It’s the 1980s. On a cold winter’s night somewhere in suburban Scotland,
a young girl is watching one of those typical American movies she adores.
She loves the perfect suburban landscapes in these films. The white picket fences that
surround luscious lawns. It looks almost utopian to her from her dreary, grey town, where it seems
dreams can’t be realized like they can in the USA. Two decades later, she’s living in suburban Orange
Country, California, trying to claim a slice of the American dream. She hasn’t seen much
to shout about yet. Her life is more like an American nightmare. It sucks. Everything sucks.
What’s happened here? Every day this woman regrets that she sold her house in bonny
Scotland and laid a bet on being content in American suburbia. The kind of place where she
now lives had looked to her as a child, like an idyll designed in town-planning heaven,
but the stark reality is, it was forged in the offices of land management hell.
It’s complicated, so today, we’ll try to paint a complete picture for you from start to finish.
Let’s begin with a huge part of the American pie people can’t seemingly live without: the car. Or,
in the case of many suburbanite American families, the two cars plus the fuel-guzzling,
environment-hating, pedestrian-bashing sports utility vehicle. Americans just love BIG,
but big, dear viewers, is not always better. The car is important in the US, dare we say, more
important than it is in other countries. It’s not only a symbol of what people want to project onto
the world, but it represents the individualism many Americans are so proud of. “Catch a bus?!
says a typical American guy. “I might as well tattoo SUCKER on my head in capital letters.”
A lot of Americans adore their cars. To take them away, you’d have to pull them from their cold,
dead hands. We are generalizing, of course, but the car is an important aspect of American life.
Just look at all the movies about cars and car worship, possessed cars, making out in the back
of cars, and the fast and furious conspicuous consumption of cars. In trucks, we trust. Amen
to automobiles. We hold this truth to be evident that all Americans love their right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of a turbocharged, fuel-injected, bad-to-the-bone combustion engine.
But it’s not just a matter of individualism, style, or freedom on the highway. It’s also
because the majority of Americans wouldn’t be able to get anywhere without them. The first
thing that woman in the intro noticed when she moved to Orange Country is that if you
intend to spend your life on foot there, you might as well move to the Sahara Desert. Ok,
that’s an exaggeration, but seriously, in much of American suburbia, you can’t get anywhere
without the help of a two or four-wheeled machine. The US suburbs are sometimes called car-centric.
They were designed for cars, not feet. So, if you live there, you might find that you
are car-dependent. Maybe some Americans are watching this right now and thinking, yeah,
sure, I’m car-dependent. You just haven’t been to 12-step meetings about it. “My name is Joe,
and I am dependent on my car.” It’s not your fault. That’s life. So what?
We hate to tell you this. This isn’t what life for the rest of the world is like.
There are around 276 million vehicles in the US, but those are the ones that are registered.
There are many more on top of that, for the 331.9 million people that live in the US. There are
746.4 million people living in the EU, but only about 250 million registered vehicles in the EU.
These numbers might change a bit depending on the source, but wherever you look,
you find that Americans seem to have a lot of cars. For instance, the US Department of
Transportation said lately that “the average number of cars owned per household is about
1.88.” The European Union says that for every 1,000 EU households, there are about 600 cars.
You have cities such as New York, where owning a car might not ruin your lifestyle so much,
but New York is an outlier in the US in terms of getting around easily. And anyway,
moving into the suburbs farther out of the city and getting around on foot will be
about as convenient as practicing Christianity in North Korea. But maybe slightly less dangerous.
Ok, excuse us for adopting hyperbole again, but it’s true to some extent, Americans, for the most
part, really need their cars. Again, it’s not just because they all desperately want cars. The places
they live have been specially designed for cars, whereas in much of Europe, the cities and suburbs
have been designed for people’s convenience. You can step out of your suburban house or apartment
and walk a very short distance to a train station, a bus stop, a tram stop, or you can use one of the
many bicycle lanes. Don’t say the US is too big for this. We’ll show you why that’s not true soon.
Our woman in the intro would wait for a bus for so long in Orange Country that she’d take nail
clippers to the bus stop. Her friend, who lives just outside of Arlington in Texas,
said there’s so little public transport where she lives that people think they’ve seen a UFO when
they finally set their eyes on a bus or train. Ok, we are exaggerating again, but it’s true, in
Arlington and many other places in the US, there is no access or no easy access to buses or trains.
We mean none at all. Nada. Not a sniff. This is virtually unheard of in Europe unless you live
somewhere like the wildest parts of the Scottish Highlands or in God-forsaken northern Sweden. And
let’s face it, not many people live in such areas. Like Santa, you might need to get around on a
reindeer-pulled sleigh that far up north. Still, a friend of the Infographics show recently told us,
“I currently live in the northernmost part of Norway, and even here the public transit
is better than in the American suburbs.” But where there are lots of people in Europe,
you will find public transport on your doorstep. You will be spoiled for choice.
In many parts of the US, there isn’t much on the doorstep, and if you walk a while,
you reach bigger roads that take you to other roads, and if you walk down those for a while,
perhaps getting funny looks from all the shocked car drivers who think you are mad or up to no
good, you might reach a strip mall where you can at least get a drink to satiate your now
raging thirst. Walk on, and you will likely reach a highway or a giant nexus of highways, and if you
try to walk or even cycle down those, you might well end up in jail or the local asylum. This
could be an exaggeration, but also might not be. With all these US cars, if you use a bicycle, you
can be sure you’ll breathe more pollution than you would in many European suburbs. Sometimes you’d
also be taking your life into your own hands. We aren’t talking about the BMX bandits of the 80s
scooting around small streets, we are talking about actually using a bicycle as a means of
productive transportation. It’s normal in much of Europe. It’s cool. You should try it. It looks and
feels great. The US just wasn’t designed for this. For instance, drive-thrus are everywhere in the
US, and we aren’t just talking about Big Macs and heart attack shakes. They’ve got those in Europe,
to a much lesser extent. People in the US even watch movies in their cars at drive-ins! Normal
for you, but totally weird for many Europeans. Since cars are the a la mode, mode of transport,
you can often find bank drive-thrus, liquor store drive-thrus, vaccine drive-thrus (we
aren’t kidding), and Walmart curbside services. What next, drive-thru funerals?!... Drive-thru
weddings? Oh wait…that’s a thing already. Also, in the US it’s quite normal to see people driving
a vehicle inside the supermarket. These people for the most part have become too big to walk.
One guy writing on a forum said the new things he’d seen were “Drive up service for
food banks!” These saviors for the very poor are sometimes called “drive-thru food pantries.” Sure,
the austerity-ailed UK has a rising number of food banks but try driving through them,
and you’ll end up with human guts on your windscreen. Many of the poorer folks in the UK
can’t afford a car to take them to get their free can of Tesco Value baked beans and loaf of cheap
white bread. This brings us to something else. Not only is it easier to get a cheap set of
wheels in the US than in Europe, but the gasoline that powers the things is waaay
cheaper in the US. In the UK, where cars are expensive, gas is much more expensive
than in the US. There are good reasons for this. It’s supposed to make you live a certain way.
In fact, because of high taxes, European gas pretty much everywhere is much more expensive
than in the US (not including Russia). The main reason for the high taxes on fuel is to get people
to use their motor vehicles less. It’s worked. There’s far less congestion on European streets
than in many parts of the US, and Europeans are more likely to buy fuel-efficient cars.
As we write this show, one liter of gas in the US costs $1.048. The same amount
in Poland will set you back $1.437. In Germany, it’s $1.860. In the UK, it’s $1.905. In Greece,
it's $2.012. Iceland is the most expensive in Europe and almost the world at $2.234 a liter.
Cheap cars, cheap gas, you might think that’s great, but it’s not really. It would be better
if you could hop on cheap public transport and live somewhere that is pretty and doesn’t
smell like the inside of an overworked muffler (exhaust pipe to some of you).
Americans might also say that they love the fact there are so many parking spaces for
them. On average, for every US car, there are 3.4 spaces. Try parking a car in various parts
of London. You’ll either need to take out a loan or drive around for so long that you’ll
forget why you wanted to park in the first place. Parking spaces in the UK are so rare that people
will literally kill you for them. It might sound bad, but it’s better on the whole.
In the British suburbs, even where anyone can legally park on a street,
using up a home owner's parking space is very taboo. We are exaggerating a bit again,
but we have a point. The US wants you to drive, so parking spaces are made available. It makes
the suburbs the land of cars and car spaces, which is not very nice to look at or live in.
Ok, so some of you are now saying, well, the US is so much bigger than Europe. We
couldn’t build public transport infrastructure as Europeans have. Actually, in terms of size,
Europe and the US are almost equal. Europe has just built its cities better. It has connected
people better. Collectively, it has twice as many people as the US but far less congestion
and far more public transport connections. The cities, their suburbs, and the countries,
in general, have been planned to help people get around. The US hasn’t bothered with that. It’s
not about construction difficulties, it’s about lack of political will, car culture,
and to some extent, the automobile industry. In Europe, trains go almost everywhere, while the
US rail system is terrible for a wealthy nation. Trains are a part of most Europeans’ lives. They
are essential to living for many people. For Europeans, traveling long journeys on
a Greyhound bus with a grinning guy next to you drinking from a plastic liter bottle of
$7 vodka should warrant a human rights abuse investigation. Kidding…almost.
The train maps of Europe look like the arteries and veins of the human body,
while US train maps look like a two-year-old got bored trying to draw a T-Rex with a thick crayon.
You half expect to get on an American train and find some guy with a rollie in his mouth and a
banjo in his hands singing a song about breaking rocks in the prison gang. It’s that outdated,
while in Europe, modern trains get you everywhere at pretty much all times. Buses
or bicycles can take you short distances, and trains can take you long distances.
Add to this the fact that you can travel without visas in the EU (minus Brexit Britain) and you
can easily walk out of your house, get on a cheap bus, and then board a cheap train,
and be sunning it up on a beach in another country in as much time as it takes a guy in the LA
suburbs to get to his office not 30 km away. Ok, some commutes are easier than others,
but the worst ones in the US are hellish. Here’s what one guy wrote on a forum after
someone had complained about congestion in LA: “I once lived in Long Beach and traveled 30 miles
to a job in Wilshire, taking the 405 was the most direct route and the fastest. I spent 4
hours minimum, every day, on the road not moving.” This is what car dependence is doing to America,
not to mention the pollution it creates. There should be infomercials on American TV right
now showing people breaking down during their commutes. “This is your brain at rush hour.”
Suburbs in Europe have also been built so people can do stuff in them. How unique!
They are usually active communities where people interact. Kids are usually safe playing in them.
Even the most hardcore suburban council estates in the UK are home to takeaway food restaurants and
places nearby where one can enjoy oneself, even if many people’s idea of enjoyment is placing a
bet in one of the ubiquitous bookies (small gambling places). Yeah, it’s not all ideal.
But even with that downside, you find pubs that have been there sometimes
for centuries (no kidding) that serve the community, hence the name “public house.”
The suburbs in the US, meanwhile, are often only designed as a place to live and sleep and
then commute to work in your car. They’re not community or fun-focused. In the US,
you might need to go all the way to the city to find enough things to do.
You don’t need the city in Europe for the most part. The suburbs can be good enough,
and they are self-sustaining. They don’t just break down, go rogue, collapse. Not
so much in the US, where many suburbs don’t seem to sustain much but widespread boredom.
With their long tree-lined streets, the big gardens, the wide roads, and the fact folks
drive all the time on those roads, the US suburbs aren’t cheap to run. If you are poorer and live
in some of the suburbs that look so neglected, the streets are virtually crying out for a hug,
things are much worse. These places have gone to hell in a handbasket. Lack of
maintenance means a once bright idea now looks ripe for a Hollywood dystopia movie.
In many of these worst-case-scenario US suburbs,
there are only shells of houses on some streets. Where families used
to sit in charming dining rooms eating Thanksgiving dinner, now disenfranchised
folks huddle below smashed bedroom windows wondering how they’ll get their next score.
It’s a truly sorry sight to behold, but it’s happened in many places in the US.
Sure, as we said, there are some pretty dodgy,
run-down areas in suburban Europe. Not everyone lives like a middle-class Dutch family that gets
around on multi-seated bicycles and has no idea what it’s like to pawn your furniture for food.
In the UK's toughest suburbs, just about all the bicycles have been stolen and fenced at least
three times, and getting on a bus late at night could mean a fast introduction to knife crime, but
still, at least there are buses. At least there’s something to do to merit a bus journey. Also,
the streets might look rundown, but they aren’t as bad as the USA’s post-apocalypse suburbia. The
worst of America resembles Dresden after the Brits and Americans bombed the hell out of it in WWII.
Something unique has happened to these really rundown US suburbs. They are dark, strange
places. It’s hard to believe they belong to the richest country in the world. Maybe right now,
someone in a crime-infested Venezuelan barrio (slum) is thinking, “Those poor,
unfortunate American suburbanites. Life must be so hard for them.” He then sees
an ad on the TV. It says you can help out an American family living in poverty for just $1
a month. The guy writes down the website address. This brings us to something else. What has been
called the great American suburban Ponzi scheme. How did so much of the US get so rundown so fast?
We guess you know what a Ponzi scheme is. If you don’t, here goes:
Create a fake investment. Get initial investors to invest. Pay those investors with new investors'
money. It will sustain itself for a while, but in the end, you aren’t making a real profit,
so the entire scheme will go bust when everyone asks for their cash/investment back.
Years ago, the US started its great Suburban Experiment, which was a kind
of Ponzi scheme. Those rundown places you see now were once wonderful Pleasantvilles,
but they could never pay for themselves. Still, families flocked to these places,
quickly erecting a white picket fence and putting two cars in the driveway.
More and more Americans wanted a piece of speciously sublime suburbia. Many left the cities
or the countryside in search of suburban bliss. The sprawling suburbs sprawled some more, and some
more, and some more. More houses had to be built. More roads had to be built since these places
were never intended to serve non-car families. They weren’t diverse like the European suburbs,
though. They didn’t have lots of things going on, businesses, clubs, community events, etc. People
just lived there, watered their lawns on the weekend, and drove to work from there every day.
If there was a hive of activity, it was mostly gossip. Nothing happened there and so these places
did not create much tax revenue. They didn’t pay for themselves, as the European ones did. As one
expert on this matter wrote, “North American development patterns sacrificed adaptability,
expandability, and financial productivity. Our development pattern became, in a word: fragile.”
When you have an assembly line of neighborhoods but no proper economic growth, something will go
wrong. There will be a crash at some point, just like in a Ponzi scheme. With low tax revenues
coming from these places, planners build more houses to get taxes from them. But more housing
developments only delay the pain that will surely come. The taxes paid by people aren’t enough when
serious maintenance needs to happen. The suburbs themselves don’t make much money, and building
more of them (getting more investors in on the scheme) will mean higher maintenance costs.
The money will run out. The less maintenance that happens, the less attractive the places become.
Beauty starts to take the form of the Beast. Those with enough money move out, and those
without money move in and put up with the crumbling houses around them. Those white picket
fences and manicured gardens start looking like a pile of bones lying in a half-built graveyard.
These people had been sold a dream of eternal growth, of ever-lasting beauty, when the reality
of where they lived was more like Oscar Wilde’s brilliant novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
That same website we just mentioned, called Strong Towns, explained:
“In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure
maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates the cost at $5
trillion — but that's just for major infrastructure, not the minor streets,
curbs, walks, and pipes that serve our homes.” This doesn’t mean that all of the USA is
suffering from the sprawl-ocalpse. Many places are well-maintained,
but a lot aren’t. As any ancient Greek scholar might have told you, such hubris usually comes
before a fall. More houses get built, and more people move in. It looks great for a while until
there’s no money to fix things. Sometimes the municipality borrows money, and as you’ve seen,
that can result in it going totally broke. These US suburbs are sometimes not smart,
while the European ones, despite some of them looking rather grim,
seem smart enough not to fall into the trap of becoming a biblical hellscape.
Such a hellscape in America was just portrayed to good effect in the horror movie, Barbarian.
Sure, that’s just the movies, but the rundown neighborhood in the film is
supposed to represent this fairly new phenomenon of American suburban horror.
Even if you live in one of the better suburbs, you will still probably have to put up with all
that congestion and the fact it’s not that much fun on its own. It’s more like a factory farm,
and you’re a cow who was fooled and told that rolling green meadows were old-fashioned. If
you don’t believe us, just look at forums where scores of Americans talk about how
the suburbs are ugly and depressing. Nonetheless, Rome wasn’t built in a day,
so don’t feel too bad if you’re stuck in a place that reminds you of the play Jean-Paul Sartre
wrote about hell called “No Exit.” You might not be able to change the fact you’re surrounded
by highways that wrap around you like venomous snakes, but you can be part of the solution to
transform your suburb. It doesn’t always have to be what some US media have called “soul-crushing.”
Suburbs can be re-designed for humans, not just cars. They can connect people to places
of interest, not just places of spending. It will take the will of governance and the public,
although it is obvious that the suburban areas that have been forsaken for too
long will need to be completely overhauled. Now you must watch this classic “Average
American vs Average European - How Do They Compare? - People Comparison.” Or,
look at an alternative reality in “Hitler's Plans for the World if He Won.”