[maxerickson]

Biking around Utrecht is a lot more fun than biking around Ann Arbor.

The train to Amsterdam is better than the train to Chicago too (cheaper, faster, more frequent).

It's a bigger city than Ann Arbor, with about twice the density.

I think there are probably enough differences in land use planning that you won't quite be able to have a model city for Europe.

[tptacek]

The train from Ann Arbor to Chicago? The nearest major metro to Ann Arbor is Detroit, not Chicago. Utrecht is just 30 miles away from Amsterdam. A2 is 250 miles from Chicago.

[maxerickson]

Sure, but you'd drive there.

The point of that was that it is connected to a rail network in a way that doesn't exist in Michigan.

Also, when I lived in Ann Arbor, we never cared about going to Detroit itself.

[tptacek]

Utrecht is about as far from Amsterdam as Orland Park is from Chicago. Train connectivity between Orland and Chicago: also pretty frequent and reliable.

It's a little unfair to compare that particular run to the entire state of Michigan, which would be the 20th largest country in Europe if admitted to the EU, just behind Iceland and ahead of Hungary.

[maxerickson]

That's fair, I wasn't in NL long enough to really get a sense for distance. Took the train to Amsterdam once.

(we're both making some edits)

I think the higher density is part of why Europe seems to have more nice cities though. I actually kind of joked about that while I was there, that the publicly owned land in Michigan is roughly the size of the Netherlands (the national and state forests).

With high density, if you "need" cityscape you can just build a rail to where it makes sense to have the city.