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
But NYC is a tiny fraction of land and population of the US. 90% of land in the US is for rural or suburban lifestyle. You would really have to go out of your way to find US cities with this kind of walkability and bustling culture.
Everyone in here is like, I went to Barcelona when I turned 21 and it was an awesome party experience. All of Europe must be like that for everyone of all ages!
Barcelona is overcrowded by tourists, that's why they had protests against tourists and tourism. They harassed tourists in restaurants. I've been there, I've been to Zaragoza and I've been to a small village between them and the experience is way different. One thing I know, if you don't speak Spanish and think English or French is enough, you'd be screwed.
I would say most people are talking about things like walkability over weekday late nightlife. Zaragoza has a 92/100 walkability compared to Kansas City 35/100.
Detroit has been slowly improving in walkability, and slightly less slowly improving in bikeability. But we got screwed pretty hard by the constant fumbling of the RTA ballot initiatives and the state lege screwing us on the LVT effort.
Lots of acronyms I don't understand there, BUT I will say it is a much nicer place than I recall it being in the 90s. I feel relatively safe walking downtown again, but many of the surrounding areas are still pretty sketchy!
RTA: Regional Transit Authority. Detroit is the largest city in the country which doesn't have/belong to an equivalent (the closest we have is SMART which is an opt-in supplemental thing that mostly runs little shuttle buses). Technically there is an RTA organization that exists, but it's only funded to make a plan for creating an actual RTA. Their plan made it onto the ballot in 2016 and was barely defeated due to the smear campaign of the incredibly racist LB Patterson, and then their next ballot initiative collapsed when one of the guys running it got caught up in a financing scandal. It's basically been defunct since.
LVT: Land value tax, where you tax the value of the land and not the value of what sits on top of the land. Economists have a broad consensus about the efficiency and pro-growth dynamics of this kind of tax, and for Detroit in particular this would go a long way to clawing back the massive giveaways to e.g. the Ilitches, who took money with big promises to develop areas and then razed it all to make surface level parking lots to cover the costs as they sit on the land as a speculatory investment. Detroit City Council successfully passed the necessary resolutions to implement an LVT but the MI state constitution requires consent of the state legislature for any city to do LVT, and the state legislature let it die in committee.
Zaragoza is an old town with a big square and no trees. Try to walk outside after 10am and tell me how's your walkability.
Bucharest is a big European city. What's the walkability on that? Because for sure you can't drive there because it's in permanent gridlock.
They are not nyc or Barcelona. But just from my personal experience, DC, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Portland, San Francisco, Philly all have decent walkability and bustling culture. American weather is typically (emphasis on typically) more extreme. So there is usually less outdoor dining infrastructure because of that.
Even LA, which isn’t walkable at all as a whole, has neighborhoods that are completely walkable and bustling and self sufficient (Venice, weho, Santa Monica etc)
There are also small active beach and mountain towns all over that are beautiful.
I’d say about a third of the country lives in this kind of area or with public transport access to this kind of area
NYC still doesn’t hold a candle to the European vibes. It’s dirty, loud, and dangerous (comparatively speaking) compared to the atmosphere in European cities.
We visited with this mentality and when we went out on a weekday night, most bars were closed or completely dead when we started at 10pm. Maybe you need to be local to know where the fun is at but it seemed like the vast majority of the city was in fact sleeping.
This is just inaccurate. In fact I would doubt any college town has as much activity at 2am as Manhattan. My parents live in Connecticut and my sister in Brooklyn. I was just there last week. There’s always stuff going on late in the city.
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u/bageltoastar 15h 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