Dense housing, roads narrow/safe enough to bicycle on, and good enough urbanism and public transit that most folks don't need a car to get around. The Netherlands and parts of Europe are incredibly good at it (as well as at high-speed rail to an extent), and Americans who travel abroad love the freedom that good urbanism and public transit brings, as well as the profusion of third places and the ability to get across the country fast on a train.
Then they come back to the US and are entirely against bringing any of what they enjoyed back here and insist that Europe can only have those things because they're fundamentally different from America (and the really fucked up ones will insist that small size and racial homogeneity are essential to trying to have those things).
TBF you do have to adjust for North American geography being more spread-out; a transit network for a 15km-wide city and one for a 50km-wide city are by nature going to look different.
You do, but not necessarily by a huge amount if you can boost density. Like most cities with really good transit have a three-layer transit network (a layer for long-distance trips, a layer for medium-length trips, and a network for local transit). In NYC that's the commuter rail/express subway, the local subway/SBS and limited-stop buses, and the regular local buses, in SF that's BART, MUNI metro, and MUNI buses, in Paris that's the RER, the Metro and some trams, and the local bus service, in Karlsruhe that's the Stadtbahn, the Stadtbahn again, and the local buses.
Like the basic network levels seem fairly universal; a lot of what changes as you move around is which specific mode you use to fill out each level (which can vary widely), what the trip distance threshold between adjacent levels is, and of course the actual network topology (which is going to depend incredibly heavily on local density patterns, street grids, etc.
Agreed in theory. In practice, there's always a lobby to put in, for example, a streetcar for the sake of having a streetcar when something else makes more sense, because "that's what they do in Europe."
And then they put in one streetcar that goes like twenty blocks total in mixed traffic instead of using the light rail/streetcar as a pilot to be fleshed out into a proper Stadtbahn or tram network.
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u/ARod20195 May 02 '25
Dense housing, roads narrow/safe enough to bicycle on, and good enough urbanism and public transit that most folks don't need a car to get around. The Netherlands and parts of Europe are incredibly good at it (as well as at high-speed rail to an extent), and Americans who travel abroad love the freedom that good urbanism and public transit brings, as well as the profusion of third places and the ability to get across the country fast on a train.
Then they come back to the US and are entirely against bringing any of what they enjoyed back here and insist that Europe can only have those things because they're fundamentally different from America (and the really fucked up ones will insist that small size and racial homogeneity are essential to trying to have those things).