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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]

Exactly. While DC has had interurban commuter rail for over 100 years like other east coast cities, it was always infrequent. Towns like Kensington or Bowie just didn’t have the population to ever demand high frequencies way back then or now. And as previously stated, DC is a mid-size city, so a robust commuter rail network with high frequency to far off towns never developed.

Until recently people often derided DC as a “Small Southern Town,” a backwater so to speak. Only within the past 50 years has this area aspired to world-class status, and it still lags.

Philadelphia and NYC were historically much larger employment centers, and so commuting to quaint, historic commuter suburbs out in the countryside has always been the norm. [/quote]

Copenhagen is also a mid-size city. But go on making excuses.[/quote]

Copenhagen is the largest city in Denmark. It makes sense that it is a hub for transit in Denmark. DC is smaller than all of its neighboring jurisdictions except for Alexandria City  [/quote]

Weird goalpost shifting. DC is the capital city in a country 55x larger than Denmark. We have far more money and resources and it makes sense that the US would have multiple transit hubs (and that these hubs would be connected to one another). Also, the idea that the district of DC is smaller than it's suburbs is beside the point -- I was comparing "DC and environs" with "Copenhagen and environs" -- they are very similarly sized cities with similarly sized suburban populations. It's just that Copenhagen is designed to efficiently get those suburban populations in and out of the city via public transportation (and to efficiently move residents, commuters, and visitors around the city itself) and DC is not.

This is why DC has massive traffic and air pollution issues and Copenhagen does not. It has nothing to do with Copenhagen being the largest city in Denmark (with the EU, being the largest city in a small country is irrelevant -- like DC, Copenhagen has a huge population of transplants from elsewhere in the EU) or DC having large suburbs. It has to do with policy choices, and DC and surrounding areas making bad, short-sited policy choices that result in spiraling issues related to traffic, commute times, and affordability in the region.

I don't even like Copenhagen that much! But it's actually a good example of how much better DC could be with proper infrastructure and planning.[/quote]

People forget the cultural idiosyncrasies that shaped DC. It was a “Southern backwater” surrounded by farmland until fairly recently, despite being the seat of government. There really weren’t any substantial suburban commuter towns and the ones that did exist on the few commuter train lines were tiny villages like Garrett Park, Takoma Park, Clarendon.

When the DC region did finally develop, the tobacco and dairy farms became tract suburban subdivisions, except for the agricultural enclaves in Loudon and Montgomery Counties.

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