[hollerith]

Europeans tolerate more onerous restrictions on individual liberty than Americans do. The combination of high degrees of individual liberty and high population density tends to produce a less predictable, sometimes disheartening and sometimes dangerous environment that wealthy people in the U.S. tend to prefer not to live in (at least after their young adulthoods).

The point is that there are good reasons why most Americans with the ability to do so choose to live in areas low enough in density that cars work better than public transportation and that America cannot simply copy Europe's urban planning without also copying some of Europe's laws and attitudes regarding individual liberty. (And laws and attitudes are hard to change.)

[gobbluth]

I'm sorry, but you're associating liberty with cars, and that's just not true. If you live in Nowhere, Indiana, then you're completely dependent on your car to get ANYWHERE, including to buy food, get to work, or see your mother in the hospital. If it breaks down and you can't afford the repair? How free are you to travel now?

You're not completely incorrect, insofar as European cities (and any worthwhile city) are forced to infringe to some extent on fundamentalist interpretations of property rights for urban planning. But you might as well throw up your arms and complain about building codes and zoning restrictions anywhere else if such things are such "onerous restrictions on individual liberty."

The reason why so many Americans have settled in exurban developments is because we've artificially subsidized those lifestyle with federally-funded freeways, artificially cheap gasoline, and destructive corporate attacks on public transportation systems (especially in the 1950s, check out the GM attack in Los Angeles as an example). Exurbs didn't develop organically, nor are they in any way models of efficiency, cost, or sustainability.

[hollerith]

You have misunderstood me, so let me give you an example.

When I used to live in the Mission District of San Francisco, sometimes "poor, urban" type people would stand around on the sidewalk and street in front of my window and yell at each other for hours in the early in the morning. (My guess is it had something to do with pimping and prostitution.) If I lived in an outer suburb of San Francisco (Walnut Creek miles from a BART station for example), people like that would have a hard time getting to my street, because most of them do not have cars; and since there would be nothing near my home besides other homes, it would be a boring environment for them unless perhaps they are into jogging or walking their dog or something like that. Ditto the people who used to park across the street and play their car stereo really loud. And the guy with the pick-up truck who was helping his friend move and left his car alarm on the most sensitive setting, so that it would go off every time a car passed by it. The French and other nations on the continent of Europe are much more accepting than Americans of the use various policing, administrative and legal procedures to encourage the aforementioned individuals to stop the aforementioned behaviors and conform to a quieter or more conventional patterns of behavior. This is an example of what I meant when I said that Europeans tolerate more onerous restrictions on individual liberty than Americans do, and this is a significant part of why IMO wealthy people in France mostly consider the core of Paris a nice place to live whereas wealthy people in the U.S. mostly do not want to live in American inner cities -- at least they do not want to after they turn 30 or so.

[gobbluth]

Fair enough, but that's not really more liberty. Presumably the police would also arrest a homeless guy screaming about prostitutes if he were in your front lawn in the suburbs.

You'd just like to pay extra to be so far away from everyone that you won't see homeless people. Besides the obvious suggestion of directing the money taxpayers are forced to spend on exurban roads, water pipes, etc. towards asylums, rehab clinics, and shelters... you realize that gentrification means you can have your cake and eat it too, right? Especially in NYC, while there are still tons of bums and Jersey douchebags, the gangster element has all but died off. (Though you still have stupid assholes in the Bronx and Bed-Stuy, gangs aren't the problem you see everywhere else.) Having mixed-income, dense neighborhoods makes policing WAY easier and makes NYC the safest American city.

[briandon]

Cars really do give individuals more liberty.

Replace cars with, for example, private refrigerators and public transport with communal refrigerators and think it through.

Any time that you smoosh people together and force or nudge them into using shared or communal facilities rather than their own, personal freedom of action is being curtailed.

We can argue that whatever we're getting in return is worthwhile but we can't pretend that we're not giving anything up.

[gobbluth]

Is that really a good analogy? Do you really feel that sitting in your car on a freeway is so radically different (and liberating) than sitting in a subway car?

If you're so certain that public transportation means giving something up, what is it that you're losing?

[briandon]

No analogy is perfect but, yes, that analogy is good enough.

If every car trip really did mean sitting in a traffic for an hour, then I would love public transport more. Thankfully, that's not the case.

My wife and I take taxis a lot and, even in uber-dense HK, we rarely get stuck in traffic. When we do, it's usually just at a handful of choke points, like entrances to cross-harbor tunnels, and the traffic gets moving again once one is in the tunnel.

As to what one gives up by not owning a car, living in densely populated areas, and using public transport, I would refer you to an earlier reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3974910

Basically, living close together and without a car means that the pain-in-the-neck factor of practically everything is increased. Everything becomes at best just a teensy bit more of a hassle and needs to be scheduled more carefully. Convenience and the ability to be spontaneous become more of a luxury.

[WildUtah]

I don't know what you are suggesting about high degrees of personal liberty and high density being incompatible. European cities and even the denser US cities like San Francisco and New York are known for better civil liberties records than the majority of the USA.

And the USA is not reluctant to really cram down civil liberties to control crime, if that's your unstated implication. The rate of imprisonment is many times higher in the USA than in Europe. You might be suggesting that controlling crime in the USA is simply impossible with anything short of a police state but criminological research indicates the high crime rates are largely a result of poor policing policy.