I gave up and resigned myself to teaching my kids how to avoid being killed by drivers and advocating for safer street design. But if someone ever builds a Cyclocroft[1] or Culdesac[2] in my region I'd happily move there.
[1] https://twitter.com/mrmoneymustache/status/10960784095689891...
As a bonus, you avoid many other problems that America has: a spiraling crime wave, housing crisis (depending on where you go), school shootings, mass shootings, more guns than people, religious restrictions and laws pushed by religious groups, I could go on and on.
(Based on your username I'm guessing you're also in Japan?)
Yep, this was exactly my thought process too!
>(Based on your username I'm guessing you're also in Japan?)
Good catch! Yes, that's correct. Biking isn't perfect here, but it's not bad, and I'm not afraid for my life.
During a conference there, I (a brown person) didn’t feel as welcome as in the US. Same holds for Europe.
The US despite its flaws is orders of magnitude more diverse and welcoming than the alternatives here.
I am okay sacrificing walkability for being treated as an equal.
Europe is vast. You might get funny looks in a country that doesn't have lots of non-their own colour palette, especially in smaller places. E.g. in a smaller village in Romania, "brown" people are rare, so funny looks or the occasional ignorant comment are.. expected.
However if you go to a more mixed country, like France, Spain, Germany, Italy, there will be the occasional hardcore racist (as everywhere, stupid is not nationality/ethnicity specific) but those are rare, mostly old, and shunned by society. And extremely rare in big cities. (As an example, a few years ago in Paris an old lady sad "of course it's a black person" about a woman talking loudly in an African sounding language on a bus, and multiple people reprimanded her).
I see brown people here all the time; I even work with some.
Have you tried visiting northern Idaho BTW? Good luck feeling welcome and treated as an equal there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Japan
Tell me can a brown person aspire to the highest post in Japan?
I did my PhD in a very conservative area in the US. I have travelled a lot.
There is this weird fetishization of Japan, an ethnostate, by white folks who don’t consider other experiences even exist.
>Tell me can a brown person aspire to the highest post in Japan?
You mean the PM? No, of course a non-Japanese person is not going to be the head of government. How about in America? Can an immigrant be the President? Definitely not, it's unconstitutional.
>There is this weird fetishization of Japan, an ethnostate, by white folks who don’t consider other experiences even exist.
Only Americans say I have a "fetish" for wanting to live in a place that's walkable, peaceful, and doesn't have school shootings. Every time I have a discussion about Japan with them, I get utterly bizarre accusations like this and I'm so glad I got out of that insane country.
Health care is non-existent for me. I'm happy to explain it later on, since I'm sleepy.
Education is way more difficult with autism, nobody will help you, but someone else non-brown will make things easier.
I have to prove every ducking thing.
In Japan if you're hoping to blend in as a Japanese person, that's a pipedream - you're not Japanese, you don't speak, look, act, or think like a Japanese person, and you probably never will. It's not the same as America where anyone can legitimately call themselves American. And that's fine if you ask me, Japanese people have every right to preserve and be proud of their unique heritage.
But people will treat you "as an equal" in day-to-day life so long as you at least try to assimilate (speak some Japanese, be generally polite). So long as you don't hold onto the belief that one day you will be Japanese, then you won't be bothered by the fact that you're different.
I lived in China for some time as well, and that was similar; my friends who have lived in India seem to feel the same way, and I suspect this is the case in any country with a dominant ethnicity or sufficiently distinct culture.
That said I do hear it's harder to climb corporate hierarchy as a foreigner, but it's not something I worry about since I just work for global/foreign companies rather than for Japanese ones. A legitimate concern for others who want to join the rat race, though (still amazed @patio11 subjected himself to that).
Guess it's a difference of values; I for one would easily take walkability over blending in with the crowd, but maybe that's because I never have experienced that even in the USA (and I lived in SF and spent time in NYC, and honestly I have had as much culture shock in those places as I did in Tokyo). I've come to see "equality" as a different thing than how Americans typically view it, and my particular circumstances allow me to navigate around the parts where I would hit a glass ceiling while enjoying the parts where I wouldn't.
Moving to a safer country run by grown-ups is something we considered and it's not off the table if things get worse. My wife and I both worked in Sweden years ago, but besides that I have only been a tourist in Europe, and have never traveled outside of that. I'm curious what countries you have in mind?
Just not the UK. We don’t meet your test of “run by grown-ups” …
When saying the UK isn't a place for grownups ( and it certainly isn't run by grownups at the moment ). I'd place it somewhere between American and Northern Europe in terms of the sensible rating! I like American too, but agree with some of the shortcomings mentioned above.
Now, going in London itself - although it took less then an hour by high speed train - wasn't as much fun by bicycle at all. The cars were crazy and there were stop lights everywhere so it took much longer to get anywhere.
Public transport was great, though.
My partner is Dutch. I'm not. My own Dutch citizenship was approved last week.
I wouldn't count on it. As bad as the Tories are, Labour still doesn't seem to mount much of an opposition. I think the country would be much improved if both those parties were to vanish and replaced by the LibDems and the Greens or something. The SNP frequently comes across as the sanest party on the island, and that's really quite unusual for a separatist party.
(Not a Brit, but I've looking at it from across the channel with varying degrees of horror for a number of years now.)
Danish culture is (statistically) not authoritarian. People are expected to think for themselves, and also expect to be allowed to.
I used to live in Los Angeles, so talk about a car dependent extreme, and now settled down more permanently in Belgium. I’m car free for about a year and a half now and it’s extremely doable between my bicycle, the train and car sharing.
Every now and then I contemplate moving back to the US but then I run into the same predicament as you, which less-than-completely car dependent place to move to.
I'm completely lost, since it's 7AM, but I would guess it's very hot out there?
Yes, this is not heaven and we are having problems but overall this is a really safe and people friendly place.
There's nothing simple about getting permanent residency in a country of which you are not a citizen. How did you do it?
If you can convince the review process that out of the gate you'll have stable income (won't be a burden to their society - better yet if you already have the job at entry), is well behaved with potentially high education, the door with easily open.
I think a lot of people here would fit the criteria. Now it becomes exponentially harder the farther you're off that golden path.
(I did it too.)
According to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/crime-rat... the US has amongst the highest crime rate of "1st world" (I know loaded) countries, I can only see France and Sweden at slightly higher.
And what is going on in France? Their crime rate is much higher than all their neighbors, and in the range of countries like Mexico, Ecuador, Paraguay, etc. Sweden is a surprise too; again, their neighbors score much better.
Wage theft is one of the most common forms of crime in the US, and it's widespread, including wage theft from farm workers.
(Indeed, farm employers may be violating a lot of laws - https://www.epi.org/publication/federal-labor-standards-enfo... .)
Police steal more dollar value from innocent people in the USA than burglars do. This is of course crime but is not counted in normal crime statistics or regarded as violent crime despite police doing this while armed.
As far as I can tell, per capita violent crime is indeed often higher in urban areas than suburban or rural areas, but sometimes the violent crime rate in rural US is higher than the national average.
Quoting a 2018 publication at https://atlantablackstar.com/2018/07/16/rural-red-states-tha... :
> According to Pew Research, violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply in the past 25 years. For the first time in a decade, violent crime in rural areas has surpassed the national average, as the website Governing reported. The reasons for this state of affairs are severalfold: Although all rural areas are not poor, poverty has increased, which has led to an increase in crime. Employment has fallen in the countryside as farming has consolidated and manufacturing jobs have left. Further, the opioid crisis , as well as the methamphetamine epidemic,continue to make their presence known in small towns as a driver of crime. Finally, there are fewer law enforcement resources in the country due to shrinking tax bases, with fewer jail cells, and sheriff’s deputies required to cover significantly larger patrol areas than their urban counterparts. This rural reality provides an opening for criminal activity such as drug dealing to thrive.
Or, Table 7 of https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/docu... states that in 2019 the rate of violent crime in suburban US was higher than that of urban US.
There are regional numbers at https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/bjs/grants/252630.pdf?utm_cont... correctly, ("Victimization in Different Types of Areas in the United States: Subnational Findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2010–2015").
In looking at the numbers I think the take-home message is that violent crime is not mostly due to "bad parts of a few cities".
Violent crime rate dropped in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
2021 numbers should be out within a month.
Getting your phone/purse/whatever nicked in Paris became sort of tradition and part of visit long time ago (for me it was the phone, in museum where they have Napoleon at rest... seriously staff working the lockers just took it from my backpack).
It even leaks into neighboring countries, ie Geneva surrounded by France from 3 sides is the town with highest crime in whole Switzerland. Second highest is Basel, on the border with... you get the pattern.
Even local crime statistics are a mess to interpret, extrapolating to the whole world feel suspect.
I mean, I can't be the only one who is willing to pay 2-3x more to live in a neighborhood with no cars.
Highly recommended channel!
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/03/davis-califor...
But Roosevelt Island and Governor's Island were like the two places I ever felt halfway relaxed in NYC.