Same, everyone has this loaded idea that as soon as you visit a city out of the US it's a utopia. "Walkable-city" often means taking 2-4 different forms of transportation to get from A to B, and if you're going to 5 different places in a day before coming home(say class, the gym, the grocery store, a specific store for that one thing you need today, then dinner with a friend) it means carrying 1-2 bags with you all day and making 15 different metro line transfers, buses, etc and dealing with inclement weather and rush hour crowds where you can't get a seat. Have you ever been in a city with one of the largest metro systems in the world and had to physically push and get pushed into a rush hour metro car that's so packed you can't even get your phone out of your pocket on a ~38C day?
I have a feeling a lot of this sentiment is driven by digital nomads who booked a hostel next to a wework and do nothing but go to a coworking space for half the day then sightseeing and get the impression that everyone lives like this. I've stayed in more than one world class city and if you can afford it you eventually just start taking a lot more ubers than you'll care to admit.
I dunno. I’ve been to all of those European cities and they were nice to visit for a week as a tourist but the density along with everything that goes with it: noise, smells, crowds etc were always a reminder that I only want to be there on a brief visit. I’m my suburban city, I simply hop in my vehicle and can be anywhere I want in 3-15 minutes.
You're making false assumptions about where I've lived or travelled without refuting my points about New York. I live in San Francisco (the bart+muni+caltrain system here is actually quite horrible - it's inefficient, expensive, the coverage is weak and frankly it's smelly) and it's nickname as "the most East Coast city on the West Coast" is not well-earned at all, it's just due to the rest of California being completely and utterly car-based and without decent public transportation.
I've also travelled a lot, including Europe since all of my relatives are in Turkey. Barcelona is great, it's kind of like a cross between my hometown of San Diego (it's also 2 million people and sunny) and New York (great art scene, up-til-dawn nightlife and a city-wide metro) but it's on a much smaller scale.
And it's not simply a bias towards big cities - trying to find my way around Tokyo was a nightmare. I love Japan and it was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, but the trains inside cities (not the bullet trains between them) aren't even run by the same companies, there's several parallel networks in place.
I can see London being very similar, considering New York modelled its subway system on the London Underground. Just looking at the two different subway maps makes me think NY is a vast improvement though, considering that one is a grid that maps directly to the streets and the other is a confusing circular spaghetti-looking mess. Most large European cities tend to have a similar layout of concentric circles (due to castles and moats and whatnot) and I find that using polar coordinates to get around isn't very intuitive compared to simple square x-y grids. If I look at a map of New York, it's easy to say "ok, I need to go two over and 5 up to get where I want to be."
Saying that cities are "uniquely great each in their own way" is fine, I'm not saying any other cities aren't great and that New York is better than them in all respects. In fact, New York is a horrible place to get lonely - if you don't already have a lot of friends, nothing's lonelier than being surrounded by millions of people all in a rush to get somewhere else and too busy to meet new people.
Or the seemingly crumbling infrastructure, airports that make me feel I'm traveling back to the 90s, metro systems that are filthier and noisier than almost any other I've ever taken (even the ones in developing countries). You being bombarded by ads everywhere, and for bizarre/dystopian products (like healthcare or medicine), payday loans, lawyers. It makes me icky to travel in the US.
I agree with you, there's a hollowness in American urbanscapes that's hard to put a finger on. Even bustling areas in SF or NYC feel... Decadent?
I think this is a pretty big assumption that doesn't really consider that not all people prefer densely packed urban environments.
I've visited Europe multiple times and lived in Austria for 7 months. I loved seeing new things that were so different from my midwestern home. Using the train was awesome, the ease of access to get good quality food, walkability etc.
However, returning to Europe in my 30s I don't have that same feeling anymore. Those cities give me anxiety now. There are far too many people in one area. Everyone lives in tiny apartments where they have to be careful about who they disturbed. Almost no one owns houses, much less any land to go with those houses. They're completely reliant on public transportation. There's a massive lack of access to any real nature. Everyone just seems really sheltered and most of them don't appear to have any knowledge outside of urban environments. There's also a very elitist attitude that their way of life is somehow better, even though most of them couldn't survive a day without having easy consumer access to everything.
Further into adulthood now I much prefer to live outside a city with some land and the freedom to do what I want on it. I can take my car into the city and visit whenever I want. However, I get to live outside of it with much better access to nature and imo a mentally healthier environment than a packed city. Large cities just seem packed with consumerism to me. People do nothing but go around and pay for products all day. Pay to eat, pay to have coffee, pay to go to a show. I'll visit and live elsewhere.
That's great, but my point is that if you go to such a place and see all that spontaneous social interaction, you're just seeing people who can afford to eat out and live close to the city centre. That's not how actually life in such places looks like for most.
My (European) city is walkable by any American definition. Tourists enjoy its XIX century architecture, restaurants, boulevards and such. What they don't see is that the 1,6% unemployment rate is there thanks to huge swaths of barely walkable and frankly ugly industrial complexes providing jobs to which people generally drive or commute a significant amount of time in public transport, because with their credit score it made more sense to get something on the outskirts or suburbs. You won't see them in places visited by tourists because that's far from where they live and they generally can't afford going out that often.
That sounds violently American. Anyway, according to that statement either you hate dense cities or you just love wasting your time in them.
Maybe try a top public transit network, like Vienna (overall), Moscow or Madrid (subway), Tokyo (train) or even Paris (when there's no strike) to see things done right, because in the US cities with barely functional public transit can be counted with a single hand.
Isn't that a massive issue? That cities are overcrowded, expensive, and polluted? Europe has decent public transport and there's the same issue. Cramming people into cities makes things worse.
Sure I can see this, another thing is that cities suck in America. Just take a vacation to Europe and just wake up and go get a coffee and live your life getting around the city. Take the bus there and then come back to almost all major US metros and try to take the bus. European cities also feel much much safer, probably because the bottom 10% of their population in terms of income have simple access to some kind of safety net.
We only have a small handful of cities in the country that can even compare to this on any level. That's why young people would leave cities, because the cities aren't built for living in.
I meant on the parent's point that it be top rated liveable city worldwide, which to me can't possibly rhyme with bad public transit and nothing reachable by foot. At least if you use a workdwide benchmark. But I've never been so maybe I just don't have a sense for it!
But that is not a fair comparison. You need to compare moving from NY, Amsterdam,Berlin, Madrid, Shanghai, Singapore, big cities with good public transportation to any big America city https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZDZtBRTyeI
where did you get this idea from ? my advice travel around more. & spend less time on the internet. and then you'll see plenty of places where quality of life from clean air, healthcare, transportation, entertainment, culture, friendly folks etc is much better than the american metros. nyc & sf.
I kinda agree with you. One thing that was striking to me when I started to travel throughout bits of the rest of the world is how abruptly cities just...stop. Outside of that there's farmland, forests and small villages.
In the U.S. it seems there's a slow decrease in density from a city core out dozens of miles; from tall density out to suburbs, then individual developments and maybe around then you'll get the kind of farm environment you'd find in Europe.
It's not to say that all of Europe/Asia, or all of the U.S. is the same in this way. But it seems to be a pattern. In the U.S. people try to move away from cities once they can, in Europe people seem to gravitate towards historic centers.
I think lots of it has to do with livability. In France it might be convenient to take a daily trip to the local market to get some groceries for dinner -- not much more work than going through the pantry. Density might not be too high, and the environments are pleasant, relaxing and convenient.
In the U.S. cities built before the car are better, but can still be a grind. Big swaths of NYC are hard to do daily shopping in for example. Cities built after the car are a mess wholesale and people live far from each other and spread very far out, and the things they need to live are similarly spread everywhere.
In Korea, my parents-in-law live in a proper house (not an apartment flat), but a grocery store is a 2 minute walk, and a large commercial center with pretty much every other service you might want is about 5 more. I easily triple my walking-time in Korea even on lazy do-nothing days compared to life in the U.S.
I have been in most capitals in Europe, and in quite a few cities of USA, and totally agree with the story. Of course there are some individual exceptions, but he is talking about the feeling from different cities, the state of public transportation or healthcare, which IMHO is fairly generalizable.
mostly agree. currently, US city life has too many unappealing aspects unless you're either super wealthy or truly broke.
in the US high quality of life cities are actually quite scarce and in time almost always overwhelmed by large numbers of people who want to experience that quality of life. then quality of life decreases significantly.
I'm very happy to live in Zurich where most people ride trams, bike, or walk. To me a good city should feel like a place to mingle, not zoom around in personal capsules.
(No, it's not exclusive to rich countries. Before Zurich I lived in Moscow and used public transit daily for two decades. Loved it too.)
I actually prefer the vastness of space in the US. Just go out in the American country side and there is so much beauty. I would love to see a world where the idea of a city is obsolete, distributed local communities of 2000 people spread across the span of American wilderness. Basic services such as electricity, sewage and internet are all maintained by standards set by the state authorities, but run by locals. It all sounds too hipster, but it is not. This COVID-19 pandemic has taught us a lot about how we can survive as a distributed species as compared to dense city life.
Europe has no such luxury due to the density of people cramped in tight corridors and old (but beautiful) architecture. There it makes sense to have a well organized city life.
IMO city life is overrated but that's just my opinion/perspective of society.
I have never entered the US, but have been to many of the larger European cities. None of them came close to what Americans on /r/fuckcars are fantasizing about, when they talk about Europe.
If they post pictures it is almost always of the few square kilometers of the city where millionaires and shops for millionaires are located. The rest of the city is full of streets and cars are everywhere. The one difference is that there are trains, which usually are awful places but get you from A to B.
FWIW, I haven't made the parent comment's sort of experience in either Berlin, London, or Paris. So it might be somewhat specific to New York.
And I have trouble understanding what you are actually suggesting, but it seems to be an entirely technocratic take ignoring what actually makes cities liveable, with possibly some dehumanisation of homeless people thrown in for extra discredit?
I have a feeling a lot of this sentiment is driven by digital nomads who booked a hostel next to a wework and do nothing but go to a coworking space for half the day then sightseeing and get the impression that everyone lives like this. I've stayed in more than one world class city and if you can afford it you eventually just start taking a lot more ubers than you'll care to admit.
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