Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

Living car-free in Berlin is ridiculously easy. I have my own bicycle, but still grab a Jump bike when I've walked somewhere and need to get home faster/easier.

But this is the summer. I haven't done the winter here yet. That'll be the test.

Europe has had fantastic public transportation for a long time. I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980s, never had a car, and never felt I needed one. I traveled all over western Europe.

In the last winters it barely snowed in Berlin, so I know quite a few people who kept riding their bikes all through the year. Of course, use your head - if it is damp and then below zero, be careful. Common sense, really.

If all fails, public transport is decent enough to get you anywhere on foot. It's not perfect, I think mostly because Berlin is spatially huge and comparably empty. Cities like Paris have a much more dense public transport infrastructure. But I think you never need to walk more than ten to fifteen minutes (compared to a max of five minutes in Paris and London), which is acceptable.

There really isn't much of a reason to own a car if you live within the S-Bahn ring.

I never knew loss of parking was even a thing in the US. I can't imagine it being as bad as within European cities where most of the streets (and adjacent buildings) have been built before cars were a thing. Probably one of the main reasons why alternatives to cars are well-received is that cars have never been an option anyways, especially in historic districts.

Big cars are another dimension of this problem. American cars are usually larger because they don't have these types of issues. You won't see a majority of people driving pickup trucks in Europe.

Where I live, the two biggest fears about non-car transportation is that it's a) inconvenient or stressful and full of delays (for public transport) or b) too dangerous (for stuff like electric scooters).

It's a lot easier for Europe to go carless than the USA. They have better intra-city public transit for one. Also, most (all?) of their major cities laid out their grids before the invention of the car.

In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car.

That being said, I don't understand why new cities in the US aren't being planned around being carless. I guess it's just so engrained in our culture that it will be hard to overcome?