Marcus Andersson wrote:
yeah... this is probably the clearest example for Europeans of the
low standard of living for Americans... you simply cannot live
without a car...
You are forced to sit in your home without being able to go anywhere.
Unless you want to make yourself the trouble of bringing your car with
you, that is.

Marcus, obviously you have never spent much time in the US, or, if you
did, it was on the East coast.

One of the amazing things I noticed when visiting Europe was the smaller
scale. Cities and distances there are much, much smaller than in the US,
primarily due to history.

It's a lot easier to do effective public transportation when your scale
is lots smaller and your people come into a central location in the
morning to work and go back out in the evening to go home. That's also
why public transportation works so well on the US East coast like New
York City.

When you're dealing with groups of cities and suburbs that are literally
a hundred kilometers across (or more), and your house and your work
place can be anywhere within that circle, you can't create a
cost-effective public transportation system. I know lots of people whose
daily commute is well over 50 kilometers (each way) and they only
consider it mildly long. And they're all going in different directions
-there is no "center centre" to which all business people go.

Look, for example, at maps of Los Angeles, San Francisco/Silicon Valley,
Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth. Compare the scale of those metropolitan
areas to London and Paris. I took the Eurostar from London to Paris; it
was lovely. Take that same distance and draw a circle from the major US
cities listed above; you'll not get very far, certainly not to another
large city.

Where I live everyone has a house set on a lot with a reasonable amount
of land around it (typically a half acre -sorry, don't remember the
conversion). The nearest grocery store is a couple of kilometers away,
as are restaurants, shops, etc. We think nothing of going 10-20
kilometers for an errand. It's just that things are more spread out,
whereas whilst I was in London you'd walk by a dozen of those places
between the Tube stop and your walk-up flat.

It's not that one or the other is a lower standard of living, it's that
in one case (Europe) public transportation is cost-effective given the
local topology and in the other case (most of the US) it's not.