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by arp242 360 days ago
> Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere

It's the degree of things. I live in Ireland, in a village of a few thousand people a few km outside the city, what you might call a "suburb" in the US. I don't even have a driver's license. It's rarely an issue and can go about my life by foot. bike, and public transport.
2 comments
throw0101c 360 days ago
> I live in Ireland, in a village of a few thousand people a few km outside the city, what you might call a "suburb" in the US.

Whatever villages that used to exist in the US have been drowned out by car-centric suburbs that were build around them. The 'village' is now the downtown-ish area of the community that tourists go see.

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disgruntledphd2 360 days ago
> It's rarely an issue and can go about my life by foot. bike, and public transport.

You are a very unusual person then, as the vast vast majority of people in not urban core Ireland have (and use) a car. I live in a Dublin suburb, and we're one of the few married couples that don't have two cars.

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insane_dreamer 360 days ago
Yes, European families own cars, but they don't have to use them as much as Americans.

There's almost no way to survive in the US without a vehicle, except in a few cities (mostly NYC). You can do without a car in many European cities.

I never owned a car until I moved to the US ~10 years ago.

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arp242 360 days ago
It's needed a lot less than people think unless you live out in the countryside. While it can be a bit inconvenient at times, in general it's perfectly feasible to not have a car in car-dependent Ireland.

In the US on the other hand, it's needed a lot more.

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ethbr1 359 days ago
> In the US on the other hand, it's needed a lot more.

A central problem in the US is transit between cities/states.

Since Europe was urbanized at scale long before the US, passenger rail networks were built out.

Most of the US grew with cars, and so that was just never developed.

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disgruntledphd2 357 days ago
> It's needed a lot less than people think unless you live out in the countryside

Yeah, that's basically what I meant about non-urban core. Like, towns around Dublin are sortof OK, but public transport in the rest of Ireland makes it very inconvenient to have no car (and I've done this and it sucked).

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