>>1414830The environment isn't uniform in western Europe. In mediterranean countries it's overly dense around the urban cores surrounded by sprawl, there you may have a point about many people living in walking distance of the station. But the germanic layout is very similar to american planning, consisting of smaller "dense" cores, surrounded by low density urbanisation. Maybe not to the point of US type sprawl, but not far from it. The main difference is that the street layout isn't so extremely car centered in avoiding through streets and absurd cul-de-sacs, but then again it's not like ALL suburbs are like that, that's only the case around the cities, not around small towns. Small towns are quite similar, just lacking le cutesy medieval old town, instead they have a Main Street. Wow big whoop. FFS a lot of midwest small towns had electric interurbans back in the day, which worked almost exactly like our small town local trains.
Probably the biggest difference is simply that we're willing to actually put some money into running a bunch of trains without thinking that providing adequate transport to small towns is communism. Hell Switzerland spends iirc 7 or 8 times more on public transport per citizen than Germany. But in turn we get god tier trains, no one depends on a shitbox, young and old people can move around freely without being a burden to anyone, that in turn keeps small towns alive, etc. Don't want any of that? That's fine, just don't fucking pretend it's somehow about your mutt exceptionalism when really you just don't want to spend some money on public transport. Noone said this shit is free, it gets you good value but it has its price. And it also doesn't just happen, we busted our asses to get this running right. In the 1960s noone cared for any of this and people wanted to be just like you guys, but at some point we just decided it sucked that we'd have to take our kids everywhere and that our town square was just one big parking lot.
