I live ~33 miles away, round trio, from the nearest grocery store. No trains, no uber, no bus. The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds.
I tire of "you guys just love your cars too much". I've lived in several states and only when I lived in Los Angeles county was there ever a bus within "walking distance" - but still that was a 25-30 minute walk.
Oh, and in case you were curious, California is about 60,000 square kilometers bigger than Germany.
And I live 36 hours away from California in the United States. At highway speeds.
I would not call ~20% of the US population an outlier. It's a very different situation from urban areas, but just as valid
And even cities in the US are vast sprawls compared to organically grown very old cities in other parts of the world. That makes a huge difference for walkability.
Furthermore, the 80% urban stat from the US census gets routinely misinterpreted. Just going through some property line details with a couple neighbors on collectively about 75 acres plus adjacent conservation land. The census considers this urban.
yes, the cutoff for "urban" to not is 2000 housing units in an area. I don't consider that urban, 2000 homes is a decent "town". This is just "othering" of people who live more than 25 minutes from a metro which is what i consider "urban". i am 25 minutes from my nearest metro, and the metro population is smaller than the city i grew up in in california, population-wise.
my point is, talking about Berlin and then carrying that thought over to "americans just love cars" is silly. Germany is smaller than CA, and double the population of california. Most people "in california" live in the "san angeles" range or in the "bay capital" area. a half hour outside of any of those areas and it's either sand or farms or mountains.
and i wish i was "rural", there's ~600 houses within 6mi radius, that's not very rural. It's rural compared to Manhattan, i guess.
Without looking it up, I think it's also related to adjacency to a significant metro. But, yeah, the US census uses a binary classification that makes a lot of people assume "urban" means a big walkable city when, in reality, it often includes very dispersed exurbs (including places many would consider basically rural) that are never going to be serviced by public transit among other things.
So a lot of people tend to translate 80% urban into 80% cities which is manifestly not true, and even less dense cities.
> Consistent with previous decennial censuses, changes were made to criteria classifying urban areas following the 2020 Census. Key changes to the Census Bureau’s urban area concept and criteria include:
> The use of housing unit density instead of solely population density. The minimum population threshold to qualify as urban increased from 2,500 to 5,000 or a minimum housing unit threshold of 2,000 housing units.
> The jump distance was reduced from 2.5 miles to 1.5 miles for 2020. Jump distance is the distance along roads used to connect high-density urban territories surrounded by rural territory.
> No longer distinguishing between urbanized areas and urban clusters. All qualifying areas are designated urban areas.
We agree (i think), i'm just quoting the census bureau document.
I hadn't looked in a while and, yeah, the definition seems to have switched a bit though the overall result seems to be fairly similar. The bottom line is that "urban" in the census has a lot broader definition than what a lot of folks think of as urban colloquially.
Everyone knows the US is massive lmao. Outside the US people are relatively educated about the world.
The topic was about public transit in cities, where many millions of people gather. Nobody has said that the US needs to ditch cars and only use public transport between states or cross-country.
I tire of "you guys just love your cars too much". I've lived in several states and only when I lived in Los Angeles county was there ever a bus within "walking distance" - but still that was a 25-30 minute walk.
Oh, and in case you were curious, California is about 60,000 square kilometers bigger than Germany.
And I live 36 hours away from California in the United States. At highway speeds.
That's why we "love our cars"