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Every time I go abroad, whether it's Europe, Japan, or most other places, I'm always struck by how international cities do such a better job of prioritizing people. Their public spaces are so enjoyable and safe to simply walk around in or bike through. American cities by contrast inevitably prioritize vehicles, even in Manhattan where fewer than 1 in 4 people even owns a car. We could be doing so much better, but simply aren't. No one seems to have the political will to make improvements.

Its because US cities evolved during times of horse carriages and cars. European ones evolved when people were walking all the time

They could start now. For example they could create pedestrian zones but for some reason the American psyche doesn't allow it.

I went to Vegas half a year ago and it was quite awkward walking around... I felt like I was on an airport runway all the time, quite uncomforting

The Vegas Strip is the absolute poster child for the American mentality of prioritizing drivers even when pedestrians radically outnumber them and could make much better (and more profitable) use of the space.

Fremont St (the Old Strip) is much more enjoyable than the new strip now, because they actually had the balls to pedestrianize the entire thing. It's a much more enjoyable experience; you can walk along at ground level, popping into whatever businesses you want while drinking your beer, and at no point do you have to take a bridge over a giant highway wasteland.

Just compare these two photos and consider which you'd rather walk around in as a pedestrian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Strip#/media/File:La...

https://www.playnevada.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/New-De...

I think it's baloney that "the American psyche doesn't allow it", it's just that disrupting automobile traffic is a huge burden on a ton of people, and given the history of American cities, most people rely on autos as their primary form of transportation.

What ton of people would this be a huge burden for? In other areas in the world this works perfectly fine. You can also make zones where cars have to go very slow if they absolutely have to go to some building. It's a psychological thing.

I know people in this city that live 2 miles from their work. I told me SO who's from Singapore this and she couldn't believe that they'd still drive every day. It may be so in very sprawled areas but it's absolutely due to psychology in the denser cores of cities that existed before the car revolution in the 50's to 60's.

In Singapore I wouldn't walk 2 miles. The metro isn't great either unless you happen to be on the right line, I'd just get a cab or uber, they're very cheap.

I don't know what you're talking about. If you'd rather not walk that far (it isn't far but say it's raining or it's super hot) and that's also a quick bus ride away.

Also, the "metro" is great but it can get crowded like any train can during peak. You gotta qualify what you mean by "unless you happen to be on the right line."

Singapore is always the same temperature -- very humid and 32 degrees during the day. It's never super hot (temperature record is something like 35), but it's always hot and muggy and about to rain.

I used to walk from Sim Lin Square to Raffles, less than 1km, always regretted it.

Clarification would be if you didn't have to change. If it's a 10 minute taxi or 2 metro changes, I know which I do in SG. I commuted from Haugong via taxi for a month rather than take a bus/metro/bus

I agree America would be improved by better civic planning and better walking and biking facilities.

The traditional complaint I hear is that a random street in Los Angeles looks like https://goo.gl/maps/U7kg8VMV4FtDxQ838 whereas a random street in London looks like https://goo.gl/maps/nR1BJSgYEk5du5CN8 i.e. American cities being built with much lower population density.

That means, if you have one bus stop for every 400 residents or one metro station per 30,000 residents, Los Angeles residents have to walk a hell of a lot further to get to the bus stop or metro station.

I much prefer any given random street in Kyoto, which doesn't have on-street parking. On-street parking is such an eyesore and takes up so much space that could be better used. When on-street parking isn't available, fewer people have cars, and you instead see people biking around everywhere. The end result is a nicer, safer, less-polluting, denser, and healthier city, with better mass transit.

Many Asian cities developed today and still do better than us. I really don't know what to blame other than American culture of individualism over thinking of things for the greater good.

You think major European cities evolved before horse carriages?

Europe was a bit like this too, but it seems the wave reversed earlier than in the US [0]. A lot of guys on reddit are very annoyed at parking lots etc etc.

[0] not a US citizen but the legend says that cars are too deep into american culture

As a parisian who stayed in SF for a month last year, i can tell you SF is way better for pedestrians than Paris, without any question (except for the hills of course).

Streets are wide enough that you never feel stuck in a line, there are trees everywhere, and the wind from the ocean makes the air feel very clean.

The reason Paris is spending so much energy thinking about its organization is because it is ( and has always been) completely overcrowded with one of the highest population density in the world. For a city that’s almost 2 thousand years old, that’s an extremely difficult problem to tackle.

> For a city that’s almost 2 thousand years old

There is really not much of the city that wasn't redone by Haussmann at the end of the 19th century. Even remnants of medieval Paris are few outside of the Marais.

In addition to Haussmann's works, there's also all the reconstruction that had to took place after the Franco-Prussian war and its aftermath.

I've spent months in both Paris and SF. I hate walking around SF, and enjoy walking around Paris, at least in the 1st-8th. Density is a feature for walking. Paris isn't perfect, but also has fewer piles of human excrement in the middle of the sidewalk, and in the cases you don't want to walk, the metro actually is usable. (Manhattan > Paris for walking and subway, but Paris is fine).

>As a parisian who stayed in SF for a month last year, i can tell you SF is way better for pedestrians than Paris, without any question (except for the hills of course).

As a European that has visited both Paris and SF multiple times, Paris wins hands down...

Modern Paris has its problems, but for a pedestrian there's no comparison with SF.

(And let's not even get into the huge homeless/etc problem in SF)

I feel like replies to this and elsewhere need to qualify where when they talk about a city. It can vary a lot depending on where you live and need to get to on foot.

De-automobiling Paris is a wonderful thing. It's evidently come a long way from the 1960's, but I don't know the history.

https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/photos-...

This literally looks like any city in America.

Except for the drivers.

London is so much more well kept than Paris for some reason. I went to Paris last year and the city was terrifyingly dirty, with layers of dirt struck on the walls of beautiful buildings, darkened by it. Stuff under construction was also mismanaged and often just poorly done. Scaffolding was very poorly done all around the city. After midnight I felt quite unsafe even in good neighbourhoods. I feel like London as a city is way better kept than Paris

"Terrifyingly dirty"? The simple way they clean the gutters with the fountains on the corners is amazing to me as an American.

Layers of dirt on beautiful buildings? They're several hundred years old.

Felt quite unsafe even in good neighborhoods? I spent all last week there, on foot, at all hours alone and never once felt unsafe. It occurs to me now that maybe that's my male privilege so apologies if that's not the case for you but Paris is the greatest city in the world as far as I'm concerned.

My city (Oslo, Norway) also has buildings that are centuries old, but they are kept clean. When I went to Stockholm a couple of years back, their old buildings looked dirty because no one seemed to be cleaning them.

> "Terrifyingly dirty"? The simple way they clean the gutters with the fountains on the corners is amazing to me as an American.

As a Parisian, I can sadly attest that the city is currently disgustingly dirty, that it has been getting worse and worse in the five years since I moved there and that London is indeed a lot cleaner.

Paris suffers from a lot of incivilities, very lax policing, the current mayor puting cleanliness as a non priority and extremely poor supervision of the existing cleaning crews.

It has become such a pain point for Parisian that cleanliness is likely to be the main issue of next year electoral campaign.

I will never forget when I visited Paris as a tourist and in the green patches of grass in front of the Eiffel tower where everyone sets down their blankets and takes selfies is littered with Heineken bottle caps and cigarette butts, it was so uniformly covered in the things that I took a picture of it to remind me. I sort of got that Heineken and smokes are super popular there (at least amongst the touristy areas) but still.

May be the non-touristy areas are also considered dirty by you, but I'm an American, where we treat public places like shit but make sure interiors and the entrances near parking is pretty and the rest of the fucking street is trash since no one other than me apparently walk it. To me, the "grime" I see seems normal if not a little nicer than any city in Ohio.

I am a man as well. Not sure how that has anything to do with male privilege lol. I still felt very unsafe. All kinds of people walking on the streets at night. Also all the terrorist attacks make it quite uncomforting too. If youve been to London you would be amazed at the condition of the buildings, the way the scaffolding is all done, how stuff under construction looks like. Its probably the most well organized city in the world, and Ive been to NY, Vegas, and all European big cities.

At least public spaces are public spaces in Paris. That's something, which definitly cannot be said about London.[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseu...

I've been living there for a while now and as much as there good things about London, being clean is absolutly not one of those... Unless you stay in the really wealthy areas. Where I live the really few public trash are never emptied, their content being scattered by foxes every night and people tends to discard their take away boxes on the pavements and roads where it stays for quite a while.

The stones being dirty is another issue. A lot of white stone will get darken by car pollution really quickly and cleaning those is a never ending process until fossil fuel is completely banned. The speed at which the the stone will get dirty as the the price of cleaning it wihtout damaging it differs a lot depending on the type of stone. I know that around the Loire valley, cleaning tuffeau is a huge pain.

I was about to write the same thing. I lived in Paris and now in London. Often residential streets are disgusting and smelly because people just leave their trash bags there out in the street. Talking about stones, you can easily see the dark layer of pollution on bricks as well.

Talking about the Loire valley, I lived in Tours also and It's true that this is very difficult to clean, if I'm correct the best technique is to use a laser but it's slow and expensive.

I lived in Paris 9 years from 2000 to 2009, then lived abroad and I currently live in the south of France.

I have to admit that when I went back to Paris 2015, the one thing that struck me was the dirt on the buildings like "le Louvres"'s musueum façade on the Rivoli street. It looked almost black. I actually did not really notice when I lived there, maybe it worsen.

Also I agree with you that Paris is a dirty city and London (at least the tourist areas) is much cleaner. There are a lot of incivilities in France and cleaning services are not known for their efficency.

As for safety, I also agree even if I have read that there has been many knife or moped attacks in London recently.

Odd, I live in London and visited Paris last year, walking around the centre and saying near Monmartre. Paris certainly didn't feel noticeably unkempt to me.

> It speaks very well to their fiscal management too that they're able to fund the project through ticket sales, and don't need to levy any new taxes or bonds.

Paris' current fiscal management is the worst the city has ever seen. The city's total debt grew from 1B euros in 2001 to 6B in 2018.

American cities across the country are tearing down beltways built in the 50s and 60s. San Francisco tearing down the Embarcadero Highway was the start of the movement.

The issue with such a project is that it's going to (again) increase the traffic jams in the Paris suburban area and push more traffic to the cities surrounding Paris; but since the mayor is only elected by the inhabitants of Paris, she doesn't have to take into account the impact of her decisions on the other cities around Paris.

Most of the traffic in Paris actually comes from Paris : https://www.paris.fr/actualites/a-paris-seuls-22-des-conduct...

That figure is 4 years old and was done only in a very small area right in the middle of Paris, so the figure of 50% of drivers coming from Paris is not very useful.

Please note that this study was ordered Paris city council, which tries to reduce actively the number of cars. The presentation is not totally neutral.