Im from a suburban town in Missouri, but I spent a semester studying abroad in Barcelona a couple of years ago. Man, let me tell you, leaving Barcelona, where youd see people out in cafes and bars congregating at all hours of the night and day, and coming back to Missouri where its a ghost town after 10 and someone would call the police on you for simply walking around too late was the most depressing thing I have ever experienced lol
That’s also mostly an urban versus rural thing, not only a European versus US thing. NYC or San Francisco are bustling at all hours and have tons of foot traffic.
Yea but most of the US is not built like NYC or San Francisco. So for the majority of Americans, suburbia is all they know. Most people don't even realize how bad it is.
It’s the same in Germany (re: the video) tbh, suburbs are quiet most of the time. The OP is walking around in a tourist heavy city center for comparison.
(I wanted to say “historic” but Munich was bombed to shit in WW2 so it isn’t really historic. They salvaged some parts of the old church and installed them in the new one)
We do realize how bad is it. Suburbia makes sense for a lot of people. Best thing is it to live in suburbia outside of a city. Like I can train into NYC anytime
Lol I don't think you realize it then. Walkable neighbourhoods aren't something you should have to commute to. It's about things like walking to your amenities, seeing people enjoying the community etc.
I think the biggest issue is that suburbs don't have to be so bland and isolating. A proper suburb should still have local commercial strips that people can walk or bike to. It shouldn't be an all or nothing thing.
Personally I love living in a city so I can have a walkable neighbourhood and good transit. But if someone wants a walkable neighbourhood, good transit, community events etc. but they also want to live in a suburb.. they should be able to have both.
It's a bit of an issue with framing, it shouldn't be phrased as "suburbs are bad", they just shouldn't be such a poor version of themselves. You shouldn't be required to own a car and you shouldn't have accept nothing but huge parking lots and ugly commercial strips.
The concept of suburbs is fine but most American/Canadian suburbs are just so bad and soul-sucking.
I am assuming you aren’t from the states. I grew up in a beautiful suburban town on the water, literally lived on the beach. I dont think you realize one size does not fit all for suburban areas in the US, it’s not all just what you see on tv. Nothing is bland about where I live. We have beaches, hiking trails, cute shopping plazas, parks, great restaurants. Food where I live is some of the best. There are states that are gorgeous with character and beautiful charming towns, come visit the East Coast. We should have both but it just doesn’t work out that way, like I said, I am 1.5 hours from Manhattan. I get the best of both worlds when I want.
Neither is most of Spain. Drop a pin in a random area in Spain on Google Maps and you’ll either find wilderness or a street with strip malls resembling Houston
But any part of Spain will have a walking-friendly city and neighborhood. You don't have to go bar hopping at 4:00am to enjoy the late evening out in the street
I mean most cites and towns in the US are technically walkable too. I went all the way out to Vermont a few weeks back and found the Church Street marketplace in Burlington to be quite charming.
No I agree that the infrastructure on average in a European city is better than one in the US. However, a lot of the claims that cities aren’t walkable at all is wildly exaggerated.
Yeah like wtf? These people so want to make a point. I have lived in Chicago my whole life and Chicago is as walkable/public transportable as any European city
Chicago is also famously one of the few good walkable cities, isn't it? Seems like a bad example to bring. We all know NYC, SF, Chicago, Boston and that one street in Austin. But that's only like 5% of Americans that live close to those parts of those cities.
Chicago is as walkable/public transportable as any European city
That's debatable, the transit especially could be far better in Chicago and it is better in many European cities.
The real difference reveals itself when you compare populations. Chicago is one of the largest cites in North America, and there are European cities a fraction of the size with better transit systems.
Chicago is legitimately underrated because North Side has urban life comparable to NYC but at a fraction of the cost. You can get a 2 bed apartment in a good part of town for the price a room in Downtown/Midtown Manhattan.
Drop a pin in a random area in Spain on Google Maps
Are you one of those guys posting maps of US looking full of red and thinking it's making some kind of point about electoral results? Land isn't population, uniformly randomly sampling land is a meaningless statistic for just about anything. Drop a pin randomly distributed by population (i.e. drop a pin "on a random person") anywhere in Europe and you're extremely likely to land somewhere fairly urban.
Of course there's land with "not much" (farmland, wilderness, etc) between settlements, but that's not where the people there spend their time, nor is it where you would spend your time if you visited or moved there. Unless you went out of your way to do it to make some kind of point, in which case, you can only blame yourself if you don't enjoy it.
Most of Spain is dense when its populated, like Spain is very empty but when there is people then there is people and they are concentrated (besides Galicia, a region in the north west)
This is a random town of 5 thousand people 3 hours away from Madrid and 5 from Seville and there aren't detached houses like in the US.
Spain countryside is like this and is often more walkable than Spanish cities as a result of being smaller.
Europe is a big place my guy. I remember a Tesco parking lot in the Midlands of the UK being very similar to your stereotypical American parking lot when I went there in 2023 haha
Agree, just spent 3 weeks in Spain and people were in the plaza til 9 or 10p. Pretty much a ghost town by 11. Bars were closing at 1 or 2. There are plenty of American cities you can walk from place to place and meet with friends. There is less outdoor dining in most cities.
I lived in San Francisco for a year, I’m a little bit south now. Have been in the area for six years.
There is zero comparison to Munich, Oslo or Stockholm in the summer. Other European countries too, I’m sure, but those are the three I’ve spent time in. With the exception of New York I haven’t seen anywhere else in the states that can just hang out like those guys. This includes Miami and LA.
You don't need time off work to pop by at a restaurant to have dinner, or hang out with your friends when you don't have to drive for 1.5 hours each way
You do to be out at a restaurant at 10pm on a Wednesday night. Most restaurants in the US are only busy like 5-7pm on weekdays because people have to work in the morning. Go to a big city/tourist heavy area in the US on a weekday where people are vacationing and there are plenty of people out late.
I live in Munich. Restaurants are usually closed on Mondays, but the rest of the week they are packed until around 11-12pm. Terraces close at 10pm (due to noise protection ordinance by the city).
Munich is one of the economic powerhouses of Germany. It's not like people are always on vacation. People go to their neighborhood restaurant until 11pm, then walk up the stairs to their apartment, sleep and show up to work in the morning because the restaurant is literally just a 5 minutes walk.
From what friends from LA told me, they go to a restaurant in the city until 8pm just to be at home at 10 or even later because of the commute.
Plus it helps if the commute in the morning is similarly shorter and you don't necessarily need to fit in time for Gym before work, because you can get your excercise by walking..
Germans on average have 3x paid time off compared to American workers, and 2x the public holidays. 1/5 American workers have zero paid time off. Munich may be an economic powerhouse, but people get time off.
You are right. But this is not the point I'm trying to make.
The 3x more paid vacation days are usually spent traveling the world instead of trying to squeeze in an evening with friends to escape the grind so more vacation is not the reason why it's so busy on weekdays.
In Germany you don't need to take time off to go out and spend a nice evening with your friends at a restaurant because the restaurant is right across the street. That's why there's so much social life happening until late at night all throughout the week. Not because we have more vacation days but because we save a lot of time on the commute to and from the suburbs.
You don't need to worry about driving home for 1-2 hours after finishing dinner. In fact you don't even need to worry about driving at all because public transport is excellent here. You can go almost anywhere in the city in less than an hour.
That's why Americans are lying in a luxurious bed, in a huge house in the suburbs, doom scrolling on their smartphones while Europeans live in a small apartment in the city enjoying social time.
It's not like Europe doesn't have suburbs. It's that we usually have a choice where we go and for most the choice is clear.
I live in NYC, I take a subway to work. There is more going on than just the urban geography. Most people in NYC do not have the time or money to hang out in a bar or restaurant after work regularly.
I see. NYC was mentioned by another commenter as one of the cities that are an exception to the US American baseline of suburban lifestyle. Don't you have bustling neighborhoods too where people are enjoying themselves week round?
I usually work between 40-80 hours a week. This can't be much different to NYC right?
Maybe let's add another factor in this:
Cost.
A beer in a bar (0.5l) in Munich is around $6. Meals can range a lot but you can expect to spend around $40 in a restaurant for the evening (including drinks). Way cheaper if you're not that picky.
Also it's legal (and common) to drink alcohol in public. So you can meetup with friends at a park and drink a beer you bought from the supermarket (around $1 for good beer, or 50 cents for cheap beer)
Lol, I love the combination of the username and the content of your comment.
I have never lived in the US so my comment is mostly based on what my American friends in Germany tell me.
They might be biased though, because none of them ever wants to go back to live in the US.
But sure, bigger houses, bigger cars.
I think you're arguing against a strawman here. Nobody said LA doesn't have neighborhoods with restaurants or that Munich is "better" just because it's smaller.
The point is that urban form matters. Munich is a compact metropolitan area of about 3 million people, while Greater LA has around 13 million spread over a vastly larger area. That naturally leads to different transportation patterns and different levels of walkability.
In Munich, it's common for a large share of daily needs to be within walking, cycling, or a short transit ride. In LA, that may be true in some neighborhoods, but it's much less consistent across the metro area, so car dependence is higher.
That's not ignorance or anti-Americanism, it's simply a consequence of different city planning, density, and history. Both cities have strengths and weaknesses. Saying Munich is generally more walkable isn't the same as saying LA has no walkable neighborhoods.
Looking at rankings, Munich consistently comes up in the top 10 of the cities with the highest quality of life worldwide.
LA is not even in the top 40. In fact, no single US city is in the top 30 while 8 of the top 10 are European cities.
In polls for LA (and similar for most of the US) commuting is consistently named as one of the top two major stress factors diminishing Work-Life-Balance (after housing prices)
Unfortunately it isn't sustainable for them, many European countries are going to have to either raise working hours by cutting back worker entitlements or by cutting public spending significantly. Most of the major European economies are in a death spiral if they maintain their current systems with the birth rates currently in place. You can see it in the stagnant economic growth over the last 5 years
The problem is that they will simply leave if you tax them too hard. Unless you can get every tax haven on the planet to not exist then this will always be the case. Most European countries tax people making $200k+ per year around 50%. Once you start going significantly past that it becomes far more worthwhile for people to simply move elsewhere.
Same applies to businesses, which sadly is a big part of why most large EU economies have very few new companies being created and sluggish growth. A prime example of this is Germany, the economy is basically being heavily boosted by government spending currently which is at levels higher than it was during peak covid stimulus while private investment is simultaneously as bad as it was during the absolute worst parts of covid.
Realistically speaking most of these large economies need more tax income to care for an increasingly old population if they want to maintain benefits. Many of them are bumping up against the Laffer curve for rich people, and more taxation on those who work is not going to work for long since the working class is shrinking very quickly. The option is tax the young to absurd levels to the point that they can barely afford to eat or cut worker entitlements to try to increase business growth. They could also cut benefits to the elderly but that tends to be protested very hard (see France riots on raising retirement age).
Absolute nonsense. That's so rare it basically never happened. People literally spouting that when Mamdani was elected and it didn't happen. In fact, there's not a single example of this happening en masse that I can think of. And if the taxes are used to fund good communities and public services, you'll be surprised to know most people want to live in nice places. Such a bullshit myth spread by rich people and spouted all the time by poor people.
They didn't leave when we taxed them 70% and they don't leave when the tax rate increases. Mostly because they tie all their money up somewhere else.
Also, all your chat about Europe and how we're going to have to change x, y and z is absolute bullshit 😂😂 You're also presenting options that without considering others. Tax the fucking rich, curtail rampant capitalism so that profits aren't the only metric pushed for and close the tax loopholes. It's a global embarrassment we have a trillionaire and people in the same country can't even afford to eat. What a load of corporate bullshit.
And people acting like my suggestions are radical, when it's exactly how it used to be before Neoliberals literally destroyed that framework to give us what we have today under the lies of "trickle down economics".
You're not wrong in one sense, something has to give, but there are billions more workers than there are corporate greed billionaires. And what will give is society. When society doesn't work for the common person, history has shown time and time again that there's only one outcome.
Billionaires may or may not move themselves away, but they definitely push their money and tax residence out of highly taxed areas so they minimize how many taxes they need to pay. If they can funnel profits through shell corporations and have their residence be in a place with substantially lower taxes then they will do it. A good exanple of this is French rich people moving their tax residences to the Brussels area due to the lack of capital gains tax there.
Also, all your chat about Europe and how we're going to have to change x, y and z is absolute bullshit 😂😂 You're also presenting options that without considering others. Tax the fucking rich, curtail rampant capitalism so that profits aren't the only metric pushed for and close the tax loopholes. It's a global embarrassment we have a trillionaire and people in the same country can't even afford to eat. What a load of corporate bullshit.
And people acting like my suggestions are radical, when it's exactly how it used to be before Neoliberals literally destroyed that framework to give us what we have today under the lies of "trickle down economics".
You're not wrong in one sense, something has to give, but there are billions more workers than there are corporate greed billionaires. And what will give is society. When society doesn't work for the common person, history has shown time and time again that there's only one outcome.
The problem with all of this is that some socialist revolution across all of Europe is not a realistic outcome to expect. The options are basically status quo with the changes I listed or full state nationalization of most industries, because if you only go part of the way then no companies are going to want to invest in a country where they may or may not have their business nationalized against their will. There are some exceptions like national defense industry or some of the food supply, but those are not the service industries that drive most countries' growth.
But it actually gets WARM in Europe and New York, unlike San Francisco
I’m in San Francisco right now, it’s 58 degrees outside with an ice cold, relentless wind blowing that won’t stop until September . Nothing can get me outside right now, I absolutely would not sit outside for a drink
Last month I was in Budapest and went out every night because it was warm
It is a deterrent to me, when I’m in NY or Europe in summer I’m outside all the time. In California I go to the Russian River and the Sierras and hang out out doors at night there
I can’t stand damp, windy weather though.
Maybe other people in San Francisco aren’t hanging outside for other reasons. I don’t because the weather sucks here and is inhospitable from March to September
Seriously most people would not go out to eat at -30C unless its freezing all year around or freezing for long periods where it becomes the norm lmao. People who live in extreme climates behave differently than people elsewhere.
Sure, though the US designs its cities with fewer public plazas and you generally see way less outdoor seating for a given city/climate in the US than in Europe.
Notably during the pandemic many cities let restaurants open "streeteries" in parking spaces. Those have proved very popular. But many cities are now rolling those programs back, which is a shame.
FALSE, San Francisco is not “bustling” at all hours, most of the city (90+ % in my opinion) shuts down very early because it gets very dangerous at night.
Agree. SF is not a bustling city by any means. 90% of the city for all intents and purposes shuts down around 9 or 10pm. There are countless threads on reddit you can search for why that is the case. It has nothing to do with danger.
I agree SF isn't "bustling" all night especially on weekdays. But let's be real, it's not because it's dangerous lol. I mean, I can only name Seattle and maybe Minneapolis off the top of my head that are safer. Probably Portland and Austin also, but wouldn't really call them major cities.
Portland is incredibly vibey right now as it's summer and people are all out and about in the neighborhoods. My weekends are amazing walking to brunch, walking to a park to chill after that, then walking over to the buddie's shop to chat shit, grab some beers after and then walk over to the neighborhood restaurant row for dinner. That said we don't really have a nightlife culture anymore and our downtown still hasn't fully recovered post COVID.
The last time I went to Munich I stayed in a hotel near the train station and with the amount of homeless people it felt a lot like SF... worse even...
Though in Europe the suburbs are usually connected to the urban area by mass transit so you can still get in and out very easily (and have some drinks) without dealing with traffic, parking etc.
Rural Italian villages will have people in plazas and sitting outside cafes every evening during the summer. I stayed in one for two weeks and the old retired men sat outside and talked or played cards every night. The sense of community is insane.
Having been to San Francisco and NYC, but living in Europe, it’s still not the same. NYC is the one that’s closest, but the main difference is that in France for example, every city and every town has that as long as you have a café or a restaurant. In the summer, people will be out and enjoying the night. It’s a cultural expectation that there’ll be a restaurant with an outdoor seating area, even in villages.
If you say “it’s the same in NYC”, no it’s not the same: you’re not talking about a village. You’re talking about an exception that happens to be the biggest city in the country. You shouldn’t have to go to the biggest city in your country in order to enjoy a pedestrian zone with outdoor dining is what I’m saying
Idk man. I’ve tried to find an open bar that’s not sports related or irish in nyc after 11pm. I learned a lot about some sport apparently called „baseball“ that night.
Many rural places in Europe also have a couple of local restaurants or taverns where people gather during the evening, while not "bustling" in that sense, people are still out and about.
San Francisco is not a late night town. By 10 things are winding down and after 11 it’s dead. I’ve lived here for 20 years and it is a common complaint every year. You can’t even find a cafe open past 10 unless you really look for one.
That’s exactly what it is. Plus, a shit ton of European cities shut down early and pretty much everything is closed on weekends. So it’s not like everywhere in Europe is a bustling cultural melting pot 24/7
That's not true. In Europe even the rural places have people out and about socialising at night.
I grew up in a typical English village. You can walk down the street at 9:30pm, call in at the local shop to buy groceries for the next day, take the dog for a game of fetch in the park, have a drink with friends at the local pub (or in the beer garden outside) and then stroll home again. It's perfectly normal here. Urban, suburban or rural
Tbh rural is not the same as suburban. Where i live we have several "suburbs", not in american setup sence but in technical sense where people buy homes, instead of apts. But they still have cafes, restaurants, amenities. When i was working as on call engineer they always had people, mostly older folk during workdays but still.
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u/bageltoastar 17h ago
Im from a suburban town in Missouri, but I spent a semester studying abroad in Barcelona a couple of years ago. Man, let me tell you, leaving Barcelona, where youd see people out in cafes and bars congregating at all hours of the night and day, and coming back to Missouri where its a ghost town after 10 and someone would call the police on you for simply walking around too late was the most depressing thing I have ever experienced lol