American vs. European Suburbs (and why US suburbs suck)

I was recently told by a member of a local city council that there are usually not many people showing up to the meetings or even speaking there. Therefore, if one person talks about a specific topic, there's usually not much attention. As soon as a second person advocates for the same idea, they start to listen. But if a third person brings up the same issue, council members get seriously anxious and afraid to loose votes and therefore will start to act.
My point is, go to town hall meetings, you could be this second or third person! Or even better, bring a friend and be two persons :D

i just love hearing a guy stating facts on why america sucks

You can see the relation between community design and culture. In Europe, dense design paired with paths for walking or biking makes for easy commutes and practical public transit. Communities in the US are car-friendly, not pedestrian friendly. They are spread-out, and often lack paths for pedestrians/bikes. In such low-density design, public transit is impractical. They result is that Americans tend to be more isolated, more independent and less engaged in their communities. Americans will get in their car, drive into the city, park in a garage, take an elevator to a certain floor in a building...and may never encounter another person. Americans often spend up to two hours a day commuting to and from work. Just the commute time can add a lot of stress to people's lives, as that is time they don't have to spend either working or with family.

Evironmentally, US urban planning is terrible for the environment. Compact urban planning is better for land usage management as well as has been shown to decrease carbon emissions. An experiment was done with Volusia county, Florida and showed this exact fact.

I was an exchange student in a smaller town in Missouri back in 2010, and one of the dumbest things I experienced was trying to get to my school. I lived about a 4 minute walk away from my school, but I had to get a ride every day to and from school because walking would mean suicide. I had to cross a six-lane road with no way of crossing as a pedestrian, so after trying a few times I would give up. It´s absolutely insane to me that Americans are so car dependent that they can´t even make a single pedestrian crossing anywhere on the six-lane road that literally carved the city in half.

The bottom line is, suburbs in the US are built around a culture of having your own vehicle while the rest of the world builds around public transportation systems which is more efficient.

American suburbs are a hellscape.

What sucks is American suburbs will be built anywhere, with barely any infrastructure around it, which makes it borderline impossible to walk anywhere. There are literally suburbs built barely even 2 miles away from O'hare airport. It sucks,

That's because U.S. suburbs weren't primarily built for cultured living, as in Europe. U.S. suburbs' main purpose are for middle-class/upper-class white families can escape "The Others" (mainly black folks -- especially poor black folks -- but Latinos to a lesser extent as well). Hence, why public transportation options are limited there. And in more recent years in certain metro areas, suburbs enable the black middle class/black upper class to escape the black poor. I'd imagine that there are class differences among Latinos as well. The suburbs are INTENTIONALLY designed to be inaccessible.

I think it should be noted that much of this phenomenon is driven less by the motivations of insidious city planners and just car culture and Americans desire for bigger better properties.
Clearly it would make more sense to have a system more similar to what Europe has, but Americans don't want smaller properties and they largely like cars and driving. You can't have a logical argument to a set of decisions that's emotionally driven.

"Muh conservatives bad. they dont want cyclopaths". You clearly don´t understand the basics of urbanism but here you are, commenting on major cities in europe. Prague is not on a flat soil, it´s all hills. So for us, the inhabitants of Prague it´s not convenient to use bicycles, we use our great public transport system. The cyclo paths are just occupying space that literally no one uses.
Another thing is your hate towards white neighbourhoods. we white people know that non-whites can´t live by themselves without us, but it´s getting annoying, get yourself a treatment.

Now saying that conservatives are all the cause of problems its stupid, it depends on the person bruh

Things get a bit mixed up here. That German „suburb“ you are showing still belongs to an older, urban part of the city. We also have areas with lots of newly built detached houses („Einfamilienhäuser“) with much less infrastructure, even around smaller cities - however, they are much smaller than in the US.

I wish the audio level was higher, on my phone I can't hear it very well even on max volume.

I find it absolutely shocking that Europeans do something better than the U.S., I mean who would have thought?

aaaaaaaaaand that´s why kids are so obese in america.

Aren't I glad to see my hometown's (Louisville) downtown highway abomination getting called out.

This is overgeneralization. The largest U.S. cities do have residential neighbourhoods and nearby suburbs that fit the description of European suburbs with mixed-use buildings, availability of mass transit, and so on. In general, though, the so-called “typical American suburbs” are a not a place I would want to reside. It’s ok to visit them for a few days on vacation, but that’s about it. Being forced to drive for your immediate needs is not a high standard of living (even if that suburban house happens to be affordable). Referring to it as “American dream” is disgrace. Perhaps being able to comfortably afford living in a densely populated urban area is more of a true American dream, in my opinion.

I used to live in a Suburb in Lepzig omg this video just brought some amazing memories back.

I like the American suburb better considering I live in one and it has nice parks and a school in walking distance and a few restaurants and gym in walking distance

For me, it's scary how people, especially in the U.S., are depented on cars. After all, it was supposed to be a tool for people, not people for a the tool.

You can have a white majority community without having suburbs. Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.

Americans live in a car dystopia and they don't even realize it. However, it can happen everywhere, as shown in the video as well. In my country (Slovakia) there is a parking problem in every city/town. This is caused by car overload, there's just too many of them. This is quite visible in my residential area of Bratislava built on a hillside with many Soviet era buildings (blocks of flats). There is one 'major' road leading to the top of the hill that has public transit buses/trolley buses going up and down. The car situation here has worsened so much that the cars are now parked on both sides of the road which narrowed the road and the buses now can not be going side by side - one has to stop and move to the side a bit to let the other one pass. I'm actually surprised no accident has happened yet.

If you ever lived in Germany outside cities ore towns you do not have much publik transport, and it can definitly look like in an american suburb.
You picture here an image that is not at all complete.

American houses are big... But made out of fragile dry wall

If you have a problem raising children then don't have them. Please don't reproduce.

Americans enjoy their children being children. We don't want little adults.

And there are no yards for the kids to play in; which explains a lot. You seem like you just made the video to attack people.

Northern Chicago suburbs are actually incredibly nice! It honestly depends on the town, but plenty of them give your privacy at the same time as having everything close by.

I don’t think this has to be a conservative or liberal viewpoint, and I’d argue that there is something conservative about designing your towns to be easily accessible for people and not just for their luxuries.

American suburbs are not created on a grid because they are created to be protective and not easy to pass through. It's a safety feature.

I live in Miami shores, Florida and there is a
police department 2 minutes away,
fire fighters 4 minutes away,
doctors 6-8 minutes away,
coffee shop 3 minutes away
small shops all around.
public library 1 minute away
school 7-8 minutes away
park 5 minutes away
gym 4 minutes away
big grocery store 7 minutes away
basketball / baseball / soccer(or football)/ tennis court 6 minutes away
(all of this is by walking)

Am I the only one that prefers the American suburb to the European one shown in the beginning? Looks peaceful, plenty of space, more 'natural'. The European one looks more like a city.

Plus this is such a stupid conversation. You know what's even closer houses and faster transportation? Live in the city. People move to the suburbs precisely to avoid the suggestions this video is proposing. By this guy's train of logic, every building should just be a high rise so things are closer together

It's significant to notice how you avoid mentioning how cities run by "progressives" have become basically nothing slums with crime, homicides, rapes, looting, explosions, homelessness, drug addicts etc.. Paris run by the "progressive" major hidalgo has become so overwhelmed with those problems that the only way to hide them is to blame conservatives 🤣 seriously, stop whining man

This was so confusing to watch at first because I grew up in the Suburbs of San Diego and they look NOTHING like what I saw here for the U.S examples. Then I did some digging and apparently our suburbs in particular were modeled after a Mediterranean model.

So basically USA v Germany? 🤨

damn this video is so ridiculously bad lol
The dude started off well and went into an unhinged rant about politics which shows he has some issues. Living in France, almost everyone hates the Paris mayor not only for her stance on cars but because she is legitimately stupid. She tries to reduce cars in the capital while doing little to provide good alternatives, creates problems with traffic that affect businesses who mostly rely on cars to get the products they need to offer their services or to go to the places where their services are needed etc...
If you destroy traffic in a major city, how is a plumber gonna reach his client ? By taking all his tools in the subway ?
Also, conservatives are also in favor of public transportation (at least in France). Most mayors with right wing views tend to work on better public transportation in their cities.
He also started to talk about how suburbs were meant to keep power in white middle class hands, like, wtf ? This is flat earth conspiracy theory level at this point. Not every decision made in the 50s was about race, or sexism, or anything like that. People didn't wake up and started their day wondering "how can I be racist today ?" and made their whole life revolve around it, but this guy thinks it worked like that, somehow.
The guy who made this video is just a liar who has a chip on his shoulder. I've rarely seen a video that started well and suddenly decided to be one of the worst on the internet lol

The way he describes "driving" as if it was such hard and laborious task that enslaves people is both funny and shocking to me

Great. So do not move here and go fight the Russians yourselves.

the examples you give of american suburbs are mostly an east coast thing, America is huge, so the suburbs vary wildly throughout the nation and a lot of them look like the european example you gave.

In defense of the US, yes our cities and urban planning our the worst in the developed world, our Suburbs probably the biggest waste of resources in the world but unlike Europe we actually have considerable preserved nature and wilderness. Europe has nothing, it’s completely baron about 98% of the virgins forests are gone and all you have are fields of trees and I realize Poland and some other places in Eastern Europe are an exception but all of Western Europe, do you have one Park that even compares to one in California? I Love Europe but your nature is beyond depressing.

Why is America always against logic?

I guess it's only natural that conservatives tend to be extremely protectionist of a car oriented lifestyle. They just got used to it. They likely don't really associate the "cars first" principle with the history of white dominance or class dominance. It's just what they are used to and believe to be a value and a tradition. So they short-sightedly protect it.
On the wide scale, though, this trend of car centrism is but a smal period of society adaptation to a new lifestyle changing technology. There's a powerful trend to urbanisation. And it will inevitably lead to a more careful approach to land, transportation, and their efficient and rational use.
I think the way to deal with people with a conservative mindset is to remind them that all those technologies were made to make our lifes more comfortable. We kind of let the situation develop on its own and now it's pretty obvious that it took the wrong turn, since a) the car centrism is too uncomfortable for categories of people, other than car owners, who are actually always around (name children first, I guess), and b) the car centrism has slowly taken away many precious aspects of the old traditional lifestyle.
So it's high time to turn to the values, so dearly protected by conservatives, and re-evaluate the currect practices such as car centric worldview and policies.

single family home >> european appartement in a shitty building full of crime and drug


im european

i live in Europe, but some city here isn't pedestrian friendly, for example Debrecen (in Hungary).

I think there's some points here but both the video and comments present this sort of exaggerated image of the US being one giant soulless suburb- with many comments coming from actual Americans, making me wonder where these people grew up and how often they got out. The suburb shown in the video is NOT at all typical of suburbs, at least not in California. Most suburbs I see in older, "poorer" parts of town actually have many of the features shown for European suburbs, such as nearby shopping areas, more "engaging" streetscape (which I think is mostly just older landscaping that has had time to grow in), unique houses and landscaping (people here usually have more than a lawn, and there's plenty of lovely gardens and examples of individual expression), and mixed-use (apartment buildings among tract homes and shops within walking distance). This is even more true for the denser parts of the city. Maybe this is just where I live, but I thought I'd present another perspective that isn't just more circle jerk.

To be honest, I actually like both types of suburbs. The American one looks calm and peaceful, while the European one looks beautiful. Both are nice, and both deserve to stay like that..

Those suburbs there's LITERALLY NO SIDEWALKS SECONDS INTO THE VIDEO