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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball.

Being used to high density housing and underground parking spaces all those open parking lots seem nonsensical to me, even more considering the alleged housing shortage over there.

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This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100 years to replace community labor with commercial relations.

This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Software As A Service, Family Mental Health As A Service, Guiltlessness As A Service, etc) as they catch on globally. Sometimes naturally because we discover some actual value. More often just by finding a practice which is addicting and then just dumping product until a population is addicted.

Great recipe for success, much wealth has been stockpiled.

It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process, but the U.S. is a young country so most of our culture was pretty raw in the 19th century.

The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.

Too real.

The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S.

Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately, Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the algorithm.

>throughly modern American

You baby-boomers need to speak for yourselves only and keep me out of it.

(Assuming you mean "modern" as in contemporary. If you mean the more canonical "modern", sorry for the react.)

Are baby-boomers some how too old to be allowed to consider themselves as part of our contemporary society?

I wish. You people are a disgrace.

“Exxxxcellent... another sucker has bought into the generational warfare meme we’ve been selling. Divide and conquer!”

- the media

“Excellent—another sucker had bought into blaming the distribution mechanism rather than the group directing it for the message we pay for it to transmit!”

— the capitalist class

Please don't do this here.

We've banned this account for violating the rules and spirit of this site. Generational warfare isn't an ok thing here. Same for ideological battle.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

“You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other.”

Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries, this makes me smile :-)

The US is a widely diverse country, including internally. Milwaukee is quite segregated, Sacramento isn't. There is a wide spread, depending on where you are. Overall, the US is about average diversity compared to other countries.

If you factor in economics that picture gets worse for the US relative to most countries. The divide between rich and poor is large and growing.

> Overall, the US is about average diversity compared to other countries.

I don't think that's accurate. Europe is almost entirely European, Asia is almost entirely Asian, Africa is almost entirely African. Even Wisconsin at 86.5% white is less white than most European countries. And Milwaukee itself is 40% black and 17.3% Latino.

The countries that come anywhere close to the US on diversity are predominantly the other countries in the Americas.

> I don't think that's accurate. Europe is almost entirely European, Asia is almost entirely Asian, Africa is almost entirely African

This has to be sarcasm, right?

If not, this view is very wrong because it views diversity in a manner that's purely and literally skin deep.

When people talk about diversity, the diversity they want is typically cultural, but race and culture are strongly correlated. There aren't a lot of ethnic Africans who are culturally Japanese or ethnic Europeans who are culturally African American.

Which means there aren't a lot of people of any race who are culturally Japanese in Africa or culturally African American in Europe.

Trust me, if it's culture you're interested in, Europe has more established cultural differences between white peoples from completely different language groups within small European countries than between African Americans and non-African Americans, and we didn't even have to impose Jim Crow laws to achieve this.

> Trust me, if it's culture you're interested in, Europe has more established cultural differences between white peoples from completely different language groups within small European countries than between African Americans and non-African Americans, and we didn't even have to impose Jim Crow laws to achieve this.

The category "white people in America" has that level of cultural diversity inside of it. It includes millions of first generation immigrants from all of those places. Plus millions of people descended from those cultures who over the past centuries have developed them into something uniquely American, melding them in a thousand cities with the cultures of all the other immigrant populations that have come here since then.

And we can't pretend that no country in Europe has ever sinned. Or any country anywhere for that matter.

You're musunderstanding segregation and ethnicity. For instance, Milwaukee is widely regarded as the most segregated city in America. Their overall population total isn't the issue; its that neighborhoods within the city are overwhelmingly uniform.

Of course Asia is full of Asians; but they represent an incredible diversity of ethnicities. In some areas, they are geographically mixed, in others not.

Diversity and segregation are two different things. If you had a city that was 100.0% Vietnamese then there would be no "segregation" within that city but it also isn't particularly diverse. And adding an equal number of Hawaiians wouldn't reduce the diversity even if there was 100% segregation between them.

Moreover, if you can bisect Asians into Japanese and Koreans etc. then you can bisect whites into Irish and German, Latinos into Colombians and Venezuelans, blacks into Jamaicans and Haitians etc. And if you're going to play that game then why aren't the racially segregated areas still internally diverse in the same way? Certainly they are as much as the countries that consist almost entirely of that category of people are.

Yes, you are correct, diversity and segregation are two different things, which is why I broke them out.

My original comment was to explain how the statement, "Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries . . . " is incorrect.

Right behind France and it’s Parisian suburbs, no monsieur?

Absolutely.

Segregation is probably a more chronic problem there than it is or was ever here.

  But Saint-Denis is not a rich neighborhood.

  It's what the French call a "banlieue."

  Literally translated, the word means "suburb," but 
  it has come to be associated with the depressed, mostly 
  immigrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city
  where unemployment is high and opportunity scarce.

  "If you look at the situation of people, you 
  understand the path they have taken to become a 
  terrorist or whatever you call it," Villain told 
  CBS News correspondent Vladmir Duthiers. "Exclusion 
  makes the terrorist, in my opinion."

  .
  .
  .

  The French government does not keep statistics 
  based on race or religion, but surveys have found 
  unemployment is as high as 30 percent in these immigrant 
  neighborhoods.[1]

[1] Les Banlieues: Searching for the seeds of terror

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-banlieues-seeds-of-terror...

I wonder if you've ever even been to Saint-Denis?

Segregation in France is absolutely nothing like what you see in America where, outside three or four major cities, different races, no matter how rich or poor, are absolutely cordoned off from one another and do not ever attend the same schools [1]. If you actually go to Saint-Denis you will find everything from Russian Jews to Moroccan Muslims to Nigerians to good ol' fashioned ("from before Napoleon took over the world") French families. It's an extremely diverse hood, the kind you'd only saw 30 years ago in America's largest cities.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-get...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/16/segreg...

I saw a study a couple years back remarking on how job applicants without french last names would have far fewer call backs.

Might it be you just getting older.

Wow, just one short leap from cars to a kids-these-days rant about Tinder?

> The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!".

If that’s the case then I disavow all things “modern.” Nothing exciting to me at all about putting up walls between me and the people I actually see in person.

Maybe this is why I deleted my facebook a few years back, call when a few texts become a back and forth conversation, push for meet ups, and don’t use Tinder. I really don’t want to live in a world where the majority of our human-to-human communications is tapping on glass.

This is the first time I've heard the phrase "Guiltlessness As A Service" - from a google search I think it may be your own term?

Regardless, I like it. I think you're using it to describe businesses that do things like sell carbon credits or do humanitarian work?

Companies with an "eco" or "humanitarian" angle are rly just selling newfangled Catholic indulgences.

Except they might also actually be helping some people, or improving the environment, even if its very inefficient.

But they also are a cop out to not solve the real problem.

If you give tuition money to a few poor kids via a non profit, you don’t solve the college debt and education accessibility problem, but it makes people who did it feel better.

> If you give tuition money to a few poor kids via a non profit

Or pay someone to plant a tree when you fly to offset the carbon.

Is it not... something?

One could always not give tuition money to a few poor kids. That fails to solve anything too.

I really dislike the knee-jerk, blanket dismissal of people who are trying to do small but good things.

"If nothing we do matters then the only thing that matters is what we do." - Joss Whedon

> Is it not... something?

Basically, it isn't. The theory that everyone should do a little bit is based on the idea that if 1000 people each solve 0.1% of the problem then we solve 100% of the problem. Which in general isn't a bad idea.

The problem comes when somebody tries to sell it with bad math. Because then you have a hundred million people each solving one trillionth of the problem, which accomplishes effectively nothing. And worse than nothing, because then you have a hundred million people each thinking they've done their part and no further action is required, even though no one has made the slightest dent in the actual problem.

Slavoj Žižek makes a very persuasive argument against this sort of tokenism in "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJDgxH8aRGs

I watched the video but I didn't notice any argument against the practice, unless I synthesize "one should always feel bad about participating in consumerism", is that it?

Or maybe he meant companies destroying the environment, or anything else, for you so you don't have to feel guilty about it.

Well Deserved is a (parody) marketplace for privilege https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoK4_dQbfuU

This is a fascinating idea which seems worth expanding into a longer piece of writing. Could you give some specific examples of what you mean by “community labor” and what they’ve been replaced with?

Also, what do you mean by “Guiltlessness as a service”?

Fair-trade, ethically sourced, carbon-neutral consumer product.

Guaranteed by a public-benefit corporation.

Bonus: Now on the blockchain!

Right on the money.

Before WW2, America was a culture desert. Europeans fleeing the war are the only reason NYC became an international culture hub.

Hip-hop is undoubtedly the most progressive Western art form. (Side note: hip-hop's genius appropriations of commercial symbolisms and it's will to collective empowerment directly underwrite and provide the language of the public engagement of today's millenials. It's influence is as deep as an ocean.) But while hip-hop is the only non-native wholly American cultural movement, it's American origins are a far cry from enlightment; more bound in shame. To say America created hip-hop would be an offense. Saying America stole it would be more accurate.

Appropriation and disproportionate credit for white people is a real and serious problem, but it's not the whole story. Most of the actual musicians who were inspired by black music fully acknowledged their inspirations and were often annoyed at how no one seemed to care about the people they looked up to.

The actual artists out on the stage doing the music know exactly what comes from where. Culture spreads like that: someone likes a piece and adds it to their own, fusing two cultures. It's how we have American Chinese food that looks nothing like Chinese Chinese food. (the xenophobic policies that led to it is another matter)

You have a very narrow and stereotyped view of American culture. The whole of it is not a few white-majority cities in the north and one over-funded region in the west.

I have an opinionated view of American culture, and I'm daily surrounded by other musicians, artists. These are the topics we discuss. I am opinionated as a result.

In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless...

I grew up in the south. My father was literally a clogger. I'm no stranger to folk. But, I am extremely skeptical of a lot of it's history. The mid-century folk-revival era did a real number on our conception of what's really there culture-wise. Behind the curtain, I am honestly afraid it's mostly puritanism, shame, and self-conflict. It's interesting but I think calling it a cultural movement is mostly romanticism. In terms of music, we could delve into details for days, and break down the whole history of hip-hop and jazz, and I do encourage that. There's a lot of good music there. But, I'm afraid it serves essentially the same end in terms of culture; a terribly familiar story. Hip-hop exhibits the whole of the cultural dynamic fairly explicitly, and is internationally renowned. Folk is mostly replicated in parody.

EDIT: Another thing to add... I think most people would be surprised how many contemporary folk musicians (young ones) would actually agree with me. They eventually are challenged with contending with things like: Did folk come from slaves? Or the working class? Or the fraught relations between the two? And is it reconcilable? Where did country music come from?

>> "In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless..."

We may have fundamentally incompatible perspectives if you see culture and art as separate things. I grew up surrounded by hip-hop (Atlanta), but I know better than to sing along with the n word as a white person. This is because the experience of the music is inseparable from one's experience with its culture.

Culture generally has a parental relationship to art. The art is of the culture but the culture is not of the art. I think we agree on that, but I totally see where you're coming from here because I am suggesting something else with folk.

I am basically saying that the legacy of American folk is just too mysterious to nail down, and too precarious to draw conclusions from. I wonder if this would be the case without the mid-century folk revival, which amounted to a mass-commercialization of the white American south as a suffering working-class. The older field recordings in the Library Of Congress suggest the music was predominantly made by slaves. The old radio recordings from Nashville tell a slightly different story and seem to stitch together something of an art form, likely for the very first time. Then folk-revival was a massively commercial effort that made it all look very pretty. But the culture of it all still remains vague. Touring the south and studying it's history doesn't suggest much of any concern for culture in any higher sense. Literacy was surprisingly high but they mostly read the bible. Music seems to have occupied a space more like entertainment than cultural reflection. A likely theory is that it was very much a culture for slaves, but merely entertainment for white people. Hopefully this clarifies my comprehension. Hip-hop is a full embodiment in comparison; a whole new world of unmitigated expression.

Opinionated is one thing, inaccurate is quite another. Reductionist and insulting is yet another.

Jazz. Blues. Techno. Ragtime.

Blues, Jazz and Ragtime all predate WWII — and all influenced pretty much everything you hear today.

You could even argue that Breakbeat is American given its roots with the Winston’s.

American culture is vastly richer than many countries specifically because it is effectively an All Star team of traditions from everywhere. Thinking “American” is simply hot dogs and Hip Hop is to greatly undersell what has been one of the great cultural achievements in the history of the world. American culture is vastly diverse compared to, for example, France. You have Cajun/Creole in Louisiana, Tejano culture in Texas, cowboy culture in Montana, laid back “surfer” culture in California, Boston/Nee England culture, Chicago with it’s melange of Polish, Italian, African American. Where else in the world could you have sushi for lunch and watch a rodeo in the evening? To be clear, I am not saying American culture is “best,” I am just saying that to reduce American culture to Hip Hop is about like saying French culture is nothing more than Edith Piaf and baguettes. Americans even invented basketball and baseball — and most of the things I mention were in motion long before world war 2.

NYC was a culture hub long before Workd War 2. Read some de Tocqueville and learn a bit about American history before just engaging in a wholesale dismissal of America.

I am not prone to quoting Bono, but this clip is relevant: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O8aLAZ8SnvI

Wow I love this comment. Especially because I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process

We've lost most of our knowledge about how to create civic spaces of value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ

The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.

A lot of it was transformed.

The entire current debt-based economy is fundamentally designed to extract as much money as possible from "consumers".

I had not considered that planning cities like this was meant to be community-hostile, but I can easily see how this is meant to breed a dependence on corporate solutions.

This has the taste of conspiracy, but I do believe you're right. There's a lot of money to be made this way.

  I had not considered that planning cities like this
  was meant to be community-hostile, but I can easily
  see how this is meant to breed a dependence on 
  corporate solutions.

Could you elaborate on this?

I guess the angle I don't see answered is why would you need 'corporate solutions' say home surveillance solutions, private security solutions and other security & theft deterrence apparatus and solutions if you didn't have any hostile communities to be begin with?

Was this ever studied in the American or non-North American context? Are European cities and towns seeing a new found need for these things now, that were practically unheard of a few decades ago?

Theft and other crimes seem to increase the more you remove or disrupt community. In other words, it's not about hostile communities, but the absence of community. In the absence of community, the default is hostility. Or, community is the establishment of non-hostility. Almost by definition. Community is people with common interests in a common location doing favors for each other and looking out for each other. When you have that, crime decreases.

There's also a generic version of the word "community" that people throw around, that can mean almost anything: a town (which isn't automatically a community)... gamers ("the gaming community")... "the Native American lesbian sportfishing enthusiast community"... and so on. I don't mean that.

Anyway, something "community-hostile" would therefore be anything that creates separation and alienation. Among other types of separation, there's separation in the spatial realm, such as through sheer distance (things are far apart), or through side effects of physical barriers that are part of the infrastructure, e.g. walls built to block traffic noise, or streets themselves, especially when wide and dangerous; or through other physical barriers that are more subtle such as the windows of your own car, through which you can see, yet you could easily drive right past your friend coming the other way without knowing it, whereas that would never happen if you were both walking or on a bike or scooter. Well, you say, I can just text my friend on my phone. Exactly, and now you're dependent on the phone maker, the carrier, Apple/Google, etc. for that communication to take place.

Exactly as this fine person illustrated. :-)

"Car As A Service" is essentially rented cars: taxis, and Uber & friends. Problem in USA is bicycles and cargo bikes are not widespread. Hence the roads aren't build for bicyclists and people don't expect them while bicyclists wear helmets (in The Netherlands the latter is rare but roads are build with bicyclists taken into account).

This is just an example of 'path dependency', i.e. 'history matters'. It's not baffling if you consider that sparse, car-driven infrastructure makes a lot of sense in a country with low population density, and population density has tripled in the US since 1930 [1]. At that time, Germany's population density was about 6x the US's.

However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem.

People get upset if you take away their parking spaces and build densely when efficient public transport doesn't exist yet and they still need to own a car.

Yet building efficient public transport is at least a decade-long endeavor and requires either buying out or leveraging eminent domain to carve out space for the necessary infrastructure.

Local and state officials aren't going to stick their heads out to support this unless voters will politically reward them for starting a project, but probably not being around to see it finished.

If you want a regime that can efficiently bulldoze its way to the public transit and cheaply, then one way is to copy China, give power to governments to 'strongly encourage' the sale of any rights of way needed, don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-pop...

> don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay?

Given that in US, "public review" for any kind of infrastructure (regardless if it's an apartment building, a cell base station, a railway, a power plant) means soliciting input from the most meddlesome moralistic NIMBY normies who have as little respect for other people's property rights as they have appreciation for the societal benefits of public infrastructure works -- and then giving them the authority to use their concern trolling to obstruct/delay/kill whatever project is considered.

It actually turns out you don't need to go full-on PRC to build cities with apartments and dense single-family houses with modern, high-capacity railways (all of which help reduce both the need and impact of parking spaces) if you're willing to tell these people to pound sand, and remove the land-use laws that they use to enforce their capriciousness.

This is absolutely correct. NIMBYism has adversely affected more Americans than Russia.

Since it follows that NIMBYs are more anti-American than Russia, we MUST put sanctions on their ability to affect their fellow Americans.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

Exactly. Furthermore, the US is a comparatively young country. A lot of cities with great public transport either already existed before cars were around, or had the necessary population density to support mass transit.

I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take the Underground anywhere I needed to be, but it was very clear that it was only possible because the city was already there and densely populated before the arrival of cars.

To a large extent it’s about path dependency as well. You simply aren’t going to fit car infrastructure in a dense urban area whose streets were originally made for horses and pedestrians. It’s not like several European cities didn’t try though, in the heyday of car-oriented urban planning from the 50s to the 70s. Insofar as those attempts succeeded they are now being undone in favor of transit and walkability.

>>I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car

Well, to be fair, if you are talking about a specific city in Europe then you should do the same here in the USA. London's american equivalent is NYC. You will not need a car here either.

Arguable. For every London in Europe, there’s 10 cities that grew 3-5-10x since 1945. After all, the postwar boom happened on both sides of the Atlantic. London, Paris, etc. are outliers.

It was just policy decisions in many cases.

I don't understand this argument. The automobile is much younger than the country. Cars became broadly used about a century ago, the 1910s-20s. How many U.S. cities do you imagine there are that were created after that? Or even that, due to cars, dramatically changed their size relative to the overall population?

>How many U.S. cities do you imagine there are that were created after that?

Quite a few:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb#Post-war_suburban_expan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York

Created, or built-up, expanded, and for more heavily populated? The US population has more than tripled in that same period, and the percentage of those people living in rural areas dropped precipitously.

Historical note: most US cities had dense public transit until the rise of the automobile. Those transit systems were bought by the car companies and dismantled to drive adoption of private cars. A similar path led to the creation of the crime of 'jaywalking' and getting people off of the streets so car adoption wouldn't be stopped by high rates of drivers killing pedestrians.

>I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car

I'm not sure this is a great test. (Though, yes, London does have a great transit system even though I've also taken cabs from time to time for various reasons.)

When I visit American cities and don't travel outside them, I very rarely rent a car and don't necessarily take cabs/Lyfts all that much other than getting from the airport. I'm usually staying/doing business in/eating in a relatively central location that often exists in cities that are otherwise fairly spread out.

To give just an example that I'm very familiar with. I never rent a car any longer when I visit Raleigh but I'd never claim you could live there without a car.

Talking about modes of transportation that work well based on countrywide population density is silly. The US's population density is massively skewed by Alaska and everything from Kansas to California being almost completely empty.

Most east coast cities have actually decreased their population density considerably since 1930.

Yes. I had the same experience. Visiting Mountain View, I was surprised at how walk hostile is. It took me 10 minutes to just pass one of the buildings surrounded by a huge parking lot and move to the next. To go from Intel offices to the Computer History Museum takes a really long walk cross kilometres of parking space.

The Computer History Museum is situated in the middle of "no-where". But it has a highway 2 minutes away. To go from the close houses walking you need to walk close to the highway, with no trees or shadows. https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2

Some friends had a story about this. They were in LA and asked directions to a comic shop. "It is 10 minutes from here in that direction". After 20 minutes walking they asked again. It was "10 minutes" by car, the guy that give them directions did not think that they will go walking.

I always have lived in places where is better to take public transportation or to walk than to use your private car. And one of the reasons is that the parking space is expensive. Buildings with parking space, that is also mandatory for new buildings, will place the space underground. This keeps residential buildings, shopping centres and offices close together.

You can use an electric unicycle to get around easily.

I've heard this referred to as the "cycle of autodependency". This graphic describes it well.

https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m

Once you've created an auto dependent city it's really difficult to undo it.

Surrey, the biggest suburb of Vancouver, is trying to shift from being a car centric suburb to building its own compact downtown. It will take decades to change development patterns. They're trying to jump start it by creating their own LRT system, but of course due to auto dependency there is push back because LRT will "get in the way of the cars..."

It's infuriating to me living in North America (I'm in Canada but it's as bad or worse in the US) watching cities develop this way. Mention this to almost anyone here and you will be met with blank stares. There are countless places that contain many stores that share parking lots that we so huge you still have to drive between them.

Reno is an awesome example of this, and this is true even of the latest developments. It's like developers in Reno have never seen pictures of other cities, even here in America. This problem has been solved time and again... and Reno builds large and small shopping malls and then they're empty and under-utilized, so they build another new one and the results are the same.

Having lived overseas a few times in my life, I really am looking forward to leaving NorCal/NV and heading somewhere more sanely organized.

America has plenty of cities that are just like cities everywhere else...we're a big country, we hardly have need to pack everyone in like sardines. I live in a major city, downtown. And I'm starting to hate it. No personal space, no yard, shared (or no) garage, and I'm a car enthusiast by the way, which I'm sure is practically a dirty word around most city-dwellers now. I'm seriously considering moving out to the suburbs even if it means a longer commute to the office. I like driving, and I have no problem driving places to get things done...after all, I can only carry so much shopping with me anyway.

I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.

Significant sections of a number of US cities are quite walkable: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, parts of Denver, Chicago. As well as smaller cities like Boulder. It's certainly true that newer US cities tend to be more spread out but if city walkability is a priority for you, examples exist.

Very, very few cities in America are walkable enough to enable the average household to not own a car without it being a hardship [1]. You can probably count them on one hand.

So yes, Denver has a few walkable areas that are nice. But if you can only walk 80% of the time and still have to own a car for the other 20%, which has to sit in a parking spot somewhere all the time, then we're back to the subject of this article.

1. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you have kids, or aren't able-bodied, or don't want to spend 3x - 5x more time on public transit than you would in a car, or live in an area with extreme weather conditions, or don't want to be weird-sweaty-bike-person all the time, etc, then you need a car in most of America.

Oh I agree. Maybe for a few years after school if I had a job in the city I could imagine a handful or two of cities that I might forgo owning given the various options like Zipcar and Uber available today. But long term? I'm not sure there's any US city other than NYC/Manhattan where I wouldn't. (And I wouldn't live there.)

This is what I saw when I randomly dropped the yellow man into the middle of Boulder, CO: https://goo.gl/maps/A9oKpnFQLpR2

Boulder has a city population of about 100,000 and a metro region population of about 300,000. Here are some random Street View locations from European towns and cities of a roughly similar size.

Reading, England: https://goo.gl/maps/yQaTTaWQJav

Bonn, Germany: https://goo.gl/maps/Pu9Ro28F4UH2

Caen, France: https://goo.gl/maps/ppgL2J8nsAJ2

Vicenza, Italy: https://goo.gl/maps/rMtCBEqC7vr

Click around a bit, explore the neighbourhood, get a sense for the place. Get the picture?

American urban development happens on a scale that is simply incomprehensible to most Europeans. I spent a good ten minutes clicking around Boulder, looking for the city centre; it took me that long to realise that there wasn't one, at least not in the sense that I understand.

Pearl Street is the main drag. It's essentially a college town although a fair bit of tech has moved in. It's actually pretty walkable but Boulder is very protective of open spaces and conservative about growth generally so you're not going to see anything like a dense urban core. Somewhere like Ithaca NY isn't that different.

Of course, you wouldn't want to live in Boulder without a car. Pretty much the whole point of being there is to get into the mountains.

This is what I saw when I randomly dropped the yellow man into the middle of Boulder :P https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@40.0181872,-105.2785854,2a,75...

I've walked a couple hundred kilometers in San Francisco and I saw significantly less than when I did the same in Tokyo. I wouldn't call SF walkable at all.

> I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.

it's only sad because you went to a 7/11 expecting to get produce! I guarantee you there's a real grocery store within a few blocks.

I guarantee you there's a real grocery store within a few blocks.

Pretty good chance that's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

"In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5% of Americans live in a food desert, meaning that they live more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas, and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas."

> Pretty good chance that's not true

Or a 23.5% chance that's not true...

In response to a “guarantee”, that’s a lot.

“I guarantee this plane won’t crash” = 23.5% chance of dying?

The real question one should be asking is how much of that is by choice?

Plus the "within 1 mile" standard seem a little low, that would mean that every single urban grocery store would have multiple competitors within a 2 mile radius which is totally unrealistic though, apparently, is quite common.

That's more of a cultural thing methinks.

In the predominantly hispanic areas around Phoenix there are tons of tiny shops serving the neighborhood -- it's a thing. Where I live now there used to be a few corner markets but now that gentrification is in full swing they are all gone and are being replaced with trendy restaurant/bars with the people presumably now shopping at the major supermarkets. There were probably more before they built the super-massive Ranch Market but I didn't live in this area then so can't really say.

I'd venture to say it has more to do with the cost of owning/operating a car, in Mexico (and much of Europe) they are significantly more costly than the US so the convenience of "shopping local" is different.

The supermarket test isn't really a very good one. If I'm standing in Chinatown in San Francisco or Boston I can easily imagine that I'm more than a mile away from the nearest supermarket. But I will in no way be lacking in non-packaged food options.

If ONLY your "distopian nightmare" of high density cities were true.

In reality it is the opposite. The vast vast majority of space in the US is reserved for the low density living.

Even the supposedly "high density" cities in the US are nothing compared to what they could be. Even places like New York have difficulty building enough housing to house everyone who wants to live there.

I just want a single city, in the entire world, where everyone said "hey, let's just allow building to be as high as anyone wants, and not put a single building restriction on anything".

The people who want low density living having an entire world to choose from. And yet that's apparently not enough for them.

America definitely doesn't have plenty of cities that are like cities in Europe and Asia in particular (where I've lived and traveled most outside of the US).

As to your situation, it sounds like it's just not a good fit for your lifestyle. No one is saying that there's not pros / cons or that dense urban living is for everyone. If you want to grow all your own food and raise horses, NYC probably isn't going to be a great fit for you. Ditto if you want a garage full of cars that you work on and take out for leisurely drives all the time.

The issue in America isn't that everyone needs to be forced to live in high-density urban areas. It's that we've spent decades enacting bad policies that heavily discourage urban density while encouraging and subsidizing suburban sprawl. And it turns out that suburban sprawl is bad for the majority of people, and carries huge externalities that we're discovering we can't really afford, but it'll take many decades to reverse the damage we've done.

What makes it more difficult is that there's a lot of cultural value in America (some of it natural, some of it driven by anti-density propaganda) around being positive towards cars, driving, having lots of huge personal space, etc. And negative perceptions of density, public transit, etc.

Not an expert, that's just my read on the situation :)

Yeah I used to love the city and all the action too. But I tired of the filth, noise, hassle. I just wanted peace and quiet so I moved to the country. Couldn’t believe how much I loved the quiet. Also I love how dark it is at night and being able to see stars. When I get home, the air is noticeably fresher too. I can more or less do what I want to do on my property without anyone telling me what to do. I would have never thought I’d have loved it as much as I do.

Leaving the urban area of my city for the 'burbs was awesome, I highly recommend it.

"America is big enough for cities to spread out" is a terrible meme. It's not like cities in other countries are right next to each other and if you lowered the density by a factor of two or three there would be war between the cities over who gets to own that new parking lot.

But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US stores, like malls, seem much more convenient for families.

What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. But I guess that's more family-friendly as well, especially with 2 or more kids.

> What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built [...] far away from residential areas

This is probably zoning; in many non-urban places mixed zoning is considered to lower the quality of residential living. So you end up with subdivision mazes without so much as a convenience store in walking range.

> wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip

My impression is that it's the other way around: because trips take so long, you maximize the amount you fetch on each.

> What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots.

Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" signs on my street because it got so bad. The apartments across the street went so far as to designate parking spots on the street -- totally illegal but it seems to work. The ones next door to them leave their trashcans out 24/7 for the same effect.

Out of curiosity, do you have a sense for whether the restaurant's patrons are driving from other parts of the city, or from the suburbs?

My guess is most of them work downtown and stop in the restaurant/bar to wait out traffic before driving home. And all the employees seem to drive to work. Plus the multitude of (baseball, basketball, arts & entertainment, convention center) venues around.

At first I just considered the parking hassles a "free-wifi tax" but then they added a second popular sandwich shop/bar next door and it just snowballed from there. Oh, and I lost the free-wifi benefit so now it's all just pure hassle.

Are you unable to pay a business for a place to store your car? What's the problem, exactly?

> people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that

The distance is related to the shopping habit. It’s neat watching people move to New York. At first, they continue their big, irregular shopping trips. Slowly, though, they switch to quick daily or every-other-day trips (+ delivery), and walkig to a store around the corner.

A family member describes to me the love affair of the automobile ~65 years ago did this. It became so ingrained in the culture, intentionally designing cities around the car so that you could drive more. Americans loved showing off cars, they loved driving them. Teenage boys' psyche used it as a way to get out of the house, away from their parents (this is city life in middle America during and post-WWII) in particular as men came home from the war, and women weren't doing as much factory work. Kids wanted out of the house all day long. Cars were many things to people but it was the hyped technology of that era and making everything bigger, including all the available infrastructure was a "good thing". You'd see gas stations on every corner.

Another family member of that same era to this day says "rip out the trees, rip out the bike lanes, put in more lanes to deal with this god awful traffic!" Driving is a right. It is not a privilege. Again, it's that ingrained in the culture, and the belief system.

One of those family members gets that cars are on the way out and other things need to replace it for the sake of the planet and human sanity. As much as it was induced sanity in the beginning, it's now a source of individual and public planning stress. The other family member has zero interest in accommodating anything but more cars.

This still manifests in how Americans get driver's licenses: states issue them, and the testing is pretty much a disqualification test not a qualification test; by that I mean it's not so much up to you to prove you're a safe driver but for the test to prove you're not. And boom you get a license. Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. It might be 2018 but it's the wild west and cowboys still exist here!

I'm not familiar with licensing requirements in other countries, are they more rigorous?

Here in the UK, you need to take a multiple-choice theory test and a practical driving test. The practical test takes about 40 minutes and is conducted on public roads. The pass rate for both the theory and practical test is about 50%. It's not uncommon for learners to fail the practical test several times. You're not required to have professional instruction but the vast majority of people do, because it's extremely difficult to pass the driving test without it. Most instructors recommend 30 to 40 hours of tuition before attempting the test.

Learners who are driving on a provisional license prior to passing their test must be accompanied by someone who has held a full license for at least three years. They must display an L-plate on the front and rear of the vehicle and cannot use motorways (freeways) unless they are accompanied by a licensed instructor.

It is my understanding that the British process is relatively straightforward by European standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Basically the same thing in France.

That doesn't sound all that different from requirements in CA, save the special license plate tags.

>Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive.

Driver's ed at least used to be pretty common,in part because it gave a discount for the (expensive) insurance covering younger drivers. I don't see anything special about the typical driver's ed instructor anyway. It's not like the typical driver's ed is some expensive defensive driving course taught by an ex race car driver.

Furthermore, the typical system is that someone gets a learners permit first which lets them drive only under a limited set of conditions so they gain experience that way.

And, honestly, you gain experience by doing things not taking classes.

> you gain experience by doing things not taking classes.

Sure, but "experience" doesn't have to mean you're out there on the highway with everyone else. You don't start scuba diving in the actual ocean. You get experience in a pool for a while first.

The important thing about driver's ed is that it's a /professional/ teaching the foundational experience (they also typically use a custom car where the instructor has limited controls in the passenger's seat in case things are going really wrong).

That way you try to bring the quality of drivers up to that of the instructor, not a cargo cult of family members who might be horrid at driving.

And the big thing is dangerous misinformation and misconceptions get passed down without professional instruction - you see it all the time.

You learn bad habits by doing things incorrectly over and and over again too. As a pilot, the rigorousness of aeronautical training compared to the complete lack of training requirement for car driving, is ridiculous to me. The point is you have to learn how to fit into a system, because it's a shared system.

But somehow driving, and the daily experience of it is: fuck you, me first. And it shows. It's an adversarial system. I'm really impressed that it works as well as it does, despite being the #1 killer of teenagers, and 40,000 total deaths on the road per year.

I don't totally disagree with you but people have to work within practical realities. In this case, western countries have pretty much decided that being allowed to drive on public roads so long as you can reach the gas pedal is probably a bit too free and easy. On the other hand, requiring the sort of significant time and financial commitment required to get and maintain a pilot's license--together with medical exams, etc.--isn't realistic to require for something that many people effectively need to be able to function in society.

So you end up with the current system which is fairly similar across states and countries with somewhat greater or lesser rigor depending on the particular place.

> It's not like the typical driver's ed is some expensive defensive driving course taught by an ex race car driver.

This is a common misunderstanding of what is really needed in driver education to improve the average driver. The average American driver really lacks a lot of skills and a clear understanding of optimal driving behavior. Driving on public roads should be optimized for safety, but most drive as if it ought to be optimized for speed.

It would be a good improvement if all drivers were required to take a Smith system or similar defensive driving course annually in order to retain their license.

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere

When I lived in Cincinnati just north of the University in the cool little Gaslight neighborhood, I would come home from my job in an office park in the suburbs, then walk to the grocery, cool shops, the cafe, the library, the bank, friends houses. That wasn't typical, but it still existed.

That's because it is cheaper to acquire land than build underground parking. I live in a city that has gone through that transformation. Big parking were converted into malls/supermarkets with multi-floor parking.

Parking areas were also built with underground parking buildings. But that's only because land become scare and so it was expensive to have a non-underground parking.

Here in the US, some city developers are building apartment buildings - with dozens of units - which provide NO parking for the tenants ... let alone any potential guests. To me this is equally puzzling.

Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.

The lack of parking may be an effort to solve a chicken and the egg problem. While some zoning restrictions call for parking per unit, some high traffic areas are calling for less parking per unit.

If everybody is expected to have a car then pedestrians never develop, local businesses don't thrive, class mobility is it's highest.

By limiting parking, or at least making it ala carte, residents and businesses consider their location proximity to eachother.

This is why we have more flooding too. More parking space means less ground to absorb rain water.

America has a lot of land and in the developed world you wont get planning permission for residential property with out of street parking

Have you been to many other regions in the US? I live in the Bay Area and one of the few things I love about it is that it's way more "walkable" than other places I've lived in the states, especially the suburbs.

Or, maybe a better question: what part of the Bay Area?

The Bay is the garbage dumb of modern America. I'm sorry that it left av memory. Next time head to Chitown or NYC and absorb some culture.

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