So how does rail solve the Last Mile problem? It does no good to say “take the train” if the nearest train station is 60 miles away. And is it the best use of a train to run tracks to a town/village with a population 150 people or less?

Only where the rails went. We’d have to replace all the roads with light rails.

Haha

Not a typo. There are no buses unless you go to one of the neighboring cities. I live too far from anywhere that has buses. You either have to walk, or… you can drive! Like everybody else in the US without access to any sort of public transportation remotely close to their home…

Edit: Here’s my nearest walking directions to a large supermarket

Most bus systems in American cities are for people to get to work and back home. Trying to take it to, for instance, a friend’s house, and you’re generally going to spend about 4x the time it’d take to drive there.

I’m in the Indianapolis area, and we do have public transit… though I don’t know why.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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)

Does America not have places like British retail parks?

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:

1. Disconnected cul-de-sac subdivisions of single-family houses
2. Stroads lined by endless back-to-back strip malls

Maybe that’s what a mall is.

Generally speaking, America has a few different kinds of “malls:”

0. 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.)

1. “Strip malls” a.k.a. shopping centers – like I said, “retail parks” but bigger. Also the most common type of American retail.

2. “Malls” – indoor shopping centers with large department stores at the ends, connected by hallways with smaller stores along them and surrounded by parking lots.

3. “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.

I was going to call it a “small” city but Google told me that 300k is mid-size so I went with that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The city is ~350 sq km and our tiny downtown area is probably about 1 sq km, so the entire city is kinda like a suburb. Heck, I’m from Houston which is known for its urban sprawl, and yet there’s lower population density where I live now.