Isn't NJB's general rule something like the more car-friendly a place is, the worse it becomes to live there. Guess pedestrian & bike friendly is always a good thing if there's people living around there.
this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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The opposite is also true: the bigger a city is, the more transit friendly/pedestrian/bike friendly it should be, hor it will be congested by cars (see Palermo, Italy as an example)
No I get that, but there's this prevailing sentiment that cars are somehow more necessary in rural areas because...they're not worth serving with transit or something? I don't know. I think it's ridiculous. Big cities should obviously have excellent transit and non-car infrastructure but so should small towns and villages
Lol "rural" his first 'small town' was 100k+ people.
...and then he went to a village of 265 people, which still has a bus stop with a bicycle rack and buses that come every 12 minutes.
That was within 10 minutes of another large 100k plus settlement. These are not valid distances or densities outside of Europe.
It absolutely is. I live in a German village, only 3km away from a 100k settlement. While busses come every 10-20 minutes in the town, I get them once per hour and only in the morning and in the evening and that's it.
From a certain point of view a small town should be more walkable than a big city but that all comes down to planning. I've lived in several small towns over the years. Let's compare 2 for example.
Isolated oil industry town of 990 founded in the 1950s. You cannot function without a car. Only a dozen or so businesses or places to go. Everything is far apart, literally ZERO sidewalks. Two high speed highways bisect the town, obviously no sidewalks means no crosswalks either.
Historic 1800s ranching town turned into a resort destination, population 8,000. I never had a car living here and never wanted one (I'd bum a ride to go hiking). Several hundred businesses or places to go, but sidewalks everywhere. Traffic had recently been calmed as the mistakes of the previous decades of car centered design became obvious to the town. The highway through town had a lower speed limit and several safe crossings. The streets were originally planned out before cars and euclidian zoning were a thing. Was very pleasant to be a pedestrian.
In theory the town of 990 could have been even more walkable because combined together all the towns businesses and destinations would have been maybe 10 acres. But instead they were spread out in different unconnected parcels which had dangerous highways between.
In my experience, small towns in the US are much more spread out than in Europe. In Europe I lived next to some farmers, and we lived in the village proper, they'd hop on the tractor and head out to their fields.
Here, farmers mostly live on their farms, and most people have comparatively big properties.
Still not impossible to have transit, but definitely tougher when the density is lower.