I wouldn't say most cities unfortunately. European cities are quite walkable and not as sprawling as American ones. But it is still pretty easy to end up were only cars can go not that far from the city center, or where there is only the occasional bus. Asia is really the leader in public transport now. I think the article is slightly misleading. Currently in Europe things like bike infrastructure and public transport is sort of like the development of drones. Everyone is saying they are doing it to claim they are keeping up, but not a lot is happening. It isn't like Shenzhen were every year there is a new pedestrian street, bikes, subway line, train line or something became electrified.

I live in Europe (in Prague right now) and I never needed to own a car here. I would say it depends on the city in Europe. However, if you occasionally happen to be outside of the city center where only cars go you would call Uber. I am fine with that when 90% of my daily transport is covered by public transport.

I live in Germany, and use the bike, e-scooter/bikes/... and public transport for everything.

I have owned a car before, and I did not use those other transportation methods any less. We don't own a car anymore because it does not make economic sense for us.

When we need to travel by car inside the city, we just use Uber (~30 EUR/month is what we currently pay). When we need a car for a couple of hours to pick up stuff, we use one of the car sharing vendors. We can get "the right car" for whatever we need for ~4 hours with gas for less than ~20 EUR (~once every two months). When we want to travel around with a car, we just rent a high end one for the weekend for ~300 EUR. We do that once every two months, although in the summer a bit more often. This means we end up paying ~3000-3500 EUR/year in rentals/uber.

If we were to own a high end car, we would at least have to pay 30.000 EUR/year for a used one with 100k kms. On top, we need to pay insurance (~500-600EUR/year), parking (~150EUR/month where we live), maintenance (~200/year), handle some other burdens (wheel changes, etc.), and if for whatever reason we need a different car (to pick up something big), we still need to rent that. That puts the costs of owning a car at 2300-2400EUR/year + unforeseen maintenance + gas + rentals + (30.000 EUR - reselling value) / (years until re-selling).

Where we live, unless one uses the car at least every weekend, it makes no sense owning one. At one weekend usage per month, you can just rent, and are more flexible.

Your estimated costs are pretty average, but I found the €30k figure curious. Used cars are dirt cheap in Germany, and they are often in really good shape and well maintained compared to used cars in other countries.

I occasionally drive a 20 year old Opel that was purchased 7 years ago for €2500. It works great. I ride my bike most of the time, but it's really handy to have a car to haul kids or heavy/bulky stuff.

€30k is only a little under the annual salary in Germany, so I'm suspicious that this figure is somewhat overblown as well.

€30k is enough for pretty much any new entry level or basic trim car outside of Audi/BMW/Porsche.

Cars are important status symbols in Germany, and people who can afford it often do exactly as described--buy a new or slightly used Audi/BMW/Mercedes, use it for a while, keep it in absolutely immaculate condition, and sell it on a couple of years later for close to what they paid for it. Those higher end cars often go through many owners until they no longer pass inspection and finally get exported. 'Ordinary' people are more likely to drive lower end cars, which seem to have a different life cycle, ending as student cars and getting crushed instead of exported. That's my impression anyway, could be wrong. My experience (see Opel reference above) is that those lower end cars can be had for pretty cheap and often in great shape. With a little care, you can keep them running for ages on the cheap.

And then those sold cars end up in Poland. Reuse, then recycle. ;)

If you have kids, especially more than one, a no-car city center is a nightmare. Even in Europe.

That very much depends on the city. I had no problem getting around Paris/Amsterdam/London/Rome when I was traveling with my friend's family (3 kids). A car would have been a bigger nightmare with traffic and parking and we weren't even staying in the central areas.

But it also depends on how and where you live and work specifically. If I lived in a many of the areas outside of the Périphérique in Paris, not owning a car would probably impact your overall quality of life, but I'd still not want to take it into the city.

Rome should not be on that list IMO. Its public transport is terrible, at least in the centre. Still preferable to having to drive there though, that's for sure. I'm sure it's not true of every part of the city, but I was unpleasantly surprised by inadequate rush hour bus service. Haven't seen buses that packed since my childhood in 1990s Ukraine.

I have 2 kids and live in Berlin car-less without trouble.

We use public transit and bicycles (lots of parents have cargo bikes for transporting little kids e.g. https://www.babboe.de/lastenraeder/big).

vienna is definitely not a nightmare with kids and no car. even disregarding the subway and public transport, i see plenty of people riding around with bike trailers (fits two) if the weather permits.

How about you raise your kids without the big trust-no-one bubble mover?

I also have a hard time seeing how a "high end car" is a fair comparison to not having a car at all.

Anyway, could you also elaborate on your parking situation? Is this mostly destination parking? I'm just a bit surprised, since a resident parking permit is like €20 for two years here in berlin [0].

[0] https://service.berlin.de/dienstleistung/121721/ (german)

It's the same reason why you can have vending machines everywhere in Japan but not in the US. Uniformly high cultural level (relatively speaking), as well as a high level of trust (justified) probably has a lot to do with it.

I don't see how a lack of uniform culture and trust prevents vending machines elsewhere, or what it has to do with vending machine proliferation?

In japan you even have vending machines to pay for your restaurant food inside the restaurant, where your usually paying upfront. And some parking lots have per stall locks that don't let you drive away until you pay. You could argue that is symbolic of lower "trust".

The "vending machines" inside restaurants are only there to increase efficiency and reduce labor needs, because there's a labor shortage of sorts in Japan.

For stuff outside, they just don't have problems with vandalism and theft the way America does, so it makes it much more feasible to have lots of vending machines outside: no one is going to deface them or break into them.

This is also really useful for bicycling. Bikes in Japan all seem to have little locks on the back which go through the rear wheel's spokes, so someone can't just hop on and pedal away. But there's nothing stopping someone from picking the bike up and carrying it away, putting it on a truck, etc. But theft is almost nonexistent in Japan, so people just leave their bike parked on the sidewalk and don't worry about it, and this makes biking very easy and feasible, whereas in the US you have to worry about someone stealing it if it isn't U-locked to something completely immovable, and even then someone might steal parts off of it.

I don't buy your labor shortage thesis because the vending machines are also commonplace inside restaurants in Korea, and there is certainly no labor shortage here. I think it's more of a cultural thing - Koreans (and Japanese) value efficiency more than Americans when it comes to eating out. Korean dining is the most standardized and efficient I've seen in the world.

How is this about culture and not about economics? People presumably don't steal bikes for fun but to fence them, because that's the best way for them to keep themselves from starving.

Having a country with starving people is absolutely about culture. The culture of that country doesn't allow any social welfare programs, so people become like that.

I think the parent comment is referring to vandalism. See any public machine in any big US cities.

Depends on the city, really. I live in Dublin, which has a not-great public transport system (a couple of train lines, a couple of tram lines, a vast, sprawling, slow bus system). I don't have a use for a car (on the rare occasion I need to go to the suburbs, I can use the bus system), but some people certainly do. When I visit German cities, though, I'm always kind of amazed anyone bothers having a car.

That gap is being bridged by scooters (electric rental ones, but also private ones, non electric ones) and bikes (same here, rental but also private ones)

In general people are less reticent to bring a foldable bike in the subway for instance.

I can't speak for mainland China, but if it's anything like Taiwan, there's probably an illusion of accessibility brought on by the sheer size of the cities/transportation infrastructure that you don't really notice until you've lived there a while.

The subway systems in Taipei and Kaohsiung are great, but it's easy to ignore just how much of each city isn't serviced by underground or above ground rail, and are only accessible via public transportation through spotty bus networks.

> It's the case not just in Korea and Japan but in most cities outside of America. It's one of American peculiarities, like checks or no public health care.

As opposed to the peculiarity of Japan, where cash (often in envelopes) is used for a lot of stuff (instead of cards). :)

In New York you don't need a car either. But this isn't good enough. A Car-free city means no one is allowed to use automobiles for personal transportation. I'm sick of non-necessary car use ruining the quality of life for everyone else.

How long did that take?

Dunno about China, but you can go from one end of the city to the other in Delhi - a distance of nearly 40km by car - in under 1 hour by metro.

There is public health care in US. Medicare for old people, Medicaid for poor people, and anyone without insurance can go to the ER. It may not be great, but it does exist.

> There is public health care in US. Medicare for old people, Medicaid for poor people, and anyone without insurance can go to the ER. It may not be great, but it does exist.

There is some public healthcare but no universal healthcare.

ER is not healthcare. You do not get treatment for chronic diseases, cancer etc. ER only treats you for the life or health threatening consequences of not getting treatment.

For cancer, yes. For chronic diseases that can treated with a pill like heart disease and diabetes, they will prescribe the pills. People should use the word universal if that is what they mean.

Most people outside US when they say public healthcare they mean what's known in US as universal one.

This seems like a pedantic point. The US AFAIK is the only healthcare system that is as dysfunctional as it is in the first world.

While traveling outside the US, I have found many people think Americans are cold and heartless and just let people die. It is an understandable conclusion the way people talk about the US system in the media and internet, but it also isn't true. The US has dysfunctional, public healthcare but it isn't so dysfunctional that you just die if you fall or get an ear infection without insurance. So saying the US has "no public health care" is not only incorrect but it is also overly dramatic.

But you are fucked with a huge bill that would cripple your life in a way that you might as well be dead.

And folks do skip going to the doctor, ration their medicines, and other such things.

Folks suffer until things are an emergency as well and hospitals won't always help if you, say, need surgery for cancer that isn't presently killing you and isn't an emergency.

Yes, it is dysfunctional. No one is arguing otherwise.

The government reimburses hospitals for ER visits if the patient can't pay.

Hospital will gladly send you to collections and fuck your credit, though.

Citation? Genuinely curious.

The source is my wife who is a clinical pharmacist at a large hospital which has a sizable uninsured patient population. Here is the first result on Google which does talk a little about federal funding for "uncompensated care" [1] starting near the halfway point.

My wife's hospital was hit hard by ACA because it reduced federal funding for uncompensated care. The idea was that the funding could be cut because more people overall would be insured. Unfortunately enough of their patients still are without insurance that the funding shortage led to two rounds of layoffs. They seem to have adjusted to the new financial reality now and are hiring again. But the first couple years after ACA passed were tough.

I guess it would be more accurate to say that the federal government funds uninsured ER visits, but the funding falls short of what is necessary especially after ACA.

1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/03/who-...

But there are people who choose to die rather than risk bankrupting their family with uncontrollable medical costs.

So there's plenty of drama. Medical bankruptcy in particular is something that I don't think occurs anywhere else.

> So there's plenty of drama. Medical bankruptcy in particular is something that I don't think occurs anywhere else.

I doubt the veracity of this oft-repeated meme, but I'll let Snopes provide the detailed analysis: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/643000-bankruptcies-in-the...

I would appreciate similarly-detailed evidence to the contrary.

The summary of that Snopes article is that while medical bankruptcy in the US is indeed far more common than anywhere else, it's not entirely unheard of outside the US. Not all medical expenses are always covered, and disability can always lead to financial difficulties anywhere. Though medical bankruptcy is still significantly less common; in the US it's the leading cause of personal bankruptcies, in other countries it's a lesser cause.

This paper from the American Journal of Public Health says ~530k/year.

http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304901

What's more, Medicaid costs about as much per American citizen as the NHS costs per British citizen. The only difference is that NHS also covers all those British citizens, whereas Medicare only covers a small group.

So Americans are already paying for socialised health care, they're just not receiving it.

Checks? France loves checks and use them more than Americans.

No public health care? That isn’t true either. Medicaid and Medicare are public health care.

Another legitimate peculiarity of Americans is the vastly higher disposable income compared to most other countries. Even with all of the “free” stuff, the French have lower wages and far less disposable income than Americans.

> No public health care? That isn’t true either. Medicaid and Medicare are public health care.

I think you know that "public healthcare" was referring to universal healthcare in this context. US is the only western democracy without universal healthcare.

Switzerland and the Netherlands healthcare is private though people are obligated to get a plan. Works great and cheaper than here in France which is horribly expensive for anyone with a decent wage.

The Dutch and especially Swiss healthcare systems are actually among the most expensive in Europe. France is cheaper per capita.

Yes per capita, that's why I said "for anyone with a decent wage". France has one of the highest unemployment rate in OCDE, so for all these people it is indeed cheap, in fact free. But for those actually making more than the minimum wage (and for anyone making close to a SV salary or the French equivalent), you end up paying way way more than the Dutch and the Swiss.

Yeah that's what I meant. Too late to edit comment!

> Checks? France loves checks and use them more than Americans.

I am afraid your data is outdated: it is now used for less than 15% of payments, mainly by old people or for C2C payments.

I am in my late twenties and have emitted only 3 checks from my account, in my entire life.

15% is still a lot more than in many other countries. Checks are certainly on the way out, but in rural southern France, there are still places where you can pay with check but not with pin card.

I had to use them years ago to pay some club for the kids (UK), and every time I was sweating - where do i write the amount? Where the name? Is it readable? Did I mark the end correctly?... Thank $deity banks phased them out.

The French have the RIB system, wherein you can send a snapshot of what your account details are, and the bills are automatically deducted from there. In practice, that means you need to use cheques MUCH less frequently than in the US. What's worse, the US doesn't have an easy way to transfer money electronically between banks! Thus requiring even more cheques.

> The French have the RIB system

When living in France I never came across the use case you describe, at least not in this form. But I did often come across people wanting money from me sending their RIB as an image attachment to emails rather than copying and pasting their IBAN into the body of the mail like elsewhere in Europe.

That's more or less what I meant, except with utility companies instead of people. Apologies if I made it sound fancier. Having lived in the US and France, I think the places where cheques were used a lot was in bills-type things. That's why I brought this example up.

Why would you need checks at all if you can just pay by card or transfer money using your bank online page?

It's often the other way around. Companies sometimes prefer to pay you, reimburements etc, via a cheque.

It's because the USA decided paypal was the way to do C2C transfers between banks and decided not to develop their own as a result.

You also have venmo, square cash, fb messenger, etc.

Don't forget we also spend less on feeding ourselves than anyone else in the world[0].

[0]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...

That's partly due to lower food standards, surely? Salmonella causes hundreds of deaths per year in the US but I believe almost zero in the US.

If you are going to make inflammatory statements like that, at least back them up with data. Per Table 3[1], the Americans and Europe have roughly the same death rate from salmonella.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4668831/

It was inflammatory and for that I apologise.

Table 6 of p.10 [1] shows zero deaths from salmonella in the UK for the period 2006-2015.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

In the context of public healthcare the OP felt like an unwarranted and overly simplistic diversion, which I think is why I got frustrated.

EDIT: I also realised I typed "US" twice in my original comment; the second should be "UK".

My guess would be agricultural subsidies more than food standards.

Really? The US spends about 1% of its budget on agricultural subsidies compared to the EU's 40%.

The EU's budget is tiny, though. It doesn't maintain armies, police, infrastructure, health care or any sort of social security. Farm subsidies are among the few things the EU spends money on. The rest is paid by member states. So this is not a meaningful comparison.

A meaningful comparison is difficult, granted. If anything, doesn't that make OP's point about food prices being low due to agricultural subsidies less tenable though?

No less tenable than the food standards proposition, unless you have data that shows the difference in industry expenditures on food quality.

I found a USDA publication [1] which is a little dated but raises a large number of factors that affect food household expenditure differences between the US and EU. Broadly speaking these are:

- Food prices inc. agricultural protection & consumption taxation;

- Income;

- Food availability;

- Consumption patterns;

- Preference trends inc. health, food safety, production process & taste;

- Demographic trends;

- Retailing & regulation (e.g. consolidation laws).

Some of the factors it highlights that may cause lower expenditure on food in the US than in the EU are:

- Lower food pricing due to protection & taxation;

- Food safety concerns in the EU since mad cow disease and dioxin in chicken feed (and foot & mouth disease in the UK) leading to lower confidence in food supply regulation;

- Greater willingness in the EU to pay more for higher animal welfare in the food chain;

- Higher proportion of organically grown food across the EU and differing definitions of "organic";

- Longer history of consolidation laws in the US.

Apologies I missed copying the actual reference in my last post: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/40408/30646_wr...

EU budget does subsidize infrastructure and some R&D grants.