About the density, everything is just closer together over here. Public transportation is well-built and trains work great for anything further than that. Cars are mandatory by design in the US.
It's not "just" close together like it happened. The US has made it illegal to build human-scale dense neighbourhoods for 50% years.
Parking minimums, density restrictions, street width minimums, LOS (level of service) planning, etc. all combined to make the US an unwalkable, uncyclable, unenjoyable place to be a human. As a reward the US gets about 35,000 people a year killed by drivers, and many many more indirectly through lung disease, cancer, obesity, etc. as well as parents terrified to let their kids ride a bike.
Lots of free parking though.
This is a fantastic series illustrating the effect of urban design policy in the US
Development gets done in whatever way makes best use of the available resources at the time. The overwhelming majority of the cities and towns in Europe were built out before transportation over land was slow and expensive so you had dense town centers surrounded by farmland and dense cities surrounded by even more farmland so to avoid spending precious resources on transportation. The practical limits on transportation constrained development.
By comparison huge portions of the US were built out after the advent the automobile (often tearing down and building over places that were previously more densely developed) and being geographically large there was always more land to build into so you got sprawling development because overcoming distance was fast and cheap.
The way we have more or less not built any infrastructure since the 20th century despite increasing population (and increasing clustering of the population in urban areas) is starting to catch up and incentive density but it will take time and policy sticks/carrots if you want it to happen faster than it organically would.
So yes, Europe to a large extent did win the lottery in that regard though they didn't know it at the time.
Can you explain what you mean? I’m having trouble squaring that with my model of developers, which is that they try to make money, not make efficient use of resources.
Are you talking about Europe specifically? I live in America.
There was also the General Motors street car conspiracy[2], which saw car companies buy up privatized public transit only to run it into the ground.
The fight against this future being imposed is also fascinating reading, particularly the work of Jane Jacobs[3]. She correctly saw past the hyperbole to the unfortunate consequences, fought against the vision but lost.
The reason not much infrastructure is being built these days is simply that cities are running out of money and credit. Every road built comes with a price tag for building it, and an ongoing price tag for maintaining it. The building price was so often done on credit (bonds), but the maintenance price is usually not considered. Given that roads bring in basically zero income for a city, every road built comes with an obligation for the city but no way to pay for it. In the past credit was issued on the assumption that future growth would somehow provide some payback, but after 50 years cities have hit the growth limits and still not seen any payback. Strong Towns[4] is an excellent book on the subject.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... [3] https://shelterforce.org/2016/05/10/jane-jacobs-defender-of-... [4] https://www.strongtowns.org/book
She was indeed against highways going through the middle of cities and in favor of walkability and mixed use.
At the same time, she also opposed rationalist urban planning like Le Corbusier's clusters of towering skyscrapers. She would likely not have favored the mass building of vertical housing that many of the same people who oppose cars want in order to reduce housing prices.
My (limited) opinion, is that auto-centric opponents want dense, walkable, cyclable cities. That doesn't imply towering skyscrapers, six stories of apartments with mixed retail, office, and light industry are sufficient. That should provide enough density to make public transit a viable option, if road space is reclaimed from cars.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/16/urban-living-...
(But you'll find no shortage of people arguing for basically bulldozing the Mission and building a bunch of high-rises.)
The other has to be more organic but takes a lot of time and tends to generate a lot of resistance if 2-story zoning is turned into 6-story zoning.
This is the heart of what needs to change in the US. World-class bike cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen were just as car-centric in the 20th century as any American city. It took decades of deliberate, systematic change to make what they are today. This is just as possible for American cities as it was for their foreign peers.
>everything is just closer together over here
To this point, human-scale cities with fewer cars directly enable closer and denser habitats. Cars are a direct impediment to more livable cities. If you remove the cars, all of a sudden you have more space for people.
Would you want someone to tell you that your choices are limited because your city prefers "human scale" instead of whatever you prefer on the market that is totally doable?
While I acknowledge that in the United States the culture is extremely car-centric and that must change, some of that is history / culture / lobbying but a lot of it is because not all of us have the good fortune to be Dutch. As a result, housing choices and preferences are much different.
Making a more bike-centric culture starts with a number of things, not just bike lanes and denser cities. The city as a whole has to want it, first, and then continue to prove out the concept that bike-friendly can still be business friendly. (See: the old saw that "if my people can't park they won't shop here")
Note: I'm in favor of denser cities, but I also acknowledge that it removes choice and it's not just my opinion that matters. Also, I can't afford a house in Amsterdam.
To give just one example of these many, many, many rules, I just spoke with an architect about changes to my house and one of the rules is I need at least 2.4 metres of basically dead space where I meet the road because it's assumed I'll be sitting there in a car looking left and right before exiting. Saying "nah I ride a bike so I'm going to put a hedge up there" isn't an option.
"house with a yard, a few minutes drive from a walkable downtown,"
Problem is that every time you drive to that downtown you make it a bit less walkable by virtue of bringing your car. In effect, everyone there is paying a little bit of their quality of life for your parking. Sometimes, this makes sense (having a place for ambulances is good), but sometimes you end up with a tragedy of the commons.
You get sick and need a taxi to the doctors office? Need it. Tumble off the bike and break or sprain something, and you rent a car while you recover? Need it.
Do you plan on selling the house, and the buyer is a tradesman who need a truck to do landscaping or carry his tools?
You're not going to cycle always and forever. A lot of people here one day are going to get old enough where cycling is a chore, even with a ebike. At that point the hedge becomes an expensive nuisance.
Relevant: https://twitter.com/mlroach/status/1216078001709780992
"News article: can bicycles replace many car trips for some people?
That person: nobody can ever replace any car trips with a bicycle trip because I drive cross country every week with 14 hockey players and their equipment."
Those are two very different things.
Housing with yards, by and large, makes the city sprawl more, which takes away farmland.
If you want to dwell in a single family unit - that's great! You should absolutely be able to.
But other people ought to be able to be free to make different choices.
Obviously in the US more and more acreage around urban areas is being bought up and turned into housing stock and some of these areas can be quite far away, far apart, and not subject to as many zoning restrictions especially where population is already somewhat spread out (thinking of SW Ohio here, particularly)
It's not a hard boundary, and can grow as the city demonstrates a need.
The reason this isn't done is purely because of stupid zoning laws and NIMBYism.
I think the solution is pretty simple: make a state law that bans municipalities from making any zoning laws at all, and only allows the state government to control zoning.
It's also super-windy. Places that have massively adopted cycling rarely have the best environmental conditions for it. Minneapolis, for example, has some of the highest bike commuting numbers in the U.S., despite it's high snowfall and frigid temperatures. We're pretty good at making excuses, and "grass is greener"-ing places that make it work.
> ... very dense city
Chicken/egg scenario here. U.S. cities are sprawling because cars both require it and make it possible.
PS it's like a different planet riding you bike around in those temperatures!
-Cheap high-speed Internet-> It won't work in America because...
-Universal health care -> It won't work in America because...
- Mandatory vacations -> It won't work in America because...
The form of "American exceptionalism" that seems to be most common today is one of "we are uniquely important and many rules don't apply to us in the same way they would others, because of [various usually underlying differences like "freedom"/"democracy"/religious dominion/destiny]."
The difference between "we're going to reach the moon because we're special" and "let's spin up this massive program to do it in response to discovering that another nation might be dangerously ahead of us."
That last bit of logical reasoning is, in my opinion, not supportable. Let's look at the things the government already does in America in compare it to what the government does in Germany. Germany spends $11,000 per student on public education. We spend $12,800 per student. But our schools are much worse. Transit is the same story. Germany spent $250 million per kilometer to build the U55 line in Berlin. New York spent $2.2 billion per kilometer for its most recent line: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne....
So yes, America is exceptional. For whatever reason, we are uniquely bad at running public services. Contrary to popular belief, its not because of "lack of funding." (The American government does less, but in the areas it does something, like education, it usually spends more to get worse results.)
Americans understand this intuitively, and that's why they say "it won't work in America because." They may not be able to pull up statistics about how their municipal water/sewage system is poisoning kids and destroying the environment, but they perceive that their government just doesn't do a good job. When polled, they say so. Since 2006, 80-90% of people polled reported being "frustrated" or "angry" at their government: https://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/2-general-opinions-a.... Even in 1997, 2010, and 2015, all during Democratic administrations, only 1/3 of Democrats thought that the federal government did an "excellent" or "good" job running its programs. For the population as a whole in 2015, 33% said it did a "poor" job, and just 20% said it does an "excellent" or "good" job. As of 2015, 53% would rather have a "smaller government" offering "fewer services" than a "bigger government" offering "more services."
The most remarkable statistic is for millennials: https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/assets/db/140488628178.... When you ask millenials whether they want a smaller government providing fewer services (with low taxes) versus a larger government providing more services (with high taxes), 57% want a smaller government with fewer services, while just 41% want a larger government with more services. Basically, when you ask millenials--the most pro-government demographic there is--whether they want more of a European-style government, they say "no" with a 3:2 margin.
Yes, America is exceptional. Americans hate taxes, hate their government, and frankly, on various measures, their government isn't very good at what it does.
Given how many problems Italy has had over the years with massive corruption, it's really a rational decision.