[nradov]

European countries only have good and affordable transport in the first and second tier cities. I usually spend a few weeks per year in Europe, often in smaller cities or rural areas, and the only public transport you'll find is some occasional bus service at inconvenient times. In those places everyone drives everywhere. Or they just sit around and home and don't go anywhere.

[mojuba]

And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.

My ideal city of the future is a small walkable town with everything within a 15-20 minute walk, possibly a part of a conglomerate of towns that run trains or buses between them.

I currently live in one such historical town in Southern Europe that's protected by Unesco. The streets are so narrow that not only there's no public transport, all non-resident and non-delivery traffic is prohibited and there's no Uber even. And yet you have everything you need for life and work within a 15-20 minute walk max. More for remote work, obviously.

An ideal city of the future doesn't need to be medieval but maybe we should go back to a city planning concept that is made for humans and not cars. And you know, narrow pedestrian streets are totally fine, they are cute!

[AllegedAlec]

> And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.

Ah yeah sure I'll just find work in a place and then buy a house there. It's not like 3+ decades of mismanagement on migration and internal policies left even places 30+ minutes by car from work unafforable by mere mortals.

[grues-dinner]

> third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable

Very many people, including me, want to live in a glorious walkable bijou old-town stone apartment, except they can't afford to because they stopped building them like that in about 1756 and the only jobs within walking distance of the old town are in hospitality and those do not pay the salaries to buy one of the treasured old town apartments from under an AirBnB host.

And if it's a really small, non-tourist town in the middle of nowhere, it may not even have the hospitality sector. So, yes, that bijou property may indeed only cost 50,000 euros, and yes, you can walk to the boulangerie or the confitería or whatever but you're probably going to need a car to get out of your tiny town and go to work or basically anywhere else.

[BobaFloutist]

Or you could work remotely or hybrid, or take a 30-60 minute wifi-enabled commuter train to the big city for your big city job, clocking in and handling your emails during your commute and doing the last bits of work on your way home.

There's lots of solutions.

[ang_cire]

It's interesting to me seeing the different ways that different people respond to our modern urban hellholes. I don't want to live in a city at all, I want to live in at most a village where people all have their own land, and the village 'center' is just the most convenient nexus of property lines, where people could set up the local market.

I always sort of assume people who are into de-urbanization are also de-dev, because I don't see how or why the large-scale industrial base would be needed or could be sustained with only smaller, distributed cities, but it's interesting to hear another perspective.

[UtopiaPunk]

Peasant life has its charms, I suppose.

[ang_cire]

It's only peasant if you have a Lord. Ni Dieu, ni maitre.

[nradov]

You only have everything you need for work in such a city if your "work" is limited to small offices, restaurants, and retail shops. So you're excluding everything related to manufacturing, agriculture, resource extraction, logistics, military, etc. You know, all of that stuff that keeps modern industrial civilization operating and allows quaint medieval towns to continue existing at all. If you like where you live that's great, but it's hardly ideal and certainly not scalable.

[griffzhowl]

> all of that stuff that keeps modern industrial civilization operating and allows quaint medieval towns to continue existing at all

That doesn't make sense to me. Medieval towns existed for centuries before industrial civilization and without it we might see a drastic increase in medieval style living...

In any case the poster is talking about their own ideal future scenario, maybe leaving out the details like the robots working in underground manufacturing facilities or fusion-powered hydroponic vertical farms etc.

[mojuba]

> if your "work" is limited to small offices, restaurants, and retail shops.

...or just any kind of remote work. Still limited, not available to everyone obviously but can't be omitted.

[outime]

Yeah, I agree. I've just happened to live in two capitals, so I've had access to top-tier public transport. But even in the capitals, a simple 10-minute drive can turn into a 50-minute journey on public transport (this is a literal common example of mine, not an exaggeration!). So even then, you have to consider how much your time is worth.

[antonymoose]

I lived in a lower-tier American city (Charleston, SC) for 15 years, and this was my experience with public transportation. I had commute options of a 7 mile drive @ 30 minutes due to congestion, a 7 mile bike ride @ 35 minutes no congestion thanks to bike lanes, or approximately 2 hours bus ride on an unreliable system with no good drop off points and no guarantees in a timely arrival or space for a bicycle to complete the 2 mile walk to my office. These numbers are also one way, not round trip.

In other words, I could not use the service in any honest sense.

Perhaps a nice future is a hybrid model of public transportation plus personal transport via bicycles and scooters, especially with battery powered options becoming so robust.

[tzs]

Even in the first tier cities there is usually significant personal car ownership, often with more than half of households owning one.

Is that because many people find even first tier city public transit inadequate for much of their normal in-city transport, or are there a lot of people living in the first tier cities who need to visit the smaller cities or rural areas often enough that it is worth keeping a car just for those occasions?

[Freedom2]

> only

Categorically this isn't true, I easily found good and affordable public transport in smaller towns. It's definitely less common, but to bluntly say that only first and second tier cities have gold and affordable public transport is inaccurate and dismissive.