As a European I was really surprised at how cycle-friendly San Francisco and Palo Alto (especially Stanford campus) are- its much better than you might expect. Room for improvement, but no worse than many cities over here.

As a resident of Copenhagen this was not really my impression. Yes, Palo Alto is cycleable, kinda in the same way any small town in the world is cycleable - low amount of traffic and comparatively wide streets. San Francisco is cycleable because it is 7x7 miles large so not that much space to sprawl but cycling infrastructure is basically completely absent.

What surprised me though is how overall passable public transport in San Francisco was. MUNI and BART are pretty okay for getting around even if locals don't believe so. Unsurprisingly whenever I was in trams, they were full of other European tourists.

Yeah, I never understood what people have against MUNI. The bus and subway seemed perfectly fine and quite cheap when I visited.

MUNI's shortcomings are visible during rush hour due to system collapse, and off-hours / on secondary routes due to missing runs or too-infrequent scheduling.

Moving around the most urban cores outside of rush hour, you typically won't see the worst of the warts.

from what i hear about copenhagen, no city in the world can compete with how cyclefriendly it is. even dutch cities struggle to keep up. so naturally, you won't have a good impression of any other place. i don't blame you. i am jealous. :-)

they have the best cycling infrastructure, they are called roads.

I get the feeling you do not know what good cycling infrastructure looks like.

If it requires cyclists to act like pedestrians and is only safe to use at pedestrian like speeds, then it's not good cycling infrastructure.

In Munich, where I live, for example, we have bike lanes on the sides of most streets throughout the town, and dedicated bike paths in the countryside. It's wonderful - cyclists can drive safely the speed they'd like to, without interfering with neither cars nor pedestrians. I use my bicycle almost exclusively for anything up to 20km.

Bike lanes on the sides of streets present problems for cyclists where there are frequent intersections. At those intersections, cyclists need to check for traffic overtaking them and then immediately making a right turn in front of them, traffic entering the roadway and encroaching in the bike lane, and oncoming traffic making a left turn across the bike lane.

I am also interested in moving to Munich at some point, could you tell me more about the state of the biking infrastructure? Is it practical to use cycling as your main transportation method around the city? What about recreationally - i.e. biking outside the city, to a nearby village?

Don't trust your feelings. The problem with the way cyclists and cycling transportation have been used politically is that it is now impossible to have any serious conversation about it, it's just like climate change. The experience of cyclists riding on roads have been quietly dismissed so that the establishment can get away with their bike lane agenda.

It is possible, but it is a challenge. When I was in San Diego Car2Go helped a lot (short one-way car rentals), but they're gone now. I cycled from Clairemont Mesa to South Park regularly and that was brutal.

While you could get between pre-selected points reliably (home and work), how was your experience living in LA carless when it came to going anywhere outside walking distance? The sprawl is massive and the busses/trains only go so far

if i wanted to go somewhere i planned ahead (most of the time). LA wasn't half bad in that regard. it has busses going on all major streets east-west and north-south. for many places i wanted to go to, a single transfer was enough. for example: go east first to the street that you want to reach, then transfer and go south.

i don't remember ever to having had to take a taxi. i got a few rides, but then it was friends who went to the same place anyways (like a linux user group meetup)

Now try going carless in Montana :)

There are plenty of similar places in Europe. I don't see how this says anything useful.

well, i did claim that if i can live without a car in san diego i can do it anywhere. dannyw does have a point about places like montana likely being a lot worse.

i can't think of any places like that in europe. european cities are simply not that spread out. so unless you live on a farm far from everywhere, you should be fine.

In Europe, urban centers are prohibitively expensive to live in if you want to avoid living in a slum.

Imagine if every city was San Francisco, especially in realtion to income.

In the end, I can live somewhat comfortably if I commute, essentially trading my time for lower crime rates and nicer surroundings.

which countries/cities are you talking about? i didn't make that experience in germany for example.

Germany is kind of a mixed bag here - situations are getting weird quickly if you search for Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg or Stuttgart, they get somewhat acceptable when you consider Berlin (but listen to them complaining about rent!), and in some areas, living is almost free (most of the Ruhrgebiet).

Also consider that if you are reading HN, you are likely to work in IT, which gives you a skewed idea on average income levels.

fair point. i did go by gut feeling, and haven't actually done any thorough comparison. and yeah, i can totally see that working in IT won't let me feel the pain of above average rent.

berlin is indeed interesting, one would think that with it being the capital city, the demand would rise, but i guess that east berlin is less popular, and that berlin also suffers from the overall reputation of east germany.

The population density of Montana is 2.7/km^2. Iceland is close with 3.5/km^2, then Norway and Finland (14 and 16/km^2). (Wikipedia)

Iceland has 824 cars/1000, Finland, 494 and Norway, 616.) The US overall has 811. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...)

challenge accepted :-)

you haven't watched "Mountain Men" have you? :-D