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Comment by jcoder | Hacker News Reader

Houten has a population of 50,000. Plenty of American cities much larger than that have the sort of human-scale features and transit you’re describing—they’re all over Portland, OR.

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The place I linked (McLean/Tyson’s Corner) has about 50,000 people.

The place you linked is an outer station in the broader Washington DC metro system. Millions of people live here; trying to view McLean or Tyson’s in isolation is insanity.

It’s big because lots of people transit through; the bridges are high because they go over interstate 66. It’s big because because one of the main purposes of the station is to serve as a transfer point from cars to light rail.

Would you suggest that the bridges over an interstate be 10 feet high? Would you rather the rail system just not service that area?

Houten is just 50 km from Amsterdam, while Tysons is 25 km from DC. Both are distinct urban areas within a larger urban sprawl: 4.5 million people in 1,400 square miles for DC, 7 million people in 2,400 square miles for the Randstad.

One look at Google maps tells me they are nowhere close to comparable. Houten is surrounded by farms and cows, next to Utrect which has a population of half a million.

Tysons is next to a ring road for DC, and the greater DC-Arlington-Alexandria metro area has 6.6M.

Having lived in Paris, London, Tokyo, Amsterdam and San Francisco, it’s striking how quickly you go from urban to rural in the Randstad. It takes at least an hour of driving in Paris to get to the same as 5 minutes out of Amsterdam. And of course US cities are less densely populated because the country has land to spare, why would they?

The comparison is still not fair. You can comparing a road-intersection with a high-intersection. Of course, the highway bridge/tunnel is going to be more massive for pedestrians.

It's a probably because it's a popular place (I've been there but only because it's close to DC and has the metro connection!). It seems that there is significant shopping, medical and corporate places there too (Capital One for instance).

Public transport in Tyson's Corner, or the Metro anyway, is very much an afterthought. The original plans for the Washington area metro ended well short of Tyson's

And that portion of the DC area is textbook "50s/60s sprawl". What's your point?

The picture you linked to is where they added metro to into the island of a highway. They shouldn’t have built a subway, they should have created express lanes for express buses instead of these monster metro stops.

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