️ Is Boston Really The Most European US City?

I here it's very Racist👹

Blah blah blah. Just another video bashing american cities because they are not like european cities. American cities are built their own way for their own reasons and its neither better nor worse, its just different.

Post wab 2?

Clearly English dictation voice

Or most intact old world city with less "great fire" damage

Or most intact old world city with less "great fire" damage

boston is a hassle to drive in with tiny streets and pot holes everywhere. give me straight streets all day.

I only clicked on to see if he pronounced Boston right, thank you for getting it right

Brother if you’re not an ai voice over you need work on livening up your voice

Boston is my favorite city. I'm biased cause i live in the area..

As a boston resident, it is absolutely comical to hear this video praising the subway system

The roads are terrible no parking , eh i dont drive tho

I'm 12 and I live on the Massachusetts east coast. I usually consider my home to be the cities of Somerville, Cambridge, Arlington, and Medford, all of which are part of the northwestern Bostonian metropolis. I love being able to walk and bike pretty much everywhere I go, and although there is a huge amount of car reliance, it's the closest I'll get in this god awful country to a good city while also being near to all of my friends. 1 thing that makes transportation here hard though, is the fact that our streets were built off of literal cow paths. P.S., If you live in this area I recommend taking a train to Salem, Worcester, or Marblehead for the day with nothing but a purse with your essentials and a water bottle.

The least European place on Earth is Pittsburgh.

Seattle is a city rapidly densifying, as well as some satellite cities such as Bellevue and Redmond, yet the metro area is still sprawling. And Tacoma has done away with single-family zoning completely, yet the rest of the county is still sprawling. It's strange to watch density and sprawl taking place at the same time.

Am walking here

It’s genuinely difficult to own a vehicle if you live in downtown Boston too

It's walkable and all, but only if you can afford to live in the parts that are. There's also terrible car-centric planning all over outside of the core. Some neighborhoods were clearly built to be serviced by a trolly and have become very car-dependent, which causes all kinds of nonsense like parking halfway up on the sidewalk. I looked at a place right next to a train station, just about, and it required crossing something like 6 lanes of traffic at a crosswalk to get in the station. It wasn't a commuter rail stop, either.

Driving in Boston is an absolute nightmare

I am reminded of a line from the Eagles - "Where the old world shadows hang heavy in the air." (it's from "The last Resort") . Boston has done a great job maintaining that "old world" look and feel, but had some serious challenges doing it -- the biggest publics works project in history (the Big Dig), urban renewal (which wiped out whole neighborhoods). Given it's traffic , parking and horrendous state of mass transit, it doesn't feel like it should be a model for the future, but it sure is charming as heck! I'm not sure that large US cities have the wherewithal to reinvent themselves at this point. I think it's more interesting what Newburyport, Portsmouth and Portland did and to a lesser extent what Gloucester is doing now. Thanks for the food for thought and come visit any time!

Nah. Not you cannot survive without a car. Not outside a few major urban centers public transportation simply doesn’t exist. /

Even Boston had terrible-idea urban highways ripped through it, and generally more car-dependent U.S.-style infrastructure

philadelphia is a grid city that looks very european. features dense low rise apartments and row homes and narrow streets. looks very similar to boston

Its because boston wasnt razed to the ground for carparks and highways during the 60s.

America lost alot of good architecture and infrastructure then.

I love Boston.

After having visited a handful of different parts of Europe I can say with confidence Boston still does not compare to modern European cities/transportation. If Boston is the champion of accessible cities and transportation then we have to do better as a country overall 🙄

It's too bad Boston, and MA as a whole (masswhole) has such an abysmal track record of maintaining the infrastructure and that is very unEuropean. The MBTA, the roads and the bridges are some of the worst in the country in terms of degradation.

I live in MA and boston isn't the most European city. It's the most stupid and ass backward city. Try driving around boston or navigating the streets. Intersections with right, soft right, left, soft left, middle right and middle left is just stupid. There's a local joke that boston roads were designed by cows, because that were cows walked. They literally made cow paths into roads and that's why the roads in Boston are so freakin stupid.

Not even google maps can navigate Boston without making a ton of mistakes. The number of times google map directions goes haywire in boston is well known. Boston is also hella elitist where people brag about paying 100K for a parking spot on beacon hill.

San Antonio represents older mexican cities. It would have been a pretty big old city, just that during the american mexican war a lot got destroyed

Boston resident here. This video could have been a lot more nuanced:
- Most US cities even in the West had a historic walkable core just like Boston did, but many wiped them out with urban renewal (look up old pictures of Cincinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City, Buffalo…)
- Boston also did extensive urban renewal, demolishing the West End and adding two major highways through the city. One reason Boston retained such a European vibe is because activists prevented even more urban renewal from moving forward.
- Even so, Boston has many American attributes. One of the neighborhoods you keep showing in the video is the Back Bay, which is in fact a master-planned American-style grid.
- When the Prudential Tower was built, it was the tallest building the Western hemisphere outside of Manhattan.
- The Boston suburbs are similarly interesting. They sprawl just like most American suburbs, but they also typically have a small historic core with a walkable main street and a commuter rail station.

Also, is this being narrated by an AI voice? It pronounced “WW2” as “wuh2” lmao. Betty was cool though, I’ll check out her videos.

USA is USA Europe is Europe. Why do they love Dubai because its of infrastructure ? Dubai is Americanize its architecture .

New Orleans is European-esque. Public transit could be better though. Chicago is very walkable with one of the best transit systems in the US.

I live in vermont and Montpelier is definitely one of the ones that fall under this category

Another fun fact: Europe actually has a more dense freeway network than the US Interstate highway system is.

Boston is a mess. Not everyone wants to live in a dense, expensive city with no open spaces. I like going home and cranking up my stereo with loud symphonic music. Can't do that in a dense city.
Fun fact: Every single thing you buy at any store in Boston gets to that store by trucks using roadways!

My favorite city is Boston, not because the suburb planning and street grids but because the architecture

Also, I don´t see the problem with having a big house with a big garden and in a tree-lined street, with no one living above or below you, especially in a country where buying a car is the easiest thing.

When people demonize cars they seem to forget that walking to a bus/metro station, catching a crowded bus/train, etc... is much more difficult and perhaps slower than using a car. it´s not just about lecturing people to not want to do things the easiest possible way.

I don't think car-centric cities could become like Boston any more than Boston could become a car-centric grid. There's little things you can do here and there, but you're not going to rip up the foundations the city was built upon and start over. It would take a century of piecemeal adjustments.

“European city” is a reach man 😂 just say pre-automobile era…there are city that look like Boston n London OUTSIDE OF EUROPE WOOOWWWW…Asia exist. Please open your eyes and understand that Europe and NORTH America isn’t the only continents. Humans made cities for humans. Americans make cities for car lobbying billionaires.

The North End is by far my favorite part of the city to walk in. The narrow streets are very cozy and it feels much more intimate, it has a great charm to it. Just never want to drive there 🤣

Dc is a good example of a European street layout

If the colonists from Europe had arrived 200 years before they did, way more of the US would look like Boston. In Latin America where the Spanish took hold before the British came to the US, you have way more cities that planned around the Spanish model with plaza de armas and gothic cathedrals at the center.

as a resident of the boston metro (around 15 miles south of the city) i've come to realize that you don't really notice much sprawl here; we don't have miserable suburbs with "stroads" and really nothing is gridded outside of parts of downtown itself

The AI is god awful ruining this video

Yjr eotdt hsbbit of American urban planing is demolishing historical builings or even whole blocks to build skyscraper or new higway. In Europe you just can`t demolish few hundreds years old building

The most European city in USA is
WHEELING WV .

What about DC, San Juan, Philadelphia or Charlotte Amalie ?

Most Boston suburbs and New England towns are similar to Boston itself. You will not find many grids. I live 22 miles west of Boston and I can't think of a single town where I have ever seen a grid layout. Also, except near to the town center, depending on the kind of town, you will not see homes built so close together in a cookie cutter style. You'll see a variety of styles of housing built along winding streets. Before GPS, when family from the Midwest would come to visit, they couldn't understand how we got around without a map.

Fun fact tell people from Boston they smell like fish is considered a compliment, so next time you meet someone from Boston make sure you tell them they smell like fish and they will love you for it