Tokyo is very oriented towards pedestrian traffic, considering shinkansen and most rail service - yet satellite suburban sites, like Saitama, etc have tiny residential rows that literally don't fit both a car and a pedestrian. And that's where most people live. Yet Japan is highly pedestrian.
Now, South America. Most if not all urban centers of 1M are extremely well covered by bus networks. And they have to, since most of the population cannot afford a car. However, the moment you step off the old city centers, you are literally walking on the main road, sharing space with speeding cards and buses driving like maniacs. You will often find a major road has literally no sidewalk, only dirt, weeds and sewage.
Compared to those situations, the US is a walking paradise.
The problem of distance is very different from the problem of safety and confort in the US
You can find a ton of much worse examples than the US, but the US is just vastly far behind Europe (i.e. Spain, to which OP was comparing the US to).
Plus, it's worth mentioning that while Tokyo has a lot of mixed-traffic streets, the streets are small, have very low speed limits, and have strong restrictions on the size and type of car that can actually be within the city. It's less like you're walking in traffic and more like the car is intruding on a pedestrian space.
> It's less like you're walking in traffic and more like the car is intruding on a pedestrian space.
As far as I can see, this is essential to ant attempt a truly "walkable" city (assuming that is your goal). City streets designed & optimized around car usage are basically inconsistent with pedestrian spaces that really work well.
> Unpopular opinion: We (US) should stop subsidizing Europe's security
It's cheaper to subsidize European defense than to let them arm up and start fighting again. The lack of large militaries in the second half of the 20th century has lead to the longest period of peace in Europe in about 1500 years.
What would be smart, as has been shown by the invasion of Ukraine, would be to integrate the NATO supply chains more deeply (for the same reason we do multipath and redundant routing). This wouldn't threaten US jobs or safety, but instead make the whole system more resilient.
(Honestly I don't know why supply chain people don't talk to networking people and consider multipath, bufferbloat, and the like. The finance people wicked down those supply chains and have resulted in too many single points of failure.)
US is defending its interests in Europe, not Europe itself. This benefits GoldmanSacks, rather than it is for the benefit of Nathan the Romanian plumber.
Europe is the largest affluent market outside US. They’ve considered purchasing tech from China, they’considered taxing internet tech companies based on revenue instead of profit, and each time US convinced them not to.
Without really reading the article, I think maybe the parent's point is that the US basically pays for large portions of defense and security of Europe, especially when it comes to the need for blue water navies to protect trade. That frees up a lot of time, money, and manpower for them to spend on not defense, and spend instead on infrastructure and nice things. It's also nice that another effect Pax Americana has contributed to is that the majority of Europe has stopped starting progress-destroying wars with each other every two decades.
The US doesn't get that benefit as the self-employed enforcer, and I'm sure we're all aware of how insanely massive the defense budget is.
So the argument is actually that the US can't have livable cities because they spend all that money defending Europe? Because of the implicit assumption that European-style cities are more expensive in upkeep than current US cities?
I think the assumption is more that us Europeans can afford such decadent, livable cities because we don’t need to spend as much money on defense (?!) So car-oriented hellscapes are somehow the default, "normal" situation, because of course what you have accustomed to feels subjectively normal to you! Then Europe is some sort of a fairy-tale Disneyland that doesn’t need to face the Realities thanks to the US. Anyway, a nice claim but building and maintaining all that sprawling infrastructure is actually vastly more expensive than a denser, more sustainable urban fabric…
It can be both that in America we value sprawl and car-centered culture at great cost to ourselves, and that maybe it'd be nice if we pulled back on being world police a bit and invested more financially back at home. Maybe we could use all that money being spent on destroyers and forward bases to tear down all the stroads in the country and replace them with walkable mixed-use developments connected by rail.
In real life though, it's never that simple. Those destroyers and bases are being used for something even if it's stupid, and if they are no longer there, then things may change in unexpected ways.
Correct. People in these EU countries never understand how large the US is. it has the 3rd highest population but is almost 10 times less dense than Japan, 9 times less dense than the UK. There's so much dang land here. And until modern industrialism so much of it sucks to build a proper community around. mountainous, extreme weather, disaster prone, simply infertile. Much of western US doesn't have hundreds of miles of view into the horizon; you're going to get cut off maybe 5, 10 miles off by some mountain (or you live in a valley). It's very hard to "just build denser cities" in the same way the EU could.
That's what makes China really impressive (losgistically speaking). it's really large AND very dense population wise (I don't know about the land quality).
Tokyo is very oriented towards pedestrian traffic, considering shinkansen and most rail service - yet satellite suburban sites, like Saitama, etc have tiny residential rows that literally don't fit both a car and a pedestrian. And that's where most people live. Yet Japan is highly pedestrian.
Now, South America. Most if not all urban centers of 1M are extremely well covered by bus networks. And they have to, since most of the population cannot afford a car. However, the moment you step off the old city centers, you are literally walking on the main road, sharing space with speeding cards and buses driving like maniacs. You will often find a major road has literally no sidewalk, only dirt, weeds and sewage.
Compared to those situations, the US is a walking paradise.
The problem of distance is very different from the problem of safety and confort in the US