This always strikes me as an unsatisfying response. What about America is so fundamentally different than Europe that would make the same policies that work there not work here?

Every time I’ve seen this type of argument brought up, it’s fallen flat when the same infrastructure is built here because it does end up working. We’re really not so unique.

> What about America is so fundamentally different than Europe that would make the same policies that work there not work here?

And yet, if I suggested that the US do something a lot of (all?) European countries do, like having to present ID when voting, I’d get an endless stream of replies about why that’s fundamentally impossible in the US (and racist, naturally). And that’s a FAR easier problem to solve than pie-in-the-sky “make everything more dense and have high speed rail everywhere and European-style public transit in every city” daydreams that are so popular.

Maybe some things really aren’t that easy to do in the US.

> like having to present ID when voting

Complaints about this usually revolve around the fact that voter ID laws aren't accompanied with increased funding for and availability of voter ID services. Show me a law where they added Saturday and late-evening DMV services, or pop-up voter ID registration services at grocery stores, pharmacies, post offices, churches, community recreation centers, and schools.

The purpose behind these laws is quite clear. It's fundamentally unfair to add voter ID laws to depress turnout under the guise of "election security".

Land area and population density?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

Well Sweden has a lower population density than the US and there is still plenty high density housing, so your argument is?

I think it would be good to do away with these simplistic this or that doesn't work here because... The US society was remodelled quite dramatically to be very car centred over a very short time and now people say that it can't be any other way because of the geography? The US was literally different 70-80 years ago.

Which doesn’t mean much as a comparison point in the US because much of that land has zero or approximately zero residents, and nobody’s talking about building high-density housing in the middle of nowhere anyway. Upwards of 80% of the US population lives in urban areas and those places certainly are comparable to much of Europe.

>Upwards of 80% of the US population lives in urban areas

Look up the US Census definition of "urban." In the town where I live, three houses around me are on 100 acres collectively--not to mention even more adjacent conservation land and that's classified as urban because it's near a smaller old mill town and only about 50 miles from a major city.

Apparently the new "urban" definition is something like:

>Adopting 500 persons per square mile (PPSM) as the minimum density criterion for recognizing some types of urban territory.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/03/24/2022-06...

Which basically means anything "town-like" or higher is "urban".

So most Americans live in urban areas even if they are in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

Yes. Most people see urban and imagine at least a 2nd or 3rd tier city in terms of population. Not a 5K person town that may or may not be within a not too long a drive of some sort of population center.

Urban in the sense of "don't need to own a car" is a much smaller slice--especially if you aren't adjusting your expectations.

Yeah the census counts urban as “a cop or ambulance will show up in decent time” and rural as “you could detonate a cow and nobody would be around to notice”.

Without knowing exactly which town you’re talking about, I would posit that that’s likely still dense enough to have some pretty direct comparison points somewhere in Western Europe. It’s not like all of Western Europe is a city.

Which doesn’t mean that the same infrastructure you’d see in a dense European city would make sense in your town, mind you. I just think that Europe and America aren’t as incomparable as some people seem to think.

Well, it's a typical more rural New England town. There is zero public transit of any sort. Essentially no businesses in town except barely when they merge with an adjacent small old mill city. So even in the town center where there are some sidewalks basically nowhere to walk to other than the library or post office. About 7K population total.

About an hour drive from a major city.

Though not that different really from small English countryside towns I've walked through.

That's one thing that fascinated me about CT when I was up there.

It seemed bizarre that even "one strip mall" towns didn't have certain categories of business. Down in the south, you can't measure a mile without hitting two serviceable Tex-Mex restaurants.

Up north? The nearest Tex-Mex is often 30 minutes away, and the nearest pizza place (which often isn't great) is 20 minutes.

I'm not sure how much decent Tex-Mex I've seen in the Northeast generally. I do have a few decent pizza places around where I live west of Boston. But generally speaking I find I'm on my own with respect to food. Which is a reasonable tradeoff I make.

> What about America is so fundamentally different than Europe that would make the same policies that work there not work here?

The amount of violent criminality? Look at any major light rail network in America and they are nowhere near as safe as the European equivalents.