But there's one lame excuse that is so common, so prevalent, so ubiquitous, that I want to talk about it and that's the excuse that "My country is too big to have trains, bicycle infrastructure, walkable neighborhoods or whatever."
So when someone new to walkable cities sees an example of a great City and they realize it's clearly better than where they live, their first gut reaction is to grab any difference between the two and make that the reason as to why their city can't be the same.
So why is this argument so stupid? Well, quite simply, Americans aren't traveling from Fluffy Landing to Hump Tulips every day. Canadians aren't traveling from Dildo to Spasm every day, and Australians aren't traveling from Chinaman's Knob to Useless Loop every day
For example, in the United States, over 45 percent of trips - all trips - are three miles or less (that's five kilometers for the rest of my audience). These are distances that could be easily done by walking or cycling. So despite the size of the country, and the sprawliness of the cities, Americans don't actually travel that far for most trips, but unsurprisingly, almost all of those trips are taken by car because it's too dangerous to walk or cycle, and public transportation is non-existent, which again is the whole point.
This is where Americans will claim that America is too big for trains, which is absolutely comical, because America was literally built by the railroads, and so was Canada.
Nearly every town, city and village in the United States and Canada had a train station and was connected by rail, with very few exceptions. And almost every city and town had a streetcar line too, with very few exceptions. And every one of those places was built to be walkable, as every one of those places was built before automobiles were common. Again, with very few exceptions.
A hundred years ago, you could get a train from almost any city to just about any other city on the continent, and even many towns and villages, too. The reason those train stations don't exist anymore is because they were bulldozed, often to make room for highways, along with the walkable downtowns they were connected to.
The Schengen zone is not constant and new countries are being added every few years. For example, Croatia was just added in 2023 and Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus and Montenegro plan to join in the near future. But if that happens, will Amsterdam need to tear up all their bike lanes, because the Schengen zone is too big? No, of course not, that would be stupid. Which is the same reason why saying America is too big for bike lanes is also stupid.
The fact is, it is possible to build walkable neighborhoods everywhere. They have existed in every country on Earth for thousands of years, and it is possible to connect those walkable places together by high quality public transportation, to make it so that people can go from any walkable area to any other walkable area regardless of the size of the city the country or the continent.
When Americans say something like "U.S cities are too big and spread out to do - whatever" then yes, that's true. But that is literally the problem that urbanists are trying to solve, so it's not really helpful to restate the problem, and then use that as the excuse as to why it can't be solved.
Good gosh I've gotten sick of hearing this excuse. In my own household, even, as there's someone in my family who likes to reply with "the U.S. is too big; Europe has denser cities because they have less space" any time I talk about urbanism issues.
I guess the argument is that everyone lives in all these vast swaths of single-family-home suburbia and exurbia and it's all so sparse so where are you gonna build trains or whatever. But, really...we've got school buses. And we've got shuttle buses to help seniors get to the grocery store and such. It's that we've zoned ourselves into a metaphorical corner where we can't do things like build things like corner stores that we can walk to or build multi-family low-rise condominiums just because it's legally prohibited. It's because we've written stupid laws that specify that one dinky little fast food joint requires a huge parking lot. (And even sillier if it's instead a business that serves alcohol.)
This stuff takes a while to fix. But it's fixable. Our roads are coming due for maintenance, and our If we could rip out streetcar lines and bulldoze entire neighborhoods back in the day, we can put in new bus lines (with decent bus stop shelters) and protected bike lanes today, and start fixing our laws to allow people more flexibility to use local land more efficiently, and start giving people alternatives to needing to use a car to get anywhere and everywhere.