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.
Great summary. One small correction:
Germany is very much about cars, even if their transit network is robust.
The rail system in Germany has pretty much been unmaintained for decades. It used to be good, but the decay is showing by now and even the Deutsche Bahn says it’s less “calculating” than “guessing” when trains will arrive.
How is that a correction? I predicted that a German would respond to this by shitting on DB.
Also, those rail lines are only decades old total.
Take an Amtrak from Chicago to NYC or a 15 hour ride across Sweden in SJ. You have no idea how good DB is. As much as y’all complain, a quick Google says they are within a 6 minute window 90% of the time. The publicly funded American rail company doesn’t even own the rail it uses.
https://www.bts.gov/content/amtrak-time-performance-trends-and-hours-delay-cause
a g quick Google says they are within a 6 minute window 90% of the time.
It’s currently more in the realms of 62%. In june, it was 52%.
That the arrival times were more guesswork was a direct quote by a Bahn boardmember.
It might not be as bad as the US, but it’s still worse than most of Europe.
