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Comment by tomaha | Hacker News Reader

It's really about planning. Modern Swiss towns mostly consist of high density buildings with parking underground and most of the areas around the buildings are for walking & biking. The really good thing about high density is that it allows for much more efficient public transport which reduces the need for cars.

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Just a reminder when talking about the Swiss... they are half the population of New Jersey over twice the area.

Maybe their cities planning ideas might not scale?

Yes, but Geneva and San Jose have the same density. I think it’s worthwhi to see where scaling breaks down with constant density and also worthwhile to not a priori dismiss the idea as non-scaling.

I'm sorry, this is hilarious to me. You see, urbanists constantly get pushback from people who know almost nothing about urban planning, or cities in other countries, who say, "uh, you can't apply lessons from Japan/UK/Germany/France/etc., because the US is so much more spread out, duh."

And now we have someone arguing literally the opposite. Now it's the US that's apparently too dense.

We need a new word for this brand of snowflakey NIH syndrome, where unless you can't prove that [city/country] is exactly the same as [other city/country], there is nothing one could learn from them.

I think you read a lot in my post that wasn't there.

But also sure... I don't know why you would be so naive to think that scaling issues don't work both ways. Perhaps what works for Switzerland and it's one city over 250k people might not work for USA with it's eighty eight over different climates, areas, densities, geological formations. No, surely I'm just being hilarious :D

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