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by INTPenis
641 days ago
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Being from Sweden that is how I measured safety for a large part of my adult life. How safe I felt in a new area directly depended on how far I could walk with my dog without crossing car traffic. In Malmö for example I could walk for 2 hours and only cross 2 roads. Because the bicycle network is so developed they have underpasses for bikes that us pedestrians can use. Then I lived in the balkans and saw the stark contrast. But there's no point in shoving this down American's throats because their whole country is far too vast for European design. They need to fill it up with people for a few hundred years like Europe before they will be forced to implement good street design. |
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That's not really true though. There is no particular reason to think of the vast almost empty spaces when thinking about urban and suburban spaces. There are plenty of walkable towns in the US, the problem is that there are vastly more towns that are not. I spent quite a lot of time in Raleigh NC and the surroundings in the 1990s and early 2000s and walked and cycled everywhere. There were a lot more roads to cross than in Malmö of course but it was still quite reasonable.
One need not be forced to implement good urban design, one merely needs to want it.
And I would also say that most towns in Sweden are not really very typical of European towns, even Norway next (where I live) is different. Sweden has a lot more space available than most European countries and in fact has an average population density (25/km2) lower than that of the US (33/km2).