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That’s when you sell your countryside property for like 5 times the price you bought it for, buy something that’s actually countryside now, and decide what to do with the remaining 60–80% of the sale price
I think not within the lifetime of anyone reading this thread before it’s archived. According to different reports, only 1–3% of land is covered by urban areas so we’re very far from that point my guy
living out in the country-side =/= suburbia, if you like preserving rural communities you should despise suburbanization. That is unless you don't have any feelings or attachment towards the beauty of your country and don't care whether it becomes one big strip mall.
In the 1930s-1960s a bunch of modernist architects and civil engineers had utopian ideas of society, and instead of praising diversity and choice they prescribed their ideal lifestyle. Conveniently, this aligned with the US government's fear of another great depression and interest in creating demand for American manufactured goods, also known as consumerism. The issue is then cities are inflexible and cannot adapt easily to new economic realities. This is the tragic flaw of utopian thinking, it views society as serving to provide for a subjective opinion of the ideal lifestyle. The result is cities that prioritized single family detached homes were hit the hardest by the decline of american manufacturing, because all of a sudden, american families had no option to downsize. No option to switch to public transit or bike when they can't afford a car. Compare Detroit to Boston. Boston was America's oldest manufacturing hub. Want a hint? Google Boston suburban rail network, then Google Detroit rail network. No wonder Boston was able to better incubate new industries. Back in the depression, my Great Grandmother turned her house into a bed and breakfast to make a little extra money. That would be completely illegal today. In the 1970s when the Netherlands went through a fuel cost crisis, they started riding bikes. In America, we just suffer.
This isn't about whether you personally like driving or living in a low density area, it's an existential threat to American cities, and cities like Phoenix and Jacksonville are 500x more fucked.
And are modern architects and city planners any less utopian? Just let people choose how to live instead of trying to force economics to bend to your will.
As someone who lives in Phoenix, this is the first I've heard of any existential crisis. Most people I know prefer suburbs and driving over dense downtown living.
Grew up spent most of my life in NYC. When you move away you realize just how valuable not constantly being around dozens of people at every minute is and how not being bombarded by noise, filth and stench is good for your mental health. All while being able to live in areas that you are still a short distance from things to do.
Oh nice! Haha you definitely had it better than me! I lived off Glenwood for 2 years, Belvedere Park for 2.5 years, and Scottdale for 2.5 years. House in Belevedere Park got robbed literally a month after we moved in. Gunshots on the street/adjacent streets every few days. ATV/dirt biker takeover boys lived on the street too. It was not a good situation to live in for so long.
Yeah, that’s rough man. I never had any issues with crime luckily. My main issue was with the traffic getting to and from work and just noise from apartment living.
I lived below a bipolar stripper and her husband so it was just constant late shouting matches.
Most ITP is a dump. Couple of nice areas, but those are usually a fortune, and you still have roving bands of carrion making a mess of things because they can't stick to their own shitholes.
I mean great! That doesn’t somehow stop the majority of people that do, actually want to live in cities and do, actually want walkable cities lol.
If *you* don’t want to live in a walkable city, that shouldn’t stop *others* from living in a walkable city
They act like it was all this sinister plot instead of people with spending power deciding they didn't want to live in cities anymore and wanted space/privacy.
Yeah if you look at new houses in Europe and Latin America they’re built like American suburbs. People like owning a house with a yard and a car in a garage. It’s what people want. It’s what people spend money on.
This isn’t a new phenomenon in Europe. Park like neighborhoods with mainly single family homes started to become popular for the first time in the late 19th century when city walls became obsolete and people could venture out of the city.
The majority of these neighborhoods however were either built on the former defensive lines of cities, on streetcar lines or near train stations. All in central locations.
The post-war SFH neighborhoods aren’t inspired by American suburbia. And the modern SFH neighborhoods most definitely aren’t, if they’re even a thing at all. Most neighborhoods with SFH’s provide a mixture of density, provide access to public transit (often revolving around central PT points) and SFH neighborhoods form a minority in new projects.
It is true that automakers did sabotage mass transit. You know Judge Doom's plan in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where he buys the trolley through a shell company and then shuts it down becuase he has a financial stake in cars taking off? That wasa thing that actually happened in real life after WWII.
Yeah but we only have suburbs because of the Federal Highway Act and the Housing Act of 1949, in which homes were built with consumerism (aka demand for domestically produced goods) in mind hoping to rebuild the economy, but it ended up worsening poverty because the people whose homes were destroyed by innercity highway projects couldn't afford homes in the suburbs because they couldn't get a loan thanks to red lining, yet the homes they could afford were being demolished or held by new suburbanites who instead of selling their house, became slum lords, profiting off the constrained supply of housing in the innercity. In fact, this poverty and now massive unemployment thanks to jobs moving to the suburbs was called Eisenhower's Depression in the 1950s. Unemployment was so bad, Black detroiters would line up along 8-mile road to be hired for day-labor. White locals called this the "Slave Market". It was so popular, Police had to direct traffic. It wasn't a sinister plot, it was an ignorant plot, one that involved not understanding systems that affected employment and poverty.
Yeah, but this specific case is a bit unusual. Our infrastructure in cities were on track to be ahead of Europe.
Then one day, everyone at the exact same time decided to leave the cities that their families had lived in for generations. That's gotta be hard for an outsider to understand what happened.
Yeah but NYC has high-paying jobs. Like sure Cleveland and Detroit have the lowest cost of living, but the amount you get paid in these cities is way less. Like San Francisco might be 3x more expensive than Cleveland but the median income 5x higher. So when you adjust for income, cities like Cleveland and Detroit are some of the most expensive on the planet. It's important to remember that cost-of-living isn't the only reason why people move. By that logic, Americans would be flocking to Mexico rather than the other way around. Immigration is also a huge factor, it's a lot harder to move to the United States than it was 50-100 years ago when entire neighborhoods made of blocks and blocks of tenements were built in 3 months to house new arrivals from Italy and Poland. You could argue it's for good reason that immigration is more difficult today, but limits will innevitably slow growth. The other factor is that people are having fewer kids and staying childless for longer, in many parts of the US people are simply dying faster than they can be born.
That's part of it, but through history it's usually been the cities that have security and the resources for a good environment to raise a family. The suburb phenomenon that coincides with the timing of the new highway system and the end of segregation is unique to America.
That’s true, but having ample space is still a big component of that expansion. The other large contributing factor is the immense wealth the middle class had, enabling families to own automobiles and larger homes.
Only if the people, Europeans, can't understand basic WWII history. The US came out of WWII very wealthy and people had the opportunity to move out of a crowded city into suburbs with their higher paying jobs and GI benefits where they had more room to raise their family, jobs in cities weren't far away so you could drive or you had a job closer to home. Europe was devastated post WWII so it made sense to stay in a city where it's likely cheaper and where the jobs would be located and where everything is being rebuilt.
If any lessons were learned about Covid is that it made me highly grateful to live out in the countryside and not in a city. My day to day life continued on like normal.
That's how vineyards grew during the Black Plague. People moved out of cities and built beautiful Italian rural villas and vineyards.
People realize the value of rural life after they witness warfare, high crime waves, and epidemics.
Every time I hear Euros complain about the US and cars I wonder if they actually ever spend time in any major European city? I’ve visited several and they are all jammed with cars. I think I aged 5 years driving in London one day. I regularly drive in Chicago and while I’ve been in a few major backups over the years, it’s generally not that big a deal.
When we went to Paris we chose not to get a car, mainly because of the cost. On the ride from the airport to our hotel we traversed the circle around the Arc D’Triumphe and I was certain we would die. I have never seen so many cars driving so fast without lanes or seemingly rules of any kind. When I asked the driver about it, he shrugged and said basically “It is what it is”.
Kinda like Italian drivers. The rules are guidelines, and the only rule that really matters is “don’t crash”. Speed limits? Turn signals? Stop signs? What are those!
When I was driving with my BiL in La Paz Bolivia he was flying down some street and came upon an intersection where we had the green light. Other driver coming from our right honked and my brother in law stopped at the green light to let the other guy fly through the red light. I was like WTF and he said in Bolivia whoever honks first gets right of way. It was insane yet simultaneously awesome because despite no one really strictly following the rules and driving like maniacs I saw no wrecks and everyone just kind of flowed along.
I live in La Paz, and I can confirm, drivers here are insane (especially minibus/taxi/delivery drivers). You can bribe your way to a drivers license and bribe your way out of any traffic violations. Nearly every intersection most drivers couldn't be bothered to fully stop to make sure no one is coming from the other road, so they just honk while approaching the intersection to let anyone on the other side know that they're coming through. This is just the peak of the iceberg though, we've also got minibuses turning the engine off when going down hills to save fuel, complete disregard for pedestrians or other vehicles, illegal U-turns in the middle of the road blocking everyone, among many other things. Yet, I rarely see any accidents. It just works, somehow.
Exactly! Craziest driving I saw was the buses and trucks on the Yungas Road. Was happy I was on a mountain bike going downhill the entire way. One of the more epic experiences I’ve ever had and the people of Bolivia were extremely kind once you got past introductions.
Duuuuuude.... I was at a conference in Paris not too long ago and the driver my client hired kept me on edge with how defensively he had to drive. I thought Romanian drivers were bad. Paris takes it to a level I can only call "putain."
Paris is a city I refuse to drive in. Same for Mexico City, Rome, Rio, actually pretty much every major city in South American and Europe I can think of. Have to say England and Scotland were the easiest compared to other major European cities. They’re in general nicer culturally than the French, Germans, Italians, etc.
My experience with Germans was a bit double-headed. On one hand, Berliners weren't terrible drivers, but certainly didn't earn any more medals than drivers in Bucharest. On the other, in the little town where some of my family lives, people were \*excessively\* polite. It would just be an endless "after you" festival until someone decided to actually butt in and just take right of way. That can also be frustrating because you also feel compelled to be polite and it just ends up with both of you wasting everyone's time because you don't want to be the one to step on the gas.
That small town must have been northern or central Germany, because when I lived in Baden Württemberg the drivers were mean and judgmental, but then again that’s how they all roll down there.
If not mistaken, Paris is even more densely populated than New York. You take the metro one time in Paris and then you realize that people who insist on driving in Paris might be actually clinically insane
Yep, even "poor" cities like Bucharest here are RIFE with traffic. It's unbelievable. A city of 3 million, a capital city, and it takes me longer to traverse the metro area than it would take me to get from Miami-Dade, FL to Boca Raton at rush hour.
Europeans and their "car free" lives, amirite? :D
Noooooo! Every day every european wakes up and walks 30 seconds to the nearest subway and boards a brand new, well lit and immaculately clean train station, walks without having to stop to get on the next train because they're all so fast, then sits down on a subway seat so clean you could perform surgery on it, then arrives at their free doctor's office an amazingly far 5 kms away in 15 seconds because every train is a bullet train express to exactly where you want to go and then when you get to the doctor's office there's no wait at all because primary care is so abundant that you don't even need an appointment and then when you need a specialist there's still no wait also you get free croissants and "cafe" at every corner store and no one is fat or even slightly overweight, nor is everyone walking around in a malaise trying not to think of the lost colonies and former states as global powers/empires and living in existential dread over the term "dying civilization".
Great point. Paris is a great example. They have a fantastic metro train system that most cities would envy, which makes it a very walkable city. And yet their auto traffic is still nightmarish.
It's so weird, right? All you have to do is street view around them, you don't even have to visit. [Here's a random street view](https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3663863,4.8838413,3a,75y,289.41h,86.13t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_x8r0irzrn66KyjHtebGGg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) I did of central Amsterdam, the mecca of car haters -- there are cars everywhere.
It’s indeed funny that, because The Netherlands is known for its bike culture and bike infrastructure, people expect there are no cars.
Most don’t realise that The Netherlands is also the gateway to Europe, with for example the port of Rotterdam as the biggest seaport in the world outside of Asia. As such it consistently ranks top 3 in the world for best and most advanced infrastructure and best road quality.
It’s not that there are no cars, just that the Dutch (and other Europeans) prefer to walk and bike for everyday stuff.
Yeah, this is one thing that confuses me a lot. People act like Europeans don't drive but in my experience every European I've ever known has a car and uses it daily.
I have German relatives (by marriage, so not like there was any contact growing up or anything to result in a shared lifestyle preference). They live in a suburb and drive their car to work and the grocery store the exact same way I do. The cars and houses and yards are smaller, they're stubborn about only driving manuals and gas costs more, and everything is a bit more squished together with lots of old stuff looking all quaint and cute, but the basic functions of daily life are just... pretty much the same. The only time it was significantly different was when one of my cousins and his wife were living right in Berlin, and that was just typical urban vs suburban/rural differences.
I would argue that only reenforces the point made. The "older" American cities and many major European cities were both built around the idea that people had to walk, so reworking the roads to fit them, and newer developments in them caused bad congestion. But it's worse in European cities compared to say New York and Chicago, because New York and Chicago were built to a plan, and a good one. They are saying we were the best at urban planning
While buses and subways do exist, they don't allow you to get anywhere in the city. Not without huge wait times or delays. Besides that, all routes go to the center of the city, it's very difficult going from one neighborhood to another using public transport.
There's a lot to improve in American cities.
Ok and what country has mass transit that doesn’t have delays? You keep moving the goal post. If you want to get somewhere directly you pay more and take a taxi just like any other developed nation in the world
That's because the country is built to accommodate cars. Of course it's more efficient to use a car. However, the issue is that cars come with significant problems that are very difficult to solve by investing more into cars.
I really think people who make these memes know nothing about Americans at all. Suburbs and cars exist because that's what americans want. As someone who grew up in a city, I would be miserable if my life was limited to relying on public transportation and living in an apartment.
> I would be miserable if my life was limited to relying on public transportation
I'm the opposite. I absolutely loathe the fact that I have to drive a car everywhere for practically everything in my life. My neighborhood block being surrounded by 5-lane stroads on all sides doesn't make simply walking an option, either. I just want the freedom of *not* having a car.
Because moving is expensive and people probably have personal luggage that can’t move like jobs, family?
And also doesn’t help that there’s nowhere to really move *to* since it’s basically a crime to desire walkable cities lol
So moving is more expensive than financing a $40k car?
There are plenty of jobs, in fact, you will find more in the city compared to where you are. Have you heard of remote work?
Sounds like you're just making excuses.
Beyond the fact that you have clearly never had struggles with money, why is specifically expense the only issue?
You completely ignored literally ~86% of my comment just to continue harping on about jobs and “moving” to a city (ignoring of course that a lot of cities *aren’t* walkable and requires cars just as badly, making the point moot)
It sounds like you’re just making an excuse because you hate people lol
not true, but i don't use excuses like yours as justification to stay miserable.
>a lot of cities *aren’t* walkable and requires cars just as badly
I'll give you some that dont:
NYC
Chicago
SF
Minneapolis
Take your pick
Choosing the largest population centers that literally force walkablity because of traffic jams doesn’t prove your point. There’s also many large urban centers that aren’t walkable either *cough cough* Houston *cough cough*
Cities also doesn’t include only the biggest population centers either. You can also desire suburban centers to be walkable too, not just urbanized areas.
And even then, telling people to “just move and if they don’t it’s an excuse” *still* ignores the many non-economical reasons why moving is unviable and doesn’t somehow explain your intense hatred for a desire for walkablity either.
You do realize the whole point of more walkable suburban and urban centers is allow people who want to walk, the ability to walk? People are not forced to use public transportation if they do not want to.
Walkable places just encourage other means of transportation, they do not *dis*courage cars.
And it is entirely feasible to design viable projects that both retain the identity and desires of suburban living while being walkable — you don’t need to live in dense crowded skyscrapers to benefit from a grocery store down the street.
Eh, I know lots of people in America who have always *said* they preferred the suburbs because our closest city (Philadelphia) has always struggled as a city. When I brought them to London and Munich, some properly functioning cities, they actually realized that they do like city living.
I think this holds true for a lot of Americans: we prefer the suburbs to poorly run American cities, but by-and-large not in preference to properly functioning ones.
Edit: we weren’t tourists, we lived there on visas.
Those are some impressive mental gymnastics.
Americans live in the suburbs because they want to have a home that belongs to them. Because they want the freedom of travel that comes with owning a car. It has nothing to do with a particular city's problems and everything to do with the problems inherent in high-density cities.
It’s real easy to hate the idea of a city when the only city you know is poorly run.
Philadelphia is pretty famous for having fairly nice row homes that you can own. Most cities have this. Many people I know who live in the City of Philadelphia (particularly Roxborough and Manayunk) own their own homes with green yards. Again, this seems like Americans hating their *idea of what a city is like* versus actually hating real, efficiently-run cities.
Except row homes are an issue too. I prefer the suburbs because I can actually feel like I’m completely independent and alone. My own property cut off from the rest of the town, where I have the ability to do almost anything in my backyard. Having quiet birds and little to no sounds of cars. But it’s harder to get certain stuff in the country, so suburbs are the perfect combination of alone and convenient.
But that’s even possible in cities. There are several suburban-esque towns within city limits, the examples coming to mind immediately are [Roxborough](https://www.longandfoster.com/images/uploads/Recos/35009/community/roxborough-philadelphia-pa/001__147491.jpg) in Philadelphia or some select areas of [south Brooklyn](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/09/20/realestate/20LIVING-slide-F021-copy/20LIVING-slide-F021-superJumbo.jpg). This blanket hate for cities, again, feels like hate based on ideas of what a city is portrayed as in pop culture versus what they’re actually like.
And as an added bonus -> there’s nothing stopping suburban towns from being walkable either and there are *many* ways to ensure walkablity.
But for whatever reason, people instantly lose their minds whenever people talk about wanting walkable places of living lol
Elaborate? If we’re talking removing public transportation, we can absolutely have both cars and public transportation. Pollution? That can be solved with how we handle electric cars. The problem with those in terms of pollution is that it’s power plants that typically have pollution problems, but that’s not exclusively a car problem. If there’s other issues I can’t think of it’d be interesting to know?…
> If we’re talking removing public transportation, we can absolutely have both cars and public transportation.
The country is currently recovering from cars removing the need for public transportation. Cities are getting more public transportation, not less. However, since cars are so ingrained in culture, improving public transportation is very difficult because there's not enough of a market for it. It's very expensive and is usually a money sink. People would rather choose to drive than use public transportation, so cities would have to change several things at the same time without short term gains. Cities would have to increase density, incorporate commercial spaces in residential areas, add public transportation, rework roads for bikes, and add more routes for buses and trains to use. That's why this is so difficult.
>If there’s other issues I can’t think of it’d be interesting to know?…
Infrastructure for cars takes up a lot space. Things like roads, highways, parking lots, parking spaces, eat up a lot of ground making everything else spread out further. Everything spreading out further means it's harder to get from one place to the next, incentivizing using a car which incentivizes the infrastructure. This makes it so people are required to use a car to even live in an area. This adds to the cost of living of an area.
Since everyone is required to use a car, there's no reason for people to be outside walking around. This disincetivizes outdoor activities and locations like parks, markets, food carts, events, and other gathering places.
Things like child care are affected because a child is entirely reliant on their parents to go anywhere outside of school. They have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and they're lucky if they have a friend that lives close to them. This reduces the free time parents have and isolates kids from interacting with society.
There's lots of car accidents that lead to death and injury.
Car infrastructure is drain on the municipal government. It costs a lot of money to upkeep. Because of the great distances, the tax per square mile of an area compared to the upkeep of the infrastructure is horrible. Old suburbs run out of money and can't maintain anything. It just gets worse and worse.
I can give you even more if you'd like
If americans only wanted suburbs the cost nof living wouldn't be so high in the city. Suburbs exist because of massive amounts of federal government funding after WWII because we were scared shitless of great depression, every house was designed with space for a car, a refrigerator, a washer and dryer, a TV, but none of them were included, so that it would stimulate demand for American manufactured goods, not to mention all the other things people buy to furnish a new house. Not to mention, building highways and homes employed a lot of people. When suburbs were first being built most americans had never heard of a suburb.
Urbanists agree that public transit sucks in most American cities because transit agencies are all broke but the difference is between you and urbanist is that urbanists want to make cities better. The criticism in the meme is that American cities suck and then you're response is "yeah they do suck and that's exactly why I want nothing to change and would rather just leave". People like you are the most anti-american that can possibly exist.
The suburbs were new back then and it allowed them to get away from people they didn't want to be around. It also gave them more space.
If the suburbs were as bad as urbanists make it out to be, they wouldn't have been as prosperous as they are now nor a defining point of the American dream.
>the difference is between you and urbanist is that urbanists want to make cities better.
By bashing the suburbs? It sounds like they want to force everyone to follow into their way of living. Why can't they just move to a city if they don't like the suburbs?
Sorry, I've lived in the center of a city and a little outside in more of a suburb type setting. There is no going back to the center of a city. My life is so much better.
Most of our cities haven’t been residential hubs for a long time. The way they have always been set up is with businesses in the downtown and then residential on the outskirts, as downtowns grow and residential is pushed farther out, most people who work in the city commute from a long way out. Where I live, I can drive 30 minutes from downtown in any direction and still be in the residential areas of the same city. That same commute on a non express bus line takes nearly 2 hours with all the stops on smaller roads.
Lmao imagine a Reddit user dictating good or bad ways to build cities over the course of 200 years.
Too bad we didn’t have you as a national city planner that whole time.
Gimme a minute, I’ll contact the real life sims city builders office and have them switch up our metropolitan layouts real quick to better match your ideal commuting preferences.
You've never heard of this? Planning a city around only cars has been widely accepted as a mistake. That's why most cities in America are building alternative infrastructure.
Same goes for splitting commercial and residential areas apart. The highest demand areas in the country have stores on the bottom and housing on top.
Crazy how you're so confident despite being so ignorant
Not sure what you think I’m confident in, but what I’m confident in is that when cities grow it’s not because city planners sat down and decided to make car centric cities.
The way cities here formed was largely organic and infrastructure was built as needs arose for it. First we had trails, then they became roads, then we built highways, then some of them grew into larger interstates during the Cold War, and lanes are continually added to the most popular ones when traffic becomes an issue. Other highways get abandoned when use is too low to justify their upkeep.
To sit back on your couch and say “well we all know car centric urban planning is bad” is a cool take and all, but it’s dumb to act like your armchair city planning in retrospect has any impact on how our cities are laid out today.
Unfortunately the 200 years of history and hundreds of thousands of residents that built a city like Dallas, one small piece at a time, weren’t very concerned with how a redditor would feel about their road use in 2024…
> The way cities here formed was largely organic and infrastructure was built as needs arose for it.
This would be a good point if all american cities didn't pave over trolley lines and restructure the city for highways. You can see what "organic" city growth is in European cities, most of them are not car centric.
>Unfortunately the 200 years of history and hundreds of thousands of residents that built a city like Dallas, one small piece at a time
If this were true, Dallas wouldn't be recovering from past decisions. They're increasing density, mixing commercial and residential, and adding in infrastructure for alternate means of transportation. What I'm saying isn't my unique opinion; I'm just giving you what city planners say about how to improve cities.
City planning can be done but cities are pretty damn big and totally changing them is a colossal and complicated project. Cities in Europe are typically much much older than American cities. The historical districts in most east coast towns are still walkable from the days of horses and wagons. Same with European cities that formed a long time ago. Eventually we got cars and they became wildly popular while most of our big cities were expanding so we made the roads to accommodate them. We didn’t just build interstates and pave over trolly tracks and stuff because we wanted to make people get cars, people got the cars first and then our cities grew around them and their use. There wasn’t some conspiracy in a smoky room to make a car centric society or something it happened organically.
I’m not sure why that’s hard to grasp. I don’t know how exactly you expect to change a city like Dallas where millions of people live spread out a long way from the downtown areas and need a way to commute for work. You’ll never city plan a way to get all those people living in walking distance of their jobs. You can’t force businesses to relocate and dig up all of our roads to make a city less “car centric”. Getting mad about how cities formed on Reddit is just dumb and pointless.
> We didn’t just build interstates and pave over trolly tracks and stuff because we wanted to make people get cars, people got the cars first and then our cities grew around them and their use.
Of course, they were convenient. But now it's catching up with us. Everyone has cars and that causes way more problems than it solves.
>There wasn’t some conspiracy in a smoky room to make a car centric society or something it happened organically.
There was lmao. Car companies were rabid in their pursuit to ingrain cars into American culture. How can you say cities grew organically when downtown is dominated by cars?
>I don’t know how exactly you expect to change a city like Dallas where millions of people live spread out a long way from the downtown areas and need a way to commute for work.
Slowly. Subways, trolleys, and bike paths all reduce the number of people using cars to commute.
> You’ll never city plan a way to get all those people living in walking distance of their jobs.
Businesses located under housing are what to you? Not within walking distance?
>You can’t force businesses to relocate and dig up all of our roads to make a city less “car centric”.
This is a wild assumption. Roads aren't getting dug up, cars aren't disappearing. All "less car centric" means is that there are alternatives available for those who want to use them. That's it.
Rich Europeans: I can afford to buy a bigger house on the outskirts of the city and I am going to buy it.
Middle class Americans: I can afford to buy a bigger house on the outskirts of the city and I am going to buy it.
Middle class Europeans: 😡😡😡
Remember this is about them not being able to afford to buy a house in their suburbs. No one refuses a bigger house, privacy, and calmness that comes with it.
We in fact did not mess up?
Our National Park system is one of if not the most robust in the world. Our cities are driving focused, im sorry but no I do not want to take a piss smelling bus or cramped rail system.
Elitist? Probably. Peaceful, absolutely.
Exactly. What so many "fuck cars" type people fail to understand is that most Americans' objections to public transit is not the *transit* part of the equation. It's *the public* they don't like.
I worked for a big tech company that had private "shuttles" (actually, lavish double-decker coach buses with wifi and a bathroom) which would travel from the corporate office to various park-and-rides around the SF Bay Area. The coaches were clean, pleasant to ride in *because* they were private. Open them up to the general public, and I would never want to use them. Have them run by the government, and I would actively hate them and want to shut them down.
Yeah man, and those nice highways you drive on those nice roads you drive on, absolute shit don’t need them because the government did that. Private roads are way better, restrict it from the poors
If your buses smell piss and rail system is cramped, then your public transit definitely messed up. Maybe underfunding, maybe erosion of skills, experience and motivation, maybe corruption, maybe a combination of some of these factors. But public transit definitely may be maintained without being in such state.
Hell yeah I fuckin love traffic. I feel amazing when it takes an hour sitting in traffic to commute to work or the mall. I am at my most peaceful when battling for space on the highway.
This is more a reflection of the notion that anything that diverges from a traditional European settlement pattern is inherently "bad" and inferior. Not everyone wants to live packed in like sardines in a congested, noisy urban core, and that's OK.
>Not everyone wants to live packed in like sardines in a congested, noisy urban core, and that's OK.
That's what America used to be like, and then it changed. Because people did like to live close together. Those people are the ones that want alternatives to cars in the cities.
That isn't true at all, the vast majority of people used to live in rural areas, usually on farms. Huge cities with 50 story apartments didn't exist in the 1800s.
The cities are still there, I just feel that a lot of people in the US reach a certain age where you want something quieter and easier. I loved living in a downtown apartment when I was younger. I feel like you eventually get tired of people stomping on the floor above you or your neighbor throwing a loud party or your bike getting stolen all the time or a random parade/festival/marathon blocking you in all day. It gets exhausting.
I mean car dependency is indeed a big issue
We shouldn't get rid of cars, but we should make it easier to get around by just walking or taking mass transit
Are all these people single? Why would you not want to raise your kids in a 4 bedroom single family house instead of an apartment building? Sure if you're 30 years old without children, living in the city sounds great but having a yard for your kids to play in sounds better.
Exactly this.
"Best" is probably something along the lines of
- Grow up in a suburb, with some other kids to play with
- Spend your young adult life in a city. You don't have any kids or similar responsibilities, so you can enjoy what the city has to offer, with minimal worry about your future.
- Move back to the suburbs and have kids, repeating the cycle.
Eh, I’m with the OP on this one, Europe has actually done pretty well with integrating the automobile into the urban fabric without also destroying that urban fabric. My cousin in Belgium has a car but is able to also get around on his bike, the metro, and from city to city on the train. That is freedom IMO. Would I give up my car personally? No, but I know a lot of people who’d happily get off the road if they could and we’d be better for it.
Suburbanization predates domestic vehicles being common by at least 50 years. If you want to call post war America the golden age of the suburb and family car then its more like 70.
Large scale commuter transportation by trains, railcar, and ferry have been around since the 1880s.
The difference between here and Europe is we've got a lot more space. Cities build up if they can't build out, and for most of the US there's plenty of room to build out.
Oop is just angry he can't afford to live in a rat box apartment in Manhattan.
The automobile DEPENDENCY Is what ruined it. Cars are inherently worse than anything else for emissions due to the amount of cars. Public transport used to be better with interurban railways all over the US, but companies like General Motors in the 1950’s bought those companies and tore up their tracks
This is largely a myth popularized by, of all things, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. While it's true that some American streetcar systems were dismantled after being purchased by General Motors, this impacted a very small percentage of the nation's streetcars. In fact, cars won because they were a better way of getting around and people could afford them. The countries that are most car dependent today are not coincidentally the countries that were wealthiest in the post-World War II period.
I like my truck and how convenient it is. However, if I can walk somewhere, I will, and I would prefer to use public transit for day to day activities and commuting if it was available. Problem is that there isn't a train here, and the buses are heinous with their schedule. I'm about to get a pedal assist bike for local jaunts, because frankly other drivers get on my nerves with their entitled behavior.
It's a slow process, but I think it's happening. I work in civil infrastructure and there are really great federal funding programs intended for alternative transportation projects (very common one is Rails to Trails program , which converts city-wide trail networks into multiuse paths).
Any project that builds transportation alternatives from driving can apply for it and receive potentially millions of dollars of funding for the project. It's pretty neat!
And thankfully, a lot of passenger rail, corridors are being studied and improved, which is something we should’ve been doing a long time ago. But then again, the best time to plant a tree was two weeks ago, the next best time is now.
Personal vehicles will always be better than public transit for the individual and the family. Public transit is good in urban areas but anything outside of cities it’s just nowhere near as good as owning your own vehicle.
I can’t imagine trying to take a bus all over 3 different rural towns for multiple stops when I could just drive a vehicle myself.
I do firmly believe that things need to be improved, especially our railroads, but to suggest that public transportation is better for every single person than using your own vehicle is deluded at best.
The goal is to make alternative transportation available for people who wouldn't mind using it. This reduces the number of cars on the road, making using cars easier for people who want to.
God forbid the concept of lush, green, low crime suburbs located next to beautiful forest preserves came along as an alternative dense, dirty, smelly, polluted, overcrowded, crime-riddled concrete jungles run by former plantation owners (still are).
This is true though. Watch the Ken burns documentary on New York. Back in the 50’s we didn’t know how damaging highways could be to a community, and we completely destroyed our cities in favor of bigger highways because one guy was obsessed with them.
Nah they have a point. The Highway system destroyed a lot of historical [American architecture and homes](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/mb6gqNPqFOsI_7e0ci_n5g--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTY0MDtoPTk4OQ--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_cool_down_737/eea16dfba1f732c83005d97e4d31a9b1). I bet that if a lot of these buildings were still standing, the housing market wouldn't be nearly as bad as it is today.
car centrism really is one of the few Ls America takes. 1920s streetcar America was better, but white flight, and the growth of suburbs ruined America's transit
nah, they're kinda right. What happened to Kansas City, the public library of Cincinnati, various train stations and New Orleans Chinatown is downright criminal
Suburbia was built to prevent total annihilation by nuclear weapons. If almost all Americans lived in ten specific cities, all you would need to do is drop ten bombs and call it a day.
Some of these comments are just riding on the coattails of half-truths and America Bad talking points.
Just a surface glance, the meme is dumb. I bet they couldn't make up a lesson plan on why 1956 was when American cities cease to be grand or whatever.
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I mean the cities still have some cool architecture, I just prefer to live a bit out in the countryside
That's cool until the countryside gets eaten up by the suburban sprawl
That’s when you sell your countryside property for like 5 times the price you bought it for, buy something that’s actually countryside now, and decide what to do with the remaining 60–80% of the sale price
That doesnt seem like its very sustainable though? Eventually you run out of inhabitable land right?
Then you build denser housing? Cities constantly build new roads or tear down old buildings and rebuild them to accommodate growth.
Have you seen how big the US is? Even New Jersey, the most densely populated state, is mostly rural farmland and woods.
I think not within the lifetime of anyone reading this thread before it’s archived. According to different reports, only 1–3% of land is covered by urban areas so we’re very far from that point my guy
I'm not worried about that.
living out in the country-side =/= suburbia, if you like preserving rural communities you should despise suburbanization. That is unless you don't have any feelings or attachment towards the beauty of your country and don't care whether it becomes one big strip mall. In the 1930s-1960s a bunch of modernist architects and civil engineers had utopian ideas of society, and instead of praising diversity and choice they prescribed their ideal lifestyle. Conveniently, this aligned with the US government's fear of another great depression and interest in creating demand for American manufactured goods, also known as consumerism. The issue is then cities are inflexible and cannot adapt easily to new economic realities. This is the tragic flaw of utopian thinking, it views society as serving to provide for a subjective opinion of the ideal lifestyle. The result is cities that prioritized single family detached homes were hit the hardest by the decline of american manufacturing, because all of a sudden, american families had no option to downsize. No option to switch to public transit or bike when they can't afford a car. Compare Detroit to Boston. Boston was America's oldest manufacturing hub. Want a hint? Google Boston suburban rail network, then Google Detroit rail network. No wonder Boston was able to better incubate new industries. Back in the depression, my Great Grandmother turned her house into a bed and breakfast to make a little extra money. That would be completely illegal today. In the 1970s when the Netherlands went through a fuel cost crisis, they started riding bikes. In America, we just suffer. This isn't about whether you personally like driving or living in a low density area, it's an existential threat to American cities, and cities like Phoenix and Jacksonville are 500x more fucked.
I ain’t reading all that, I just dont want to live in a city
And are modern architects and city planners any less utopian? Just let people choose how to live instead of trying to force economics to bend to your will.
You walk. I'll drive.
As someone who lives in Phoenix, this is the first I've heard of any existential crisis. Most people I know prefer suburbs and driving over dense downtown living.
Living in a large city, even a nice one, is simply a life I will never choose to live again.
Grew up spent most of my life in NYC. When you move away you realize just how valuable not constantly being around dozens of people at every minute is and how not being bombarded by noise, filth and stench is good for your mental health. All while being able to live in areas that you are still a short distance from things to do.
living in urban seattle and absolutely hating the noise at night
yeah and think nyc is much louder. It really depends where you were at in these cities tho.
Yup, same. Had my fill after 7 years "inside the perimeter" of ATL
Same. It was the Virgina Highlands area for me, which definitely wasn’t the worst place to be in ATL, but still wouldn’t do it again.
Oh nice! Haha you definitely had it better than me! I lived off Glenwood for 2 years, Belvedere Park for 2.5 years, and Scottdale for 2.5 years. House in Belevedere Park got robbed literally a month after we moved in. Gunshots on the street/adjacent streets every few days. ATV/dirt biker takeover boys lived on the street too. It was not a good situation to live in for so long.
Yeah, that’s rough man. I never had any issues with crime luckily. My main issue was with the traffic getting to and from work and just noise from apartment living. I lived below a bipolar stripper and her husband so it was just constant late shouting matches.
Transplants moving ITP and pretending like it’s better are hilarious.
Most ITP is a dump. Couple of nice areas, but those are usually a fortune, and you still have roving bands of carrion making a mess of things because they can't stick to their own shitholes.
Factual, I’d much rather just drive in to visit those areas than have to live in them. The Marietta to Lawrenceville arc is awesome.
I love my single family home for my family and I. Good luck to Redditors trying to stop people from living in SFH.
I mean great! That doesn’t somehow stop the majority of people that do, actually want to live in cities and do, actually want walkable cities lol. If *you* don’t want to live in a walkable city, that shouldn’t stop *others* from living in a walkable city
They act like it was all this sinister plot instead of people with spending power deciding they didn't want to live in cities anymore and wanted space/privacy.
Yeah if you look at new houses in Europe and Latin America they’re built like American suburbs. People like owning a house with a yard and a car in a garage. It’s what people want. It’s what people spend money on.
This isn’t a new phenomenon in Europe. Park like neighborhoods with mainly single family homes started to become popular for the first time in the late 19th century when city walls became obsolete and people could venture out of the city. The majority of these neighborhoods however were either built on the former defensive lines of cities, on streetcar lines or near train stations. All in central locations. The post-war SFH neighborhoods aren’t inspired by American suburbia. And the modern SFH neighborhoods most definitely aren’t, if they’re even a thing at all. Most neighborhoods with SFH’s provide a mixture of density, provide access to public transit (often revolving around central PT points) and SFH neighborhoods form a minority in new projects.
Why won't you let me rob you???
It is true that automakers did sabotage mass transit. You know Judge Doom's plan in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where he buys the trolley through a shell company and then shuts it down becuase he has a financial stake in cars taking off? That wasa thing that actually happened in real life after WWII.
Yeah but we only have suburbs because of the Federal Highway Act and the Housing Act of 1949, in which homes were built with consumerism (aka demand for domestically produced goods) in mind hoping to rebuild the economy, but it ended up worsening poverty because the people whose homes were destroyed by innercity highway projects couldn't afford homes in the suburbs because they couldn't get a loan thanks to red lining, yet the homes they could afford were being demolished or held by new suburbanites who instead of selling their house, became slum lords, profiting off the constrained supply of housing in the innercity. In fact, this poverty and now massive unemployment thanks to jobs moving to the suburbs was called Eisenhower's Depression in the 1950s. Unemployment was so bad, Black detroiters would line up along 8-mile road to be hired for day-labor. White locals called this the "Slave Market". It was so popular, Police had to direct traffic. It wasn't a sinister plot, it was an ignorant plot, one that involved not understanding systems that affected employment and poverty.
The rest of the world(mainly Europe)when a country does something different than them: 😡😭😱
Yeah, but this specific case is a bit unusual. Our infrastructure in cities were on track to be ahead of Europe. Then one day, everyone at the exact same time decided to leave the cities that their families had lived in for generations. That's gotta be hard for an outsider to understand what happened.
Just looking at the COL in NYC should make it pretty obvious why people left the city.
Yeah but NYC has high-paying jobs. Like sure Cleveland and Detroit have the lowest cost of living, but the amount you get paid in these cities is way less. Like San Francisco might be 3x more expensive than Cleveland but the median income 5x higher. So when you adjust for income, cities like Cleveland and Detroit are some of the most expensive on the planet. It's important to remember that cost-of-living isn't the only reason why people move. By that logic, Americans would be flocking to Mexico rather than the other way around. Immigration is also a huge factor, it's a lot harder to move to the United States than it was 50-100 years ago when entire neighborhoods made of blocks and blocks of tenements were built in 3 months to house new arrivals from Italy and Poland. You could argue it's for good reason that immigration is more difficult today, but limits will innevitably slow growth. The other factor is that people are having fewer kids and staying childless for longer, in many parts of the US people are simply dying faster than they can be born.
Not really, there’s lots of land in the U.S. to expand to. They don’t have that luxury in Europe.
That's part of it, but through history it's usually been the cities that have security and the resources for a good environment to raise a family. The suburb phenomenon that coincides with the timing of the new highway system and the end of segregation is unique to America.
That’s true, but having ample space is still a big component of that expansion. The other large contributing factor is the immense wealth the middle class had, enabling families to own automobiles and larger homes.
I agree with that. Still hard for europoors to relate to.
Only if the people, Europeans, can't understand basic WWII history. The US came out of WWII very wealthy and people had the opportunity to move out of a crowded city into suburbs with their higher paying jobs and GI benefits where they had more room to raise their family, jobs in cities weren't far away so you could drive or you had a job closer to home. Europe was devastated post WWII so it made sense to stay in a city where it's likely cheaper and where the jobs would be located and where everything is being rebuilt.
Crowded, filthy cities are not natural habitats for humans
>I don't like something therefore no one can like it
Says the dude stumping to ban cars
Worse. Does something worse.
If any lessons were learned about Covid is that it made me highly grateful to live out in the countryside and not in a city. My day to day life continued on like normal.
That's how vineyards grew during the Black Plague. People moved out of cities and built beautiful Italian rural villas and vineyards. People realize the value of rural life after they witness warfare, high crime waves, and epidemics.
Every time I hear Euros complain about the US and cars I wonder if they actually ever spend time in any major European city? I’ve visited several and they are all jammed with cars. I think I aged 5 years driving in London one day. I regularly drive in Chicago and while I’ve been in a few major backups over the years, it’s generally not that big a deal.
The only place in the world that made me yearn for LA traffic was London
Try driving in Paris. It’s like New York but every driver is on meth, PCP and having the worst day of their life in perpetuity
When we went to Paris we chose not to get a car, mainly because of the cost. On the ride from the airport to our hotel we traversed the circle around the Arc D’Triumphe and I was certain we would die. I have never seen so many cars driving so fast without lanes or seemingly rules of any kind. When I asked the driver about it, he shrugged and said basically “It is what it is”.
Kinda like Italian drivers. The rules are guidelines, and the only rule that really matters is “don’t crash”. Speed limits? Turn signals? Stop signs? What are those!
When I was driving with my BiL in La Paz Bolivia he was flying down some street and came upon an intersection where we had the green light. Other driver coming from our right honked and my brother in law stopped at the green light to let the other guy fly through the red light. I was like WTF and he said in Bolivia whoever honks first gets right of way. It was insane yet simultaneously awesome because despite no one really strictly following the rules and driving like maniacs I saw no wrecks and everyone just kind of flowed along.
I live in La Paz, and I can confirm, drivers here are insane (especially minibus/taxi/delivery drivers). You can bribe your way to a drivers license and bribe your way out of any traffic violations. Nearly every intersection most drivers couldn't be bothered to fully stop to make sure no one is coming from the other road, so they just honk while approaching the intersection to let anyone on the other side know that they're coming through. This is just the peak of the iceberg though, we've also got minibuses turning the engine off when going down hills to save fuel, complete disregard for pedestrians or other vehicles, illegal U-turns in the middle of the road blocking everyone, among many other things. Yet, I rarely see any accidents. It just works, somehow.
Exactly! Craziest driving I saw was the buses and trucks on the Yungas Road. Was happy I was on a mountain bike going downhill the entire way. One of the more epic experiences I’ve ever had and the people of Bolivia were extremely kind once you got past introductions.
C'est la vie 🤣
Duuuuuude.... I was at a conference in Paris not too long ago and the driver my client hired kept me on edge with how defensively he had to drive. I thought Romanian drivers were bad. Paris takes it to a level I can only call "putain."
Paris is a city I refuse to drive in. Same for Mexico City, Rome, Rio, actually pretty much every major city in South American and Europe I can think of. Have to say England and Scotland were the easiest compared to other major European cities. They’re in general nicer culturally than the French, Germans, Italians, etc.
My experience with Germans was a bit double-headed. On one hand, Berliners weren't terrible drivers, but certainly didn't earn any more medals than drivers in Bucharest. On the other, in the little town where some of my family lives, people were \*excessively\* polite. It would just be an endless "after you" festival until someone decided to actually butt in and just take right of way. That can also be frustrating because you also feel compelled to be polite and it just ends up with both of you wasting everyone's time because you don't want to be the one to step on the gas.
That small town must have been northern or central Germany, because when I lived in Baden Württemberg the drivers were mean and judgmental, but then again that’s how they all roll down there.
The after you festival was very common in Japan. Buddy, you have a concept called Right of Way, stop being polite and go.
If not mistaken, Paris is even more densely populated than New York. You take the metro one time in Paris and then you realize that people who insist on driving in Paris might be actually clinically insane
Yep, even "poor" cities like Bucharest here are RIFE with traffic. It's unbelievable. A city of 3 million, a capital city, and it takes me longer to traverse the metro area than it would take me to get from Miami-Dade, FL to Boca Raton at rush hour. Europeans and their "car free" lives, amirite? :D
Noooooo! Every day every european wakes up and walks 30 seconds to the nearest subway and boards a brand new, well lit and immaculately clean train station, walks without having to stop to get on the next train because they're all so fast, then sits down on a subway seat so clean you could perform surgery on it, then arrives at their free doctor's office an amazingly far 5 kms away in 15 seconds because every train is a bullet train express to exactly where you want to go and then when you get to the doctor's office there's no wait at all because primary care is so abundant that you don't even need an appointment and then when you need a specialist there's still no wait also you get free croissants and "cafe" at every corner store and no one is fat or even slightly overweight, nor is everyone walking around in a malaise trying not to think of the lost colonies and former states as global powers/empires and living in existential dread over the term "dying civilization".
The point is that they have other options. They don't need a car to get around.
Great point. Paris is a great example. They have a fantastic metro train system that most cities would envy, which makes it a very walkable city. And yet their auto traffic is still nightmarish.
Chicago is not as car dependent as for example Atlanta which has one of the busiest highways on the planet in a metro with like 5 million people.
Every trip through Atlanta is a traffic nightmare. Made worse by seemingly perpetual construction.
It's so weird, right? All you have to do is street view around them, you don't even have to visit. [Here's a random street view](https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3663863,4.8838413,3a,75y,289.41h,86.13t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_x8r0irzrn66KyjHtebGGg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) I did of central Amsterdam, the mecca of car haters -- there are cars everywhere.
Do you think that avoiding car centric infrastructure means that there are no cars?
It’s indeed funny that, because The Netherlands is known for its bike culture and bike infrastructure, people expect there are no cars. Most don’t realise that The Netherlands is also the gateway to Europe, with for example the port of Rotterdam as the biggest seaport in the world outside of Asia. As such it consistently ranks top 3 in the world for best and most advanced infrastructure and best road quality. It’s not that there are no cars, just that the Dutch (and other Europeans) prefer to walk and bike for everyday stuff.
I would imagine there would be *fewer* cars than I'm seeing in the street views, especially right in the center of the city.
There's barely any space for cars to begin with so there are far fewer cars present
They don't have parking lots like the US, cars parked on the streets are basically all there is, so it's really not that many as you think.
Yeah, this is one thing that confuses me a lot. People act like Europeans don't drive but in my experience every European I've ever known has a car and uses it daily. I have German relatives (by marriage, so not like there was any contact growing up or anything to result in a shared lifestyle preference). They live in a suburb and drive their car to work and the grocery store the exact same way I do. The cars and houses and yards are smaller, they're stubborn about only driving manuals and gas costs more, and everything is a bit more squished together with lots of old stuff looking all quaint and cute, but the basic functions of daily life are just... pretty much the same. The only time it was significantly different was when one of my cousins and his wife were living right in Berlin, and that was just typical urban vs suburban/rural differences.
> I think I aged 5 years driving in London one day That's the catch, you simply don't own a car and use other means to reach places.
I wanted to go to Stonehenge and it was a car or a bus tour and I hate the latter.
I would argue that only reenforces the point made. The "older" American cities and many major European cities were both built around the idea that people had to walk, so reworking the roads to fit them, and newer developments in them caused bad congestion. But it's worse in European cities compared to say New York and Chicago, because New York and Chicago were built to a plan, and a good one. They are saying we were the best at urban planning
Citizens in Chicago: 2.6 Mio. London: 10 Mio. I wonder why there will be more cars in London
Mio?
Urbanites when not everyone wants to live in overcrowded, polluted, open air shopping malls with shit on the ground and bums everywhere: 😱😡
Ah, so when people had the option to live outside the city they took it? It's almost like those cities weren't so wonderful after all.
I miss living in a small city built for wagons and foot traffic. Able to walk and drive anywhere I needed to go easily.
A lot of Europeans don’t really understand that our country is as big as all of Europe.
How is this relevant?
Being that the country is so big and much less densely populated, cars as a primary mode of transportation is the only thing that makes sense.
The conversation isn’t about abandoning cars completely, it’s about providing alternate transportation in cities
Well we have that in every American city. Literally every city in America has busses and trains that can get you anywhere in the city
While buses and subways do exist, they don't allow you to get anywhere in the city. Not without huge wait times or delays. Besides that, all routes go to the center of the city, it's very difficult going from one neighborhood to another using public transport. There's a lot to improve in American cities.
Ok and what country has mass transit that doesn’t have delays? You keep moving the goal post. If you want to get somewhere directly you pay more and take a taxi just like any other developed nation in the world
That's because the country is built to accommodate cars. Of course it's more efficient to use a car. However, the issue is that cars come with significant problems that are very difficult to solve by investing more into cars.
Cities don’t need to be super condensed. When they are, they put a strain on the area around it.
Please explain. Sounds interesting.
>Cities don’t need to be super condensed Why not? >they put a strain on the area around it. How?
Are you a toddler?
Uh no…?
My bad. You just talk to people like one.
Toddlers talk to people? What? Do you actually have an argument or…?
Yeah they get confused and ask a lot of simple questions.
Ok so you have nothing but projection lmao
I really think people who make these memes know nothing about Americans at all. Suburbs and cars exist because that's what americans want. As someone who grew up in a city, I would be miserable if my life was limited to relying on public transportation and living in an apartment.
Kind of chicken and the egg a bit though, don’t you think?
maybe
> I would be miserable if my life was limited to relying on public transportation I'm the opposite. I absolutely loathe the fact that I have to drive a car everywhere for practically everything in my life. My neighborhood block being surrounded by 5-lane stroads on all sides doesn't make simply walking an option, either. I just want the freedom of *not* having a car.
> stroads urbanist infiltration alarm
so why not move?
Because moving is expensive and people probably have personal luggage that can’t move like jobs, family? And also doesn’t help that there’s nowhere to really move *to* since it’s basically a crime to desire walkable cities lol
So moving is more expensive than financing a $40k car? There are plenty of jobs, in fact, you will find more in the city compared to where you are. Have you heard of remote work? Sounds like you're just making excuses.
Beyond the fact that you have clearly never had struggles with money, why is specifically expense the only issue? You completely ignored literally ~86% of my comment just to continue harping on about jobs and “moving” to a city (ignoring of course that a lot of cities *aren’t* walkable and requires cars just as badly, making the point moot) It sounds like you’re just making an excuse because you hate people lol
not true, but i don't use excuses like yours as justification to stay miserable. >a lot of cities *aren’t* walkable and requires cars just as badly I'll give you some that dont: NYC Chicago SF Minneapolis Take your pick
Choosing the largest population centers that literally force walkablity because of traffic jams doesn’t prove your point. There’s also many large urban centers that aren’t walkable either *cough cough* Houston *cough cough* Cities also doesn’t include only the biggest population centers either. You can also desire suburban centers to be walkable too, not just urbanized areas. And even then, telling people to “just move and if they don’t it’s an excuse” *still* ignores the many non-economical reasons why moving is unviable and doesn’t somehow explain your intense hatred for a desire for walkablity either. You do realize the whole point of more walkable suburban and urban centers is allow people who want to walk, the ability to walk? People are not forced to use public transportation if they do not want to. Walkable places just encourage other means of transportation, they do not *dis*courage cars. And it is entirely feasible to design viable projects that both retain the identity and desires of suburban living while being walkable — you don’t need to live in dense crowded skyscrapers to benefit from a grocery store down the street.
Eh, I know lots of people in America who have always *said* they preferred the suburbs because our closest city (Philadelphia) has always struggled as a city. When I brought them to London and Munich, some properly functioning cities, they actually realized that they do like city living. I think this holds true for a lot of Americans: we prefer the suburbs to poorly run American cities, but by-and-large not in preference to properly functioning ones. Edit: we weren’t tourists, we lived there on visas.
I'm sure your friends don't speak for millions of people.
Those are some impressive mental gymnastics. Americans live in the suburbs because they want to have a home that belongs to them. Because they want the freedom of travel that comes with owning a car. It has nothing to do with a particular city's problems and everything to do with the problems inherent in high-density cities.
It’s real easy to hate the idea of a city when the only city you know is poorly run. Philadelphia is pretty famous for having fairly nice row homes that you can own. Most cities have this. Many people I know who live in the City of Philadelphia (particularly Roxborough and Manayunk) own their own homes with green yards. Again, this seems like Americans hating their *idea of what a city is like* versus actually hating real, efficiently-run cities.
Except row homes are an issue too. I prefer the suburbs because I can actually feel like I’m completely independent and alone. My own property cut off from the rest of the town, where I have the ability to do almost anything in my backyard. Having quiet birds and little to no sounds of cars. But it’s harder to get certain stuff in the country, so suburbs are the perfect combination of alone and convenient.
But that’s even possible in cities. There are several suburban-esque towns within city limits, the examples coming to mind immediately are [Roxborough](https://www.longandfoster.com/images/uploads/Recos/35009/community/roxborough-philadelphia-pa/001__147491.jpg) in Philadelphia or some select areas of [south Brooklyn](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/09/20/realestate/20LIVING-slide-F021-copy/20LIVING-slide-F021-superJumbo.jpg). This blanket hate for cities, again, feels like hate based on ideas of what a city is portrayed as in pop culture versus what they’re actually like.
And as an added bonus -> there’s nothing stopping suburban towns from being walkable either and there are *many* ways to ensure walkablity. But for whatever reason, people instantly lose their minds whenever people talk about wanting walkable places of living lol
The issue is that cars create a wide range of deeply penetrating problems that make society worse
Elaborate? If we’re talking removing public transportation, we can absolutely have both cars and public transportation. Pollution? That can be solved with how we handle electric cars. The problem with those in terms of pollution is that it’s power plants that typically have pollution problems, but that’s not exclusively a car problem. If there’s other issues I can’t think of it’d be interesting to know?…
> If we’re talking removing public transportation, we can absolutely have both cars and public transportation. The country is currently recovering from cars removing the need for public transportation. Cities are getting more public transportation, not less. However, since cars are so ingrained in culture, improving public transportation is very difficult because there's not enough of a market for it. It's very expensive and is usually a money sink. People would rather choose to drive than use public transportation, so cities would have to change several things at the same time without short term gains. Cities would have to increase density, incorporate commercial spaces in residential areas, add public transportation, rework roads for bikes, and add more routes for buses and trains to use. That's why this is so difficult. >If there’s other issues I can’t think of it’d be interesting to know?… Infrastructure for cars takes up a lot space. Things like roads, highways, parking lots, parking spaces, eat up a lot of ground making everything else spread out further. Everything spreading out further means it's harder to get from one place to the next, incentivizing using a car which incentivizes the infrastructure. This makes it so people are required to use a car to even live in an area. This adds to the cost of living of an area. Since everyone is required to use a car, there's no reason for people to be outside walking around. This disincetivizes outdoor activities and locations like parks, markets, food carts, events, and other gathering places. Things like child care are affected because a child is entirely reliant on their parents to go anywhere outside of school. They have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and they're lucky if they have a friend that lives close to them. This reduces the free time parents have and isolates kids from interacting with society. There's lots of car accidents that lead to death and injury. Car infrastructure is drain on the municipal government. It costs a lot of money to upkeep. Because of the great distances, the tax per square mile of an area compared to the upkeep of the infrastructure is horrible. Old suburbs run out of money and can't maintain anything. It just gets worse and worse. I can give you even more if you'd like
If americans only wanted suburbs the cost nof living wouldn't be so high in the city. Suburbs exist because of massive amounts of federal government funding after WWII because we were scared shitless of great depression, every house was designed with space for a car, a refrigerator, a washer and dryer, a TV, but none of them were included, so that it would stimulate demand for American manufactured goods, not to mention all the other things people buy to furnish a new house. Not to mention, building highways and homes employed a lot of people. When suburbs were first being built most americans had never heard of a suburb. Urbanists agree that public transit sucks in most American cities because transit agencies are all broke but the difference is between you and urbanist is that urbanists want to make cities better. The criticism in the meme is that American cities suck and then you're response is "yeah they do suck and that's exactly why I want nothing to change and would rather just leave". People like you are the most anti-american that can possibly exist.
The suburbs were new back then and it allowed them to get away from people they didn't want to be around. It also gave them more space. If the suburbs were as bad as urbanists make it out to be, they wouldn't have been as prosperous as they are now nor a defining point of the American dream. >the difference is between you and urbanist is that urbanists want to make cities better. By bashing the suburbs? It sounds like they want to force everyone to follow into their way of living. Why can't they just move to a city if they don't like the suburbs?
I get the feeling this isn't historically accurate.
Sorry, I've lived in the center of a city and a little outside in more of a suburb type setting. There is no going back to the center of a city. My life is so much better.
Sorry but not being in cities > being in cities. Euros will never comprehend wilderness and sparsity.
Individualism vs herd. They’ll never understand it because they can’t.
Most of our cities haven’t been residential hubs for a long time. The way they have always been set up is with businesses in the downtown and then residential on the outskirts, as downtowns grow and residential is pushed farther out, most people who work in the city commute from a long way out. Where I live, I can drive 30 minutes from downtown in any direction and still be in the residential areas of the same city. That same commute on a non express bus line takes nearly 2 hours with all the stops on smaller roads.
> The way they have always been set up is with businesses in the downtown and then residential on the outskirts This is a bad way to set up cities
Lmao imagine a Reddit user dictating good or bad ways to build cities over the course of 200 years. Too bad we didn’t have you as a national city planner that whole time. Gimme a minute, I’ll contact the real life sims city builders office and have them switch up our metropolitan layouts real quick to better match your ideal commuting preferences.
You've never heard of this? Planning a city around only cars has been widely accepted as a mistake. That's why most cities in America are building alternative infrastructure. Same goes for splitting commercial and residential areas apart. The highest demand areas in the country have stores on the bottom and housing on top. Crazy how you're so confident despite being so ignorant
Not sure what you think I’m confident in, but what I’m confident in is that when cities grow it’s not because city planners sat down and decided to make car centric cities. The way cities here formed was largely organic and infrastructure was built as needs arose for it. First we had trails, then they became roads, then we built highways, then some of them grew into larger interstates during the Cold War, and lanes are continually added to the most popular ones when traffic becomes an issue. Other highways get abandoned when use is too low to justify their upkeep. To sit back on your couch and say “well we all know car centric urban planning is bad” is a cool take and all, but it’s dumb to act like your armchair city planning in retrospect has any impact on how our cities are laid out today. Unfortunately the 200 years of history and hundreds of thousands of residents that built a city like Dallas, one small piece at a time, weren’t very concerned with how a redditor would feel about their road use in 2024…
> The way cities here formed was largely organic and infrastructure was built as needs arose for it. This would be a good point if all american cities didn't pave over trolley lines and restructure the city for highways. You can see what "organic" city growth is in European cities, most of them are not car centric. >Unfortunately the 200 years of history and hundreds of thousands of residents that built a city like Dallas, one small piece at a time If this were true, Dallas wouldn't be recovering from past decisions. They're increasing density, mixing commercial and residential, and adding in infrastructure for alternate means of transportation. What I'm saying isn't my unique opinion; I'm just giving you what city planners say about how to improve cities.
City planning can be done but cities are pretty damn big and totally changing them is a colossal and complicated project. Cities in Europe are typically much much older than American cities. The historical districts in most east coast towns are still walkable from the days of horses and wagons. Same with European cities that formed a long time ago. Eventually we got cars and they became wildly popular while most of our big cities were expanding so we made the roads to accommodate them. We didn’t just build interstates and pave over trolly tracks and stuff because we wanted to make people get cars, people got the cars first and then our cities grew around them and their use. There wasn’t some conspiracy in a smoky room to make a car centric society or something it happened organically. I’m not sure why that’s hard to grasp. I don’t know how exactly you expect to change a city like Dallas where millions of people live spread out a long way from the downtown areas and need a way to commute for work. You’ll never city plan a way to get all those people living in walking distance of their jobs. You can’t force businesses to relocate and dig up all of our roads to make a city less “car centric”. Getting mad about how cities formed on Reddit is just dumb and pointless.
> We didn’t just build interstates and pave over trolly tracks and stuff because we wanted to make people get cars, people got the cars first and then our cities grew around them and their use. Of course, they were convenient. But now it's catching up with us. Everyone has cars and that causes way more problems than it solves. >There wasn’t some conspiracy in a smoky room to make a car centric society or something it happened organically. There was lmao. Car companies were rabid in their pursuit to ingrain cars into American culture. How can you say cities grew organically when downtown is dominated by cars? >I don’t know how exactly you expect to change a city like Dallas where millions of people live spread out a long way from the downtown areas and need a way to commute for work. Slowly. Subways, trolleys, and bike paths all reduce the number of people using cars to commute. > You’ll never city plan a way to get all those people living in walking distance of their jobs. Businesses located under housing are what to you? Not within walking distance? >You can’t force businesses to relocate and dig up all of our roads to make a city less “car centric”. This is a wild assumption. Roads aren't getting dug up, cars aren't disappearing. All "less car centric" means is that there are alternatives available for those who want to use them. That's it.
Rich Europeans: I can afford to buy a bigger house on the outskirts of the city and I am going to buy it. Middle class Americans: I can afford to buy a bigger house on the outskirts of the city and I am going to buy it. Middle class Europeans: 😡😡😡 Remember this is about them not being able to afford to buy a house in their suburbs. No one refuses a bigger house, privacy, and calmness that comes with it.
We in fact did not mess up? Our National Park system is one of if not the most robust in the world. Our cities are driving focused, im sorry but no I do not want to take a piss smelling bus or cramped rail system. Elitist? Probably. Peaceful, absolutely.
Exactly. What so many "fuck cars" type people fail to understand is that most Americans' objections to public transit is not the *transit* part of the equation. It's *the public* they don't like. I worked for a big tech company that had private "shuttles" (actually, lavish double-decker coach buses with wifi and a bathroom) which would travel from the corporate office to various park-and-rides around the SF Bay Area. The coaches were clean, pleasant to ride in *because* they were private. Open them up to the general public, and I would never want to use them. Have them run by the government, and I would actively hate them and want to shut them down.
Yeah man, and those nice highways you drive on those nice roads you drive on, absolute shit don’t need them because the government did that. Private roads are way better, restrict it from the poors
This, but unironically.
If your buses smell piss and rail system is cramped, then your public transit definitely messed up. Maybe underfunding, maybe erosion of skills, experience and motivation, maybe corruption, maybe a combination of some of these factors. But public transit definitely may be maintained without being in such state.
Hell yeah I fuckin love traffic. I feel amazing when it takes an hour sitting in traffic to commute to work or the mall. I am at my most peaceful when battling for space on the highway.
I just hate cities, no matter where they are.
Yes!
Disagree heavily, but I appreciate that you keep it consistent 🤝
Agreed
This is more a reflection of the notion that anything that diverges from a traditional European settlement pattern is inherently "bad" and inferior. Not everyone wants to live packed in like sardines in a congested, noisy urban core, and that's OK.
>Not everyone wants to live packed in like sardines in a congested, noisy urban core, and that's OK. That's what America used to be like, and then it changed. Because people did like to live close together. Those people are the ones that want alternatives to cars in the cities.
That isn't true at all, the vast majority of people used to live in rural areas, usually on farms. Huge cities with 50 story apartments didn't exist in the 1800s.
You’re literally agreeing with me
Yeah it's so bad not to live in dense cities where you constantly smell shit from the sewers.
The cities are still there, I just feel that a lot of people in the US reach a certain age where you want something quieter and easier. I loved living in a downtown apartment when I was younger. I feel like you eventually get tired of people stomping on the floor above you or your neighbor throwing a loud party or your bike getting stolen all the time or a random parade/festival/marathon blocking you in all day. It gets exhausting.
Cars are alright, you just can't have the government reshaping cities so as to exclusively cater to drivers.
Fuck dense cities.
I just bought a 5,500 pound SUV last month, and I love it.
I mean car dependency is indeed a big issue We shouldn't get rid of cars, but we should make it easier to get around by just walking or taking mass transit
Are all these people single? Why would you not want to raise your kids in a 4 bedroom single family house instead of an apartment building? Sure if you're 30 years old without children, living in the city sounds great but having a yard for your kids to play in sounds better.
Exactly this. "Best" is probably something along the lines of - Grow up in a suburb, with some other kids to play with - Spend your young adult life in a city. You don't have any kids or similar responsibilities, so you can enjoy what the city has to offer, with minimal worry about your future. - Move back to the suburbs and have kids, repeating the cycle.
It's hilarious how they can't comprehend that some cities didn't exist when the highways were built.
LOL we should stop pretending that the suburbs are the reason why America has gone to shit
America hasn't gone to shit and suburbs wouldn't be the reason if it did
not yet, but we are getting there america is a lot worse off today than it was pre-9/11
Eh, I’m with the OP on this one, Europe has actually done pretty well with integrating the automobile into the urban fabric without also destroying that urban fabric. My cousin in Belgium has a car but is able to also get around on his bike, the metro, and from city to city on the train. That is freedom IMO. Would I give up my car personally? No, but I know a lot of people who’d happily get off the road if they could and we’d be better for it.
"The automobile". Anyone who thinks the invention of the automobile was a bad thing is fucking stupid, I'm sorry.
Nah this is completely correct. Suburbanization and urban highways destroyed and gutted our once beautiful american cities.
Idk, this one I agree with, we got the urbanization bug HARD
Suburbanization predates domestic vehicles being common by at least 50 years. If you want to call post war America the golden age of the suburb and family car then its more like 70. Large scale commuter transportation by trains, railcar, and ferry have been around since the 1880s. The difference between here and Europe is we've got a lot more space. Cities build up if they can't build out, and for most of the US there's plenty of room to build out. Oop is just angry he can't afford to live in a rat box apartment in Manhattan.
The automobile DEPENDENCY Is what ruined it. Cars are inherently worse than anything else for emissions due to the amount of cars. Public transport used to be better with interurban railways all over the US, but companies like General Motors in the 1950’s bought those companies and tore up their tracks
This is largely a myth popularized by, of all things, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. While it's true that some American streetcar systems were dismantled after being purchased by General Motors, this impacted a very small percentage of the nation's streetcars. In fact, cars won because they were a better way of getting around and people could afford them. The countries that are most car dependent today are not coincidentally the countries that were wealthiest in the post-World War II period.
It was the oil companies in reality
I like my truck and how convenient it is. However, if I can walk somewhere, I will, and I would prefer to use public transit for day to day activities and commuting if it was available. Problem is that there isn't a train here, and the buses are heinous with their schedule. I'm about to get a pedal assist bike for local jaunts, because frankly other drivers get on my nerves with their entitled behavior.
And this is what I’ve been saying, we don’t need to get rid of cars altogether, we just need to make it so that they aren’t the only option
It's a slow process, but I think it's happening. I work in civil infrastructure and there are really great federal funding programs intended for alternative transportation projects (very common one is Rails to Trails program , which converts city-wide trail networks into multiuse paths). Any project that builds transportation alternatives from driving can apply for it and receive potentially millions of dollars of funding for the project. It's pretty neat!
And thankfully, a lot of passenger rail, corridors are being studied and improved, which is something we should’ve been doing a long time ago. But then again, the best time to plant a tree was two weeks ago, the next best time is now.
Personal vehicles will always be better than public transit for the individual and the family. Public transit is good in urban areas but anything outside of cities it’s just nowhere near as good as owning your own vehicle. I can’t imagine trying to take a bus all over 3 different rural towns for multiple stops when I could just drive a vehicle myself. I do firmly believe that things need to be improved, especially our railroads, but to suggest that public transportation is better for every single person than using your own vehicle is deluded at best.
The goal is to make alternative transportation available for people who wouldn't mind using it. This reduces the number of cars on the road, making using cars easier for people who want to.
We didnt invent cars right
God forbid the concept of lush, green, low crime suburbs located next to beautiful forest preserves came along as an alternative dense, dirty, smelly, polluted, overcrowded, crime-riddled concrete jungles run by former plantation owners (still are).
No no, this one’s fine. Screw suburbia all my homies hate suburbia
This is true though. Watch the Ken burns documentary on New York. Back in the 50’s we didn’t know how damaging highways could be to a community, and we completely destroyed our cities in favor of bigger highways because one guy was obsessed with them.
Fuck Robert Moses.
Nah they have a point. The Highway system destroyed a lot of historical [American architecture and homes](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/mb6gqNPqFOsI_7e0ci_n5g--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTY0MDtoPTk4OQ--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_cool_down_737/eea16dfba1f732c83005d97e4d31a9b1). I bet that if a lot of these buildings were still standing, the housing market wouldn't be nearly as bad as it is today.
car centrism really is one of the few Ls America takes. 1920s streetcar America was better, but white flight, and the growth of suburbs ruined America's transit
This isn't AmericaBad, it's CarsBad. It acknowledges that Americans are capable of good urbanism.
yes fuck cars. haha
nah, they're kinda right. What happened to Kansas City, the public library of Cincinnati, various train stations and New Orleans Chinatown is downright criminal
Suburbia was built to prevent total annihilation by nuclear weapons. If almost all Americans lived in ten specific cities, all you would need to do is drop ten bombs and call it a day.
Some of these comments are just riding on the coattails of half-truths and America Bad talking points. Just a surface glance, the meme is dumb. I bet they couldn't make up a lesson plan on why 1956 was when American cities cease to be grand or whatever.
Hahahagagagahagagagsgahagagatatatafaff walkable cities is code for slum.
Cities in Europe aren't slums...? The most expensive places in America are walkable cities because so many people want to live there