I just visited Munich recently for the first time, and you're right, the public transit there is fantastic. What I couldn't figure out, however, was why anyone

I just visited Munich recently for the first time, and you're right, the public transit there is fantastic. What I couldn't figure out, however, was why anyone still bothers with a car there, since there were plenty of cars. But one thing about Munich: it's just not that large a city, either geographically or population-wise, compared to LA. The LA metro area has 13 million people, and LA proper about 4, according to a quick google search. Munich has 1.5M, though the metro area has 6M. But the city itself is really not very large geographically; unfortunately Americans have really screwed themselves by making their cities too sprawling, and it's pretty hard to fix that once it's done. One thing I noticed about Munich and other German cities: there's a lot of mixed-use development, where shops and businesses are on the ground floors of buildings, but there's residential space on top. This makes cities extremely livable and walkable: you can walk down some stairs and over a street and go to the local grocery store, for instance. This is mostly impossible in America because we hate this kind of development with a passion. You don't even see it much in Manhattan, NYC.