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The American mind cannot comprehend this
(i.imgur.com)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9937365
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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Fuck Cars
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I appreciate the anti-car sentiment, not so much the anti-American one:
EU countries make these kinds of snarky posts a lot, some of them while having total populations that are way more homogeneous while also being smaller than a midsized American metro area.
The scale of America is rarely comprehended by people from these smaller countries.
Edit to address some of the comments below: the point of the difference in size is that infrastructure will develop differently based on available space. Monied interests got involved and made the car the central form of transport in America, and with so much land it was far cheaper to make cities that sprawled compared to smaller European countries that already had relatively dense millennia-old cities.
I like the "Fuck Cars" community and want to find ways to improve infrastructure. I said I appreciate the anti-car sentiment, but why is it a good idea to make this post title specifically an insult? How is that helping things? It certainly doesn't make me feel very welcome.
This is a common false argument. The size is irrelevant when you build a city for people and not cars. The millions of spare square kilometres are there for farming and other natural uses. The city or town with more than a few thousand people can be built like this just fine. You see if in lots of other countries and cities that have tonnes of spare space.
This comment makes no sense in relation to this topic. This is a picture of a winter market in a German city (theoretically, I'm not verifying it but it looks legit). The size of the country as a whole or even really the population makes no difference when comparing this to the US and it's cities. As someone who's lived in multiple cities in both countries and visited far more, the population density is the only distinction and that can be designed for. Kansas city is urban sprawled to hell by design and Berlin isn't all that different, except Berlin has trains galore.
Actually looking up the data on where I live right now, Mannheim, and where I just came from, Kansas City this point is easily driven home.
KC:
Mannheim:
America is the home of the car. Germany isn't even considered to have the best public transit and yet any country with that as a priority thrives in human centric metrics.
It was a nightmare to drive downtown in KC, find parking, visit a handful of shops, and drive home. It took time and money and was generally dangerous.
Going anywhere in the entire metropolitan area of Mannheim takes me max 30 minutes, and that's by tram. I walk most places and that's 1-10 mins of walking for all my needs. I can walk a block to my nearest Christmas market, 5 blocks to the next and something like 10 to the next. Nothing even remotely as communal or friendly in my suburban neighborhood in KC.