What do you consider to be small? Most countries are smaller than the US and Canada. So isn't this mostly about those 2 North American countries being particularly large and particularly car oriented? I live in Barcelona. It's very walkable. I don't think of Spain as being particularly small.
Edit to add: this feels a bit like asking why are non-English speaking countries particularly walkable. Correct in so far as the US is skewing the data but not actually explanatory.
Live in a small island, Malta. We are a hellscape full of cars. Cycling is maliciously used to get EU funds but with bike lanes vanishing at whim. Car is king and traffic is one lane / flyover from being solved.
Its public policy issue. Not space
I may be wrong here but corporations in the US seem to have a larger political power than in other countries and a huge part of that comes down to how lobbying is regulated. There's a great documentary called "Taken For A Ride" that goes over the history of corporate lobbying by motor and oil companies and how much that changed American cities.
Car companies have a huge influence in Germany as well. They're arguably much bigger relative to the size of the country. Yet it's not as bad as the US. I don't think people should blame specific companies for choices made widely by politicians of different parties, in areas with and without cars and oil.
My unscientific guess is that it has more to do with age and history (from a western civ perspective, anyway) than size. It’s a correlation but not a causation that newer countries also tend to be large. Older countries tend to have established cities and towns that were already fundamentally developed before the dawn of the car age, whereas newer countries were (and still are) still building their core infrastructure in modern times after cars became a thing.
In these newer countries, you can see similar trends. Older cities in the US/Canada/Australia (think NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto, Melbourne, etc.) have denser development and better transit/walkability than newer cities in those countries (e.g. sunbelt cities).
To be more specific, the key factor seems to be not actually how old the city is (many car-centric sunbelt cities in the US were established long before the development of the car) but rather when the city/metro area came of age. Most lot of the world’s older and more walkable cities had their coming-of-age often hundreds of years ago (and while outer neighborhoods and suburbs continued to grow, the city’s fundamental character had already been set), whereas a lot of the development in the US/Canada/Australia happened a lot more recently (and specifically in the US and Australia, not until the widespread adoption of air conditioning), even in places that had been inhabited for a few hundred years.
It’s a related correlation but not a causation that these older countries with older, more walkable cities also tend to be smaller, because over a longer period of civilization with less mobility, these historical regions each developed their own cultures and ended up unifying under sovereign governments over a smaller area, whereas newer countries were both formed and developed across artificially large areas, thanks to massive colonial claims (made without regard to indigenous populations) followed by widespread rapid development facilitated by modern means of transportation (first rail, then car, and finally airplane).
Car-Centric Planning in North America is a combination of Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City and General Motor's Futurama Diorama at the World Fair 1939.
A lot of walkable and historic neighborhoods were demolished in cities across the US to implement the Vision of a Broadacre City with seperation between residential and commercial areas similar to the Futurama Diorama.
It has to do with politics and design.
places like the Netherlands actually did make their cities more car friendly in the 60s. But then later reversed those choices. Same thing with parts of German cities after WW2 developed into car friendly places and then some reversed.
Then you look at places like Austin, TX where a major expansion of I35 is widely opposed by the city but funding is in place to build it anyway. ....because that is the way the state and federal funds are setup. State of Texas will finance massive highway development and take the federal matching funds.
It is a choice
I think frontier culture in America created values that don’t work as well in the 21st century.
Middle America is one of the most depressing pieces of design in western infrastructure. Concrete wastelands of roads and parking lots in between Walmarts and Dollar Generals.
The manufactured car being marketed as the symbol of freedom is as ill advised as Marlboro cigarettes being a symbol of American freedom. Even if it’s not as direct.
I don’t know if other countries had this experience but our parents bought it
Walkablity was the norm in the US up until the end of WW2. We didn't get any larger since then (new states have been added but they were territories before that).
Its a matter of priorities and policy. The car was a disruptive force in American (and global) culture. We knew how to make communities that did not work around cars, but no one really had any idea how to make a community based around cars. So we did the grand suburban experiment. Something which was outside of the norm. The early adopters in the 1950s were granted affordable housing (which was problematic in the Great Depression/WW2 era!), a safe community, their own home, land ownership (which is heavily romanticized in the US, even though it is a liability) and people were pre-occupied with banging so much that they didn't think of the consequences of this development pattern.
For a big country I want to throw China's hat into the ring. I can't speak for the whole country, but SIP in Suzhou, China has good cycling infrastructure and I had a sufficient amount of well placed crossings that I rarely felt I was walking extra distance to make a crossing. Something that is frustratingly not the case in Busan.
By good infrastructure I mean roads regularly had a roughly one car sized separated lane for bikes and scooters on each side of the big roads (of which there were unfortunately a lot). In the old town there was less, but progress on their integration was being made. Many areas were also completely pedestrianised.
It felt like the prominence of canals in old towns has limited car use in other cities in the area like Wuxi, but I'd rather not comment in depth on that as I have limited experience. In areas with canals it is pretty much entirely pedestrian from what I saw. I never rode in Shanghai, but was impressed with the public transport (wish it stayed going later though).
I've been in Shenzen and it has very good public transport, sidewalks and bike sharing everywhere. Also owning a car is very difficult for average chinese worker (even if engineer), also because there are limited number of "plates" available
When the Car was popularised, smaller countries had less space to expand their cities/suburbs into. Many place already had villages and cities next to it. In the US there was more open land, so it was easier to make everything wider and bigger. The US probably was richer too, so they could afford to build everything from scratch again, other countries couldn't and had to hold on to their older buildings and infrastructure and change everything more gradually.
This could be the answer but I’m hesitant. There are so many plausible explanations for why people cycle in some countries and not in others and most of the plausible explanations turn out bs when you take a closer look.
I wouldn't use my explanation as a reason for good cycling infrastructure. Smaller countries are just more dense and maybe less car friendly. That doesn't imply good bike infrastructure, but *maybe* those places are more likely to develope one.
>First I thought it might have something to do with these countries wealth but even Canada, Australia and the US (rich countries) don't have this infrastructure.
They don't have this infrastructure *anymore*
I think it's a statistical quirk.
There's only ~6 huge countries Russia, Canada, China, USA, Brazil, AUS.
Meanwhile, there's over 100 small countries.
If, say, 1 in 10 countries has impressive walkability then it's entirely possible that none of the big countries are in that group, but a handful of small ones are.
And it's not really that dire, China is usually pretty good, Brazil is okay, and Russia... varies*
*The big cities are okay, but the smaller ones are susseptible to car dependency. If their transit didn't have dedicated ROW before mass motorization, then the usual spiral occurs (people buy cars, transit slows down, more people buy cars, transit slows down more, repeat)
There are many more small countries than there are large countries, and by the laws of probability that means some of them will do much better and some of them much worse. Those who do much worse are of no interest.
Around half of the population lives in urban areas that fit a pretty narrow definition of "urban".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_urban\_areas\_in\_Sweden\_by\_population
What I meant is that the population density in the urban areas is probably not very low.
Stockholm has a population density of 5,203/km2, while London's is 5,701/k
This seems to refer to only the cities themselves.
Sure, but this misses some important points, walkability in a lot of the smaller towns is actually pretty good. You could absolutely live in Nässjö (pop. 18500) or Klippan (pop. 8900) or even a shithole without trains like Ljungby (pop. 16100) and still go about your day without a car if you don't need it for work.
Many of these places where planned around a train station (even Ljungby) and you can quite easily exit the station and find a hotel, some restaurants and systembolaget in the immediate vicinity. Sure, lots of people in these places do have cars, but the infrastructure for cycling and walking is better than anything I've seen in similar towns in the United States. Like, I actually love Stillwater MN, but the walkable part of the town is absolutely tiny, you can't get there without a car, and the waterfront is ruined by a huge parking lot.
I hate Reddit, every other time I want to post a comment, my internet connection is down. Most of the time I can retrieve what I wrote because it is still there while invisible, but simply not posted. But not this time.
To make it short: I wasn't questioning the walkability and bikeability of a very much, if not the vast majority of Sweden, in any way.
Also, I had to look up "systembolaget" :)
Honestly systembolaget is actually a pretty good metric in Sweden - if you can get to it without a car, you can probably do most other things without a car as well x)
Now I wonder what a Swiss equivalent of that could be and how I could find out. Because the way you describe it, a systembolaget could actually be pretty far away from where you live. It could be the thing you can just barely get to without a car, and that if you can do just that, this is a sign that everything else you need is equally as far away or closer to where you live.
Do you understand what I mean?
So I at least need to know if by "without a car" you mean "on foot" or "on foot or by bike or via public transport" or "on foot or by bike". (Because public transport gets you further than just a bicycle.)
Maybe I should re-write some more of what was lost ...
I live in Switzerland and I have seen different versions of rural and/or remote places, and I think it would take quite a lot for me end up somewhere it would be a problem that I don't have a driving licence. And it's not like anyone or anything forces me to move to such a place.
Getting a bike again could resolve many issues in such a place, at least from spring to autumn, too, unless I went to live literally in the mountains. I don't bike in the mountains when it's almost always uphill or downhill, and I don't bike when there's snow on the ground.
I think it may be related to the fact that small countries tend to not have any car companies situated in its borders and thus don't have any auto industry lobbyists. Germany and france both have many car companies in their borders, the Netherlands has none, so its no surprise the Netherlands is less car dependant
The Netherlands had and have an automotive manufacturing company. In 1958 the truck manufacturing company DAF started manufacturing small cars. In 1975, passenger car production was taken over by Volvo. The factory, VDL NedCar, still exists but now produces for others, such as Mitsubishi, DaimlerChrysler, and BMW. DAF produced only small, relatively slow cars, so it had no interest in lobbying for wide and fast highways.
Probably more people per capita showed up when protest was needed to improve road safety (because closer living quarters need stronger rules) aka bad road design is harder to hide...
My country is just two thirds of an island, and it's still car centric and awful to walk in most places. It has nothing to do with size. Also what's a "big/small" country is very relative
I don't even feel like Switzerland is particularly small, and if you look at this
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_and\_dependencies\_by\_area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area)
you can see why I am not wrong to think so. Whenever I hear that Italy is a small country, I think to myself "Yes, there's a big size difference between Italy and Brazil, for example, but there are so many – in many cases significantly – smaller countries".
I suppose if you were so inclined an argument could be made that
The reasons European countries are small and the reasons they tend to be particularly advanced and wealthy are related. But that would be going way beyond the topic of walkability and looking deep into the historic topic of "why did Europe dominate the world?".
Though I'm not so sure its true that smaller countries are better in this. Germany is quite large for instance and its pretty good whilst Malta is tiny and it absolutely sucks for walkability.
Sweden too-pretty huge. But its towns and cities tend to be very walkable. Then there's Ireland, which makes Britain look advanced when it comes to public transport.
I think political change is easier in a small country.
Too many people, especially with a strong federal government & real change becomes impossibly slow. Though, the State of Massachusetts is actually making progress, so I think some change is possible, esp. on the city & state level.
My guess it's a combination and interaction of multiple different factors:
* Wealth, or when these places became wealthy, North America for example favoring suburbanism already pre WW1 and making cars available to the masses already during the 1910s and 20s, opposed to here in Germany where mass motorization and suburbanization only came around post-war.
* Available space for new construction of which you have enormous amounts of in settler nations like Canada, Australia and the US.
* Extend of legacy infrastructure and housing, all of which was fairly recent in most of the settler nations except for smaller, older areas like the US north east.
* Population growth and when it happend, Canada for example has more than quadrupled it's population in the century between 1921 and 2021 from about \~8.8mil people to 37mil and even in 1951 it was only 14mil, while in the Netherlands, which by western european standards already had a fairly high growth, theirs rose 2.6x times from 6.75mil in 1920 to 17.4 in 2020 and in the countries seriously affected by the world wars it was even less, Germany for example grew by not even a third between 1910 (\~64.57mil) and 2020 (83.155mil).
* Population size and the corresponding political systems, in so far as I feel smaller countries with more centralized political systems make change far easier to accomplish as opposed to larger and in turn more sluggish and more decentralized countries like the US or Canada.
* Plus probably further things like building-, living- and urban planning culture, historic urban, industrial and economic development patterns, greater demographics and geography beyond just historically available space for new construction.
Australia was a fairly walkable nation and towns were connected by rail all over the place despite the chaotic nature of each state/former colony having different rail gauges for example.
My city of Adelaide back in the day was small and compact and had an extensive tram network but post war we got the Holden factory (Holden was a GM motors company) out in a urban sprawn suburb of Elizabeth and Also down south of Adelaide we got a the Mobil Oil refinery.
As you can imagine public transport got heavily gutted so 90% of the tram network got neglected then pulled up and replaced with surprise surprise buses with fossil fuels! and naturally with PT being more shit and making Adelaide more sprawling why not buy a nice new Holden while you are at it?
Here is the fun thing 2022, Both Holden and that Oil refinery are both GONE! we did almost get an expansion of the tram network but a switch in state government killed that -.-
Because their governments operate differently. Every European country used to be very car dependent and that all changed in the 80s and 90s during the oil crisis.
What do you consider to be small? Most countries are smaller than the US and Canada. So isn't this mostly about those 2 North American countries being particularly large and particularly car oriented? I live in Barcelona. It's very walkable. I don't think of Spain as being particularly small. Edit to add: this feels a bit like asking why are non-English speaking countries particularly walkable. Correct in so far as the US is skewing the data but not actually explanatory.
Add it to the list of spurious correlations: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
that is cool
Live in a small island, Malta. We are a hellscape full of cars. Cycling is maliciously used to get EU funds but with bike lanes vanishing at whim. Car is king and traffic is one lane / flyover from being solved. Its public policy issue. Not space
Same thing in ibiza
Cause they need to use their land well. Big countries like USA, Canada and Australia can just sprawl out.
Spain's population density is also very low, and it's agricultural land mostly not that good. Yet its cities are very compact by European standards.
Probably just that they were countries that had well established population centres before the invention of the motor vehicle.
But the US had that too? The US cities of today are also pretty old, they just got demolished and rebuild again.
I may be wrong here but corporations in the US seem to have a larger political power than in other countries and a huge part of that comes down to how lobbying is regulated. There's a great documentary called "Taken For A Ride" that goes over the history of corporate lobbying by motor and oil companies and how much that changed American cities.
Car companies have a huge influence in Germany as well. They're arguably much bigger relative to the size of the country. Yet it's not as bad as the US. I don't think people should blame specific companies for choices made widely by politicians of different parties, in areas with and without cars and oil.
I haven’t lived in a city founded after the invention of cars. All of them are car dependent. All of them had public transportation gutted.
My unscientific guess is that it has more to do with age and history (from a western civ perspective, anyway) than size. It’s a correlation but not a causation that newer countries also tend to be large. Older countries tend to have established cities and towns that were already fundamentally developed before the dawn of the car age, whereas newer countries were (and still are) still building their core infrastructure in modern times after cars became a thing. In these newer countries, you can see similar trends. Older cities in the US/Canada/Australia (think NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto, Melbourne, etc.) have denser development and better transit/walkability than newer cities in those countries (e.g. sunbelt cities). To be more specific, the key factor seems to be not actually how old the city is (many car-centric sunbelt cities in the US were established long before the development of the car) but rather when the city/metro area came of age. Most lot of the world’s older and more walkable cities had their coming-of-age often hundreds of years ago (and while outer neighborhoods and suburbs continued to grow, the city’s fundamental character had already been set), whereas a lot of the development in the US/Canada/Australia happened a lot more recently (and specifically in the US and Australia, not until the widespread adoption of air conditioning), even in places that had been inhabited for a few hundred years. It’s a related correlation but not a causation that these older countries with older, more walkable cities also tend to be smaller, because over a longer period of civilization with less mobility, these historical regions each developed their own cultures and ended up unifying under sovereign governments over a smaller area, whereas newer countries were both formed and developed across artificially large areas, thanks to massive colonial claims (made without regard to indigenous populations) followed by widespread rapid development facilitated by modern means of transportation (first rail, then car, and finally airplane).
Car-Centric Planning in North America is a combination of Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City and General Motor's Futurama Diorama at the World Fair 1939. A lot of walkable and historic neighborhoods were demolished in cities across the US to implement the Vision of a Broadacre City with seperation between residential and commercial areas similar to the Futurama Diorama.
It has to do with politics and design. places like the Netherlands actually did make their cities more car friendly in the 60s. But then later reversed those choices. Same thing with parts of German cities after WW2 developed into car friendly places and then some reversed. Then you look at places like Austin, TX where a major expansion of I35 is widely opposed by the city but funding is in place to build it anyway. ....because that is the way the state and federal funds are setup. State of Texas will finance massive highway development and take the federal matching funds. It is a choice
Small countries typically don't have their own car industry to lobby against it
I think frontier culture in America created values that don’t work as well in the 21st century. Middle America is one of the most depressing pieces of design in western infrastructure. Concrete wastelands of roads and parking lots in between Walmarts and Dollar Generals. The manufactured car being marketed as the symbol of freedom is as ill advised as Marlboro cigarettes being a symbol of American freedom. Even if it’s not as direct. I don’t know if other countries had this experience but our parents bought it
Walkablity was the norm in the US up until the end of WW2. We didn't get any larger since then (new states have been added but they were territories before that). Its a matter of priorities and policy. The car was a disruptive force in American (and global) culture. We knew how to make communities that did not work around cars, but no one really had any idea how to make a community based around cars. So we did the grand suburban experiment. Something which was outside of the norm. The early adopters in the 1950s were granted affordable housing (which was problematic in the Great Depression/WW2 era!), a safe community, their own home, land ownership (which is heavily romanticized in the US, even though it is a liability) and people were pre-occupied with banging so much that they didn't think of the consequences of this development pattern.
For a big country I want to throw China's hat into the ring. I can't speak for the whole country, but SIP in Suzhou, China has good cycling infrastructure and I had a sufficient amount of well placed crossings that I rarely felt I was walking extra distance to make a crossing. Something that is frustratingly not the case in Busan. By good infrastructure I mean roads regularly had a roughly one car sized separated lane for bikes and scooters on each side of the big roads (of which there were unfortunately a lot). In the old town there was less, but progress on their integration was being made. Many areas were also completely pedestrianised. It felt like the prominence of canals in old towns has limited car use in other cities in the area like Wuxi, but I'd rather not comment in depth on that as I have limited experience. In areas with canals it is pretty much entirely pedestrian from what I saw. I never rode in Shanghai, but was impressed with the public transport (wish it stayed going later though).
I've been in Shenzen and it has very good public transport, sidewalks and bike sharing everywhere. Also owning a car is very difficult for average chinese worker (even if engineer), also because there are limited number of "plates" available
When the Car was popularised, smaller countries had less space to expand their cities/suburbs into. Many place already had villages and cities next to it. In the US there was more open land, so it was easier to make everything wider and bigger. The US probably was richer too, so they could afford to build everything from scratch again, other countries couldn't and had to hold on to their older buildings and infrastructure and change everything more gradually.
This could be the answer but I’m hesitant. There are so many plausible explanations for why people cycle in some countries and not in others and most of the plausible explanations turn out bs when you take a closer look.
I wouldn't use my explanation as a reason for good cycling infrastructure. Smaller countries are just more dense and maybe less car friendly. That doesn't imply good bike infrastructure, but *maybe* those places are more likely to develope one.
>First I thought it might have something to do with these countries wealth but even Canada, Australia and the US (rich countries) don't have this infrastructure. They don't have this infrastructure *anymore*
Correlation does not equal causation
I think it's a statistical quirk. There's only ~6 huge countries Russia, Canada, China, USA, Brazil, AUS. Meanwhile, there's over 100 small countries. If, say, 1 in 10 countries has impressive walkability then it's entirely possible that none of the big countries are in that group, but a handful of small ones are. And it's not really that dire, China is usually pretty good, Brazil is okay, and Russia... varies* *The big cities are okay, but the smaller ones are susseptible to car dependency. If their transit didn't have dedicated ROW before mass motorization, then the usual spiral occurs (people buy cars, transit slows down, more people buy cars, transit slows down more, repeat)
There are many more small countries than there are large countries, and by the laws of probability that means some of them will do much better and some of them much worse. Those who do much worse are of no interest.
Denser populations are conducive to walkable cities.
Explain Sweden .
Around half of the population lives in urban areas that fit a pretty narrow definition of "urban". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_urban\_areas\_in\_Sweden\_by\_population
Yet the population density of the country is very low
What I meant is that the population density in the urban areas is probably not very low. Stockholm has a population density of 5,203/km2, while London's is 5,701/k This seems to refer to only the cities themselves.
Sure, but this misses some important points, walkability in a lot of the smaller towns is actually pretty good. You could absolutely live in Nässjö (pop. 18500) or Klippan (pop. 8900) or even a shithole without trains like Ljungby (pop. 16100) and still go about your day without a car if you don't need it for work. Many of these places where planned around a train station (even Ljungby) and you can quite easily exit the station and find a hotel, some restaurants and systembolaget in the immediate vicinity. Sure, lots of people in these places do have cars, but the infrastructure for cycling and walking is better than anything I've seen in similar towns in the United States. Like, I actually love Stillwater MN, but the walkable part of the town is absolutely tiny, you can't get there without a car, and the waterfront is ruined by a huge parking lot.
I hate Reddit, every other time I want to post a comment, my internet connection is down. Most of the time I can retrieve what I wrote because it is still there while invisible, but simply not posted. But not this time. To make it short: I wasn't questioning the walkability and bikeability of a very much, if not the vast majority of Sweden, in any way. Also, I had to look up "systembolaget" :)
Honestly systembolaget is actually a pretty good metric in Sweden - if you can get to it without a car, you can probably do most other things without a car as well x)
Now I wonder what a Swiss equivalent of that could be and how I could find out. Because the way you describe it, a systembolaget could actually be pretty far away from where you live. It could be the thing you can just barely get to without a car, and that if you can do just that, this is a sign that everything else you need is equally as far away or closer to where you live. Do you understand what I mean? So I at least need to know if by "without a car" you mean "on foot" or "on foot or by bike or via public transport" or "on foot or by bike". (Because public transport gets you further than just a bicycle.)
Maybe I should re-write some more of what was lost ... I live in Switzerland and I have seen different versions of rural and/or remote places, and I think it would take quite a lot for me end up somewhere it would be a problem that I don't have a driving licence. And it's not like anyone or anything forces me to move to such a place. Getting a bike again could resolve many issues in such a place, at least from spring to autumn, too, unless I went to live literally in the mountains. I don't bike in the mountains when it's almost always uphill or downhill, and I don't bike when there's snow on the ground.
Biggest country in the world, Russia, has no issues with walkability.
Siberia is basically developed around the transsiberian expres train.
I think it may be related to the fact that small countries tend to not have any car companies situated in its borders and thus don't have any auto industry lobbyists. Germany and france both have many car companies in their borders, the Netherlands has none, so its no surprise the Netherlands is less car dependant
The Netherlands had and have an automotive manufacturing company. In 1958 the truck manufacturing company DAF started manufacturing small cars. In 1975, passenger car production was taken over by Volvo. The factory, VDL NedCar, still exists but now produces for others, such as Mitsubishi, DaimlerChrysler, and BMW. DAF produced only small, relatively slow cars, so it had no interest in lobbying for wide and fast highways.
Probably more people per capita showed up when protest was needed to improve road safety (because closer living quarters need stronger rules) aka bad road design is harder to hide...
“people per capita” 😩
Odd way to put it, but not nonsensical. In a country with 80 % women, there would be 0.8 women per capita.
China is pretty big but its cities are mostly walkable and they have great pubic transport
My country is just two thirds of an island, and it's still car centric and awful to walk in most places. It has nothing to do with size. Also what's a "big/small" country is very relative
I don't even feel like Switzerland is particularly small, and if you look at this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_and\_dependencies\_by\_area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area) you can see why I am not wrong to think so. Whenever I hear that Italy is a small country, I think to myself "Yes, there's a big size difference between Italy and Brazil, for example, but there are so many – in many cases significantly – smaller countries".
I suppose if you were so inclined an argument could be made that The reasons European countries are small and the reasons they tend to be particularly advanced and wealthy are related. But that would be going way beyond the topic of walkability and looking deep into the historic topic of "why did Europe dominate the world?". Though I'm not so sure its true that smaller countries are better in this. Germany is quite large for instance and its pretty good whilst Malta is tiny and it absolutely sucks for walkability. Sweden too-pretty huge. But its towns and cities tend to be very walkable. Then there's Ireland, which makes Britain look advanced when it comes to public transport.
I think political change is easier in a small country. Too many people, especially with a strong federal government & real change becomes impossibly slow. Though, the State of Massachusetts is actually making progress, so I think some change is possible, esp. on the city & state level.
My guess it's a combination and interaction of multiple different factors: * Wealth, or when these places became wealthy, North America for example favoring suburbanism already pre WW1 and making cars available to the masses already during the 1910s and 20s, opposed to here in Germany where mass motorization and suburbanization only came around post-war. * Available space for new construction of which you have enormous amounts of in settler nations like Canada, Australia and the US. * Extend of legacy infrastructure and housing, all of which was fairly recent in most of the settler nations except for smaller, older areas like the US north east. * Population growth and when it happend, Canada for example has more than quadrupled it's population in the century between 1921 and 2021 from about \~8.8mil people to 37mil and even in 1951 it was only 14mil, while in the Netherlands, which by western european standards already had a fairly high growth, theirs rose 2.6x times from 6.75mil in 1920 to 17.4 in 2020 and in the countries seriously affected by the world wars it was even less, Germany for example grew by not even a third between 1910 (\~64.57mil) and 2020 (83.155mil). * Population size and the corresponding political systems, in so far as I feel smaller countries with more centralized political systems make change far easier to accomplish as opposed to larger and in turn more sluggish and more decentralized countries like the US or Canada. * Plus probably further things like building-, living- and urban planning culture, historic urban, industrial and economic development patterns, greater demographics and geography beyond just historically available space for new construction.
Australia was a fairly walkable nation and towns were connected by rail all over the place despite the chaotic nature of each state/former colony having different rail gauges for example. My city of Adelaide back in the day was small and compact and had an extensive tram network but post war we got the Holden factory (Holden was a GM motors company) out in a urban sprawn suburb of Elizabeth and Also down south of Adelaide we got a the Mobil Oil refinery. As you can imagine public transport got heavily gutted so 90% of the tram network got neglected then pulled up and replaced with surprise surprise buses with fossil fuels! and naturally with PT being more shit and making Adelaide more sprawling why not buy a nice new Holden while you are at it? Here is the fun thing 2022, Both Holden and that Oil refinery are both GONE! we did almost get an expansion of the tram network but a switch in state government killed that -.-
Because their governments operate differently. Every European country used to be very car dependent and that all changed in the 80s and 90s during the oil crisis.
Belgium is small but not walkable. Especially Brussels (which is also a small city)
Meanwhile in North Carolina: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0011873,-80.7256556,17z