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It's a bit disingenuous to make straight comparisons between the neighborhood designs in the US and Germany given that the latter has something like 4% of the a
by monkeyfacebag 14y ago
It's a bit disingenuous to make straight comparisons between the neighborhood designs in the US and Germany given that the latter has something like 4% of the area of the former and almost 7x the population density. That said, Americans did consciously choose to make full use of the country's land mass to spread themselves out, prioritizing investments in interstate highways over local transportation and I'd like very much to see those priorities shift.
- sp332 14y agoThe USA has been "urbanizing" itself for decades. More than half the population now lives in cities.
- sopooneo 14y agoYeah. In some ways our vast area is curse.
- jff 14y agoThe 5-day drive across the country is beautiful, but it's still a 5-day drive :)
- scarmig 14y agoThe numbers you bring up aren't really meaningful. The salient figure isn't total country population divided by total country area: it's population density as people experience it. Vast swaths of land with no one in it aren't really relevent to social analysis. For an example: imagine the United States now, and then imagine it suddenly got ownership of all of Mars. It would drastically increase the total area of the USA, but it would not suddenly make everyone a nomad who has a hundred square miles to live in alone.
- afterburner 14y agoThe population density in Germany means that there is at least a small village every 1-2 miles. I don't know if that's relevant to the conversation, but it's definitely a big difference between Germany and the US, and affects the culture of both. (For example, the tradition of travelling tradesmen in Germany probably makes sense because of this.)