Interesting in which part of Europe are you living to make such a statement for the bit of luxury. The only country I could think of is the Netherlands and probably Belgium.

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patall an hour ago | parent | next [-]

European cities are wastly more accessible as a pedestrian than australian or north american cities. And I count northern, southern, central, western and easterneuropenan cities in that.Thre other continents have some examples where the inner cities are also okayish from a pedestrian or cyclist POV, but a lot and especially suburbia is so much worse in pretty much all regions. A mining town in northern Sweden is better than suburbia on Long Island!

	▲	etatester 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Outside France people don't live in big clusters. Take a look at the night satellite view. All those small/continuous towns do not have (functional) public transport. In my 12k-people town we don't have buses other than school buses and long-distance ones. And unfortunately people don't really walk other than for leisure. As far as I know the closest city with public transport counts 100k residents, but there are 60 smaller towns in my province alone.
	▲	ReptileMan 32 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes - car is a bit of a luxury in Europe if you don't do any of those things - live in the rural parts of the country, leave the urban core, have kids, visit parents, friends and grandparents, go to your rural property, go the mountains, the beach, buy bulky things, buy things in bulk, go to any other city just for exploration and fun, go outside the city to watch the milky way, do anything spontaneous, have job in the trades or have girlfriend.

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pjc50 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah. I was recently without a car for three weeks (bangernomics finally stopped winning) and decided that I'd learned the wrong lesson about car dependency: despite living in a city with a decent bus service, I really did benefit a lot from having a car and needed to buy a secondhand one as soon as possible, even though I am waiting for my leased EV to arrive in a few months.

You have to be quite central in quite a big city to not need a car. But that does cover quite a lot of people - I would say much of the population of London and the most central bits of Manchester and Birmingham, which is easily 10-20m people.

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monegator an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

about to say the same.

Because i don't live in a big city (and i would dread to) the 10km commute to work is either

1) 15-25 min by car

2) 25-30 min by bike

3) 40-60 min by public transport, with at least one change

And i'm lucky as we recently moved the office to be a good 4km nearer from my home. That was further out requiring 25min by car, and aobut 1h30min by public transport with at least two changes.

Also if i want to do anything beside going in my backyard on my free time, car is a necessity.

	▲	patall an hour ago \| parent [-]
		But you can walk to your neighbor 200m down the road. That feels (and actually may be) illegal on other continents.