Trying to move to escape America’s car-centric hell. The Netherlands is pretty high on the list but I wanted to explore other options. How do the following countries and their cities fair in terms of urbanism:
-Ireland
-Spain
-Belgium
-France
-Denmark
-Portugal
-Sweden
I could list more but I’ll be here all night.
Sweden is ok. Most of the big cities haven’t been emptied out for parking lots, but there are still a lot of urban highways and public squares converted into parking lots. The worst of these is the “centralbron” in downtown Stockholm, where there’s a 6 lane open highway running directly through the middle of the city, running directly alongside the medieval old town. There’s also a huge project going on right now to build a $5B+ urban ringroad straight through the middle of Stockholm’s suburbs and nature reserves.
The peak of car culture in Sweden resulted in the famous “H-day”, where Sweden converted all of its roads and streets to drive on the right instead of the left. This resulted in dozens of tram lines being completely torn up to make way for cars.
Thankfully, most of the car-centric projects in the 70’s attempted to include separated biking and walking paths, so biking is actually viable in most places. But its not ideal, with the journeys often being long, winding, and confusing, with many conflict points.
Zoning is pretty sane, and there’s no missing middle. the housing projects in the 70s even explicitly set targets for building low-rises and row houses. Housing prices are decent, though they have been rising rapidly recently and there is still a housing shortage. I have unfortunately seen some municipalities implement parking minimums.
Some newer transit-oriented neighborhoods can have world-class urbanist design, but there are also a lot of neighborhoods with big front lawns and two-car driveways. Car culture is very big in Sweden, and I have never met a manager who doesn’t have a fancy car they drive into downtown Stockholm on a regular basis.
Public transport is very underfunded. Stockholm still has a pretty big transit system comparatively, but funding is basically non existant after various political and economic crises in the 80’s and 90’s. After big construction in the 60’s and 70’s, Stockholm since has only built a single new tram line and some new commuter rail stations since the blue line was finished in 1977. A new commuter rail tunnel was also recently built to resolve a capacity and maintenance crisis on the main rail line through Stockholm, but the new tunnel hasn’t resulted in any servicr increases. The commuter rail system has instead more or less been in a maintenance and staffing crisis for the past two years, resulting in huge service delays. Thankfully, there are finally some big new projects underway to build out new subway and tram lines over the next 10 years.
