This Is Why We Can Compare the United States With Europe
“You can’t compare the United States with Europe. It’s too big! One state is like a country over there.”
This is a pretty regular American take I hear time and time again in response to my videos or social media posts. And it’s true. The United States is big. It’s the third largest country in the world by both land mass and population. And my home state of Ohio is about the same size as Italy with roughly one-fifth the population.
So I guess… Yeah. You can’t compare the two!
Alright, thanks for reading, smash that subscribe button and peace out cub scout!
Just kidding. Obviously you can compare the United States with Europe. Here’s why.
No Car Required
This will come as no surprise to regular readers of my diatribes, but in my view, one of the biggest improvements we could make to life in the United States is making it a more walkable, bike, and transit-friendly country—much like most of Europe.
In Europe, whether I’m home in Berlin or traveling anywhere between Portugal and Romania, I can reach where I want to go with public transportation. I’ve taken the night train from Sighet to Bucharest and even in Wales I got around Bannau Brycheiniog with public transit.
Contrast this with the United States where public transportation just isn’t nearly as widespread anymore. You might be lucky to live in a Chicago with pretty solid local and regional transit. But once you’re outside of the city, good-fucking-luck.
One of the biggest gaps I find in American public transportation is the lack of connection of surrounding towns and green spaces. But in Europe, generally speaking, most towns and villages have at minimum a bus stop that’s serviced throughout the day. Hell, I even stumbled across a bus in an abandoned Turkish village on Cyprus earlier this year to get back to Paphos.
It’s wonderful! It means I can travel around this country and most of the continent, and run around the mountains without ever worrying about where to leave my car. I can run from A to B, day after day, and take a train or a bus home. It’s one of my favorite things about living here and makes me feel truly free to explore.
And I’ll talk about that on here and invariably get some comment about how you can’t compare the United States with Europe. You just can’t!
U.S. too big. Europe too small. End of story.
But is that really true? Not really.
Is Europe Actually Small?
We’ll speak American here so my fine countrymen and the naysayers can understand. The United States is roughly 3.8 million square miles. And how big is whittle bitty ole Europe? 3.93 million square miles.
Yes, you heard that right, sports fans. If you’re keeping score at home, the United States is geographically smaller than Europe. But anti-transit Americans can fudge the numbers to get the narrative they want. The contiguous United States is larger than Europe without Russia by roughly 800,000 square miles.
But at the end of the day, we’re talking about two land masses that are roughly similar in size. So just remember that the next time you feel compelled to say that Europe—a continent—is small.
(By the way, I’ll forever be amazed by the confidence with which people will make claims on the internet that can easily be disproved with a quick search on the old Google box.)
This is about when people will turn to the other typical refrain: European countries are about the same size as U.S. states. It ultimately feels like a red herring, implying that the smaller you are, the easier it is to fund public transportation and make walkable cities.
But I can also point to European countries that are larger than U.S. states. Do Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware have better public transportation and more walkable cities than Germany, France, Spain, England?
No. And this ties to two real differences. The first one is population density.
Population Density
Yes, there’s more population density in Europe. In the U.S., it’s about 94 people per square mile. In Europe, it’s roughly 188 people per square mile. So we can say it’s about double in Europe.
But that’s partly because the U.S. has focused far more on auto-oriented development than most of Europe over the past century, creating sprawl with very low population density. If we look at the year 1900, right smack dab in the Golden Age of Rail, the population density of the United States was about 26 people per square mile and 102 people per square mile in Europe.
So population density actually increased by 261% in the United States. In Europe, it only increase by about 84%. Yet as the U.S. became more dense, it became far less walkable and accessible without a car. But in 1900, the U.S. had a vast rail network spanning 260,000 miles shared among passenger trains and freight operations. Today, the passenger rail network in the United States covers just 21,000 miles. The network is still there and is actually the largest in the world, if my research isn’t failing me. But the passenger service is either starved or long gone.
Cool! We have millions of more people and only one, incredibly dangerous way to get around. What could possibly go wrong, except DEATH!?
It’s Cultural!
So neither the size nor population density argument really make sense. But there’s one last argument I’ll hear from to time time that defies population density and scale: It’s just cultural! Americans simply like their vroom vrooms. Every country is different, so just let us have the vroom vrooms!
I mean, sure, you can grab data on the rate of car ownership and the average miles driven in the U.S. versus other countries to come to the conclusion that Americans just like driving more. I’ve used those numbers in my videos. Americans do, indeed, drive more and own more cars.
But that makes a hell of an assumption. It assumes that all of those Americans want to be driving those miles. There was a time when I would’ve shown up in annual driving statistics. Obviously it doesn’t mean I enjoyed it. You know this because I ramble on and on about the evils of cars like some ex-girlfriend who dated me just to get access to my social security information and commit fraud.
(I know that was awfully specific and you probably think it must’ve happened to me, but I swear it’s just a joke.)
I’ve got two things on this one and then I’ll let you get back to your regularly scheduled scrolling or… wait, are you reading this from the toilet?
(I realize that would’ve been a miss for like 99% of you, but if I got just one person… I’m happy.)
Now there’s no data on how many miles driven in the U.S. were done with joy. Maybe the Marie Kondo Auto Association is working it. But we do have data that shows the supposed American cultural love of cars isn’t as deep as you’d think.
Pew released a study about 18 months ago showing that 1 in 10 Americans rarely or never drive a car. But again, one might dishonestly assume that the other 9 want to drive their car. Again, that’s hard to prove or disprove. But we do have another smaller study of 1,000 Americans that revealed that nearly half of respondents aged 18 - 34 were willing to give up their car. And their are other surveys that show overwhelming support for improved rail access in the United States.
To say that it’s simply cultural to drive more in the U.S. overlooks nearly a century’s worth of intense lobbying by the auto industry to make driving mandatory to live and the feckless politicians who continually prioritize the needs of wealthy constituents (i.e. themselves) over the needs and desires of the majority. Americans drive more because it’s often the easiest or only option they’re left with in a rigged system.
A comparison I like to use to prove this point is by looking at escalators. When I go to a train station in Europe with escalators, an overwhelming majority of passengers take the escalator instead of the stairs—even if they’re not carrying a bag. That's because it’s the easiest way for them to go up and down the stairs.
What this illustrates is that Europeans are just as likely as Americans or any other group of people to take the easiest option. It’s pretty well-encoded in our DNA to be lazy whenever humanly possible.
Europeans are not genetically predisposed to walking more than driving. It’s not like they look at cars and involuntarily vomit a little. (That’s just me.) But driving is often not the easiest solution to get from A to B in Europe. And if it’s not easier to drive, they more often than not won’t.
And it’s not hard to make walking the easiest option. We’re humans! We’ve been making things walkable for thousands of years. And we did it just fine in the United States a century ago.
We just need to look at the decades of surface parking lots, stroads, and ugly-ass highways and take a big fat L on that one—and commit to building our environments for human beings again, not cars.
Who Cares?
A cynical American might still say “who cares” to everything I’ve just talked about. “I like driving. Cry about it!”
That’s fine! I know some people like driving. But a growing number of us don’t want to drive—or at the very least be forced to drive to do every damn thing in our lives. Americans deserve the option not to drive just as much as Europeans or any other group of people. We lack a choice in the U.S. Or, to speak explicitly American again, we lack the freedom of choice that you can generally find all over Europe.
At the very least, you can understand that the more of us you get off the road by offering transportation alternatives and making cities more walkable, the less traffic you have to deal with. It’s a win-win!
Car-obsessed Americans who think they have a right to free and plentiful parking tend to be the type to scoff at just about anything European. So this next bit of motivational speaking is for you:
🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅
Those tiny coffee-sipping Europeans think they can out walk us and have faster trains than we can!? Well, I don’t think so! Let’s show them our trains can be bigger, faster, and harder than theirs ever will be! USA! USA! USA!
🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅
Let’s see if that works. After all, nothing is more motivating for Americans who drive unnecessarily massive cars than to subliminally tell them that they have a tiny penis.