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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Where in Europe have you lived? Because Europe is made of many different countries and not everyone lives in a dense walkable area. I have lots of family in Denmark and all the ones with kids live in the suburbs. Their lives are not much different than ours, to be honest. They drive to work and to do their grocery shopping. They drive their kids to activities. They might have fewer cars but that's because cars and gas are a lot more expensive there. 
One of my pet peeves on this forum is when people reference Europe like it's one country. Things in Albania are going to be very different than things in Norway. There isn't one European culture.[/quote]

Where in Denmark? We have family and colleagues who live there and most live in suburbs other than a couple in Copenhagen. And yes, they have cars and the suburbs are more spread out. But the rail system in Denmark (at least in the Copenhagen region) is so much better than anything we have here. M[b]y BIL commutes into central Copenhagen 4 days a week via rail from a community about as far from the city as Frederick is from DC, and it's unreal how easy and affordable it is. He bikes to the rail station, the trains are frequent, and he spends maybe one hour total commuting (door to door, includes getting to and from the station and waits for trains). When we visited last summer my DH and I were lamenting how much easier it is for them to live in a nice quiet little suburb far from the busyness (and expense) of the city, but for us that would be hours a day or rearranging work schedules to accommodate a really limited MARC schedule to take trains to the wrong part of the city and then switch to bus or metro to get across town.[/b]

Also their house for a family of four is maybe 1500-1800 sq ft, and on a densely populated street (technically SFHs but just little hedges between houses and people have small patios, not huge yards). Also people walk and bike a lot around their suburb, at least in the warmer months, though most people have a car and many have two for a family. They definitely drive a lot (and when we went with them to their rural summer house, we drove everywhere) but they are not dependent on driving the way we are her in the US.

They pay through the nose in taxes but have great healthcare and a very good retirement system so they don't worry about having to work until their 80 or being bankrupted by a health emergency.

To me, their lives looked like ours except better in almost every way except the line dry their clothes and the culture is a little homogenous and personally conservative in a way that feels cold to my American sensibilities.[/quote]

You can do the same thing from Northern Jersey or Connecticut to NYC. DC is not a major employment center, try commuting by light rail from 60 miles away into a secondary Danish city and see how that goes for you [/quote]

That's a false comparison because Denmark is a much smaller country. Copenhagen is comparable in size to DC, not NYC. And the next largest city is Aarhus, which has fewer than 300k people in it (by comparison, this is only a bit larger than Richmond). People who work in Aarhus do not have to live 60 miles away to find more space or a slower pace of life because it's just not that crowded.

Within the EU, Copenhagen is a DC-like city, but they've focused investment on public infrastructure in a way that makes it a far more livable city. The cities comparable to NYC in Europe (Paris, Madrid, London, though the last obviously not in the EU) are way more expensive and crowded but still have better public infrastructure than most US cities (LA is a massive city with atrocious public transportation).

The US just doesn't give AF about public infrastructure, and it makes our cities less pleasant to live in. So then everyone flees for the suburbs, and since neither federal nor state governments give AF about public infrastructure, these suburbs are also not connected via public infrastructure (and connected to what, anyway -- what public transit system could the suburbs of Houston link up to anyway?). So everyone is car dependent and Americans don't actually understand how nice our lives could be with a functional society where we use collective wealth to improve overall quality of life, productivity, efficiency, etc.

But yes, go on thinking the livability of European cities is some kind of mirage that can't possibly be true, and dig in on American-style capitalism which sucks for all but a few people at the top.[/quote]

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