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It is common in Europe for small towns and villages to be quite walkable, have a large relative percentage multi-family housing, and have a decent train or bus

It is common in Europe for small towns and villages to be quite walkable, have a large relative percentage multi-family housing, and have a decent train or bus connection to a regional hub. Of course, they have the advantage of being around longer than the automobile has existed. The problem in the US is mostly cultural. Most rural/semi-rural/exurban people think nothing of an hour driving each way. So why would they want what they perceive as a tiny lot, with more expensive housing where they can hear their neighbors when they can get a huge lot and drive a little more? The non-cultural part of the problem is that the drive-everywhere paradigm is so heavily invested that even in a small walking-oriented European -style village, everyone would need to own a car anyway. If you built a train to a regional hub it wouldn’t solve the problem of the regional hub itself having terrible public transit. Plus, it’s a lot easier to build a road than a train politically.

ericmay 5y ago
It's cultural but also institutional. Governments think nothing of blowing tens of millions of dollars on highway construction and do not typically think about or care to invest in alternatives. Beyond a certain point (which was a long time ago) we're just building roads and highways to create artificial growth. It blows my mind how people don't realize the cultural piece either. They travel, "omg it's so walkable here! this is awesome! wow that cafe is so cute. Of course i buy bread from the local shop." then come back and it's like their experiences were completely wiped clean from their memory: "wait what do you mean not drive a car a quarter mile down the road to sit in the Zaxby's line?".
- treis 5y ago
  Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    > Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity from car crashes and deaths (among other things)? Scale can make things cheaper, but is cheapness the goal? And scale in this context also creates centralization which has some fragile properties at times. > You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving. Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. The only reason all of the best neighborhoods you've ever been to are so expensive is because we just don't build mixed-use, medium density development. And also you can look at countries in places like Europe to see how it has been achieved. I'm not sure the premise of 4/3 suburban house is a good one. It's like saying how can you use AWS when you have this server rack in the basement that you have to use. It's just cultural and institutional inertia driving us down bad paths because we don't have a good market mechanic to realize costs.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      Small towns in the US already work similarly to European towns, though a bit more straightforward (pun intended). The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc. Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.
      - stan_rogers 5y ago
        ...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)
rayiner 5y ago
The problem isn’t cultural, it’s governmental. It costs america so much more to build and maintain transit that it’s not a very attractive alternative to cars. My state just spent $6 billion on a 16 mile light rail line through the suburbs that’s not even grade separated: https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2021/02/26/purple-line-twists-turns-timeline.html https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2021/02/26/purpl.... The DC metro, which I used to ride, is extremely well funded. It’s actually regressed since it was built in the late 1970s, with the automated train control (which used to provide a smooth ride) having to be shut down due to poor maintenance. Headways are now 33% longer than they were a decade ago. (Well even longer now due to covid related collapse.) Trip times are slower—everything takes 10-20% more time than advertised. Or look at Biden’s build back better plan. Amtrak would get $30 billion and build nothing: https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-should-bring-in-foreign-experts https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-should-bring-in-foreign-... > Because as Henry Grabar points out, while $30 billion should be a game-changing investment in the Northeast Corridor, the actual plan from Amtrak is to spend about $30 billion on one tunnel under the Hudson River. Americans are not as dumb as Europeans think. If we could build light rail for $30 million/mile like Germany, instead of $350 million per mile, that stupid 16 mile light rail could be a 160 mile network all around the Maryland suburbs. That would be a totally different value proposition. The high costs mean that

ericmay 5y ago

It's cultural but also institutional. Governments think nothing of blowing tens of millions of dollars on highway construction and do not typically think about or care to invest in alternatives. Beyond a certain point (which was a long time ago) we're just building roads and highways to create artificial growth. It blows my mind how people don't realize the cultural piece either. They travel, "omg it's so walkable here! this is awesome! wow that cafe is so cute. Of course i buy bread from the local shop." then come back and it's like their experiences were completely wiped clean from their memory: "wait what do you mean not drive a car a quarter mile down the road to sit in the Zaxby's line?".

treis 5y ago
Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.
- ericmay 5y ago
  > Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity from car crashes and deaths (among other things)? Scale can make things cheaper, but is cheapness the goal? And scale in this context also creates centralization which has some fragile properties at times. > You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving. Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. The only reason all of the best neighborhoods you've ever been to are so expensive is because we just don't build mixed-use, medium density development. And also you can look at countries in places like Europe to see how it has been achieved. I'm not sure the premise of 4/3 suburban house is a good one. It's like saying how can you use AWS when you have this server rack in the basement that you have to use. It's just cultural and institutional inertia driving us down bad paths because we don't have a good market mechanic to realize costs.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Small towns in the US already work similarly to European towns, though a bit more straightforward (pun intended). The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc. Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.
    - stan_rogers 5y ago
      ...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)

rayiner 5y ago

The problem isn’t cultural, it’s governmental. It costs america so much more to build and maintain transit that it’s not a very attractive alternative to cars. My state just spent $6 billion on a 16 mile light rail line through the suburbs that’s not even grade separated: https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2021/02/26/purple-line-twists-turns-timeline.html https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2021/02/26/purpl.... The DC metro, which I used to ride, is extremely well funded. It’s actually regressed since it was built in the late 1970s, with the automated train control (which used to provide a smooth ride) having to be shut down due to poor maintenance. Headways are now 33% longer than they were a decade ago. (Well even longer now due to covid related collapse.) Trip times are slower—everything takes 10-20% more time than advertised. Or look at Biden’s build back better plan. Amtrak would get $30 billion and build nothing: https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-should-bring-in-foreign-experts https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-should-bring-in-foreign-... > Because as Henry Grabar points out, while $30 billion should be a game-changing investment in the Northeast Corridor, the actual plan from Amtrak is to spend about $30 billion on one tunnel under the Hudson River. Americans are not as dumb as Europeans think. If we could build light rail for $30 million/mile like Germany, instead of $350 million per mile, that stupid 16 mile light rail could be a 160 mile network all around the Maryland suburbs. That would be a totally different value proposition. The high costs mean that