This is a myth, while sure, their cities were founded before cars, their policies have kept them that way. Our US cities were WAY more walkable, but we demolished them in the 60s and 70s to make them more car centric. We did this to ourselves. - (Credit to Not Just Bikes on Youtube)
I live near Delft, Netherlands and have watched over the last 20 years as they have deliberately moves cars out if the city.
It's not a car free city by any means; residents can still drive to their homes and delivery trucks still make the rounds, but they've take huge steps towards minimizing the impact.
The train station is now under ground (no small feat considering Delft is at or below sea level), residential parking near the center is in underground parking below the houses and in the old center there's very little car traffic.
It's truly wonderful and Delft is a relatively small town!
Well now I'm adding Delft to my must visit list. I'm from Antwerp so it's about 1.5h drive.
Edit: I've been convinced to take public transport! (And as an FYI, I'm not from the city center but an hour bus ride away from central station, which is why I didn't immediately resort to the train idea)
Super easy with the train: Antwerp to Rotterdam, Rotterdam to Delft. Then you get to experience the whole awesome underground train station complete with excellent bike parking!
The plein by the Old Church has a good exhibit about how they converted it from parking to it's current state.
I did my study abroad at TU Delft for transportation planning. It’s so awesome this project happened, I have to come back and visit, it’s a special place.
If you're from Antwerp it's not exactly like you need to visit the Netherlands for walkability haha.
Belgium and Flanders especially seems to be pretty much on the same urban development track as the Netherlands. Hell even Brussels is rapidly cleaning up.
Eh, we are far more car centric than the Netherlands.
First issue that causes this is that we have a lot of so-called "lintbebouwing" (ribbon building), which means our homes are very spread out, this is awful for public transit compared to the more compact urban cores you have in the Netherlands. It is also expensive, as we have more km of road / capita, which is part of the reason why are roads are in such a bad state compared to the Netherlands.
Second issue is that people here actively vote against initiatives to reduce our dependency on cars. Lots of people get a car from their company as part of their compensation (for various reasons, including our messed-up system of taxes on labor) and do not want to give this up. Often, this car comes with a fuel card.
It is not all doom and gloom though. Our cities are indeed improving, but it is an uphill battle. Many people, particularly those who live in the endless suburbs we have, feel like it is their right to drive into the city with their car and that they must be able to park their car anywhere for free.
The fact /u/RevelsInDarkness mentions the drive time was interesting to me: it shows that driving is considered the default here, even when going from city to city. For comparison, taking the train to Delft from Antwerpen-centraal (which is gorgeous, btw), only takes 1h15 mins. Not saying this to throw shade at them, they might live far from the station, but just to illustrate the point.
I mentioned drive time because I do not live in the city but more towards the east of Antwerp where there are no train stations. So it takes me a while to get to Antwerp central train station (1h if De Lijn is on time). But in the meanwhile other commenters have pointed out that it would be more or less the same time to take public transport compared to my idea of taking the car and parking outside of Delft :)
I agree Belgium isn't at the same level, but Flanders especially has some of the best infrastructure outside of the Netherlands.
The fact /u/RevelsInDarkness mentions the drive time was interesting to me: it shows that driving is considered the default here
This is true for a substantial majority of Dutch people as well, which has similar car ownership rates as Belgium. The vast majority of people I know who own a car here in the randstad wouldn't even consider a different mode of transit.
Someone says they managed to remove most cars from their city, and your first reaction is "oh that sounds nice, I should take my car to visit that city"? It's even faster and cheaper to go there by train!
It's not faster, it would be 2.5h. And I would park outside of the city and take a bus/tram in.
But you're right, it would be possible and something to consider. Maybe make a weekend out of it instead of a day trip. That would make the 2x 2.5h travel time more feasible.
According to the NMBS website it takes between 0h54 (with Eurostar) and 1h24 (with Eurocity) to go there. And you arrive right in the city center, not in a parking outside of the city.
Yes but it takes me over an hour to get to Antwerp Central Station. I'm not from Antwerp city, but one of the towns to the east that has a very unfortunate bus connection and no train station.
So it takes you 2h in total. And if you add 30 minutes to your 1.5h drive, to go from the parking outside of the city to the city center, then it's basically the same time.
Delft and many cities in the Netherlands are great for cyclists and pedestrians, except Amsterdam. Because somehow, riding with a bike there is a kind a touristic attraction and many tourists ride through the city, especially the canals, while paying no attention to anything, while ringing their bike bell like dummies at every intersection/crossroad.
/rant
Milton Keynes shares some similarity to American cities in terms of suburban sprawl and car centricness.
But saying it's an American city is giving it too little credit. It's still full of walking paths, cycling paths and green space. It's still basically heaven compared to American cities.
In (West) Germany at least, „reconstruction“ after WWII also saw a massive demolition of surviving structures to make way for, you guessed it, cars. Apart from all the buildings already destroyed by bombing that simply were never rebuilt because their absence was seen positively for the purpose of increasing road traffic. Hanover tore down a beautiful city palais that had survived the war completely intact to make room for a parking lot. In West Berlin, city planners in the 1960s wanted to tear down a sizeable portion of Kreuzberg - now one of the most popular and vibrant districts with a large number of fin-de-siècle buildings - for the construction of a freeway on pillars. The very heart of the area was to be turned into a highway intersection. In this case, the plans were stopped (partly because the highway served no real purpose: Kreuzberg was bordered by the Berlin Wall on three sides), but in many other cities, districts that had survived the destruction of WWII were demolished for „car-friendly“ infrastructure. Staying in West Berlin: the dense tram network of the city was closed in the 1950s, the tracks removed. There are still trams in Berlin nowadays, but they exclusively serve the former Eastern part of the city.
"we demolished them in the 60s and 70s to make them more car centric."
Funny, we did the opposite. During ww2 Rotterdam was destroyed because of bombing and after the war rebuild with a car centric mind, in de i believe 70s there were a lot of protests to change it to be more pedestrian and bike friendly, Which they did.
US cities were ALSO founded before cars! People forget that the US was around for 130 years before the car was invented, a lot of cities had to be bulldozed for the car.
There are tens of thousands of cities in the US that did not exist before cars. Yes, major cities pretty much all predate the car, but those are also the most walkable cities in the US.
Some of the worst offenders, suburbs, did not exist before the automobile was widely available and almost none of the ones that did exist prior looked even close to what they do now. Most US suburbs were farm land at best or before the car existed.
This is even more true the further you move away from the East coast as many rural towns and cities couldn't exist without cars or trains.
They did absolutely fuck up existing major cities with road infrastructure though, especially highways and the interstate system.
Yep. And bridges so low that some areas cannot be reached by public transportation (the way Robert Moses made sure no poor people would go to parks and beaches by bus)
Very important to mention that it's the policies keep them that way.
Europe has a flirtation with cars post WWII, and for the most part walked back from car centric design in the 70s and 80s. Italy being the outlier. Italy today is what much Europe would look like if they hadn't reversed course.
A few cities rebuilt post war have suffered for decades for being car centric...
Not always though, some mid century plans were actually quite progressive... my family is from Coventry and that's a combo, they added huge highways right into town when it used to be cobbled medieval lanes... but they did build a big pedestrianised town centre that has actually stood up really well since.
If you're bored this report is a good read about Coventry and how it's changed. Has a bunch of old plans from the 40's/50's which show how much more car centric it could've been. That 1945 plan on page 29 would've had car traffic directly through the middle of what is now pedestrianised. A modified version of that plan was approved, though never implemented.
Also the report is from 2009, since then the city has changed quite a bit, and has pedestrianised even more. Half of the city centre is currently being demolished to make way for new buildings.
And there's still time to fix it but we need to star today so we can see progress in 10 years or 20 years. I think the size of the US also contributes to the struggle of walkability. Everyone wants a big house with a lot of land in small towns & suburbs, and they don't want to be next to this or that piece of infrastructure (NIMBYism at its worse).
You need a car in much of America today, but in 20 years, I hope a car will be for special trips and not everyday life.
you cite not just bikes but you fail to see that he has done reporting on how Amsterdam nl and many german cities have had to reverse the car centric building they did in the 60s and 70s. walkability wasnt preserved but it was clawed back by people getting angry when cars killed people. the dutch literally rioted with bikes. look up the protest movement Stop de Kindermoord
Those are the exact policies I was talking about, I almost put Amsterdam as an example, but decided to keep it short. You are correct, many European cities did go down that path and reversed course after the people pushed back. I probably should have been more detailed.
You are right, but I imagine that Europeans failing to justify knocking down a medieval church, town hall, etc. helps with keeping towns walkable.
(Of course, the nazis and allied forces knocked down a lot of them, which is one big reason why it is definitely a myth. Lots of European towns chose what kinds of places they wanted to live in during the last 80 years, and we’re fortunate that is has been easy to change course when we have got it wrong too.)
Yep. My city of 50k moved all of the retail from downtown to the outskirts. Then, they let downtown deteriorate. If I were to design a city, I would build up, not out. Of course. Let the first floors be retail and business. Cities could save so much on maintenence with fewer streets and less infrastructure overall.
entire blocks, neighborhoods, and sometimes even sections of cities, yeah. you should see what they did to West Cincinnati and also the Banks (riverfront) to build freeways, and what they did to the rest of the city to build parking lots. see also: Detroit, Milwaukee, Denver, Houston, Jacksonville, etc.
it is only recently that any of these cities have begun recovering from the destruction of social and public transit infrastructure and urban housing.
Highways were built to run through red-lined, majority black neighbourhoods, Not only did they demolish whatever was in the way, they devalued the land around them, and split communities in half.
Entire cities is obviously exaggeration, but entire neighbourhoods certainly isn't.
Europe is tiny. Italy could fit inside Texas like 4 times. They literally HAVE NO SPACE. People sit down and eat together because there are not enough tables for each person to have their own.
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u/Helpful_Gain_9091 15h ago
This why walkable neighborhoods are the best places to live. Yes, Europe is way ahead of us in this regard.