North America is so car-brained.

I think it's actually just anglo countries. The UK is batshit about cars as well, and I don't think the Aussies are much better.

This is seemingly changing in UK - younger generations increasingly don't own a private vehicle, due to a whole host of factors including the fact there simply isn't nearly as many affordable cars on the UK market as there was say 20 years ago, as well as the cost of fuel/insurance. It will be interesting to see if trends reverse once cheap EVs inevitably become a thing over the next decade - even entry level EVs are generally significantly more expensive than entry level gas cars used to be in the UK for the time being.

> https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a81dd5340f0b...

By what metric? The UK doesn't stand out in this list - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle... - it's below most of its peer nations.

We are tiny though, mostly high density and had a great rail inhertence. Given where we could be, I think we are car obsessed. Note also that car use and the right to use residential streets as commuter rat runs is becoming bound up with stupid culture war politics.

For all the chatter on HN, Europeans in general drive quite a lot. It's fascinating to hear people rail against cars here, and then step back out into meatspace. I just chuckle at the contrast between the dreamers on Reddit/HN and folks in the real world.

I just got back from a road trip in France and the UK and it's funny how much of the reddit-tier discourse is correct yet simultaneously so wrong. There are plenty of rural towns where everyone owns cars. There are highways, strip malls, large shopping centers with massive parking lots, and populated areas with bus service at best. The difference is the scale and the US lands embarrassingly far on one side of it. Even in the smallest rural towns in France we visited, we could hop on regional rail to the nearest large metro area.

Not only. UK is not far behind.

Sure, history made it so. From the automobile, to oil, to interstates, North America is it.

https://www.army.mil/article/198095/dwight_d_eisenhower_and_...

>> President Eisenhower is widely regarded as the catalyst for the IHS. His motivations for a highway network stemmed from three events: his assignment as a military observer to the First Transcontinental Motor Convoy, his experience in World War II where he observed the efficiencies of the German autobahn, and the Soviet Union's 1953 detonation of the hydrogen bomb, which instigated a fear that insufficient roads would keep Americans from being able to escape a nuclear disaster.

walking 10km? in most US cities that is neither viable nor safe anymore

It can include mass transit too. For a practical example, 10km covers all of Washington DC proper if you start at the center, nearly all of which is walkable/bikeable/transit-able.

Rural areas too. I made the mistake of walking down to the store when I lived in rural Colorado. A Truck almost turned me into a paste when it blindly took a turn.

Well that's the point I think. In practically all of the US you can't even take a sidewalk where you want to go. It gets even worse if you want things like walk signals or to avoid huge intersections, or even mass transit at all.

Not only that, our built environment is uninviting to walk in because it's built for cars. When have you ever walked by a parking lot and said "Oh my god, that parking lot was amazing, I want to spend time around it"? Yet we require by law parking lots to be built everywhere in America. We have legally compelled property owners to build something ugly.

Thanksgiving is coming up. Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year. Drive around, notice how on the busiest shopping day of the year, most commercial parking lots still aren't full.

> Thanksgiving is coming up. Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year. Drive around, notice how on the busiest shopping day of the year, most commercial parking lots still aren't full.

Sounds heavenly. But in reality, my wife (who actually likes going out on Black Friday, I don't know why) will be circling the lot waiting for a spot, any spot, even at the outer edge. It's nuts.

"Practically all of the US" includes nowhere I've lived, and I've moved around a fair amount. Some places are worse than others, but sidewalks are very much a thing more often than not.

Practically all of the US includes almost everywhere I have lived except for major cities. Especially in the Midwest and ESPECIALLY in the South walking to get groceries is a death wish.

Once I got a car, I became pretty unwilling to walk anywhere. Grocery store is 3 blocks from my house. I haven't walked in years. I would micro mobility though if there were a safe way to store the scooter.

Uhh, 10 kilometers is a LOT. I would not walk 6.2 miles for groceries. Or to work. Or to most things frankly

The suggestion here is not that you walk these distances, it’s that you bike or scoot them.

Lol neither dutch bike that long. Bikes are good for 5-7kms, >10 is already a stretch and ppl use bike+train combo or just straight up bus/tram

On an ebike that distance is reasonable. On a regular bike it is possible, but not reasonable. I have a 7 mile trip to work, I have used a regular bike for it, but it takes too long and so I wouldn't do it often. On my ebike it is a reasonable trip to work, my truck isn't that much faster (and is much harder to drive)

Trip is reasonable but for most ppl imo it's still a stretch. At this point, if good tram/bus alternative exists, ppl will prefer it bc of convenience

From where I live to where I work is 8km. That takes somewhere between 19 and 23 minutes. 23 minutes on the days when there was more than 3-4cm how snow on the road. I occasionally take the scenic route to work. About 14km and a little more than half an hour.

I do this every day. Regardless of weather. It saves me a lot of time for the simple reason that this both represents a mild workout and getting myself to work.

My bike commute to work is almost exactly 10km. It's great, and often faster than driving would be.

Sorry, to clarify using "walkable" as a word to encompass good public-transportation as well. I can walk to the subway, and get somewhere 6.2 miles away easily then walk to my final destination (something I do frequently).

I was recently in Europe & came back to the United States with a renewed sense of hatred for cars, single-family zoning, & our awful public transport. Cars especially continue to steal our space, time, health, sense of community, & money.

In Bern (Switzerland), for example, there's trams/streetcars for short trips in the most populated parts of the city; there's (ice? electric?) motorbuses for trips around the rest of the city; and trains/rolling stock for trips to other cities/countries in Europe. All of these methods are timely, clean, & affordable. The sense of freedom this provides is so incredibly liberating. The sense of community from all these shared spaces wonderful, and also entirely absent from the average North American lifestyle. The quality of life is genuinely incomparable.

Have you observed how quiet is Basel? I was always shocked when compared to another similar eu city where i live