Living Like Europeans

Last week Paul Krugman wrote "Stranded in Suburbia" in the New York Times.  His dateline was Berlin, and he marveled at the sheer livability of many urban neighborhoods:

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

Krugman laments that "many Americans [are] stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas."

(images: STIB Brussels Transport)

As expats familiar with both suburban American and urban European lifestyles, we can relate to Krugman's depiction of the dilemma.  We live in a leafy part of Brussels, in the kind of apartment building and neighborhood described by Krugman.  We have a car, and it is parked in the building's underground garage.  Unless we take a ride in the country (and even then, we can reach greenery by public transport), we only use the car to do major food shopping about once a week.  Everything else is by tram.  We can use the same ticket for Brussels' metro or bus systems, and for those train lines that cross the city.

This is not to gloat - far from it, since we do all this on a declining dollar - but to illustrate Krugman's point about the oil-induced reasons for Americans to change, the "strong incentives to start living like Europeans."  My fellow Americans... it's not that hard, "living like Europeans."  Once freed from the tyranny of the internal combustion engine, possibilities open up.

Last week a delegation of Brussels regional officials traveled to Malmo, Sweden, just across the water from Copenhagen, Denmark.  They saw Scandinavian examples that some would like to emulate, like urban planning that incorporates energy efficiency in building design, something which is now catching on in Brussels and elsewhere in Belgium and in Europe.  Though Brussels has a long way to go before it can resemble Malmo or Freiburg in Germany, it at least has a massive head start in its integrated public transport network.  And it didn't make the monumental mistake made by Los Angeles and other cities in ripping up their "quaint" tramway/trolley lines for "modern" freeways, like LA did in the fifties ("At its peak, the Pacific Electric Railway was huge: 1,150 miles of track covering four counties and 900 cars. 1944 marked the highest ridership: over 109 million passengers)."  Imagine the cost of recreating that.

No, living like Europeans doesn't mean abandoning the car, but it does mean embracing what's best in urban life, recognizing that it requires public investment, and is sustained by improvements to the infrastructure.  It is the opposite of the throwaway car culture.