Traveled around the world a lot… The US isn’t anywhere near the best as you say. It’s also not the worst. It’s just heavily car oriented and fuck-everything-else oriented (except maybe air travel but… TSA).
I can say that living in a big city with mobile phone payments on every form of public transport, and a highly reliable on-time system that’s always clean and free of people you would worry about being alone with… Is a beautiful thing. And seriously reduces the friction for all kinds of things like…going to work. The countries like this usually don’t have much traffic and therefore deliveries and other legitimate uses of the road are frequently unobstructed. But on the other hand, these places can be extremely dense and the people live on top of each other.
There are many regions of the US denser than areas in europe with good transportation. People try to explain away the US system by pointing out a few low density areas and say “see these 3 big empty areas in the center? All these differences are necessary” but its sort of a outlier situation run amok. Most of the US IS comparable to europe or asia and we’ve once again let ourselves be content with “American Exceptionalism” by another name.
The reality is just the US developed much of its infrastructure (1940s-1960s) with car companies basically calling the shots during that era and a lot of places in the US still are struggling to overcome 60+ years of laws and budgets more or less written by the car manufacturers themselves after their WW2 high where their competitors overseas all got bombed to hell.
Traveled around the world a lot… The US isn’t anywhere near the best as you say. It’s also not the worst. It’s just heavily car oriented and fuck-everything-else oriented (except maybe air travel but… TSA).
I can say that living in a big city with mobile phone payments on every form of public transport, and a highly reliable on-time system that’s always clean and free of people you would worry about being alone with… Is a beautiful thing. And seriously reduces the friction for all kinds of things like…going to work. The countries like this usually don’t have much traffic and therefore deliveries and other legitimate uses of the road are frequently unobstructed. But on the other hand, these places can be extremely dense and the people live on top of each other.
There are many regions of the US denser than areas in europe with good transportation. People try to explain away the US system by pointing out a few low density areas and say “see these 3 big empty areas in the center? All these differences are necessary” but its sort of a outlier situation run amok. Most of the US IS comparable to europe or asia and we’ve once again let ourselves be content with “American Exceptionalism” by another name.
The reality is just the US developed much of its infrastructure (1940s-1960s) with car companies basically calling the shots during that era and a lot of places in the US still are struggling to overcome 60+ years of laws and budgets more or less written by the car manufacturers themselves after their WW2 high where their competitors overseas all got bombed to hell.
The reality is the USA had public transport systems that were criminally dismantled by the car cartels.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a documentary.
“But what is the alternative? The state enacting laws preventing corporations to run amok? But that would be communism!”