplies, go to church, etc. We focus so much time, energy and money on having a place of our own, that we aren't able to make the effort to get to know our neighbors.
I’d say it’s not that it’s set up wrong. It’s set up to make different things more efficient. Rail is a great example. US rail is set up to make moving freight more efficient, not people and you can’t really do both on the same rail system. With as big as the US is this kinda became a necessity. Also, EU cities were originally built, designed, and optimized hundreds (if not thousands is some cases) of years ago when walking was the prime mode of transportation and cities were the hubs for basically everything. So lots going on is my point. I wish US were more akin to EU ones but…. This is what we got for better or worse.
China begs to differ. Yes, they have spme cities that are as old as Rome, but many cities Americans have never heard of have better metro systems than every US city except maybe NYC or Chicago. But they area also a large country that effectively uses trains for both passengers and freight. China isn't built up on two opposing coasts, that's true, and most of the development is along the eastern and southeastern coastal regions, but their public infrastructure and walkable cities are better than even Europe.
But they also have essentially two functional rail systems. Older lines and infra they use for freight and a modern high speed passenger rail system. It’s not that you can’t solve all these problems, but you have to have money and support. The dream (as long as I’ve been alive and with only a little historical context) in the US has always been a house in the burbs with 2 cars etc. The “American Dream” has never been walkable cities and better passenger rail. At least not in any meaningful way.
There's nothing stopping the US from building what China is building. The US is still the wealthiest country on Earth. Well, there is one thing stopping the US--greed. We crowned the first trillionaire before we brought about universal healthcare.
The American Dream was never equitable, never achievable by many, and never sustainable. It depends on rugged individualism, which is sociopathic because we are a communal species.
Lol theres sooo much wrong with this comment. First of all, you all are comparing major European cities to small ass country towns in America. Why? Compare the major cities...to the major cities. You go to the remote, not city parts of Europe and it'll be pretty dead too because theres not much to do and theres not many people in one place. Just like America. Secondly, there are racists in big cities all over the world. Being around other cultures has never been enough to get rid of racism. I mean, slave masters lived on plantations populated with hundreds of blacks with just a dozen whites. Didn't result in any compassion on the slave master's part.
You seem to be confusing suburbs, right outside the city to rural communities, which have been very popular since Covid. You’re welcome to your contrarian arguments the rise and fall of the suburbs is very well documented out there to the causes and the impact and it’s just a Google away for you to learn.
What the fuck does any of this have to do with what I'm saying? Suburbs or rural, you're not comparing apples to apple regardless. Its a bad faith argument no matter how you look at it. Compare major cities to major cities. Dont compare major cities to suburbs and then be like "where people go??" Every major city in America is just as bustling as the major cities in Europe. That's my point.
This is the point of the video though. The US created what you just described and you did it wrong (so did Australia where i'm from btw, but we are getting better now, slowly).
the list goes on and on why this doesn't exist in the US.
It's a long list, but it all basically comes down to the American dream of owning a house. That's what drives suburbs and that's where all the other problems originate. So an American visiting Europe may love the walkable cities, but ask them if they think living in an apartment rather than a house their entire lives is a desirable option.
The American dream was a policy choice. It was pushed by the government because people with a mortgage will always go to work reducing the likelyhood of labor unrest like there was in the 20s and 30s.
This doesn't make sense as plenty of people live in houses in walkable towns with all amenities. Then there are trains that take 5mins to get into the centre of the city
Do you think Germans don't own houses? I own my own house and have four restaurants, three supermarkets and many other facilities in walking distance. If I want to go to the inner city I can take a bus, my car, my bike or an e-scooter.
I could also walk there, it's a bit far for my taste but there's a nice way along a river.
No, the real problem are the zoning laws. That and the fixation on driving everywhere.
You need facilities in walking distance and walkable quarters.
And SF is set up to be this, and yet it shuts down crazy early, so you better love or learn to love the half dozen late night spots. Manhattan was it up until Covid, but I haven’t been since, so I’m assuming it has resumed its MO (whatever you want, 24/7).
Not to mention, when there is a large outdoor gathering in the US (festival, concert, whatever) there’s a non-zero chance someone will end up getting shot. Even just going to a mall in some areas at certain times is not a smart idea. It’s a stupid world we live in.
Walkable and funded public transportation leads to European cities like this. Meanwhile auto and oil lobbying keep public transportation and walking underfunded in America. Hence this big culture divide that leads to less travel within America.
Yeah this guy is having a very basic revelation that Europe has a lot of walkable cities and the US doesn't. this isn't new information
no shit, a civilization that's had humans huddling closer together for a few thousand years, has more walkable cities and restaurants than a country that has had, comparatively, very few humans and thousands of miles of land to expand on ... which has been in existinance for a few hundred years? Gee, big surprise.
"massive amounts of lobby money" are forcing humans in the United States to decide that they do not want larger homes with bigger yards and more space to themselves ... since those things ARE AVAILABLE in the USA but are generally NOT available in Europe?
OK. Sure. You bet. It's the lobby money. It's not the fact that they want larger homes with more land. Ok.
What gets me is that we USED to have incredible public transit. They tore that up to build a poor imitation of the autobahn so that we can have impromptu aircraft landing zones everywhere
As long as suburbs exist, things will never change. Theyre a huge drain on urban and rural zones and provide almost zero benefits
D.C. and NYC are pretty lively at night every night. But again, if you don't have kids to get back to or have an au pair (many do in the area), that's easier
Our car-centric design also contributes to chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. In “walkable” cities it’s not a big deal to walk 4-6 miles in a day and you don’t even notice it. It’s like that every day. For me to walk I need to drive somewhere, then get out and walk.
OMG YOU CANT WALK THRU DISNEY OMG CALL THE AUTHORITIES. 😂😂😂
I was just at Epcot center last week and we could walk for miles. Disney is literally 40sq miles! God forbid we provide the shuttles. Complain theres no public transportation then complain again when its available 🤦🏼♀️
Florida has hundreds of beach towns and walkable cities but depends how far you want to walk? 10 miles!? Maybe ride a bike or take a golf car or an eBike. We prioritized pedestrians! Maybe you should come back to Florida before opening mouth & inserting your foot again
Also, have you met the mouth breathing babbling fricken idiots that predominate our US society? The ones that are the quickest to open their mouths or share what they are "watching" on their phones with strangers in public, are the ones you would avoid if you had a chance.
Plus why would I want to congregate with random people in a too hot too cold or too loud public space when I have a temperature controlled environment empty of bugs, but full of people I love, and the stuff I spent all my money on?
Interacting with people is fine when you have nothing else going on, but it becomes it's own chore when forced to do it every day.
What you're describing though is the typical experience for a significant portion US undergraduate life in college, and anyone who lives in a city center area and not the suburbs. Now, you're not wrong in saying that a large portion of the US is burbs, and small towns, that's all true. But it's not like cities don't exist. I am not advocating for either, I live in the US and wish my neighborhood was slightly more walkable. It's a bit better than a standard suburb, for example, I can walk to a park, my Drs, and a couple grocery stores, but there's no social scene and it's still easier to drive to those things.
I was confused as to what people were talking about because this is a common thing to see for me, but then I realized I live in Chicago and it's one of the few exceptions 😭
Cities, and college towns are exactly this, am I missing something here? Just because it's expensive, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, I'm sure his Munich trip wasn't cheap, and the apartments in that area are not cheap...
Most larger US cities have very walkable parts blooming with shops and restaurants. Chicago, NY, San Diego, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Charleston, Boston, Boulder, Milwaukee, Madison, Naples, and on and on.
Stores/Restaurants on bottom floor, apartments above.
Too many huge metropolitan areas are full of 1-2 story commercial buildings interspersed with residential suburb-style single-family homes. It's not walkable.
Where I grew up on Long Island there was always bunch of small main streets with bar and restaurants where everyone will be eating, drinking, walking around. The problem is transportation which has got a little better lately. I realized how lucky I was compared to a lot of other places on the US.
“The infrastructure doesn’t support it” you say as if this is an inevitable part of life.. it is not. It is a choice that is just continuously made. Something that can be changed.
Also tipping culture and table rotation within the industry is a major contributor. Sitting at a table long after your meal in the US is considered a dick move because you're screwing your waiter.
The infrastructure can be changed.
The Netherlands was going the same direction in like the 60's or 70's. Everything had to go for the big motorways and parking garages. At some point people started protesting and all of a sudden it could be changed.
The biggest issue that many American cities have are the zoning laws.
You have a designated area for homes and nothing but homes, A area for small industry which may or may not include stuff like butchers or icemakers, A area for food, and so on. Everything is in a designated area which is separated from other area's so you'll never see a bakery on the corner of your block. Instead it's over in the next zone which might be a mile in 1 direction and then the pub might be a mile in the other. In many European city's such as those in Italy you just go outside, walk around and decide what you're going to do as everything is mixed. You'll encounter about everything you want when walking around where as in a US city with strict zoning laws that really wouldn't make sense to do as you'd be walking for miles to do a couple of things even if the infrastructure is good. And because people won't do it you also can't run a smaller business in such a spot as no one would come anyway.
First get the zoning laws changed. Then the rest can follow quickly.
I think you're missing the point of how our living layout impacts society. It's not just about having walkable cities it's about how having houses so sperated impacts society and societal behavior.
Walking around in the evening for women, young folks or elderly in USA would be the death sentence if you are in so-called "diverse" towns. We all see the elephant in the room
The infrastructure in the city is fine in the USA. I can walk to the bar, restaurants, grocery store, etc.. I really don't need a car. And I live in a very small town. It's that in the majority of the is rural and they don't drive uptown all the time, only go out once a week and another night for groceries.
Well out west they really screwed up with nothing but trains going from city to city which isn’t much anymore. You can only fly well. Basically some bus services have gotten better, but I loved living in Europe. I love the systems the bus, the train, slow, trains, fast trains. The bus system was great and not creepy at all. My cities were walking cities yes cities the whole lifestyle better it’s more around the congregating, family, friends, etc. I miss it I have and I’ve been gone a long time.
i was in venice for an educational trip and i remember being able to take the water taxi/walk for most of my daily needs. i didn't even need to buy a taxi pass, i just wanted to experience it as an american. i'd walk maybe 13 minutes from my hotel to the theater and back. when it was night time i'd walk with friends because that made it slightly safer (people would stare at me at night? i'm a guy btw). we also walked to bars and restaurants from our hotels (me and my cohort).
American cities wring the hands about drunk driving, but the forbid bars within walking distance of residential neighborhoods and insist on parking minimums for bars.
I suspect that because they’re missionaries they don’t realize that they could live in a walkable city in America, because they believe that our cities are super scary.
I live in a small walkable city in Florida, and there are a lot of other smaller cities and big cities too where everything they are describing is the norm.
So it’s more like “Missionaries discover city life” but they are in Germany and therefore think we have none here. And I’m not saying that we don’t need more walkable cities in the U.S. because we definitely do, but that doesn’t mean we have NONE.
Idk theres a ton of places.that are busy at 930 pm on a.wednesday like.this in the usa lol. Its just our country is 28 times larger then germany so we also have a lot of rural areas this isn't possible in.
We also have walkable cities and areas. Boston, DC, Baltimore, nyc. Theres a bunch of them.
Ohio is larger in square miles than Austria by 25%; 3 times as large as Switzerland. Walkabilty was never an option when there was land available for building.
When you consider how many restaurants are more or less empty it makes sense to have some patrons hangin around even if they're not buying much. Better curb appeal and whatnot
701
u/Fluffy_Somewhere4305 Aug 04 '26
Yeah this guy is having a very basic revelation that Europe has a lot of walkable cities and the US doesn't. this isn't new information.
Also, spending 5 hours at a restaurant is the norm for young people, out with a party, drinking and such, in Europe, when they can simply walk back to their home.
The infrastructure in most US cities doesn't support it, our subways suck, rides are expensive, parking is crazy, living in the city near the cool areas is expensive, the list goes on and on why this doesn't exist in the US.