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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Old and big European cities achieve good public transport by having people not live in suburbs.

Yeah, and that sucks. Even in Europe, areas that have money and space to build have adopted pretty car-dependent layouts. In France, 70% of people outside Paris and Lyon drive to work: https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/smart-mobility/europe/feature...

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> 70% of people outside Paris and Lyon drive to work

I don't see a problem with this. You use whatever works the best, and for smaller cities and towns that's going to be a car. Public transport only starts to make sense above the 1 million inhabitants mark, and even then it doesn't really get good until 2-3 million.

It has to do with density, not size.

I live in the Netherlands. Most major cities and smaller cities has good public transit and walkable centers. Not even Amsterdam has one 1 million inhabitants.

The general consensus about urban design suggest it's all about density, mixed zoning and separated bike paths and traffic calming.

Of course it's about density, but car-centric cities aren't really forced to become dense until they cross that 2-3 million threshold somewhere. But that's not what I wanted to say. The issue with the Netherlands is that the Randstad is really one big city, and that makes comparisons with other places misleading.

Funny how switzerland with no city above 500‘000 inhabitants has public transport to the furtest edge. Even to villages with only a few hundert people. The whole country only has 9mio peoples.

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