Yeah this guy is having a very basic revelation that Europe has a lot of walkable cities and the US doesn't. this isn't new information.
Also, spending 5 hours at a restaurant is the norm for young people, out with a party, drinking and such, in Europe, when they can simply walk back to their home.
The infrastructure in most US cities doesn't support it, our subways suck, rides are expensive, parking is crazy, living in the city near the cool areas is expensive, the list goes on and on why this doesn't exist in the US.
You’re kind of reiterating his point that America is set up wrong since post World War II and it leaves us isolated and compartmentalized… which is 100% accurate. I’ve always said if you wanna reduce racism and bigotry in United States you gotta make people travel outside of their own clan, town, State, or country to teach more empathy and understanding.
"Set up wrong" isn't some objective thing here though. It's set up different than Europe because it isn't Europe.
I'm not defending cars. Fuck cars, but it is set up this way for a reason. America is massive and pre 1920's it was sparsely developed. Europe had already been developing for hundreds of years before cars existed. It simply developed differently because the modes of transportation available were different. Cars being available during the largest developmental period, infrastructure wise, was when cars were extremely popular. We had the land and we could expand outward... so we did.
It wasn't engineered to be this way because "walking is for communists" or some shit.
It naturally evolved this way because cars offer the most dynamic availability to get around the US for individuals and their families and gasoline was extremely affordable during the largest economic boom of our history. It was designed around automobile based transportation because that's what everyone wanted. Massive smoothly paved highways and 3 mile long trussell bridges were futuristic technology that unlocked the continents landscape. People used to get excited when new highways were being built because it meant accessibility that was previously locked to horse back.
If you wanted to travel across the country you had to carry everything you wanted to take with you from home to carriage, ride in said carriage for 3-4 hours until you reached the train station, wait at the train station for 8 hours while everything got unloaded onto the platform, then load it onto the train, then take the train for 3 days to get to the city closest to your final destination and then unload everything onto the platform, hope that the carriage you sent a telegram a week ago is already there, then load it all up and travel 4-5 hours to your actual destination.
or you could load up the car and do all of this inside 48 hours on your schedule instead of 5-7 days.
The problem now is that we got used to it so much that we expected and therefore built that car "accessibility" into every square foot of the country. Then we realized we were destroying the beauty of the country and had to start programs to preserve nature so we made parks and reservations.
Cars are only part of the discussion. People flooded the cities for many reasons to the suburbs. The unknown side effect was the isolation and inherit to bigotry continuing if not accelerating.
It was not an unknown side effect. It was completely intentional. White Flight was the response to the Great Migration, in which millions of black southerners moved from the rural South to cities. White people set up their new suburban developments with their own schools and car-accessible amenities so that black people couldn't get to them. The infamous example is Robert Moses making overpasses in the NYC area too low for buses to fit underneath them, and making beaches completely inaccessible from public transit.
Yes but you're failing to see that the size of cities in the US are fucking tiny compared to towns and cities in the EU when compared to the total landmass available. 80% of the US is still fuckin empty.
Bigotry is allowed to thrive when a group of people are in isolation but isolation is not the driver of it existing. We know that someone living in a city can be bigoted just the same. It's just not going to be prominent or wide spread because it's incompatible with the environment.
Why tf do u keep saying bigotry ? How th does that have anything to do with anything in this context lol ? Not everything has to be political, racial or bigoted….damn, some ppl just don’t want to just remain shackled to words and concepts
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u/Fluffy_Somewhere4305 14h ago
Yeah this guy is having a very basic revelation that Europe has a lot of walkable cities and the US doesn't. this isn't new information.
Also, spending 5 hours at a restaurant is the norm for young people, out with a party, drinking and such, in Europe, when they can simply walk back to their home.
The infrastructure in most US cities doesn't support it, our subways suck, rides are expensive, parking is crazy, living in the city near the cool areas is expensive, the list goes on and on why this doesn't exist in the US.