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Comment by bananapear | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to automobiles and the US... are there any similar countries?

Most of Europe outside of large metros is the same as well.

It depends. For example there are many places that are too small to live without a car, but where you can do basic grocery shopping or kids can still go to school on foot or by bike. The spread is rarely comparable to the US.

There’s a difference between “it’s rural so things are spread out” and what we have in places like LA and Houston where major metro centers that could have been dense with good transit were purposely designed to be spread out and only able to be gotten around in in an automobile

There are plenty of non-US places which used to have transit and now do not. Britain's 1960s "Beeching Axe" comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts

Europe is not like the west coast of the US. Even urban areas are practically unnavigable by foot; everything is too spread out and only accessible by walking along heavily trafficked roads.

You'll want at least a bicycle in rural Europe, but you don't normally need a whole lot more.

Canada

Definitely the suburbs around the major cities. 40 minute walk to the nearest store does seem unreasonable.

2 hours to bus to work or 15 minutes to drive.

Depends on where.

I'm in Victoria and don't need a car (have one, though).

That may be the point of the comparison, as I understood it, with urban areas that don't require cars more of an exception than a norm. This is certainly the case in the US as well (NYC metro, DC metro, SF metro, university towns, etc.).

Perhaps, but I'd say urban areas are the norm here. 80% of Canada lives along the Windsor-Quebec City corridor.

I'm aware. As for the urbanization, that's about on par with the US (82% for Canada, 83% for the US according to this metric [1]).

More to the point, most of those areas outside of Toronto and Montreal have middling-to-no usable public transport. For example, I was recently passing by Kingston, ON, which has buses in some parts of the city but they reach a fraction of the population in the Kingston metro area. The same goes for much of the Windsor-London corridor. The qualification I stated was "urban areas that don't require cars," not any urban area.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...

I’ve been to Victoria.

Plenty of places in the US you don’t need a car either by that definition.

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