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This is honestly the thing that bothers me most about cities the US. Having grown up in Europe, I find many (I'm sure there are exceptions) US cities to be plai

This is honestly the thing that bothers me most about cities the US. Having grown up in Europe, I find many (I'm sure there are exceptions) US cities to be plain ugly and unlivable. The reason is obvious to me. It's that they are designed around cars. It makes such a huge difference.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago
US "cities" are just not dense enough to be called cities. This is not America's fault. They have a resource most of the world lacks: space. Too much space and you cannot make a real city.
- orn688 5y ago
  There's no "cannot", it's a conscious choice - if you have more space than necessary that absolutely does not require that you expand to fill all of it. And in particular this has caused issues because American cities tend towards sprawl, filling up area with low-density housing that requires significantly more infrastructure per capita, and implementing zoning laws to prevent higher-density development even as the population grows, resulting in housing shortages. Not Just Bikes has some excellent content about this, e.g.: https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    They sprawl because people want space. If you're from Paris or Tokyo or London you really just don't know what it's like to have a quiet, detached house with a nice garden, maybe a pool where your kids can play randomly without needing to plan a trip to the community center, space for a garden, knowing everyone within 200m of your house by name... It's a completely different way of life that is not possible without lots of space. Some people want that and so they will pay to buy it. It's not like city planners are laughing in smoke-filled rooms like, "haha! this will be our most sprawling city yet!"
    - orn688 5y ago
      As some other commenters have noted, in cities like Amsterdam and Tokyo there are enough nice safe public spaces that even young children are free to play outside on their own and there's much less planning required to go places since you don't need a car. That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of North Americans who love having a ton of space for gardening etc. But I would guess they're actually in the minority and that most people choose to live in sprawling suburban developments because they're the only affordable option to guarantee access to good schools and a safe neighborhood.
    - pxmpxm 5y ago
      People see what people want to see. An average family with two toddlers using bicycles to get around in the dead of Chicago winter. Sure, sure. I would wager that the vast majority of the folk here that are pushing this romanticized idea of car-free european city have actually grown up in upper middle class US suburbs and bulk of these attitudes are really just subconscious rejection of their parents' lifestyles. Having grown up in one of those car-free european cities myself, I can vouch that the US set up is, on average, far more convenient, which is also why you see car/pool/detached house/garage ownership rates increase with income and GDP. People that have the means clearly choose to avoid communal setups.
bedobi 5y ago
I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)
- tinco 5y ago
  Note that Amsterdam made a conscious flip on this, as did other Dutch cities. Take your 4 lane street, turn one lane in a tram lane, one lane into grass + trees, reduce the width on the other two lanes and add a bike lane with a heightened divider. Bam you've got a street for a more livable city center.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    It also took them the better part of several decades. Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.
    - thanatos519 5y ago
      The US can't even imagine the collective attention span required to achieve this.
      - bobthepanda 5y ago
        You don't need outward collective action, really. We remade our cities in favor of cars, mostly through applying changes to engineering standards. We could do it again, but the current engineering establishment doesn't want to change in many cases. (They had an easier time applying their standards, because by and large no codified standards existed before them.)
  - thanatos519 5y ago
    It just keeps getting better! The next step is to eliminate car thoroughfare entirely, e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9069311,177m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9... which as of a few years ago only has tram, bicycle, and pedestrian access.
sanxiyn 5y ago
I think New York is fine.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  New York is quite loud, which is not good for your hearing and causes a whole bunch of health problems. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/31/new-york-city-subway-trains-noise-pollution-jet-engine https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/31/new-yor... I would also say that navigating the piles of garbage on the sidewalk is not fun, either.
  - presentation 5y ago
    This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time. Aside, NYC’s train system is, besides being filthy, unreliable, slow, poorly maintained, and a pain to switch between transit agencies, it’s also unfriendly to anyone who isn’t fully able bodied (the escalators and elevators are always broken and only present in a small fraction of stations), and neighborhoods are often designed in ways that lend places outside of the Manhattan core to be more dangerous and unpleasant than they have to be. Not to mention the usage of land in and around stations is very poorly used (the ~2 shops in Times Square station are a hilarious joke for what’s ostensibly the financial capital of the world), and any expansion of the system is prohibitively expensive for stupid political reasons. But I suppose it’s still better than the transitless wasteland that is most of the USA.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      >This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time. Shibuya?
      - 5y ago
ekianjo 5y ago
You don't really have real cities in the US = there are a few exceptions but most of the time it's just a very tiny center and a lot of people living away from the center. That's not what a traditional city looks like.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Exactly. The US has very few cities proper, and a lot of huge suburbs that sometimes feature a city-like downtown (L.A., Houston), and sometimes don't (most of the Silicon Valley). The real honest dense US cities, such as NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and a few others, were built large and dense before the advent of the car, and had entrenched public transportation system before 1930s. Those that were not as lucky got remade for cars in 1930-1960s, and cemented in that state by zoning regulations. Europe obviously had a large number of dense cities since medieval times. Even small cities in Europe often ended up dense due to land limitations, and the generally relatively high population density. Cities in the US very rarely faced this limitation early enough, with a few natural exceptions like Manhattan or San Francisco.
  - monkeypawfan 5y ago
    I can't help but think that we're doing a repeat with building things around mobile phone use too
    - ido 5y ago
      How do mobile phones affect city planning?
      - aurelianito 5y ago
        No need for door bells. No need for street signs. No need for taxi stops. No need for privately owned cars (rent via phone app or use Uber like service). Those things affect urban planning a lot.
        5y ago
OJFord 5y ago
It took me a while to realise what it was that bothered me, but yes there's a real lack of 'high street shopping' and markets type organisation from what I've seen in North America - instead drive to a big square ~car park~ 'lot' surrounded by 'big box stores'. Everything scaled up. If you like it fine, can't really say either's objectively better, it's just really quite different and I suppose you likes what you grow up with or are used to.
freediver 5y ago
A counter argument is that US has a very developed suburban living culture with families living in houses. And while obviously this is comfortable living, you then need a car to get to the city center. Having said that, I agree that nothing beats the walkability of European cities, quality of living wise. US has a lot to learn from that.
- andi999 5y ago
  I thought a lot of people also live in houses in and around Tokyo.
  - dustintrex 5y ago
    Japanese houses are quite different from US ones. My in-laws live in a house in suburban Chiba well outside Tokyo, but it has literally no garden space and the neighborhood is so densely packed a taxi can't even pull into the little laneway it's in. Within a 100 meter radius there's a grocery, a drugstore, several restaurants and more, and everybody gets around on foot, by bicycle or by bus.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      tbh a yard seems less necessary when you can walk everywhere
      - aeharding 5y ago
        And kids can actually walk places by themselves, have social lives and develop some independence instead of being stuck in the backyard.
        christophilus 5y ago
        I want this for my kids (stuck in US suburbia), but have instead opted for them to grow up close to their grandparents. I’m not always sure that I’m making the right trade off, and it annoys me that I even have to make such a choice. Anyway, it’s been over 20 years since I visited Tokyo, and I’ve been to many major cities since. Tokyo remains my favorite.
cpursley 5y ago
After moving to Europe (and Eastern Europe), I can't really consider those places in the US "cities" and get an uneasy feeling that something is off when I'm back stateside.
- VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
  Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.
  - vasilipupkin 5y ago
    It’s pretty easy to live in big cities in America ( Seattle, SF, Boston, Chicago, parts of LA ) without a car or without regularly using a car.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I only somewhat agree. First of all, it depends if you have to commute to an office in some industrial park (even if it's only one or two days a week). Then there's the question of where your friends live, whether you regularly do activities outside the city, etc. Zipcar and Uber definitely make it easier not to own a car. But my observation of people I know in SF who don't own a car is that they make ample use of both Uber and regular/short-term rentals. People can definitely get by but it's often by adjusting their lifestyles and activities in that you just don't do things that are hard to do.
      - simplestats 5y ago
        If you live in Japan without a car you will probably end up taking a taxi from time to time. They are lined up outside the major train stations. Overall, relying on mass-transit probably is more pleasant there, and takes less lifestyle-modifications, but you still have less freedom than owning a car. And probably take longer to get around usually. Also in plenty of Japan, by the way, you definitely need a car to get by reasonably. It's not like countries in Europe where half the population lives in the capital city. If your goal is to avoid any sort of exercise (and the "forced" exercise is one of the biggest reasons to go carless in my opinion) then yes large sections of US cities may seem inacccessible without a car. But if you like walking like I do (at least up to a half-mile or so) then you can live just fine in US cities without a car, in my experience. I've done it all over.
throwaway743 5y ago
Agreed. The closest you'll get to a walkable/non-car focused designed city in the US is NYC or Boston. MTA is accessible nearly anywhere in NYC (not without exceptions) and runs 24hrs
- ghaff 5y ago
  A big limiting factor with many cities though is if you need to commute to an office. In Boston, for example, many professional jobs will require commuting out to the suburbs. In tech specifically, there's more in the city than there used to be--there were basically no major employers in the immediate urban area any longer as of a couple decades ago. But the majority of engineering jobs broadly speaking require driving to a suburban office.
turtlebits 5y ago
Americans like their own yards and giant houses and lots of storage. Personally, I'm guilty of this (except the huge house part). I want 5 acres of land and don't want to see my neighbor.
- b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
  > I want 5 acres of land and don't want to see my neighbor. You're not making Greta angry enough, don't you want a personal Olympic-sized swimming pool as well??

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

US "cities" are just not dense enough to be called cities. This is not America's fault. They have a resource most of the world lacks: space. Too much space and you cannot make a real city.

orn688 5y ago
There's no "cannot", it's a conscious choice - if you have more space than necessary that absolutely does not require that you expand to fill all of it. And in particular this has caused issues because American cities tend towards sprawl, filling up area with low-density housing that requires significantly more infrastructure per capita, and implementing zoning laws to prevent higher-density development even as the population grows, resulting in housing shortages. Not Just Bikes has some excellent content about this, e.g.: https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  They sprawl because people want space. If you're from Paris or Tokyo or London you really just don't know what it's like to have a quiet, detached house with a nice garden, maybe a pool where your kids can play randomly without needing to plan a trip to the community center, space for a garden, knowing everyone within 200m of your house by name... It's a completely different way of life that is not possible without lots of space. Some people want that and so they will pay to buy it. It's not like city planners are laughing in smoke-filled rooms like, "haha! this will be our most sprawling city yet!"
  - orn688 5y ago
    As some other commenters have noted, in cities like Amsterdam and Tokyo there are enough nice safe public spaces that even young children are free to play outside on their own and there's much less planning required to go places since you don't need a car. That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of North Americans who love having a ton of space for gardening etc. But I would guess they're actually in the minority and that most people choose to live in sprawling suburban developments because they're the only affordable option to guarantee access to good schools and a safe neighborhood.
  - pxmpxm 5y ago
    People see what people want to see. An average family with two toddlers using bicycles to get around in the dead of Chicago winter. Sure, sure. I would wager that the vast majority of the folk here that are pushing this romanticized idea of car-free european city have actually grown up in upper middle class US suburbs and bulk of these attitudes are really just subconscious rejection of their parents' lifestyles. Having grown up in one of those car-free european cities myself, I can vouch that the US set up is, on average, far more convenient, which is also why you see car/pool/detached house/garage ownership rates increase with income and GDP. People that have the means clearly choose to avoid communal setups.

bedobi 5y ago

I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)

tinco 5y ago
Note that Amsterdam made a conscious flip on this, as did other Dutch cities. Take your 4 lane street, turn one lane in a tram lane, one lane into grass + trees, reduce the width on the other two lanes and add a bike lane with a heightened divider. Bam you've got a street for a more livable city center.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  It also took them the better part of several decades. Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.
  - thanatos519 5y ago
    The US can't even imagine the collective attention span required to achieve this.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      You don't need outward collective action, really. We remade our cities in favor of cars, mostly through applying changes to engineering standards. We could do it again, but the current engineering establishment doesn't want to change in many cases. (They had an easier time applying their standards, because by and large no codified standards existed before them.)
- thanatos519 5y ago
  It just keeps getting better! The next step is to eliminate car thoroughfare entirely, e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9069311,177m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9... which as of a few years ago only has tram, bicycle, and pedestrian access.

sanxiyn 5y ago

I think New York is fine.

bobthepanda 5y ago
New York is quite loud, which is not good for your hearing and causes a whole bunch of health problems. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/31/new-york-city-subway-trains-noise-pollution-jet-engine https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/31/new-yor... I would also say that navigating the piles of garbage on the sidewalk is not fun, either.
- presentation 5y ago
  This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time. Aside, NYC’s train system is, besides being filthy, unreliable, slow, poorly maintained, and a pain to switch between transit agencies, it’s also unfriendly to anyone who isn’t fully able bodied (the escalators and elevators are always broken and only present in a small fraction of stations), and neighborhoods are often designed in ways that lend places outside of the Manhattan core to be more dangerous and unpleasant than they have to be. Not to mention the usage of land in and around stations is very poorly used (the ~2 shops in Times Square station are a hilarious joke for what’s ostensibly the financial capital of the world), and any expansion of the system is prohibitively expensive for stupid political reasons. But I suppose it’s still better than the transitless wasteland that is most of the USA.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    >This 100%, I measured the volume in my neighborhood in Central Tokyo 5 mins from the nearest station (it’s one of the more popular spots in the city) and it clocks in at 30dB or less. Compared to Manhattan where it’s deafeningly loud all the time. Shibuya?
    - 5y ago

ekianjo 5y ago

You don't really have real cities in the US = there are a few exceptions but most of the time it's just a very tiny center and a lot of people living away from the center. That's not what a traditional city looks like.

nine_k 5y ago
Exactly. The US has very few cities proper, and a lot of huge suburbs that sometimes feature a city-like downtown (L.A., Houston), and sometimes don't (most of the Silicon Valley). The real honest dense US cities, such as NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and a few others, were built large and dense before the advent of the car, and had entrenched public transportation system before 1930s. Those that were not as lucky got remade for cars in 1930-1960s, and cemented in that state by zoning regulations. Europe obviously had a large number of dense cities since medieval times. Even small cities in Europe often ended up dense due to land limitations, and the generally relatively high population density. Cities in the US very rarely faced this limitation early enough, with a few natural exceptions like Manhattan or San Francisco.
- monkeypawfan 5y ago
  I can't help but think that we're doing a repeat with building things around mobile phone use too
  - ido 5y ago
    How do mobile phones affect city planning?
    - aurelianito 5y ago
      No need for door bells. No need for street signs. No need for taxi stops. No need for privately owned cars (rent via phone app or use Uber like service). Those things affect urban planning a lot.
      - 5y ago

OJFord 5y ago

It took me a while to realise what it was that bothered me, but yes there's a real lack of 'high street shopping' and markets type organisation from what I've seen in North America - instead drive to a big square ~car park~ 'lot' surrounded by 'big box stores'. Everything scaled up. If you like it fine, can't really say either's objectively better, it's just really quite different and I suppose you likes what you grow up with or are used to.

freediver 5y ago

A counter argument is that US has a very developed suburban living culture with families living in houses. And while obviously this is comfortable living, you then need a car to get to the city center. Having said that, I agree that nothing beats the walkability of European cities, quality of living wise. US has a lot to learn from that.

andi999 5y ago
I thought a lot of people also live in houses in and around Tokyo.
- dustintrex 5y ago
  Japanese houses are quite different from US ones. My in-laws live in a house in suburban Chiba well outside Tokyo, but it has literally no garden space and the neighborhood is so densely packed a taxi can't even pull into the little laneway it's in. Within a 100 meter radius there's a grocery, a drugstore, several restaurants and more, and everybody gets around on foot, by bicycle or by bus.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    tbh a yard seems less necessary when you can walk everywhere
    - aeharding 5y ago
      And kids can actually walk places by themselves, have social lives and develop some independence instead of being stuck in the backyard.
      - christophilus 5y ago
        I want this for my kids (stuck in US suburbia), but have instead opted for them to grow up close to their grandparents. I’m not always sure that I’m making the right trade off, and it annoys me that I even have to make such a choice. Anyway, it’s been over 20 years since I visited Tokyo, and I’ve been to many major cities since. Tokyo remains my favorite.

cpursley 5y ago

After moving to Europe (and Eastern Europe), I can't really consider those places in the US "cities" and get an uneasy feeling that something is off when I'm back stateside.

VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.
- vasilipupkin 5y ago
  It’s pretty easy to live in big cities in America ( Seattle, SF, Boston, Chicago, parts of LA ) without a car or without regularly using a car.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I only somewhat agree. First of all, it depends if you have to commute to an office in some industrial park (even if it's only one or two days a week). Then there's the question of where your friends live, whether you regularly do activities outside the city, etc. Zipcar and Uber definitely make it easier not to own a car. But my observation of people I know in SF who don't own a car is that they make ample use of both Uber and regular/short-term rentals. People can definitely get by but it's often by adjusting their lifestyles and activities in that you just don't do things that are hard to do.
    - simplestats 5y ago
      If you live in Japan without a car you will probably end up taking a taxi from time to time. They are lined up outside the major train stations. Overall, relying on mass-transit probably is more pleasant there, and takes less lifestyle-modifications, but you still have less freedom than owning a car. And probably take longer to get around usually. Also in plenty of Japan, by the way, you definitely need a car to get by reasonably. It's not like countries in Europe where half the population lives in the capital city. If your goal is to avoid any sort of exercise (and the "forced" exercise is one of the biggest reasons to go carless in my opinion) then yes large sections of US cities may seem inacccessible without a car. But if you like walking like I do (at least up to a half-mile or so) then you can live just fine in US cities without a car, in my experience. I've done it all over.

throwaway743 5y ago

Agreed. The closest you'll get to a walkable/non-car focused designed city in the US is NYC or Boston. MTA is accessible nearly anywhere in NYC (not without exceptions) and runs 24hrs

ghaff 5y ago
A big limiting factor with many cities though is if you need to commute to an office. In Boston, for example, many professional jobs will require commuting out to the suburbs. In tech specifically, there's more in the city than there used to be--there were basically no major employers in the immediate urban area any longer as of a couple decades ago. But the majority of engineering jobs broadly speaking require driving to a suburban office.

turtlebits 5y ago

Americans like their own yards and giant houses and lots of storage. Personally, I'm guilty of this (except the huge house part). I want 5 acres of land and don't want to see my neighbor.

b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
> I want 5 acres of land and don't want to see my neighbor. You're not making Greta angry enough, don't you want a personal Olympic-sized swimming pool as well??