And even cities in the US are vast sprawls compared to organically grown very old cities in other parts of the world. That makes a huge difference for walkability.
And, as you say, Urban != dense city downtown.
my point is, talking about Berlin and then carrying that thought over to "americans just love cars" is silly. Germany is smaller than CA, and double the population of california. Most people "in california" live in the "san angeles" range or in the "bay capital" area. a half hour outside of any of those areas and it's either sand or farms or mountains.
and i wish i was "rural", there's ~600 houses within 6mi radius, that's not very rural. It's rural compared to Manhattan, i guess.
So a lot of people tend to translate 80% urban into 80% cities which is manifestly not true, and even less dense cities.
> The use of housing unit density instead of solely population density. The minimum population threshold to qualify as urban increased from 2,500 to 5,000 or a minimum housing unit threshold of 2,000 housing units.
> The jump distance was reduced from 2.5 miles to 1.5 miles for 2020. Jump distance is the distance along roads used to connect high-density urban territories surrounded by rural territory.
> No longer distinguishing between urbanized areas and urban clusters. All qualifying areas are designated urban areas.
We agree (i think), i'm just quoting the census bureau document.
So you've explicitly chosen to live far away from everything, in effect you've chosen to have to own a car. What bearing does this have on anything?
> The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds.
Unless you drive across the US on a regular basis, this point has precisely zero relevance.
The topic was about public transit in cities, where many millions of people gather. Nobody has said that the US needs to ditch cars and only use public transport between states or cross-country.
I tire of "you guys just love your cars too much". I've lived in several states and only when I lived in Los Angeles county was there ever a bus within "walking distance" - but still that was a 25-30 minute walk.
Oh, and in case you were curious, California is about 60,000 square kilometers bigger than Germany.
And I live 36 hours away from California in the United States. At highway speeds.
That's why we "love our cars"