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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, western countries (namely the USA) should model itself after Amsterdam and the Dutch in general.

They figured out (or at least improved on) transportation of people. City design is amazing and they have a multitude of options to move around (bike, train, walkable, or micro transportation). Their cities are much more cleaner, enjoyable, not as noisy, and everyone in general seems much more happier.

Contrast this to hellholes like most of the USA where it is an absolute necessity to own a car. Minimal alternatives. High dependency on highway / street infrastructure that requires significant resources to build AND maintain.

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> Contrast this to hellholes like most of the USA where it is an absolute necessity to own a car

This strikes me as disingenuous when taking into consideration the population density and just generally the size of land mass of the US, compared to the Netherlands or Denmark. You're comparing the US, which is, generally, much more broad open land with fewer people per square kilometer. Like, a lot fewer people. 523 people/km2 in the Netherlands compared to 37 people/km2 in the US.

Like, yes, in a wide open stretch of land, people will spread out more, necessitating more personal and speedy forms of transportation. It's not a hellhole just because you're not packed into flats like a sardine and the same convenience store exists on every kilometer stretch of city road.

Speaking as someone in the US who works from home and commonly bikes to the grocery store in my small town. The way the US is built allows for more of a sense of solitude (outside of the major cities.) This doesn't make it a hellscape just because it's not your way of living. Not by a long shot. Anyway, this is all at risk of sounding personally offended, which I am not; but the word "hellhole" seems a bit much, and far too broadly used for such a large piece of land with so many different subcultures within it.

Americans don't live evenly spread out of their country. There are a lot of very dense parts along the cost, and even in the interior, that are just as dense and sometimes even denser than anything in Netherland.

There's plenty of opportunity in the US to invest in other forms of transportation. The only thing that's missing is the political will, and that's because US politics has been bought by the oil industry, which benefits from inefficient transportation.

> The only thing that's missing is the political will, and that's because US politics has been bought by the oil industry, which benefits from inefficient transportation.

That's just not true, and I'm a bit tired of the tendency online to blame "big bad boogeyman conspiracy" whenever it's convenient.

Yes, the auto and related industries have had huge impact on the design of our cities that now seems really unfortunate. But I don't think it was some big, evil master plan. People seem to forget that for a really long time people loved driving their cars.

Just compare old vs. new cities in the US. Older cities (think NYC, Boston, Chicago) generally are a lot more dense with comparatively great (though unfortunately not always well maintained) public transportation. When other "post WWII" cities boomed, though, people wanted space out in the burbs, they wanted a private car. It's only relatively recently (last 30 years or so) that there has really been a re-evaluation of all the downsides to that sprawl and being trapped in long commutes.

In Austin, TX, our public transportation is generally really bad and there has been a huge push to build more of it. At this point though, the geography of Austin and existing land use patterns make the cost of doing so enormous. And we've built a ton of protected bike lanes in the past couple decades, but it's also been over 105F the past two weeks, so it's not hard to see why a car is pretty essential here.

Yes, I also wish things had developed differently. But comparing Amsterdam with most cities in the US is just a silly exercise in general that accomplishes nothing.

> That's just not true, and I'm a bit tired of the tendency online to blame "big bad boogeyman conspiracy" whenever it's convenient.

> Yes, the auto and related industries have had huge impact on the design of our cities that now seems really unfortunate. But I don't think it was some big, evil master plan.

I think I understand your perspective, but why does it have to be an evil master plan? Large corporations aim to make more money for shareholders. If a car/oil corporation can advance a car-oriented agenda through lobbying, PR campaigns, etc, then that's the obvious choice and they'll do it. Clearly it's not an evil plan, it's just business.

And now, those same companies are massively enriched and in the position to lobby and create PR campaigns even more effectively to protect their profits. Again, it's just business.

The whole frustration of the poster you replied to was that these companies are powerful, influential in politics, and are able to stifle the political will to make changes that improve cities by de-emphasizing cars. This isn't to say that there's a boogeyman, a conspiracy of people pulling the strings. It's just to say that corporations advocate for profit above public good or public health.

So yes, of course there's no conspiracy. But also, these companies are not only directly responsible for the (perhaps unintended) adverse affects of cars on cities' public transit, but also are doubly responsible for the influence they exert every day on the political system to keep the status quo.

> Clearly it's not an evil plan, it's just business.

Exactly. Also consider that Exxon knew in 1978 about the risk of global warming, they briefly considered warning society about it, realised that would cut into their profit, and instead decided on a big misinformation campaign to discredit the idea of global warming. To them, that's just business. They're not sitting there twirling their mustaches and laughing diabolically, they're sitting there looking at their spreadsheets.

And it's undeniable that the US government has had very close ties with the oil industry over the decades. Wars have been started and governments have been overthrown over oil.

I don't normally like big conspiracy talk, but I think it's naive to think that the oil industry is innocent of some of the problems the US is facing. I think they're one of the major driving forces behind several major problems. All just to maximise profits.

I think outside of major traffic congested cities, most people still love driving their cars.

I don’t know that I buy that. People that are into cars, and buy a very specific car because it’s their dream car they’ve been seeing in recent Fast and Furious films, sure maybe them. Kids that just acquired the new freedom of being able to go wherever they want, sure probably them too. But the average person sitting in traffic to get to some specific destination? Now that I don’t buy for one minute. We’re all just angrily thinking about how the other people on the road are slowing _me_ down, or endangering _my_ life not paying attention to the road.

That's why I said outside of cities. Yes, many cities are absolutely miserable to drive in, but scenic country roads are often an absolute delight to drive on.

The trouble in this conversation is that I suspect we both consider each other to be exceptions to a rule. From my perspective, I'd say you're either one of the classifications of people I've identified to enjoy driving, or you're one of the minority that just actually like casual driving.

And on the other side, you're going to think I'm the exception to your rule where most people apparently like being out on the road.

From my subjective experience, driving appears to be an experience that induces some amount of stress that one would prefer to avoid if at all possible. For example, I don't know anybody that's psyched when they forget to pick something up on their last grocery trip and relish the chance to drive back to the shop for it. When remote work was beginning to take off, most people I knew fortunate enough to have that kind of job were just excited to not have to drive in to work every day. I could go on, but suffice it to say, people don't seem to enjoy to drive anywhere, from what I have observed. The destination is usually the thing to be excited by, as in: being finished with the drive there.

And from what I have observed, this generalization has been mostly true in the suburbs and even in small towns.

I think there are times when people love driving, and there are times when they hate it. It's a good reason to provide better alternatives.

> Americans don't live evenly spread out of their country

I mentioned that in my comment as well. The "different subcultures" part, and the "outside of the major cities" bit. Of course large cities formed in areas all around the US. I'm talking about the majority of the land mass of the US, which is widely dispersed.

> There's plenty of opportunity in the US to invest in other forms of transportation

Inefficient transportation is necessitated by having 9 million square kilometers of land, where your friends, family, and jobs are spread across it. There's plenty of efficient public transportation inside the large cities. Admittedly outside of large cities, methods of efficient transportation are sparse. I used to take a train from my college in a small town in the midwest about a 4 hour ride up to Chicago, and then hop on another train to visit my family, which was another couple of hours on that train, and then the last 5-10 miles was usually via car or taxi, as busses outside of the major cities are few and far between. That 6+ hour journey, with an additional layover period between the two trains, was compared to a 2 hour drive via personal vehicle. So yeah, people out here buy cars.

The idea that efficient transportation is completely stonewalled by politics strikes me as someone who hasn't themselves lived in a suburban or rural region of the US before. The kind of logistical problems that the US would have to face to make more efficient forms of transportation across the entire US are unlike the problems the Netherlands would have faced on a much, much smaller segment of the Earth.

> There's plenty of efficient public transportation inside the large cities.

Inside a few large cities. A lot of US cities are still designed around massive stroads, with barely any lip service to buses and bike paths. I still remember how surprised I was back in the 1990s when someone who lived there told me that there were no buses after 7pm in the largest city of New Mexico. Of course that's no LA or NY, which I'm sure have better public transport.

> That 6+ hour journey, with an additional layover period between the two trains, was compared to a 2 hour drive via personal vehicle. So yeah, people out here buy cars.

That's not exactly a sign of efficient public transportation, then. From what I understand, US trains go more slowly than trains elsewhere, and on top of that often have delays because freight trains have priority. Just changing that would already help a lot.

Of course there will always be places that can't efficiently be services by public transport, and there's always tradeoffs to be made, but it's pretty clear that in much of the US, public transport has no priority.

> across the entire US

But you don't have to do it across the entire US at once. Focus on the cities first. And on densely populated regions like the north east. Although the US was originally also built around big transcontinental railroads, and that worked. A lot of infrastructure has been destroyed. Not just in the US; also in Europe. I love looking at train maps from the 1930s, and shake my head at everything that's been destroyed.

> Of course that's no LA or NY, which I'm sure have better public transport.

Yeah, if you intended on talking about large cities, New Mexico would not be included in that list. New York, Los Angelos, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Boston, Washington DC would be a few real metros that you could refer to as a "large city" around here with decent public transit systems. And that public transit usually extends out to their suburbs fairly well. Trick comes with crossing from one large city to another, or through wide open rural ways. Efficient transport just doesn't spiderweb out across all that open prairie in the US.

Touching on your point too, I believe trains in the US are typically of the slower variety when compared to trains from other developed countries. They also often make stops every few miles to pick up and drop off passengers that slow them down quite a lot. When you consider how far some of these train tracks go, a stop every 3-8 miles or so adds up to a lot of time.

That's why there's usually a distinction between local and express trains. In NL we've got local trains that stop everywhere, intercity trains that only stop in the larger cities (and maybe two or three times in the largest cities like Amsterdam), and then there are high-speed trains that only stop in 3 places in the country before heading towards France or Germany. That way long distance travelers don't have to wait for all the small stops.

> if you intended on talking about large cities, New Mexico would not be included in that list.

According to Wikipedia, Albuquerque has a population of 562,599, which would make it the third largest city in Netherland. That's not a megapolis, but it's not small either. Dutch cities that are a fifth of that size still get regular trains and buses until late in the evening.

Amsterdam ciry has a population density of 5,300/sqkm and 1 million.

Miami is 4,800/sqkm and 6 million across the urban area.

Seems that Miami could have an urban transit system similar to Amsterdam.

I don't know much about Miami. But some urban areas of the US absolutely do have very nice transit systems. The trick comes when people need or want to travel outside of those transit systems' boundaries. People seem to forget in this conversation that the US is one country that is more than double the land mass of the entire European Union. If you lived in Portugal, would you take a train to Lithuania? That would be like taking the train from San Francisco to Chicago. As mentioned before, people have friends, family, and jobs spread all around this land. I knew many people who took the train into work in the suburbs of Chicago. I used to ride my bike 16 kilometers into work every day. But what we all needed a car for was visiting our family out in rural Illinois.

That Montana is empty is of no interest to those in Florida.

Florida is denser than France and Spain

I'm European and my limited experience with the US (part personal experience, part YouTube documentaries from the likes of Not Just Bikes[1], Strong Towns[2], Climate Town[3] and Adam Something[4]) does indeed suggest that zoning laws and gigantic parking lots have a negative effect on life satisfaction.

That said, you're not rallying anyone to the cause of improving that situation by calling the place a hellhole. Some empathy would go a long way to getting people to see the problem.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@strongtowns

[3] https://www.youtube.com/@ClimateTown

[4] https://www.youtube.com/@AdamSomething

That's quite the ask. It's quite unreasonable and flippant to simply want the US to model Dutch transportation and infrastructure as if the US were a greenfield project. You can't ignore legacy and existing infrastructure, culture, habits, needs, etc. that we need to consider. From the point of view of a human life, urban planning and architecture are practically permanent: once a street grid or some buildings have been built and put in place, it is VERY difficult to change any of it. To see just how lasting this can be, consider the street grids in old Italian cities look at how the still follow the original Roman planning. The amphitheaters may be gone, but the streets that used to encircle them are still there, and the buildings that stand where the amphitheaters once stood even incorporate the original foundation work. Or look at smaller US cities like Hartford that were wrecked by highways. There are people working for the administration of these cities who know how many problems these things cause, but there are no realistic options available to make all but the smallest changes and improvements. The result of the Big Dig in Boston is desirable and welcome, but the cost was enormous (in part because of unnecessary losses, but good luck eliminating those). Maybe carpet bombing could liberate these cities from certain aspects of their legacy, but even then, the cost of rebuilding would be enormous (disregarding the evil of such a thing).

This is why it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL that cities take urban planning VERY seriously instead of letting developers do whatever they please. Urban planning is not a private matter. It is a matter of the common good and concerns not just the public today, but the public of the future.

The US made a radical "bet" (under the heavy influence of the auto lobby) on cars, and this has been, in retrospect, a bad move in many ways. Something more balanced would have been better. Now, this doesn't mean we can do nothing. We can make conservative or incremental improvements. We can influence the direction infrastructure and development take. We just have to keep in mind that radical and sweeping changes are easy to demand, but difficult and even uncharitable to make in practice. Comparing Amsterdam to most of America is folly. The two do not afford the same opportunities for urban planning.

There are plenty of US cities where car ownership is unnecessary. New York City and Washington, D.C. for example have very robust public transportation.

Any of them you would recommend besides those two?

Personally, none of them. I was born in one of the most rural places imaginable. I can't stand big city life. I currently live in one of the top 10 largest cities in America for work and I cannot wait to have the opportunity to move back to the country.

and everyone in general seems much more happier

Apropos of nothing, they also have weed in coffee shops and a regulated industry of 'negotiable affection'.

While I can’t easily find the latter, I can find (what’s basically) weed beside my local coffee shop. And I’m in a state where it’s still illegal.

I dunno, pedestrians in the US legally have the right of way and most motorists and the occasional altruistic bicyclist recognize that and act accordingly-ish. I was in Amsterdam for the first time this year and quickly recognized that folks on wheels (especially cyclists) don’t give a shit about pedestrians. Otherwise I totally I agree with your first sentence. :-)

There is definitely a lot of things the US can learn from countries like the Netherlands and Denmark (my country).

However please don't emulate our habit of flying to exotic destinations during our summer vacation. That would probably be the final nail in the coffin for the global climate.

> There is definitely a lot of things the US can learn from countries like the Netherlands and Denmark

But they won’t. It’s culturally incompatible.

They won't. Flying to Thailand requires too much vacation time to make it worthwhile. And most Americans don't have much vacation.

Where to Invade Next? (2015)

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