At one point I was determined to move to a car-free neighborhood in the US. Unfortunately they all seem to be tourist islands: Fire Island, Monhegan Island, Mackinac Island, Bald Head Island, etc.
I gave up and resigned myself to teaching my kids how to avoid being killed by drivers and advocating for safer street design. But if someone ever builds a Cyclocroft[1] or Culdesac[2] in my region I'd happily move there.
I simply moved out of America. If you want to live a real car-free life safely in a place where you can have a real job, a normal life, and not just live on some weird little tourist island, that's the only way to make it happen.
As a bonus, you avoid many other problems that America has: a spiraling crime wave, housing crisis (depending on where you go), school shootings, mass shootings, more guns than people, religious restrictions and laws pushed by religious groups, I could go on and on.
For now we're in an old New England town with good bones and good pedestrian infrastructure. Not much in the way of crime waves or shootings and the only religious laws are blue laws which I can live with. But the cars are enormous and just keep getting bigger, and housing is expensive.
Moving to a safer country run by grown-ups is something we considered and it's not off the table if things get worse. My wife and I both worked in Sweden years ago, but besides that I have only been a tourist in Europe, and have never traveled outside of that. I'm curious what countries you have in mind?
I can second Belgium, although I’m a bit biased since I’m Belgian-American.
I used to live in Los Angeles, so talk about a car dependent extreme, and now settled down more permanently in Belgium. I’m car free for about a year and a half now and it’s extremely doable between my bicycle, the train and car sharing.
Every now and then I contemplate moving back to the US but then I run into the same predicament as you, which less-than-completely car dependent place to move to.
Belgian here, moved to America. Living just outside of Los Angeles (TO). Used to live in Belgium. I walk more here than I did in Belgium. Partially because I don't need to deal with the weather anymore. And since I work from home I don't commute.
Nice, I lived in Agoura Hills so I’m quite familiar with TO. I used to get more steps in too but you’re in a relatively nicer part of Greater Los Angeles to walk, and that doesn’t change the fact that your transportation options for things beyond a leisurely walk are limited at the end of the day.
The UK is on my list. It’s not run by grown ups now, but neither are we. It’s an infinite step up, walkability-wise, and I think things will improve politically over time. Surely you guys are learning some lessons now, right?!
> Surely you guys are learning some lessons now, right?!
I wouldn't count on it. As bad as the Tories are, Labour still doesn't seem to mount much of an opposition. I think the country would be much improved if both those parties were to vanish and replaced by the LibDems and the Greens or something. The SNP frequently comes across as the sanest party on the island, and that's really quite unusual for a separatist party.
(Not a Brit, but I've looking at it from across the channel with varying degrees of horror for a number of years now.)
You could get away without a car in London because the public transport is good. Outside of London it isn’t great, depends on where you are - you will probably need a car. London is not a great place for cycling. It’s very congested. I got knocked off my bike every year there. Maybe not as bad as the US but the UK is still a very car centric country.
When I visited London a couple of years ago, I noticed a couple of very questionable bike paths that were short, appeared out of nowhere, and disappeared into nowhere. Arguably worse than no bike path at all.
It depends what you mean by "without a car". I live on the edge of a medium sized city in the UK and could manage without a car for getting the kids to school, shopping and I'm still working at home. In practice, I might need to go to work sometimes and my hobbies require a car so I have one.
When saying the UK isn't a place for grownups ( and it certainly isn't run by grownups at the moment ). I'd place it somewhere between American and Northern Europe in terms of the sensible rating! I like American too, but agree with some of the shortcomings mentioned above.
We came over in July to try it out. We stayed in Kent and living car free wasn't a problem at all. We both work from home so that wasn't a problem. I brought my bike and riding around Kent was incredible. Much nicer then back home. I even went out with the local bike club and they all had wonderful things to say about the area.
Now, going in London itself - although it took less then an hour by high speed train - wasn't as much fun by bicycle at all. The cars were crazy and there were stop lights everywhere so it took much longer to get anywhere.
You have to be a special kind of biker to enjoy cycling in London. A friend cycled across London twice a day every day but I'm not sure I'd want to do that. Public transport is good so you can walk or take the tube/bus.
"Learning lessons" isn't really a thing in UK politics if you look at the general trajectory of the past century. If you like the idea of living in the UK but want to avoid the actual UK, might I suggest Ireland or the Netherlands?
I've thought of both, the Netherlands especially looks very appealing, but they don't allow dual citizenship and, unlike Germany, don't appear to have any plans to ever do so. I don't really want to give up my US citizenship.
All university towns in Denmark are bike-friendly and improving. Copenhagen is definitely further along that path, even car-unfriendly, but also with much more expensive housing.
Danish culture is (statistically) not authoritarian. People are expected to think for themselves, and also expect to be allowed to.
High taxes, immigration and integration and rising crime rates are just a few. Immigrants tend to complain about the unfriendly natives, the darkness and the slowness of the government.
Pretty simple: I just got a job here. A job comes with a work visa. There's lots of places where you can get jobs with local companies that will sponsor a visa for you. Then usually, after living in the new country for a while, you're able to apply for permanent residency. Given that this is HN and many people here work in tech, the tech industry in many countries is just as desperate for competent workers as in the US.
It heavily depends on your abilities to get a decent paying job.
If you can convince the review process that out of the gate you'll have stable income (won't be a burden to their society - better yet if you already have the job at entry), is well behaved with potentially high education, the door with easily open.
I think a lot of people here would fit the criteria. Now it becomes exponentially harder the farther you're off that golden path.
I have recruited a lot of people from all around the world, including from USA, to Helsinki. From USA, it's easy for employer and employee. Simplified, one can start working right away and the permanent permits come through before the temporary ones run out. (My info is a couple of years old.)
Where I grew up in the flyover parts of the USA as a mixed race kid, my school had around 5 people in my year who weren't either white or black, and experienced some instances of hillbillies and old people complaining about me being there because I didn't blend in. Can't say that the community really made me feel integrated despite being born and raised there. Interestingly my close American friends generally tend to have a similar background.
In Japan if you're hoping to blend in as a Japanese person, that's a pipedream - you're not Japanese, you don't speak, look, act, or think like a Japanese person, and you probably never will. It's not the same as America where anyone can legitimately call themselves American. And that's fine if you ask me, Japanese people have every right to preserve and be proud of their unique heritage.
But people will treat you "as an equal" in day-to-day life so long as you at least try to assimilate (speak some Japanese, be generally polite). So long as you don't hold onto the belief that one day you will be Japanese, then you won't be bothered by the fact that you're different.
I lived in China for some time as well, and that was similar; my friends who have lived in India seem to feel the same way, and I suspect this is the case in any country with a dominant ethnicity or sufficiently distinct culture.
That said I do hear it's harder to climb corporate hierarchy as a foreigner, but it's not something I worry about since I just work for global/foreign companies rather than for Japanese ones. A legitimate concern for others who want to join the rat race, though (still amazed @patio11 subjected himself to that).
Guess it's a difference of values; I for one would easily take walkability over blending in with the crowd, but maybe that's because I never have experienced that even in the USA (and I lived in SF and spent time in NYC, and honestly I have had as much culture shock in those places as I did in Tokyo). I've come to see "equality" as a different thing than how Americans typically view it, and my particular circumstances allow me to navigate around the parts where I would hit a glass ceiling while enjoying the parts where I wouldn't.
> I (a brown person) didn’t feel as welcome as in the US. Same holds for Europe
Europe is vast. You might get funny looks in a country that doesn't have lots of non-their own colour palette, especially in smaller places. E.g. in a smaller village in Romania, "brown" people are rare, so funny looks or the occasional ignorant comment are.. expected.
However if you go to a more mixed country, like France, Spain, Germany, Italy, there will be the occasional hardcore racist (as everywhere, stupid is not nationality/ethnicity specific) but those are rare, mostly old, and shunned by society. And extremely rare in big cities. (As an example, a few years ago in Paris an old lady sad "of course it's a black person" about a woman talking loudly in an African sounding language on a bus, and multiple people reprimanded her).
During the conference, I was networking and inquiring about tenure track positions. I got the vibe that my application wouldn’t be successful. And the data bears this out.
You "got a vibe" about some tenure-track position and somehow this makes the place "unwelcoming"? Wow. Obviously you've made up your mind despite having no actual experience living here.
>Tell me can a brown person aspire to the highest post in Japan?
You mean the PM? No, of course a non-Japanese person is not going to be the head of government. How about in America? Can an immigrant be the President? Definitely not, it's unconstitutional.
>There is this weird fetishization of Japan, an ethnostate, by white folks who don’t consider other experiences even exist.
Only Americans say I have a "fetish" for wanting to live in a place that's walkable, peaceful, and doesn't have school shootings. Every time I have a discussion about Japan with them, I get utterly bizarre accusations like this and I'm so glad I got out of that insane country.
He's probably talking about places where there's no people. The western states have many places like this.
And what is going on in France? Their crime rate is much higher than all their neighbors, and in the range of countries like Mexico, Ecuador, Paraguay, etc. Sweden is a surprise too; again, their neighbors score much better.
Its unpopular to say these days, but France failed with immigration. Too easy to get citizenship, many people from northern Africa or Middle east who are not integrated and have crappy jobs at best. It shows in frustration of 2nd generations who feel they are bound for blue collar jobs at best, hence the massive unrests and burning of cars some years ago.
Getting your phone/purse/whatever nicked in Paris became sort of tradition and part of visit long time ago (for me it was the phone, in museum where they have Napoleon at rest... seriously staff working the lockers just took it from my backpack).
It even leaks into neighboring countries, ie Geneva surrounded by France from 3 sides is the town with highest crime in whole Switzerland. Second highest is Basel, on the border with... you get the pattern.
Yes, you’re 100% correct. I meant violent crime, my mistake for not specifying. The USA is corrupt as fuck
and there is tons of graft done throughout industry (as you note) and local, state, and federal government that makes the violent crime dollar amounts seem tiny by comparison.
Police steal more dollar value from innocent people in the USA than burglars do. This is of course crime but is not counted in normal crime statistics or regarded as violent crime despite police doing this while armed.
I don't believe "Almost all of the USA’s [violent] crime is concentrated in the bad parts of a few cities" is all that correct. I believe it's because your understanding may come from older reports.
As far as I can tell, per capita violent crime is indeed often higher in urban areas than suburban or rural areas, but sometimes the violent crime rate in rural US is higher than the national average.
> According to Pew Research, violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply in the past 25 years. For the first time in a decade, violent crime in rural areas has surpassed the national average, as the website Governing reported. The reasons for this state of affairs are severalfold: Although all rural areas are not poor, poverty has increased, which has led to an increase in crime. Employment has fallen in the countryside as farming has consolidated and manufacturing jobs have left. Further, the opioid crisis , as well as the methamphetamine epidemic,continue to make their presence known in small towns as a driver of crime. Finally, there are fewer law enforcement resources in the country due to shrinking tax bases, with fewer jail cells, and sheriff’s deputies required to cover significantly larger patrol areas than their urban counterparts. This rural reality provides an opening for criminal activity such as drug dealing to thrive.
I'm really skeptical of comparing crime rates across borders. Slight variations in enforcement, reporting, different processes for conviction, etc can really mess up the data.
Even local crime statistics are a mess to interpret, extrapolating to the whole world feel suspect.
Love the channel. The Toronto Islands seem like an attractive place to live. With a population of only ~700 and a (full) waiting list capped at 500 it's clearly in high demand, which makes it all the more strange to me that more developers aren't building places like these.
I mean, I can't be the only one who is willing to pay 2-3x more to live in a neighborhood with no cars.
Well in this case the no-car neighborhood's houses are 1/3 the price of normal houses due to a weird law. I wonder how much that contributes to the waitlist.
Roosevelt Island isn't car free, but if you're willing to accept 15mph max speeds, no through traffic in exchange for living in NYC with some of the most incredible views it's a nice place to be.
Good point. I used to bike over the Queensboro bridge every day and daydream about living there. I even took the gondola once to see what a commute like that would be like. We ended up looking at a couple condos in an older building near the church there but never made any offers and eventually moved to New England for other reasons.
But Roosevelt Island and Governor's Island were like the two places I ever felt halfway relaxed in NYC.
I gave up and resigned myself to teaching my kids how to avoid being killed by drivers and advocating for safer street design. But if someone ever builds a Cyclocroft[1] or Culdesac[2] in my region I'd happily move there.
[1] https://twitter.com/mrmoneymustache/status/10960784095689891...
[2] https://culdesac.com/