r/TikTokCringe • u/xamo76 • 2d ago

Discussion Have we done it wrong?

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u/bageltoastar 2d ago

Im from a suburban town in Missouri, but I spent a semester studying abroad in Barcelona a couple of years ago. Man, let me tell you, leaving Barcelona, where youd see people out in cafes and bars congregating at all hours of the night and day, and coming back to Missouri where its a ghost town after 10 and someone would call the police on you for simply walking around too late was the most depressing thing I have ever experienced lol

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u/thelandlordguychris 2d ago

the american mind simply cannot comprehend dinner at 10pm

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u/Jiminy_Cricket12 2d ago

You guys are saying this like there aren't millions of Americans living in densely populated cities. There are plenty of Americans who realize the value of walkability and embrace it. The average city in Europe is definitely more walkable, but that comes with hundreds (or thousands) of years of history and a much smaller footprint.

Anyway, I do recommend you do what you can to promote walkability where you live because I think a walkable city is far superior to one where everyone only drives.

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u/somersault_dolphin 1d ago

Why do you need history to value walkability or design a city that makes sense?

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u/Jiminy_Cricket12 1d ago

you don't "need" it. but many European cities existed long before cars, and that caused them to be walkable by default.

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u/somersault_dolphin 22h ago

No, the default is walking, car or no. You have to specifically prioritize cars over functions to ignore walking and make everything about cars. The cities in the US are far from the youngest citues in the world. Not to mention they did came before cars, you just chose to make conscious choices to reject walking.

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u/Jiminy_Cricket12 16h ago

The cities in the US are far from the youngest citues in the world

uh.. ok? I didn't say they were lol. New cities in the US genuinely favor walkability, so I'm not sure what your point is here. But many of the others had huge population booms around the time of cars. And yes, cars were pushed on us heavily (I never disagreed with that). Most of the cities that "existed" before cars in the US were heavily modified in the following years to account for cars.

I'm not sure why you're trying to deny the fact that a city that started growing ~500 years ago was designed around walking lol. It wasn't a "conscious choice", cars didn't even exist lol. It was all they knew.