[ARCHIVE] Eurotrip

What I’ve been up to

I know many people my age who have been going to Europe for one reason or another. Subjectively it seems to be by far the most popular international destination for my American peers. It wasn’t obvious to me why Europe in particular was so great, so I wanted to check it out myself.

My guess for why people liked Europe so much was the pretty, old things and the great urbanism. This hunch seemed to be mostly correct, these were the things I enjoyed the most, and the best instances of them are leagues better than anywhere I’ve been.

(In this post I’m going to say “Europe” generally. I’ve only been to southern and alpine European countries. I’m making generalizations that are almost certainly inaccurate to describe Europe as a whole.)

(This post will have a lot of comparison with my China trip, because the way I hold information in my head is comparing and contrasting with data points I already have)

(This is kind of a stream of consciousness post, no particular organization)

China in one word is big.It is 4 times larger than the US in population. It smothers every country on earth in production of pretty much everything, from steel to ships to niche chemicals. They use more cement in 3 years than the US used in the entire 20th century. They have 9 of the 15 busiest metro systems on earth. etc

And they basically built all of it in the last 30 years. It is the most insane national development story in human history. However remarkable you think it is, it’s crazier than that.

Europe in one word is old.In Europe, nothing seems to have been built in the last 30 years, at least in the city centers/old towns, which are the main tourist areas. (Especially true in Southern Europe) I had to keep reminding myself that almost everything I’m seeing has been around longer than America. This is remarkable in its own way, but is not particularly inspiring compared to China’s story.

This really hit me going through the Uffizi Museum. The art is beautiful, but a plurality, maybe even a majority, of pieces is Mary and Jesus. And the date range for these is roughly 500 years between the first and last one. For many lifetimes, they were just painting the exact same thing, again and again. There was little change. The concept of sustained change was unknown to them.

It makes me incredibly thankful that I’m born in the present. If I was born the average European in 1300, I could expect basically nothing to change between my birth and my death. The luckiest people got to paint Christ and Mary for a living in 1300 and this is still true in 1380. If I was born in China in 1980, I could expect my life to go from poorer than a European peasant to living in a metropolis with more skyscrapers than all of Europe combined. And that’s only age 45.

That being said, given all this time, Europe got a lot right. The urbanism and architecture blew me away. It’s good, very good. The US has pretty much no excuse not to build like this, at least in some areas. Walking around getting food with kids playing in the streets is an S-tier human experience. Disneyworld is popular for this reason imo, not the characters or the rides.

Urbanism

I’m not convinced that Euro-style walkable cities are actually a good way to build an economically dynamic city as a whole, but we should certainly legalize building neighborhoods that look like this, and make the heart of our cities lovely places to be.

American suburbia is pretty awesome, and the envy of the world. But our country is founded on freedom, we should be allowed to build neighborhoods of many different types; let the people choose where they want to live and let the free market provide. Defining a single system of development by zoning fiat is silly.

Outside of the city core, the European cities seemed to be mostly designed around the car. Roads are very necessary for industry and business to operate. (In Venice, Amazon packages were delivered by a guy with a small cart lugging it up and down stairs). No serious business that wasn’t tourism focused was setting up shop in the city core. The trains in Europe were wonderful, but the majority of area in the city didn’t seem to be accessible by metro. If you were visiting somewhere for business, I assume you would take a car.

The walkable areas of European cities usually looked like Barcelona below. Either a planned grid or natural walking paths. Most had an “old town” like the right, and outside of that was the newer, planned grid. Outside of the walkable grid, it turned into suburbs.

To me, the magic of the European urbanism system is the train integration between these walkable areas. It does this is a distinct way from America or China. The European train station terminals are deep in the heart of the city, in the old town or other popular areas. I was able to ride a single train from one city core to another city core hundreds of miles without ever switching trains or getting on the metro.

There is no other existing transport system that can do this task well. Airports require runways which require huge spaces outside a city. The geometry constraints of automobile locomotion and parking would sully the areas that people are trying to get to.

Large Chinese cities have the most extensive metro systems I’ve ever ridden. European metro systems are not nearly as well done in most cases. The HSR terminals in Chinese cities were usually built outside the city center, close enough to transfer to the metro system, which can take you to anywhere else in the city. Chinese cities were generally walkable in the context of the metro system, but there were no beautiful walkable “old towns” like Europe has. High speed rail (HSR) is functionally an air travel replacement in China.

I’m conflicted on how good of a transport system trains are. Most US urbanists whine about oh if only we had high speed rail in America. I’m pretty convinced this would be a horrible use of resources. A rail system is only as good as the cities it connects. Take the Texas HSR from Dallas to Houston. It cuts a 3.5hr drive down to roughly 1.5hr. An ideal HSR use case. But both cities are not navigable without a car, so you’d have to rent one on the other side after parking your car on the side you came from. Both of these cost a significant amount and for the majority of the Texas population, the value of their time is not high enough to justify the two hours saved when compared to driving. For the population who’s time is valuable enough to justify the time saved, they can further save time by going to an airport and purchasing the more expensive plane ticket that cuts the 3.5hr drive to a 0.75hr flight. There is a very narrow band of people where the value of HSR wins.

Now the calculus changes immensely if you don’t need a car on either side, like in Europe or China. We need to have walkable areas/robust metro systems immediately accessible by train to make intercity rail, high speed or not, make sense.

My European and Chinese rail experiences were superb. The trains run on time, stations are easy to navigate, there is minimal security, the tickets are affordable, the seats are comfortable. It is a lovely experience all around. On the other hand, trains are just really slow compared to aircraft. The fastest train I rode in Europe went 180mph and the fastest I rode in China was 215mph. Almost all of them did not go this fast. This is way faster than a car, but less than a third of the speed of a commercial jet. Also, jets can fly in straight lines at full speed, where trains are forced to take winding routes by the terrain. The faster you want your train to go, the more it costs to build the track (The ground gets “bumpier” the faster you go. Ex: going around or over large terrain features like a hill is insignificant at 50mph but will derail your train at 200mph so you have to build a ramp before and after the hill to smooth it out) Additionally, any airport can connect to any other airport, whereas any train station only connects to train stations with a direct rail link. The only infrastructure cost of air travel is the airports, but every additional mile has an infrastructure cost in rail travel, and that cost balloons as speed increases.

I think air travel is a much better system if we can fix the reliability/cascading delay/cancellation problems and make airports more like train stations. I should be able to show up at the airport 5-15mins before my flight leaves like I can with trains. Right now, you can’t even board a plane that fast. Rail from the airport to the city center is also necessary to solve the distance issue. The Shanghai maglev seems to have the right idea (if it actually connected to the rest of the metro system and terminated somewhere close to the city center and ran 24/7)

Architecture

I noticed a phenomenon of “upscaling” with many buildings in Europe. The urbanism defines the form of the building, often a 5 floor or so with shops on the bottom. Then, the architect is able to scale the ornamentation on that building from low to high.

Here’s an example from Montpelier

These are basically all the same building, but they chose how much effort they wanted to put into the exterior. A city composed of the first building would not look great, even if the urbanism was wonderful.

The churches had the highest “resolution”

I find this interesting, because ornamentation is somewhat of a public good. Ornamentation can also be added after the fact. The inside of my house is my own to decorate, and how I decorate it impacts only me. The inside also impacts me far more than the outside since I spend most time there; most home remodels are interior. But the outside primarily impacts other people; the sum of an exterior’s impact to others is far greater than its impact to me. It could be interesting to see governments fund exterior ornamentation in a public goods way, like a road or a park. Might be a way to bring back beautiful buildings in the modern era.

My understanding of the dearth of beauty in modern architecture is two-fold. Modernism and Postmodernism movements exist in architecture like they do in visual art. They are a reaction against and subversion of traditional beauty. The way to stand out in the field is not to strive to be 5% more beautiful than Michelangelo, but to do something entirely different. This same phenomena exists in architecture. Also something about Marxism ideology dominating the creative field in the 20th century and beauty is too bourgeois.

The second part is how buildings are bought and sold.

For the public sector, governments are seen as irresponsible with taxpayer dollars if they spend money on beauty and ornamentation. This effect is stronger in democracies. The public sees a bare bones building and assumes the government used their money efficiently (unfortunately appearances mislead in most cases here). A similar thing happens with public companies and their shareholders.

In the private sector, most beautiful buildings were commissioned and built to suit the wishes of the buyer. The buyer (a wealthy individual, the church) planned to hold this building indefinitely. If the buyer wanted a beautiful building, the architect would design that. Today however, most buildings are built for the general market. A skyscraper is built without knowing who will inhabit each floor. A house is built without knowing who will buy it. Additionally, resale value is extremely important. Both of these effects combine to encourage conservative design decisions to ensure the largest possible market to sell the building. A boring building will be able to be sold quickly (liquidity), and with as many buyers as possible to bid up the price. An unusual and “beautiful” building may fetch a higher prices, but it also might not if its style falls out of fashion, and the seller will have to wait a long time for a buyer or is forced to accept a low offer. Homeowners have a huge amount of their wealth tied up in their house; it’s important that this value is reasonably liquid and stable. I’m quite confident that this is the dominant factor in why most buildings built today are ugly.

I’ve often heard that it costs more money to build beautiful things, which it does, but buildings are an asset. If the cost rose by 15% to make it beautiful, but the value also rose by 15%, I think we would see a lot more people building beautiful things. But I’m guessing that the prettiness cost doesn’t translate into an equivalent boost in value due to the above factors.

I’ve also often heard that we lack the skilled laborers or know-how to build beautiful buildings as a reason for the lack of beauty. This may be true, but it certainly isn’t the cause. If we wanted ornamentation, the market would provide the artisans necessary.

More Thoughts

• Europe has this weird thing were somebody lives everywhere. Like they have national parks, but there’s probably like a hundred olive farmers in the hills somewhere in all of them. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere untouched by humans in Europe, except parts of the Alps. Even there though, there seem to be a few houses. Similar thing in the populated regions of China; there is someone everywhere. One of my favorite things about America is that there are places out west where you can pretty confidently say nobody has ever stood in the particular spot you’re standing; this tree you’re looking at has never once been cut down and replanted etc. We established the national parks before anyone had the chance to settle down there; we have truly wild places.
• There really don’t seem to be many kids in Europe. Italy/Spain birth rate same as China, ~1.2. France is higher than the US however, 1.8 vs 1.65. And where there are families, they are small, 1-2 kids. Just on vibes I saw way more kids in China. Likely the kids were in school when I was in Europe, but on break when I was in China.
• Odd lack of plants in the cities of Europe outside of the clearly defined parks. Both the US and China have tons of greenery throughout the city and it makes the cities wonderful places to be. I’m guessing greenery was not valued when the cities were being built. Europe could really up its game by introducing trees.
• That being said, the Mediterranean coast outside of the cities (Riviera, Amalfi) absolutely cooks with its trees. A stunning variety of trees, from all over the world, green year round; anything can grow in this climate. It’s wonderful. San Fransisco does a similar thing; they have a huge variety of trees in their parks.
• The microclimates of the Amalfi coast are insane. The top of the mountains feels like and looks like winter with deciduous trees without leaves while the bottom has palm trees and feels like summer.

• Switzerland’s train stations were built significantly differently than the rest of Europe; much farther underground, with integrated shopping and many levels, just like China. I noticed in China many of the metro stations had blast doors, but didn’t see this in Switzerland. Presumably this is so that people can live in the underground areas in the event of war, something both countries are notoriously paranoid about.
• In a similar note, apparently Barcelona was redesigned with the grid layout and wide streets so that riots could be easily put down. The government found that narrow streets are much harder to take with a military vs guerilla type fighters (eg Gaza), so they mostly eliminated the narrow streets. China seemed similarly paranoid about this, especially in Beijing. It is bizarre how wide their streets are. They take it one step further by limiting access for each block to a few points and fencing off/blank wall the exterior of the block instead of the more open access of Barcelona.
• China > Europe > US on safe feeling streets. China had no homeless people, no hecklers, no pickpockets, which are about the worst Europe seemed to have. Certainly no American screaming schizos or living dead fent/tranq zombies. (I try to have compassion but that goes out the window when you’re in a fight or flight mental state, deserved or not). Great urbanism is nothing without safe streets. I don’t know what the downsides are of what they’re doing, but I’m a huge fan of the upsides. I could literally walk anywhere at any time and never once felt unsafe. Europe was really not bad outside of Naples, Marseille, Lisbon.
• Europe had quite a bit of live music performances by individuals on the street. US has this too. China did not. Europe > US > China
• US seems to have by far the worst sense of fashion (outside of NYC). No point in streetwear if you aren’t walking through the streets.
• This is actually a common theme. Europe slam dunks US on X culture thing with the exception of NYC, which hangs with the best in the world.
• China > Europe > US on percent of people smoking.
• Europe > US > China on percent of people vaping
• Switzerland tightly controlling its immigration in contrast to the EU is immediately apparent in the demographics walking around.

• BYD is selling in Europe and it appears to be the only Chinese EV brand selling there. Saw ads and showrooms but none on the street.
• Southern Europe seemed surprisingly poor. Not obviously richer than China just from looking out train windows.
• Europe > America > China on amount of graffiti. Taiwan had a ton of high quality graffiti however.

• China has a sort multi-level urbanism that the US and Europe don’t come close to. Like a park on top of a 7 story mall on top of the metro with a skybridge connecting the bottom floor of one skyscraper to the the 15th floor of another farther down the hill. In some (mostly southern China) cities. Not Beijing. Europe is a pattern of first floor shops plus 5 floors mapped onto hilly terrain. US mostly just a 2d suburban pattern on the minecraft superflat world. Again, except NYC.
• The best goddamn part of the US is that we have free water and bathrooms in literally every building. I don’t need to pay to use the bathroom. Not squat toilets, not 2L prebottled water. They’re just normal bathrooms and drinking fountains and they’re wonderful. I can stay hydrated because water is abundant and I know I can pee. Again, except NYC. In China, the heat index is so high this is a health hazard. This is such a dumb thing, but the amount of time I think about this while traveling is insane. Why do the “socialist” European countries and the “communist” China and the “woke” US cities not have freely available water and bathrooms, but this is the default in the heart of America? Something social trust I’d guess. Not sure whether it’s cause or effect or confounding.
• They have flip caps on all of their drinks in Europe

• Pharmacies have very large bright green crosses in Europe.

• The US doesn’t include sales tax in the price of the item, but Europe and China do. Also, they don’t do that $_.99 thing. Generally round numbers. If you’re using cash, tax included is obviously better since you buy things with round number prices and you don’t have to worry about change. If you’re using card, it doesn’t matter. My conspiracy is that the US doesn’t include it because it makes paying in cash high friction which means people use card which means they spend more because cards psychologically don’t feel like you’re spending as much money which means consumer demand gets boosted and our whole economy runs on consumer demand.
• Tap to pay obliterates China’s QR payment system. It is so much better and faster.
• Monaco is interesting because it is a tax haven for rich people, not businesses. This is uncommon.
• Europe and China do not seem to have widespread clothes dryers. Clothesline out the apartment window is common. Not sure if this is a wealth thing or cultural norms thing.
• Europe frequently has armed military soldiers (not police/SWAT) patrolling/monitoring. US never has this. China only in Beijing and Chengdu.
• Europe > China > US on holiness/awe of monuments. Euro churches dunk on Chinese temples.

• US > China > Europe on nature
• US > China > Europe on optimism/futurism/tech
• In some interesting ways the US and China are more similar to each other than either is to Europe. Both seem to be fairly optimistic, future focused places. Both are hyperconsumer places. I’ve heard it said that both the US and China replaced whatever culture they might have had with intense capitalism/consumerism. This seems somewhat accurate. China seems to be the most capitalist place I’ve ever been, albeit with the state as a huge player. In Europe, the state is also huge, but as a regulator/welfare facilitator. European consumerism seems obsessed with luxury primarily, whereas China seems to be promoting something akin to a Chinese Dream for the layman, with your new high tech Chinese EV and your new phone with 16 cameras and your handheld impeller fan and your DJI agriculture drone business. America still promotes the American Dream of course. The US invents some things (malls, theme parks) and China took them to insane scale. Europe seems to have made worse versions of them. Many such cases. I’d rather try to build my solar empire/flying cars/city of the future in China than Europe; I think it would actually be easier.
• US > China > Europe in how “real” the cities feel. In Europe, all of the cities feel like Disney world and it only serves tourists and they don’t actually do anything. (Obviously I am a tourist who went mostly to tourist places) My favorite cities were Swiss and Austrian because they felt like real non-tourist things happened there. China feels very impressive but the ghost cities and empty skyscrapers do exist. In the US almost everything that exists is real and economically feasible and there for a reason.
• There is an obvious alpine Europe (Switzerland, Austria) southern Europe (Spain, France, Italy) divide. Alpine Europe feels very German influenced. There are more chain stores. It is richer. It is more expensive. It is colder. The buildings are newer. It is less diverse. The churches have different architecture. There are more bookstores. More people reading on trains. There are fewer art stores. There are more solo/groups of only female/child travelers. More nature focused recreation. More bikers and bike infrastructure.
• The food in Europe is great but it wasn’t a massive slam dunk over the US. We really do have great food from all over the world here, especially if you live in a decent sized city. The breakfast pastry places however were amazing and something the US really doesn’t have at all outside of donut shops.

Europe is very “easy” for American travelers (Canada, Australia, New Zealand may be easier). Most everyone speaks enough English to communicate, you can read every sign, they have high quality infrastructure, super chill customs, pretty short flight from the east coast etc. The best parts of Europe are some of the most amazing places on earth, and they’re very easy to get to. China is amazing, but there is friction with visas, the great firewall, WeChat/Alipay superapp confusion, QR code hell, and a very significant language barrier that makes it somewhat hard for Americans to go there. This is probably the real reason Europe is so popular, the upside is among the best on earth, and there is negligible friction to get there and be there.

What I’m going to be up to

For reasons I won’t detail here I have the freedom to pursue my goals full time until mid-August. I am incredibly excited about this, this will allow me to spend maybe 10x the amount of time on my projects than I would’ve otherwise.

Until next time,

Matthew