It's not that Europe is an urbanist utopia; it isn't. It's that North America and Australia are urbanist dystopias.
Edit: also, maybe this is a good time to point out that 'utopia' literally means 'not a place'. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/utopia
always slash two or three tires. more than one, so they cannot just substitute it with the spare, and less than all four, because of stupid insurance policy loopholes.
As a resident of France, I concur, most anything here is a parking lot. Bike lanes, sidewalks, common areas under Halles, the front of most homes, middle of the street, and basically anywhere else a car can fit. What’s the point of having a safe walkway if people walking have to enter the street to go around cars parked on the sidewalk?
In America, many suburbs don't have sidewalks. [https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1421034,-76.2069712,3a,75y,160.34h,86.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sDjp6toBFTlvG77IOss8u9w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1421034,-76.2069712,3a,75y,160.34h,86.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sDjp6toBFTlvG77IOss8u9w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
And the speed limits tend to be around 70km/h, but people often drive 90km/h. Imagine walking next to that.
yeah, no side walk but hey look theres a crosswalk just up ahead https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1413819,-76.2066986,3a,75y,18.22h,84.53t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sYm7-_cox1f7aflVpZGM2oQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
what a joke
Yup.[ And then there's this.](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1741915,-76.226208,3a,75y,20.42h,71.15t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sPvN9bPxMknIJynC8eX4w6A!2e0!5s20210801T000000!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) A school zone with reduced speed limit, no side walks or cross walks and signs blocking the shoulder. What's the point of a school zone if no one can walk there?
EDIT: There is a crosswalk on the other side of the school. It may be the [most useless crosswalk ever made. ](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1744564,-76.2218304,3a,60y,292.69h,83.92t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s7-8-DOWHMAPGy-ZA7ZMt9A!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
We have some roads like that in Metro Vancouver too. [Like this one for example.](https://www.google.com/maps/@49.2053981,-123.0204586,3a,75y,97.64h,95.23t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sLXkSFgXpueqBecyLEjrzJg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DLXkSFgXpueqBecyLEjrzJg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D97.6351008480409%26pitch%3D-5.22505348739648%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu) There is a painted bike line though.
The city of Vancouver [has a side walk but still wide and cars drive fast.](https://www.google.com/maps/@49.20551,-123.0236674,3a,75y,297.3h,86.45t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1snh-Ci1ntpxFSXrRXK6Gm6Q!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3Dnh-Ci1ntpxFSXrRXK6Gm6Q%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D297.2986955150941%26pitch%3D3.5546733603187874%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu)
In France, a town is not a proper town if the provincial road (N...) doesnt have a main intersection at the town square, which is actually square, leading to all sorts of unclear directions and a lot of dangerous situations.
Also, the French love to sit at very small terraces on the edges of the town square and stare at all the cars parked on the monument and in between the beautiful platanes.
And only parts of Europe are great - London has a legendary public transport system, but venture beyond the M25 and suddenly it's a world of traffic jams and suburban living.
London has a public transport system. It's still not very good. Relative to places with even worse systems, it's good, but it would need to be orders of magnitude better to actually replace most (reasonable) car use.
Which is why I keep pointing out that public transport is only a part of the solution here. Unless you absolutely saturate cities with buses instead of saturating them with cars - and that's not really any better - then you need complementary systems.
The issue I think is London excels at getting people in and out of the centre - but unless you want to go into Zones 1 or 2, it does start to struggle. Getting between outer boroughs is quite tricky without a car.
Bear in mind the Tube is using infrastructure well over 150 years old, and is still functioning and getting people in and out of the city, id argue that's pretty solid performance.
Although this is undoubtedly true, it is also true of most other cities I've lived in. You need to go into the centre first to move between surburban areas.
Yeah the tube is great but it's also the most crammed I've ever been on public transit before. Worse than NYC in my experience. I've been on lots of crowded trains and busses but it was the first time it made me feel panicked. Walkability in London is off the charts though.
Personally I hate the tube. If you have an idea of the above-ground geography you realise how achingly slow it is. Also very dirty.
I live pretty near a station at the end of the Northern line, and also near a station on a commuter-rail line also running north-south. Both go to Moorgate. The tube takes about twice as long for basically the same route, at rush hour.
London's tube system is pretty shit compared to most other major urban areas. It's like when someone says NYC's subway is "incredible". Honestly it's pretty shit compared to anywhere else in the world.
Correct! According to Wikipedia, etymology is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes.
True, but it does indicate on origin and I think it's relevant in this case that that origin directly refers to utopias, at least in its original meaning, not being real places.
Yeah, I've been trying to get away from the "urbanism solves all problems" narrative, and more into the "car centric sprawl sucks, but has to be replace with something "
The US just got shafted so hard by white flight and reconstruction that our cities came out gutted and dissected, while we dumped endless resources to roads.
Eh, I have seen quite a bit of change in cities Ihave lived in with walkible areas because it attracts people who spend more money.
I mean, my town in Alabama is building a $65 mil ped skybridge because it connects the arts district to downtown, so people will spend more money in both.
This is the issue with arguing absolutes. All it takes is one counter example to kill your whole argument.
To most North Americans, anywhere that’s not openly hostile/dangerous to pedestrians is an urbanist utopia (or a communist hellhole depending on what flavor of garbage media they consume)
That's very true in a lot of places. I've recently seen a sort of retro documentary about commuting in Germany from the 80s and in there the benefits of bike commuting was already broadly explained.
Also the Oil crisis in the 70s played a role, where politicians might have realized that going all in on one transportation form which we can't sustain by ourselves (as Europeans) is a bad idea. North America never was as dependent on arab oil as Europe was/is.
The USA is literally the country that produces the most oil in the world. You are not dependent.
In 2022 17,2% of all produced oil was made by USA. That's more than Saudi Arabia at 13%.
They literally waged war in Middle East because of oil, there was a point in time where USA didn't know how much oil it had. The present doesn't explain the past
He/She said "We're dependent". And that's not true.
Also the USA knew about a lot of it's huge offshore oil deposits since the 40s. They didn't extract it on a grand scale because it wasn't profitable enough back then. The Oil in the middle east is cheaper because it's a lot easier to extract.
Compared to Europe which was the topic of the original post North America is Oil paradise and has been for a very long time.
Some of this disagreement is defiently semantics. I'd argue if your government feels so threatened by things across the world it needs to fire up the military to intervene despite being in first place... you are somehow managing to be dependant on others actions while having all the resources you should need. The joys of global economy where value is divorced from material things
Id say interesting subject is Eastern Europe: Funding for bike lanes and quality public tranport is very patcy.
Car is a wealth and status symbol. (Especially old used and imported german cars)
“One more lane” is still seen as cure.
A lane replaced with bike/ public transport lane brings big complaints and is seen as a waste of resources.
In suburbs literally USA is being built, single family house neighbourhood (very car dependent and pedestrian unfriendly) projects are being built left n right - people dream about them after soviet commie blocks
Pickups are a quickly growing trend can confirm.
“Old german cars” well the topic should be worded a bit differently - used western Europe car imports are definitely a big business.
Bro a pickup truck as huge as those are doesn't even fit on our narrow Dutch car lanes.
That's by design btw, drivers drive more slowly and carefully if they are forced to. It leads to far fewer accidents :)
Yes people were denied luxuries so long plus we do did not have freedom.of travelling going vacation so taking this magical devoce that in theory can take you everywhere is nightmare to those people.
>we do did not have freedom.of travelling going vacation
What the fuck are you talking about, like half of EE regularly went on summer vacation on Yugoslav coast. (Like they still do to this day.) And a lot of them came by their own cars!
I can't speak for Europe but speaking for south of the US countries the main constraint is money. A lot of the well-to-do neighborhoods with more investment are noticeably more car-first. Its disappointing but people really believe when they have the 4 lanes afar and white picket fences at home they'll be happy.
But expensive McMansions don't bring in nearly enough taxes to finance all that car infrastructure! Not to mention the utilities like water, sewer, electric, and gas.
Not Just Bikes did a series with Strong Towns on this topic. Ironically the "poor" inner city actually subsidizes the ["rich" suburbs.](https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=kTI9XmKpuzBxdQ2U). Dense city centers are financially a plus, but sprawl is an expensive money pit. Car infrastructure in particular is economically unsustainable and requires [constant growth](https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0?si=thUI_vWA9fnlI3bq) to fund itself.
I would say you are wrong. After the war everyone was car centric, first who woke up from that nightmare did that in the 70ties. 25 years after the war when things where already built and needed to be re- planned and rebuilt.
It was mostly also due to first economic crisis after ww2. People found out its expensive to drive 10 km to shop and work. Plus they saw how dependent are their children on them and finally people looked a little more on a scenrio outside their houses and gardens and started thinking how ugly highways and brutalist architecture is.
"Europe has (sadly) gone the way of car dependant devolution in 1960s like USA. The few remaining buildings survived the WW2 got destroyed in favour of parking and highways."
i didn't portray my continent as an urbanist utopia, have you misread that or?
You can't really speak for the whole of Europe in one go. I lived in Copenhagen for a couple of years and it was heaven for cycling and walking. Budapest was great for transit and walking all around. Bucharest is probably as car centric as the cities in Bulgaria but still good for walking and public transit. The US only has a few cities that have decent enough public transit that you can exist without a car including but not exclusively NYC, Chicago, Seattle, SF, and maybe parts of Oakland. Some urban Eastern Europeans look at owning a private vehicle as proof that you have "made it" or are "successful" and seem to be resigned to sitting in abysmal traffic all day. However, none of them can even compare to what most Americans and Canadians have to deal with regarding not being able to function without driving :/
Ofc I don't speak for the entire continent, especially when different countries do things differently.
That said, what I wrote in the post was how Europe is doing in general, not just one-two countries.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm not saying it IS perfect here (I mentioned "car dependency still persists", which you explained more broadly, as I even mentioned in the comments about the black imports of pickup trucks, which is terrible).
That said, there ARE acts that fight car dependency. Copenhagen and Oslo install new bike lanes, Paris bicycles for the first time beat the cars, Netherlands, Belguim, etc. enacting strict laws on pickup trucks/SUVs and a carbrained lady in Berlin legislation got kicked out (for plagiarism). Swiss trains just get better and better and here in Bulgaria, new metro line is built and new midrises are being built.
On the other hand, I'm sorry that idiots killed your country's HSR plan under construction (is this even legal????) and the laws enacting "R1 zoning style" similar to NA. looks like politicians didn't learn a lesson...
Another reason is that a lot of non-Europeans' impression of Europe comes from historic city center areas, usually the notably nice ones, that aren't representative of typical life.
People don't really visit [this part of Colmar](https://www.google.com/maps/@48.1062764,7.3633418,3a,75y,25.15h,87.58t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sixrOrEeuh4aN_uLdJQNCnw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DixrOrEeuh4aN_uLdJQNCnw%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D154.45473%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu). And for North Americans in particular, even that is better than their equivalent at home.
It was pretty eye-opening when my family and I went to Italy for vacation. Most people see the historic city centers (though even those are choked pretty badly by cars), but once you go a couple kilometers outside, you realize that most Italians live in those early to mid-20th century apartments and houses with car-centric commercial development. It's just less bad than the US due to the smaller parking lot sizes and relatively better public transit.
Even in Italy you see plenty of locals complain about removing parking spots and adding bike lanes, so car-brain is hardly restricted to North America.
Lots of car dependency in Ireland still (even Dublin) and I feel like we are fighting an uphill battle as Ireland seems to be becoming more Americanized (and as an American here I hate seeing it). I think cycling will win out, but there are some true car-brains emerging here.
I can say the same here in Sofia, Bulgaria.
New bus and tram lines are being built, new bus lane too, a new metro line as well. However, most streets are still stroad-like.
For me as a Swiss, it's all about cities being walkable, bikable and transit oriented. Even though the federal government is still building more highways and local governments are reluctant to put in some supplementary taxes for the parking of emotional support vehicles or any regulation regarding getting into the city with 2 tones of steel and plastic...
And in the countryside it's even worse: I don't have a sidewalk for most of the year because the mayor decided that sidewalks are there to dump the snow off the car pavement, thus forcing me to walk on the road as there's not 80cm-100cm of snow... Withiut forgetting that they dump the big snowfalls right onto a little square in my neighborhood, which with snowmelting and the downhill and re-freezing makes the floor extremely slippery.
I'm an American who moved to Bulgaria, and I definitely do see the issues you are talking about, but at least Sofia where I live is far far better than the vast majority of the US. The Sofia metro and bus networks are both great, and I am able to do everything I want or need to do without having a car easily. That is not a reality for most Americans.
While I totally admit that some other countries in Europe are much better (especially with trains and cycling infrastructure, both of which leave much to be desired here) and also other parts of Bulgaria are much more car-dependent than Sofia, moving here improved my life, and this city being less car dependent is a huge part of that. It's really a matter of perspective.
Здравейте! I'm glad you moved to Bulgaria and admire our transportation! Sofia does have really good bus, tram and metro systems (for Bulgarian standards), just not as car-free as Amsterdam. Though it IS getting better (new line is under construction right now, for example).
Sadly, what you said about other places IS true (Burgas has decent bus service, but nothing else), quite hard to get around without cars. There are plans to add suburban rail for Plovdiv, but it is taking forever because our politics is abysmal.
That said, I'm very glad you chose to move to our country! Приятен ден!
Eastern Europe has always been about 20 years behind western Europe. It's slowly catching up thanks to EU funding but the mentality of people there is still way in the past.
I remember hearing Belgium is kinda rough. Brussels metro is on the unreliable side (compared to neighboring countries) and that company cars are often given in place of raises due to taxes. I feel like that plays a role too.
Just walk through big American cities and big European cities. The difference in built environment is huge. Your cities aren’t all seemingly razed to the ground for parking spaces
The reason why is that American tourists only hang out in major cities, and even then, primarily the city centers. If those same tourists had to actually live in their favorite European city for a year, they'd probably end up in a nearby suburb and see how not walkable it really is.
Italian here. Half of our railway system (which is still very extensive) was completely dismantled due to car-brainery. Whenever you read about a Italian city on Wikipedia, even the smallest one in the middle of nowhere, the most irrelevant one you can think of, you’ll always find something along the lines of, “[city] used to have 370 tram lines and 45 train stations, but then it all went to shit in the 60s. Haha!”. I hate it.
I grew up all over the US, and have seen a fair bit of Europe. Compared to anywhere other than certain large American cities, Europe is an urbanist utopia. Remember that New York City is considered an extreme outlier here.
I think you’re totally misidentifying the causes of different urban structure.
It’s more the fact that North American infrastructure was comparatively built over night, with more dispersed population centers farther away from transit.
In the dawn of “Ford’s America” the car was a liberating force to people bound to being in low population density towns with little mobility. Cars became the primary mode of transportation because massive infrastructure wasn’t required to utilize them. Paradoxically, massive infrastructure was built to accommodate the already car dominated society with the highway system.
You simply don’t have to travel that far to get to a different place in Europe. With or without cars or trains. So cars didn’t have as explosive a growth in popularity, and other more economic modes of transportation (like rail) remained dominant.
Czechia is an example indeed, I live here and it feels so weird and hybrid. We have relatively good public transit systems all over the country, our railways are great etc., but the car culture is still huge and walkability is at some places not desirable. You can usually walk, but the conditions are sometimes questionable.
I agree with the other comments just stating America is a dystopia.
It's pretty simple really, Europe is built for humans, the US is not.
Europe didn't let companies influence city design. In the US oil and car companies lobbied to pave over the once great cities that even had street cars. It's as simple as that
The only reason Eastern Europe didn’t go the way of US/Canada and demolish its historical buildings in order to built roads and parking lots is because we were too poor to do that, lol, and now the urbanist direction given by the EU is pro-pedestrian and pro-cyclist so I guess we got lucky.
Becouse most social media are UScentric, and when you compare US to Europe, Europe looks like utopia. Not becouse Europe is so good, but becouse US is so bad.
Vienna has been ranked one of the if not the best city to live in with a dense web of 24/7 public transport, but you are still surrounded by car fumes and car noice literally anywhere even if you go to donauinsel, which is an big island in the river that flows through vienna that many major highway are crossing or drive alongside.
Conclussion: The world is an urban dystopia to various degrees of awful, there are no urban utopias.
The only reason Europa hasn't gone full on american car dependency isn't because we're smarter or better - it's because we're poorer. We want the dystopia, we just don't have the money to demolish everything. Places in Europa that have money, it's all F150s and asphalt. Terrible hellscapes of dust, snow and tarmac. An F150 will set you back over $130000 here if you buy new. People will literally give anything to live the american dream.
it has a lot to do with how Europe built its cities and its societies around them and vice versa. Europe is also a lot smaller and way more densely populated forcing innovation in traffic and urban design, as well as the early adoption and widespread use of rail, busses, and trams made the alternatives for cars more appealing. The lack of nonsensical policies and regulations when it comes to parking when introduced were removed or never even introduced. Also, the cities were/are way way way older and a lot harder to justify bulldozing to create car infrastructure.
Europe is actually 1.04 the size of the US, which is bigger. And just like the US most people lives concentrated on the continental west and central parts. The US has 80% of it's population on the east side and majority of the westerners live along the coast, leaving plenty of empty land midwest.
Just like Europe which has much of the Nordic countries, east and Russia mostly empty. The difference is that rural Europe is more rural than rural America and therefore services has to be available locally or they don't exist at all. It wouldn't make any sense to put everyone in cars and force them to drive far away when a service can be provided from a much closer central point, such as close to a church were enough people to sustain a small scale service point lives anyway.
The idea that cities or more densely populated regions can't be properly designed because large uninhabited areas exist is just stupid.
"rural Europe is more rural than rural America and therefore services has to be available locally or they don't exist at all"
As an European, can confirm. Was at a rural village before, a lot of services were made specially for local purposes.
Europe isn't a lot smaller than the USA. Total landmass is similar. It's overall more densely populated with (over) twice the population of the US and denser cities - however the relative low density of US cities is a consequence of car oriented design rather than a driver for car oriented design, as even Houston was a lot denser before it was bulldozed to make parking lots and freeways.
It's wrong to generalise about "Europe". For example French parking norms are estimated to add about 15% to the costs of every building project. The Fordist vision of "popular motoring" is certainly alive and well in the home of Citroën, Peugot, Renault and Michelin with a "one more lane"/new bypass/autoroute mentality well-entrenched at the level of the départements (responsible for most roads).
And so it's wrong to generalise about France: faced with the physical impossibility of this vision in cities, not to mention often shocking levels of air pollution, progressive mayors have begun to act accordingly.
Meanwhile small-town France rises up in revolt at the prospect of even a 5ç increase on a litre of fuel.
So it's a mess of contradictions, though you're right to point out that Europe's generally greater urban density does mean that anti-car policies are practicable, nay essential.
Europe is actually bigger than the USA (you're mistaking it with EU, which is different and has fewer countries, thus, smaller).
USA was full of railroads and trams before cars invaded the lands, bombed the buildings and murdered everybody in process like Nazis, Ottomans or Soviets and brainwashing totalitarian automobile dictatorship propaganda that murdered anyone supporting public transit (it has actually happened, look it up).
Like USA before cars, Europe has denser cities (sans skyscrapers, which for a typical European doesn't click at all), which is different from having a bigger land.
The car dependency still trying its hardest to survive though (what u/Available_Fact_3445 says).
> Europe is also a lot smaller and way more densely populated forcing innovation in traffic and urban design
New Jersey has higher population density than the Netherlands.
Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland all have higher density than Germany or Switzerland.
Florida is denser than France.
California is denser than Spain.
Using the overall size or density of the US is nonsense, because it ignores one obvious fact: You build railways in areas where people actually live, and the US has huge swaths of mostly empty land. If you want to build a rail network, start with something like [this map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/MapofEmergingUSMegaregions.png) and connect within the clusters. Then connect up the clusters where they're close enough to make sense.
It's not that Europe is an urbanist utopia; it isn't. It's that North America and Australia are urbanist dystopias. Edit: also, maybe this is a good time to point out that 'utopia' literally means 'not a place'. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/utopia
yhes its more like taht . i am in rural france and sidewalk are like.. 15cms large.
You guys have sidewalks in rural areas? Nice.
You have sidewalks in urban areas? Columbus Ohio is the ultimate dystopia
>Nice They have sidewalks there too in France
This comment goes straight to the heart of the matter
And often used as parking spots
That’s why you carry a nail or two :))
always slash two or three tires. more than one, so they cannot just substitute it with the spare, and less than all four, because of stupid insurance policy loopholes.
Dry lentils
As a resident of France, I concur, most anything here is a parking lot. Bike lanes, sidewalks, common areas under Halles, the front of most homes, middle of the street, and basically anywhere else a car can fit. What’s the point of having a safe walkway if people walking have to enter the street to go around cars parked on the sidewalk?
In America, many suburbs don't have sidewalks. [https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1421034,-76.2069712,3a,75y,160.34h,86.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sDjp6toBFTlvG77IOss8u9w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1421034,-76.2069712,3a,75y,160.34h,86.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sDjp6toBFTlvG77IOss8u9w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) And the speed limits tend to be around 70km/h, but people often drive 90km/h. Imagine walking next to that.
yeah, no side walk but hey look theres a crosswalk just up ahead https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1413819,-76.2066986,3a,75y,18.22h,84.53t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sYm7-_cox1f7aflVpZGM2oQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu what a joke
Yup.[ And then there's this.](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1741915,-76.226208,3a,75y,20.42h,71.15t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sPvN9bPxMknIJynC8eX4w6A!2e0!5s20210801T000000!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) A school zone with reduced speed limit, no side walks or cross walks and signs blocking the shoulder. What's the point of a school zone if no one can walk there? EDIT: There is a crosswalk on the other side of the school. It may be the [most useless crosswalk ever made. ](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1744564,-76.2218304,3a,60y,292.69h,83.92t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s7-8-DOWHMAPGy-ZA7ZMt9A!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
Just install an LIM laumch system gping into US school zones while you're at it since we keep designing those streets for speed.
A mile from downtown there stop being sidewalks in my city.
We have some roads like that in Metro Vancouver too. [Like this one for example.](https://www.google.com/maps/@49.2053981,-123.0204586,3a,75y,97.64h,95.23t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sLXkSFgXpueqBecyLEjrzJg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DLXkSFgXpueqBecyLEjrzJg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D97.6351008480409%26pitch%3D-5.22505348739648%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu) There is a painted bike line though. The city of Vancouver [has a side walk but still wide and cars drive fast.](https://www.google.com/maps/@49.20551,-123.0236674,3a,75y,297.3h,86.45t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1snh-Ci1ntpxFSXrRXK6Gm6Q!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3Dnh-Ci1ntpxFSXrRXK6Gm6Q%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D297.2986955150941%26pitch%3D3.5546733603187874%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu)
Yeah Canada is pretty bad too.
Question: In what year were regulations introduced to France defining the minimum width of a sidewalk?
In France, a town is not a proper town if the provincial road (N...) doesnt have a main intersection at the town square, which is actually square, leading to all sorts of unclear directions and a lot of dangerous situations. Also, the French love to sit at very small terraces on the edges of the town square and stare at all the cars parked on the monument and in between the beautiful platanes.
And only parts of Europe are great - London has a legendary public transport system, but venture beyond the M25 and suddenly it's a world of traffic jams and suburban living.
London has a public transport system. It's still not very good. Relative to places with even worse systems, it's good, but it would need to be orders of magnitude better to actually replace most (reasonable) car use. Which is why I keep pointing out that public transport is only a part of the solution here. Unless you absolutely saturate cities with buses instead of saturating them with cars - and that's not really any better - then you need complementary systems.
The issue I think is London excels at getting people in and out of the centre - but unless you want to go into Zones 1 or 2, it does start to struggle. Getting between outer boroughs is quite tricky without a car. Bear in mind the Tube is using infrastructure well over 150 years old, and is still functioning and getting people in and out of the city, id argue that's pretty solid performance.
Although this is undoubtedly true, it is also true of most other cities I've lived in. You need to go into the centre first to move between surburban areas.
Yeah the tube is great but it's also the most crammed I've ever been on public transit before. Worse than NYC in my experience. I've been on lots of crowded trains and busses but it was the first time it made me feel panicked. Walkability in London is off the charts though.
Personally I hate the tube. If you have an idea of the above-ground geography you realise how achingly slow it is. Also very dirty. I live pretty near a station at the end of the Northern line, and also near a station on a commuter-rail line also running north-south. Both go to Moorgate. The tube takes about twice as long for basically the same route, at rush hour.
London's tube system is pretty shit compared to most other major urban areas. It's like when someone says NYC's subway is "incredible". Honestly it's pretty shit compared to anywhere else in the world.
Etymology isn't the literal meaning of the word
Correct! According to Wikipedia, etymology is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes.
Akshually it literally means "true sense study" :\^)
Ah, then the etymology of etymology is not the literal meaning of etymololgy.
Inception
True, but it does indicate on origin and I think it's relevant in this case that that origin directly refers to utopias, at least in its original meaning, not being real places.
Yeah, I've been trying to get away from the "urbanism solves all problems" narrative, and more into the "car centric sprawl sucks, but has to be replace with something " The US just got shafted so hard by white flight and reconstruction that our cities came out gutted and dissected, while we dumped endless resources to roads.
Sorry, but the only replacement to car-centric sprawl that capitalists will permit is... _More_ car-centric sprawl.
Eh, I have seen quite a bit of change in cities Ihave lived in with walkible areas because it attracts people who spend more money. I mean, my town in Alabama is building a $65 mil ped skybridge because it connects the arts district to downtown, so people will spend more money in both. This is the issue with arguing absolutes. All it takes is one counter example to kill your whole argument.
Haha good point.
To most North Americans, anywhere that’s not openly hostile/dangerous to pedestrians is an urbanist utopia (or a communist hellhole depending on what flavor of garbage media they consume)
Outside of NYC, Australian major cities are definitely better than America’s, maybe Canada’s aside from Montreal?
That's very true in a lot of places. I've recently seen a sort of retro documentary about commuting in Germany from the 80s and in there the benefits of bike commuting was already broadly explained. Also the Oil crisis in the 70s played a role, where politicians might have realized that going all in on one transportation form which we can't sustain by ourselves (as Europeans) is a bad idea. North America never was as dependent on arab oil as Europe was/is.
We're dependent. We just have the ability to project our military power across a ocean.
The USA is literally the country that produces the most oil in the world. You are not dependent. In 2022 17,2% of all produced oil was made by USA. That's more than Saudi Arabia at 13%.
Fossil fuel dependency is not about the domestic rate of production. It’s about the impact if we no longer had that energy source.
They literally waged war in Middle East because of oil, there was a point in time where USA didn't know how much oil it had. The present doesn't explain the past
He/She said "We're dependent". And that's not true. Also the USA knew about a lot of it's huge offshore oil deposits since the 40s. They didn't extract it on a grand scale because it wasn't profitable enough back then. The Oil in the middle east is cheaper because it's a lot easier to extract. Compared to Europe which was the topic of the original post North America is Oil paradise and has been for a very long time.
Some of this disagreement is defiently semantics. I'd argue if your government feels so threatened by things across the world it needs to fire up the military to intervene despite being in first place... you are somehow managing to be dependant on others actions while having all the resources you should need. The joys of global economy where value is divorced from material things
You guys are only dependent insofar that developments in the ME can fluctuate prices, not dependent on the oil itself.
Id say interesting subject is Eastern Europe: Funding for bike lanes and quality public tranport is very patcy. Car is a wealth and status symbol. (Especially old used and imported german cars) “One more lane” is still seen as cure. A lane replaced with bike/ public transport lane brings big complaints and is seen as a waste of resources. In suburbs literally USA is being built, single family house neighbourhood (very car dependent and pedestrian unfriendly) projects are being built left n right - people dream about them after soviet commie blocks
Eastern European here, pickup trucks are black-imported here. those imported german cars are seen as "old-school' and no longer cool.
Pickups are a quickly growing trend can confirm. “Old german cars” well the topic should be worded a bit differently - used western Europe car imports are definitely a big business.
AFAIK Belgium and Netherlands tried to stop pickup imports as the laws are very different there unlike pickup trucks' country of origin.
People getting truck licenses to drive pickups to supermarkets is also something special
Bro a pickup truck as huge as those are doesn't even fit on our narrow Dutch car lanes. That's by design btw, drivers drive more slowly and carefully if they are forced to. It leads to far fewer accidents :)
Yes people were denied luxuries so long plus we do did not have freedom.of travelling going vacation so taking this magical devoce that in theory can take you everywhere is nightmare to those people.
>we do did not have freedom.of travelling going vacation What the fuck are you talking about, like half of EE regularly went on summer vacation on Yugoslav coast. (Like they still do to this day.) And a lot of them came by their own cars!
Yes my family barely 3 times in their life was on baltic see. Most vacations was in grandmas village.
I can't speak for Europe but speaking for south of the US countries the main constraint is money. A lot of the well-to-do neighborhoods with more investment are noticeably more car-first. Its disappointing but people really believe when they have the 4 lanes afar and white picket fences at home they'll be happy.
But expensive McMansions don't bring in nearly enough taxes to finance all that car infrastructure! Not to mention the utilities like water, sewer, electric, and gas. Not Just Bikes did a series with Strong Towns on this topic. Ironically the "poor" inner city actually subsidizes the ["rich" suburbs.](https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=kTI9XmKpuzBxdQ2U). Dense city centers are financially a plus, but sprawl is an expensive money pit. Car infrastructure in particular is economically unsustainable and requires [constant growth](https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0?si=thUI_vWA9fnlI3bq) to fund itself.
I would say you are wrong. After the war everyone was car centric, first who woke up from that nightmare did that in the 70ties. 25 years after the war when things where already built and needed to be re- planned and rebuilt.
It was mostly also due to first economic crisis after ww2. People found out its expensive to drive 10 km to shop and work. Plus they saw how dependent are their children on them and finally people looked a little more on a scenrio outside their houses and gardens and started thinking how ugly highways and brutalist architecture is.
"Europe has (sadly) gone the way of car dependant devolution in 1960s like USA. The few remaining buildings survived the WW2 got destroyed in favour of parking and highways." i didn't portray my continent as an urbanist utopia, have you misread that or?
You can't really speak for the whole of Europe in one go. I lived in Copenhagen for a couple of years and it was heaven for cycling and walking. Budapest was great for transit and walking all around. Bucharest is probably as car centric as the cities in Bulgaria but still good for walking and public transit. The US only has a few cities that have decent enough public transit that you can exist without a car including but not exclusively NYC, Chicago, Seattle, SF, and maybe parts of Oakland. Some urban Eastern Europeans look at owning a private vehicle as proof that you have "made it" or are "successful" and seem to be resigned to sitting in abysmal traffic all day. However, none of them can even compare to what most Americans and Canadians have to deal with regarding not being able to function without driving :/
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It's a great city...I lived there for 3 years. Now if only they could get rid of the homophobic xenophobic dictator but.....
Ofc I don't speak for the entire continent, especially when different countries do things differently. That said, what I wrote in the post was how Europe is doing in general, not just one-two countries.
It’s not a coincidence that the most urbanist areas in the US predated the car and the least urbanist area grew up in the 20th century.
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I'm not saying it IS perfect here (I mentioned "car dependency still persists", which you explained more broadly, as I even mentioned in the comments about the black imports of pickup trucks, which is terrible). That said, there ARE acts that fight car dependency. Copenhagen and Oslo install new bike lanes, Paris bicycles for the first time beat the cars, Netherlands, Belguim, etc. enacting strict laws on pickup trucks/SUVs and a carbrained lady in Berlin legislation got kicked out (for plagiarism). Swiss trains just get better and better and here in Bulgaria, new metro line is built and new midrises are being built. On the other hand, I'm sorry that idiots killed your country's HSR plan under construction (is this even legal????) and the laws enacting "R1 zoning style" similar to NA. looks like politicians didn't learn a lesson...
Another reason is that a lot of non-Europeans' impression of Europe comes from historic city center areas, usually the notably nice ones, that aren't representative of typical life. People don't really visit [this part of Colmar](https://www.google.com/maps/@48.1062764,7.3633418,3a,75y,25.15h,87.58t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sixrOrEeuh4aN_uLdJQNCnw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DixrOrEeuh4aN_uLdJQNCnw%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D154.45473%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu). And for North Americans in particular, even that is better than their equivalent at home.
Haha, well, at least there's still quite a lot of green there
It was pretty eye-opening when my family and I went to Italy for vacation. Most people see the historic city centers (though even those are choked pretty badly by cars), but once you go a couple kilometers outside, you realize that most Italians live in those early to mid-20th century apartments and houses with car-centric commercial development. It's just less bad than the US due to the smaller parking lot sizes and relatively better public transit. Even in Italy you see plenty of locals complain about removing parking spots and adding bike lanes, so car-brain is hardly restricted to North America.
Like I said in the post, car dependency is trying its hardest to survive.
Lots of car dependency in Ireland still (even Dublin) and I feel like we are fighting an uphill battle as Ireland seems to be becoming more Americanized (and as an American here I hate seeing it). I think cycling will win out, but there are some true car-brains emerging here.
I can say the same here in Sofia, Bulgaria. New bus and tram lines are being built, new bus lane too, a new metro line as well. However, most streets are still stroad-like.
For me as a Swiss, it's all about cities being walkable, bikable and transit oriented. Even though the federal government is still building more highways and local governments are reluctant to put in some supplementary taxes for the parking of emotional support vehicles or any regulation regarding getting into the city with 2 tones of steel and plastic... And in the countryside it's even worse: I don't have a sidewalk for most of the year because the mayor decided that sidewalks are there to dump the snow off the car pavement, thus forcing me to walk on the road as there's not 80cm-100cm of snow... Withiut forgetting that they dump the big snowfalls right onto a little square in my neighborhood, which with snowmelting and the downhill and re-freezing makes the floor extremely slippery.
I'm an American who moved to Bulgaria, and I definitely do see the issues you are talking about, but at least Sofia where I live is far far better than the vast majority of the US. The Sofia metro and bus networks are both great, and I am able to do everything I want or need to do without having a car easily. That is not a reality for most Americans. While I totally admit that some other countries in Europe are much better (especially with trains and cycling infrastructure, both of which leave much to be desired here) and also other parts of Bulgaria are much more car-dependent than Sofia, moving here improved my life, and this city being less car dependent is a huge part of that. It's really a matter of perspective.
Здравейте! I'm glad you moved to Bulgaria and admire our transportation! Sofia does have really good bus, tram and metro systems (for Bulgarian standards), just not as car-free as Amsterdam. Though it IS getting better (new line is under construction right now, for example). Sadly, what you said about other places IS true (Burgas has decent bus service, but nothing else), quite hard to get around without cars. There are plans to add suburban rail for Plovdiv, but it is taking forever because our politics is abysmal. That said, I'm very glad you chose to move to our country! Приятен ден!
Yeah East Europe kind of didn’t get the same memo though.
Eastern Europe has always been about 20 years behind western Europe. It's slowly catching up thanks to EU funding but the mentality of people there is still way in the past.
I remember hearing Belgium is kinda rough. Brussels metro is on the unreliable side (compared to neighboring countries) and that company cars are often given in place of raises due to taxes. I feel like that plays a role too.
Just walk through big American cities and big European cities. The difference in built environment is huge. Your cities aren’t all seemingly razed to the ground for parking spaces
The reason why is that American tourists only hang out in major cities, and even then, primarily the city centers. If those same tourists had to actually live in their favorite European city for a year, they'd probably end up in a nearby suburb and see how not walkable it really is.
Italian here. Half of our railway system (which is still very extensive) was completely dismantled due to car-brainery. Whenever you read about a Italian city on Wikipedia, even the smallest one in the middle of nowhere, the most irrelevant one you can think of, you’ll always find something along the lines of, “[city] used to have 370 tram lines and 45 train stations, but then it all went to shit in the 60s. Haha!”. I hate it.
I grew up all over the US, and have seen a fair bit of Europe. Compared to anywhere other than certain large American cities, Europe is an urbanist utopia. Remember that New York City is considered an extreme outlier here.
I think you’re totally misidentifying the causes of different urban structure. It’s more the fact that North American infrastructure was comparatively built over night, with more dispersed population centers farther away from transit. In the dawn of “Ford’s America” the car was a liberating force to people bound to being in low population density towns with little mobility. Cars became the primary mode of transportation because massive infrastructure wasn’t required to utilize them. Paradoxically, massive infrastructure was built to accommodate the already car dominated society with the highway system. You simply don’t have to travel that far to get to a different place in Europe. With or without cars or trains. So cars didn’t have as explosive a growth in popularity, and other more economic modes of transportation (like rail) remained dominant.
Czechia is an example indeed, I live here and it feels so weird and hybrid. We have relatively good public transit systems all over the country, our railways are great etc., but the car culture is still huge and walkability is at some places not desirable. You can usually walk, but the conditions are sometimes questionable.
I agree with the other comments just stating America is a dystopia. It's pretty simple really, Europe is built for humans, the US is not. Europe didn't let companies influence city design. In the US oil and car companies lobbied to pave over the once great cities that even had street cars. It's as simple as that
The only reason Eastern Europe didn’t go the way of US/Canada and demolish its historical buildings in order to built roads and parking lots is because we were too poor to do that, lol, and now the urbanist direction given by the EU is pro-pedestrian and pro-cyclist so I guess we got lucky.
Also in Germany. Car registrations and the vehicle stock keep going up every year
Becouse most social media are UScentric, and when you compare US to Europe, Europe looks like utopia. Not becouse Europe is so good, but becouse US is so bad.
Vienna has been ranked one of the if not the best city to live in with a dense web of 24/7 public transport, but you are still surrounded by car fumes and car noice literally anywhere even if you go to donauinsel, which is an big island in the river that flows through vienna that many major highway are crossing or drive alongside. Conclussion: The world is an urban dystopia to various degrees of awful, there are no urban utopias.
I live in Bulgaria, it is a shithole.
Cars are the standard measure of personal validation around the world.
The only reason Europa hasn't gone full on american car dependency isn't because we're smarter or better - it's because we're poorer. We want the dystopia, we just don't have the money to demolish everything. Places in Europa that have money, it's all F150s and asphalt. Terrible hellscapes of dust, snow and tarmac. An F150 will set you back over $130000 here if you buy new. People will literally give anything to live the american dream.
it has a lot to do with how Europe built its cities and its societies around them and vice versa. Europe is also a lot smaller and way more densely populated forcing innovation in traffic and urban design, as well as the early adoption and widespread use of rail, busses, and trams made the alternatives for cars more appealing. The lack of nonsensical policies and regulations when it comes to parking when introduced were removed or never even introduced. Also, the cities were/are way way way older and a lot harder to justify bulldozing to create car infrastructure.
Europe is actually 1.04 the size of the US, which is bigger. And just like the US most people lives concentrated on the continental west and central parts. The US has 80% of it's population on the east side and majority of the westerners live along the coast, leaving plenty of empty land midwest. Just like Europe which has much of the Nordic countries, east and Russia mostly empty. The difference is that rural Europe is more rural than rural America and therefore services has to be available locally or they don't exist at all. It wouldn't make any sense to put everyone in cars and force them to drive far away when a service can be provided from a much closer central point, such as close to a church were enough people to sustain a small scale service point lives anyway. The idea that cities or more densely populated regions can't be properly designed because large uninhabited areas exist is just stupid.
"rural Europe is more rural than rural America and therefore services has to be available locally or they don't exist at all" As an European, can confirm. Was at a rural village before, a lot of services were made specially for local purposes.
Europe isn't a lot smaller than the USA. Total landmass is similar. It's overall more densely populated with (over) twice the population of the US and denser cities - however the relative low density of US cities is a consequence of car oriented design rather than a driver for car oriented design, as even Houston was a lot denser before it was bulldozed to make parking lots and freeways.
It's wrong to generalise about "Europe". For example French parking norms are estimated to add about 15% to the costs of every building project. The Fordist vision of "popular motoring" is certainly alive and well in the home of Citroën, Peugot, Renault and Michelin with a "one more lane"/new bypass/autoroute mentality well-entrenched at the level of the départements (responsible for most roads). And so it's wrong to generalise about France: faced with the physical impossibility of this vision in cities, not to mention often shocking levels of air pollution, progressive mayors have begun to act accordingly. Meanwhile small-town France rises up in revolt at the prospect of even a 5ç increase on a litre of fuel. So it's a mess of contradictions, though you're right to point out that Europe's generally greater urban density does mean that anti-car policies are practicable, nay essential.
Europe is actually bigger than the USA (you're mistaking it with EU, which is different and has fewer countries, thus, smaller). USA was full of railroads and trams before cars invaded the lands, bombed the buildings and murdered everybody in process like Nazis, Ottomans or Soviets and brainwashing totalitarian automobile dictatorship propaganda that murdered anyone supporting public transit (it has actually happened, look it up). Like USA before cars, Europe has denser cities (sans skyscrapers, which for a typical European doesn't click at all), which is different from having a bigger land. The car dependency still trying its hardest to survive though (what u/Available_Fact_3445 says).
> Europe is also a lot smaller and way more densely populated forcing innovation in traffic and urban design New Jersey has higher population density than the Netherlands. Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland all have higher density than Germany or Switzerland. Florida is denser than France. California is denser than Spain. Using the overall size or density of the US is nonsense, because it ignores one obvious fact: You build railways in areas where people actually live, and the US has huge swaths of mostly empty land. If you want to build a rail network, start with something like [this map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/MapofEmergingUSMegaregions.png) and connect within the clusters. Then connect up the clusters where they're close enough to make sense.