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Great question. London is amazing for being able to walk around, and has amazing transit. I honestly love your city, and may move there someday for it. This is mostly because London embraced transit in the early 20th century.
America went the other way, and embraced the car, and that pushed for the "American Dream". Suburbs became the normal, where people wanted an independent house farther away from the city. From there bred new problems, people needed to be able to drive their car there, which meant we needed more parking, which meant that things became further and further away.
You can actually blame parking for most of America's sprawl. Parking eats up a ton of space, and requires large roads to get people where they need to go and then massive parking lots for people to park their cars. Parking lots you can't even understand in your London mind. Then there are new problems - the parking lots are so massive that now you can't even walk to the building next door because it's half a mile just to walk to that place! So people get in their cars to drive across the street to park in the next place. This isn't exaggerated, that's just how it is. Take a look at this shopping center in Des Moines, a city where I grew up.
Americans designed cities for cars, not people. There is no way that areas like that were built for humans to move around in, it was built for people to drive to. Greenspace or walkways are not a thing, you are meant to park, walk for hundreds of meters to the front of the door, shop, and then get back in your car and drive across the big street to go to dinner. (To boot, most places won't let you leave your car either, if you're done shopping you need to move it).
The real problem is that this is all by design. We kill so much space in our cities so that drivers feel more comfortable. Honestly, I really appreciate London and how well they've done. Remember all of this next time your PM wants to "make it easier for drivers". No. Fuck the drivers. They're driving their huge metal car into your city, and wanting to have it take up space all so they don't have to walk or take a train/bus. They should have to pay extra for renting space from the city.
Amazing video on why parking is so freaking stupid in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8
I love how London made most residential roads 20mph so I can bike without feeling like I'm about to be crashed into at any second
I just tried to bike for the first time in my neighborhood. For half of the road there was a bike lane, and it was a ton of fun! Then that section ended and I had to merge with traffic - where I had cars swerving around me and making me feel like I somehow inconvenienced them.
The average American thinks that if roads are too dangerous for bikers, then bikers shouldn't be allowed to drive on them. This is preferable to reducing the speed limit...that people will ignore anyway.
That was an interesting read. Are you aware of any cities or towns which are built in a more European style with pedestrians in mind? I'm actually considering a few jobs in the states right now but I'm quite put off by how car reliant everything is.
Oh man, those are the hard questions. The short answer - no. You're not going to find anything in the US even remotely close. What you're going to want to look for is transit usage. How often and easily do people take transit? Here's a helpful map for you to see how people get to work.
There is one and only one city that I could consider "close" to European cities in terms of being able to be as pedestrian as Europe, and that's New York. There are others that are close and have decent transit. Chicago has the CTA and is relatively good if you live near the city center. Philly I hear has decent transit, again try to live near a stop rather than the suburbs. I'm in Seattle, and our transit system is growing rapidly - but most trips still require a car. We're looking at going from a 2 car household down to a 1 car - but the system has to expand. (Even then it's only 2 light rail lines and then bus).
Here's a good video for you on Houston from NotJustBikes on Houston, and what it's like to live there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54
Boston and New York are probably the closest to European cities with respect to transit that you will find in the States. Plenty of people live in those cities without cars. I lived in Boston for a long time (now in the Boston suburbs) and plenty of adults I know there haven't even bothered getting their driver's license.
The other Northeast Corridor cities are probably the next tier down. DC has decent transit if you make live and work near transit stops. Philadelphia can work, but SEPTA has been unreliable at best in my personal experience. I haven't really spent much time in Baltimore to be able to say.
Outside of the Northeast Corridor, the only other option really would be the San Francisco bay area with its BART system. It has decent coverage and I have family that lives in the area and enjoys it. However, I don't have much firsthand experience with it.
London (like much of Western Europe) was heavily demolished during WWII, so had to rebuild.
While during the same period the US was the opposite - it had an explosion of manufacturing growth during WWII, and having it dispersed made sense in numerous ways - it's where the population was, or where space was available to easily expand, or where certain resources were, or even was far enough away from population for safety reasons (see uranium enrichment at Rocky Flats northwest of Denver, which is now largely an open space because you simply can't reclaim that soil with all the uranium dust buried in it). You can see this in many cities where the old industrial areas are being reclaimed and converted to housing, shopping, entertainment, etc.
So you have 19th century engineering used during massive manufacturing growth ((because it was established and many older engineers (beyond draft age) had years of experience with it) in the US, while Europe saw destruction of lots of 19th century (and earlier) development.
Rebuilding happened during the mid-20th. So why wouldn't you use the newest engineering.
In the US I once worked at a company manufacturing leather belts for factories that still had drive shafts running equipment. They were also using lathes from WWII, because it was precise enough for the assembly line machinery which was similar in age. Upgrading would cost more than it was worth (this was in the early 2000's). I suspect their entire plant was built during WWII.
One way to look at it - in land space, the US is equivalent to 16 western OECD countries. Comparing a single European country to the US is meaningless. Better to compare most of the EU, and even then historical events, and political borders make for very different results.
Sure, there are a dozen reasons for why we went one route and they went another. I'm not declaring "why" it happened, but these things happened differently in each country, stirring in a few other nicely added oil and gas collusion (like buying up US transit and tearing it up to make more room for cars and throwing in some fearmongering causing white flight out of cities to suburbs) and we get where we are.
We had more space, but in terms of cities it's the same thing. Other people are comparing the space in terms of country size. I'm talking about space in terms of city size and shape. London rebuilt during that time, during that time our cities were growing. Both were building for different reasons, and we both chose radically different approaches.
Just because we have more space doesn't mean that we use it well - or that we even needed to. Our cities sprawl because of stupid politics like minimum parking. London could continue sprawling, Paris could, many many cities could. Our politics actively encouraged it, and now we have giant ugly sprawling 1 story garbage everywhere.
I don't know who did it, but there was a list of cities in the US with the amount of space used for car parking. I think Tulsa, OK was something like 2/3rds of their downtown land was devoted to parking.
It's one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it. It takes up so much space - and our downtowns are our most precious land that we have as a society. It's where everyone wants to get to, it's where we want businesses to open up and things to do, and we park cars on it. I know I come off as very anti-car, and I guess I am in some ways - but european cities have cars. They just don't use them for 100% of their trips. Heck I drive, but when I go downtown I park at my local park and ride and take the train into the city
I never knew Boston was designed for cars (yes, that's sarcasm, Boston is known for its roads being enlarged footpaths dating back hundreds of years, some of which started as paths that animals took).
The US is much more complex than such a simple statement. US cities, historically, weren't so much designed as grew. And I still see that today. My town, a suburb of a city, was established about 1860 (140 years ago), when there was empty space between it and the city - farmland.
It certainly wasn't "designed for cars" that didn't exist at the time. The town I grew up in existed before cars.
And I've seen this all over the place. The cities grow until they run into small towns, which then become suburbs of the city. These small towns were often agriculture based (or manufacturing based), because farms need to take their cop to the train, the train stop ends up growing a town.
The only "designed" city I can think of is one in Maryland. There are others, but cities aren't "designed" - that implies an over-arching plan. Cities are organic, they grow.
If you want to make a "design" argument, Western Europe is much more in line with this idea, since so much infrastructure was destroyed by two successive world wars over 20 years, and the reconstruction with "modern" engineering and design that took place starting in the 1950's.
I was going to say if it was built before 1950 then it was probably better, but even then most cities were in fact radically changed and altered by the car. Even Boston was radically changed, bulldozing entire neighborhoods just so they could build the interstates through. (Those neighborhoods were mostly minorities of course, even in Boston if you look up where they decided was the "best" locations for the interstates guess whose neighborhoods were affected) - and even then those car-centric design decisions are still reverberating today. Look at Boston's number one infrastructure project over the last 30 years - The Big Dig. Purely 100% because cars were a focus. Even now it's still designed as a car centric approach because the entire "park" they put up is surrounded by a massive boulevard that you have to cross, surrounded by car noise.
Small towns too were radically altered by the car. Where small towns had hubs near the train station where people would get on now sprawl was not just there - but encouraged. Why live in the center of town when you could go live on the outskirts away from people?
So yes, your argument of "But cities were built before" - yes, many were. That doesn't mean that we didn't destroy huge portions of them just to accommodate drivers.
So I'll amend my statement: Cities were bulldozed and rebuilt for the car.
Good Armchair Urbanist video about The Big Dig and Boston's interstates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5pPKfzzL54
I think there is one thing backwards here, the US didnt embrace the car which lead to suburbs, but embraced suburbs which lead to using cars. The decision (which really wasnt a conscious one, more just the way it worked out) is based entirely on the vast geography of the country. We have the extra space, so we used it, and needeing cars followed.
The older cities in the US that were built based on European standards all have fairly excellent public networks (NYC, Boston, Philly, etc)
I understand your meaning but saying that those east coast cities were built to European standards is maybe not the best way to phrase it.
Philly in particular, is a standout for being one of the first planned cities. Not that there weren't attempts at city planning before then, but they tended to be more of an attempt to straighten out the wacky stuff that had grown organically. With Philly most of the city was pretty much laid out from the beginning, which was fairly unique at the time. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to find something totally comparable to that in Europe at the time.
What they do share with European cities though, is that they (relatively) old, and from the era before cars were a thing, so the city planning happened with the assumption that people would be walking pretty much everywhere.
Side note- I remember reading an article about one of the older assassins creed games set in the American revolution, and one of the reasons they decided to not set it in philly was because Philly, even back then, was too orderly of a grid with lots of long straight streets that you can look a long way down and the graphics engine had a hard time rendering that far.
Does America not have places like British retail parks? Where the parking lot is basically shared by all the large shops which are then shoulder to shoulder with each other? Maybe that's what a mall is. Though I was under three impression the shops were constrained for size there.
Maybe close to our strip mall, where q bunch of retail is in a strip of stores. It's slightly better than the image I showed, but I wouldn't call it walkable. You can at least walk to the next store, but you still are surrounded by parking, and usually on a large road, usually on the outskirts of town so you have to drive there. Then if another strip mall is built than that is the same as the picture I showed, where now you have to walk a mile to get across the parking lots, usually down the road several blocks distance to actually find a safe crossing, and then cross another massive parking lot.
We also have malls, which I always laugh at because they're trying to simulate what we don't have - a walkable neighborhood. Everybody loved them because they simulated the small shops and actually walking around, but surrounded again by miles of parking and again usually outside of town, so the only way to get there is driving.
(And if your wondering, transit "exists" in that image, in that there's one bus stop for that whole area on a route that last I checked runs once every two hours during weekdays, ending at 7pm)
The lack of public transport is something I just can't get my head around. Most British towns shopping centres are also transport hubs. People still complain about buses etc but they're somewhat comparing it to London where many routes have 5-10 buses an hour and where any new major shopping areas will be sat on top of a tube or rail station. Britain still has large retail park carparks but you'll almost always find them served by a handful of bus routes. I don't think I'd ever be able to give up the combo of being able to walk 2 mins to the corner shop or hop the bus for ten mins for almost anything else.
Welcome to my primary frustration. It only takes most people to try a real city with real public transit to realize they actually like cities. Cities are fearmongered here in the states, people think they're high crime, they're dirty, they're not easy to get to, and frankly I firmly believe most of that is because of our transit. Cities are hard to get to because most of them require cars to get to. Those with actual fun downtown (that don't have good transit) involve people parking somewhere and walking around. Vegas and San Antonio are great examples.
Having things so distant and making it hard to get into the cities makes people not want to go there, which deteriorates the city core - which then crime becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. By leaving the downtown core and never going - they unintentionally make crime worse.
There's actually a really interesting theory here in the states. People really remember fondly going to college (Uni for you brits ;)), mostly because they always had a group of friends around, they would meet up for meals, go out for drinks, and they were all in the dorms. Then they graduate and most move out to the suburbs. The theory is - do they miss college? Or do they miss having a truly walkable neighborhood, with most things nearby? Friends that they can just see when they're out walking around? A transit system that helps them get around their neighborhood easily.
How we move around fascinates me, and I think it's a huge reason for a lot of social issues we face here in the states. I'll go as far as most of them. I'll take a very extreme example. Our culture's racism would be inherently better with better transit. There's reasons why more urbanized cores are more open to other people and cultures - it's because we're normalized to it. We see people every day and know they're just like us. In suburban and rural america you aren't exposed to other people. Even if you go to work you're alone in your car, you don't experience being around others. Having something like the Tube makes it a natural gathering place, where you experience everyone around you, and a lot of those prejudices can easily fall away just by being around people.
That turned out longer than I thought! Thanks for reading this far if you did :)
There's a neat video I found a while back that almost sums everything up perfectly: The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis
I say "almost," because the one thing it fails to do is take one step backward and realize that the housing crisis is itself caused by single-family zoning and lack of walkable density!
I'll watch today! But yes I think the same thing! We only allow single family homes which means everything is spread out too far, which means there aren't enough homes within a given area... Which means we need both better transit to reach those areas and/or to upzone to denser housing
I've also thought about this. Being on the subway with other people humanizes them in a way being stuck in traffic doesn't. When you have the shared experience of everyone groaning over the "being held in the station by the dispatcher", that makes a difference. It's a lot easier to hate people you never see.
Exactly. I'll admit that growing up in the Midwest I had the fears of the scary boogymen, but I grew up in a town with one black kid in our whole school. Moving to a real city all of that went out the window quick, and transit is a big reason for it. People are just people.
Of course it does! Well, sort of: American strip malls are like British retail parks, but BIGGER. (At least, judging by the pictures of the latter I just looked up.)
In the case of the grandparent commenter's aerial photo, it's sort of like Adam's aura in Good Omens: aside from various kinds of relatively high-density residential in the corners (e.g. assisted living top right and what appear to be townhouses bottom left), pretty much that entire area is retail! There are at least four strip malls on four different blocks -- the one with the Chik-Fil-A, the one with the TJ Maxx, the one with the Wal-Mart, and the one with the Aldi -- and each of the four is probably bigger than a typical British "retail park" by itself.
Suburban America is literally comprised of two things:
Generally speaking, America has a few different kinds of "malls:"
Traditional commercial development -- the sorts of "main street" shops you find in old small towns, if they haven't been killed by Wal-Mart and torn down. (Not generally called a "mall," but included in the list for completeness -- it's important to remember what we've lost.)
"Strip malls" a.k.a. shopping centers -- like I said, "retail parks" but bigger. Also the most common type of American retail.
"Malls" -- indoor shopping centers with large department stores at the ends, connected by hallways with smaller stores along them and surrounded by parking lots.
"Outdoor malls" a.k.a. "lifestyle centers" -- kinda like a cross between a mall and a Disney-esque fake downtown, with groups of shops in separate freestanding buildings connected by outdoor pedestrian paths either similar in layout to an indoor mall, or resembling a city street grid. Typically built pretty far out into the suburbs and surrounded by parking lots. On the bright side, as the newest sort of American retail development, sometimes they're mixed-use.