Today is one of the 2 days each year when the sun lines up with Manhattan's grid
haydenplanetarium.org
haydenplanetarium.org
There are three from yesterday's event but this photo from earlier in the year is visually stunning. I can't imagine the traffic slowdown driving sunwards.
The effect of combining a quick and easy to use public transporation system with an amazing amount of technical and artistic talent is that it lowers the activitation energy of participation to almost zero. You don't have a good excuse to not check out some cool new gallery, exhibit or user group meeting, or simply hang out with a friend on short notice, because the cost in time and energy is as close to zero as you can get. Well, as close as you can get without a Jetsons- or Minority Report-style personal rapid transport system like the SkyTran:
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.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Tokyo_sub...
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.
It's entirely possible, of course, that all the cities we're talking about are too large to be the best city, that in fact smaller cities (I'm in one right now - Ottawa, Canada) actually function better overall.
You made a very understandable mistake, the same one that a lot of my friends do whenever I rave about how great New York is. Just because it's the best in several aspects doesn't mean it's the best place to live.
And you could be right about the size of a city being a much larger factor in quality of life than easy public transportation. I actually like SF very much, despite the shitty public transportation, and a big part of that is because it's smaller (about a tenth the size of New York) and yet still has high population density (second highest to only New York). My friends in even smaller places like Boulder (a tenth the size of SF) love the lifestyle and startup scene there too.
Either way, this conversation seems better suited in person, like the kind you'd have over a beer after a workshop in some other city.
It reminds me of the guy who mapped out the exact best spots for each day of the year to take pictures of the sun setting underneath the Golden Gate bridge, and he was a hacker, and was interested in that. Wish I could find that page...