It’s American Thanksgiving and although I’m not scarfing down any big turkey dinners this year, I’m also not dealing with any bigoted relatives, so it comes out in the wash. Instead, let’s commemorate the biggest, boldest lie in American popular history with a fantasy map of someplace where Thanksgiving was actually held last month.
A longstanding belief of mine is when someone says something edgy or provocative or against conventional wisdom, and it gets stuck in your brain and you can’t get it out, in most cases there’s a kernel of truth in there somewhere. In this case, let’s chew on the idea that North American cities are unsalvageable and anyone who wants to live someplace habitable should move to Europe.
So how are things here in the USA? Well…the rate of pedestrian fatalities has been steadily increasing since 2010. Most cities have transit service that could be politely described as “parliamentary.” Basically every major transit system in the US is staring down severe service cuts—and, consequently, a death spiral—brought on by an imminent lapse in COVID relief funding. The concept of “walkability” is perceived as ableist, and the concept of “fifteen-minute cities” is perceived as authoritarian. There is no state capacity to build new transit infrastructure, and the subsequent over-reliance on outside consultants and public-private partnerships results in projects bogged down in endless studies, delivered years late, and an order of magnitude more expensive than they should be. It’s a crapshoot whether those new projects are actually useful for getting around. Where bike lanes exist, they serve as car parking. Even cities which are actually walkable and have good legacy infrastructure like New York, Philly, or Boston have deep systematic issues: it is like pulling teeth to install a bus lane on 14th Street, give Washington Avenue a road diet, or rehabilitate the T to the point where trains can go faster than 25 miles an hour. Boston got rid of its trolleybuses. Chicago currently has its most progressive mayor in decades and the L is still running on half-hour headways. Bicyclists have guns pulled on them. In most places the only municipal service without threadbare funding is law enforcement. And on, and on, and on. That doesn’t mean everything everywhere is bad—the Washington Metro is currently enjoying the most frequent and reliable service it’s had in years, Milwaukee is in the middle of a relatively extensive road-diet program, and Seattle’s bus network ridership has returned to pre-COVID levels—but, especially when one lives in a terminally car-brained traffic-sewer city like Indianapolis, where it is consistently more convenient to drive than to take transit anywhere, they feel like the exception rather than the rule.
This doesn’t necessarily mean things can’t get better in the USA—walk down any street in Indianapolis and it is trivially easy to imagine exactly how the road diet would look—but there needs to be widespread protests and die-ins across the country to make it happen. Even then, it won’t be overnight. The increase in state capacity and realignment of thought needed to reach the point where every road resurfacing adds a bike lane and removes on-street parking as a matter of course will take a generation. That’s what had to be done, and for how long, for Amsterdam, the gold standard in pedestrian and bicycle friendliness, to go from car-choked hellscape to the only city I’ve ever visited where I was more worried about getting run over by a bicycle than a motor vehicle. The fact of the matter is if we want the US to have habitable cities we’ll have to do a lot more than what’s being done now, and be prepared to wait a very, very long time. If we do everything right I don’t expect the average American city to be decently walkable until I hit retirement age.
When this is the state of play in the US, you can’t blame people if, at the individual level, they believe American cities won’t ever improve, and if they have the wherewithal to emigrate, decide to do so. I’m generally an advocate for people traveling as widely as possible, to have a more well-rounded understanding of what is possible, and what is regarded as normal elsewhere. Everyone should live abroad (and, critically, be able to live abroad) at some point in their life, and it would be massively hypocritical of me, as someone who has had the opportunity to travel extensively, to say Americans who value non-car-centric cities should stay where they are.
But it doesn’t follow that Europe is definitively the place to go, or that Europe holds all the answers. Amsterdam is extremely pleasant, and the bike lanes are every bit as good as people say they are, but the city was largely built prior to the advent of the automobile. When we think “Amsterdam” we generally think of its historic center, but its outlying post-war suburban areas are about as alienating and pedestrian-hostile as anywhere else in Europe. Speaking of which, Europe was seized with car-mania about as much as the US was (Amsterdam had freeway riots!), and anyone who goes to Rotterdam or La Défense will tell you that Europe basically forgot how to build non-alienating pedestrian-friendly infrastructure after World War II. Paris and Berlin may not have the same terminal car-dependency as your average US city, but their roads are still fundamentally car-centric (in Paris, this is true even after the city spent the entire pandemic pedestrianizing streets and installing bike lanes). And let’s not even get into how Europe is extremely racist (I still vividly remember when I saw a Zwarte Piet on the Amsterdam Metro, which by the way if you want to watch an otherwise progressive Dutchman sweat ask them about Zwarte Piet, not to mention the even more rampant Islamophobia that erupted throughout the continent from the current conflict in Gaza), keeps electing Nazis (consider who the incoming Dutch Prime Minister is and what he stands for, and what the current polls look like in France, Germany, Italy, and Austria), and treats trans people barbarically (any US state that instituted HRT gatekeeping requirements similar to what is de rigeur in most of Europe would be regarded as genocidal, and rightly so)… It’s certainly no picnic living in the US either—ask anyone who lives in or has ties to Florida, for starters—but that means we know what this shit looks like.
As for which part of the world actually does build the best cities, I personally would say to go look at Asia: Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese cities are basically the platonic ideal in terms of human-scale urban form; small buildings and narrow streets all over the place. With Japan in particular the vernacular architecture for mid-rise apartment buildings is every bit as good as the single-stair model common in Europe, which could serve as a model for subsidized housing once cities and states build up the state capacity to do that, also. Korea and Taiwan built their metros from scratch with little reliance on legacy networks, and Taipei in particular has a substantial dedicated bus lane network and lots of moped traffic (which isn’t bikes, but it’s not cars, either). That said, these are all real countries with real country bullshit. Nowhere’s perfect, so if you plan on emigrating you’d do well to pick a destination country with a clear-eyed understanding of that country’s successes and shortcomings. That isn’t a choice I can or should make for anyone.
If you want to stay in the US, however, advocating for walkability and pedestrian safety is without question the right thing to do…but the battle is uphill and moral victories benefit no one. Those of us who are stuck here desperately need results, and about all I can say in encouragement is that if we can look to Amsterdam for what good pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure looks like, we should also look to Amsterdam for what we’ll have to do to get it.
SO WHAT ABOUT THE MAP?
I was originally thinking of something closer to the style of the tube map, as befits, well, London, but it pretty quickly evolved into something inspired by Vignelli’s early Washington Metro map sketches (one of the ones with thicker route lines this time; the rationale was that the stations were spaced at mostly even intervals and many of them were sited on corners), with the end result looking like something inspired by Jake Berman’s Lost Subways series (you should get the book). Route lines are more or less what’s planned with the BRT network, if and when that gets built. The radial line (I love that that’s what they call interurbans in Ontario) is the old London and Port Stanley Railway. I grit my teeth and put the radial in an inset there on the right because of how ridiculously out of scale it is from the rest of the network.
Lore, if it matters to anyone: Radial Line was taken over by some local governmental authority in the 50s or 60s. Of somewhat more recent vintage is the elevated structure that rises close to the radial line’s Thames crossing and brings the line to London City station. Lines A and B were master-planned and built in the 2010s; there’s a spiffy cross-platform interchange at Central. The radial line’s London terminal is located directly above the mainline rail platforms; the transfer to Line B at York is in-system but extremely long. At Port Stanley there’s a ferry to Cleveland. If you have a Bluesky account or are reading this after December 1 (assuming current plans hold) the associated streetcar map is here.
It probably says something about my own concerns about the present and future of transit in the US and Canada that basically every fantasy map I’ve drawn is of an alternate present instead of a hypothetical future. Dorval Carter needs to be fired and replaced by someone who actually cares, and every bus driver in the country needs to be paid in yachts.
Theodoræ Ditsek 
I’m from London, Ontario! This is a cool map! We unfortunately scuttled the west and both legs, of our rapid transit network (NIMBY and neighborhood politics)
[laughs bitterly but sympathetically in our state legislature is currently trying to cancel the third and most useful line of ours]