> With the possible exception of people living in old cities whose roads are just too small.
It's more the rule than the exception.
European car makers have a specific car category named "City cars", big enough to host 4 to 5 people but as small as possible to be easy to park etc.
Driving, and worse parking, an american sized SUV in europe is very painful. This is why he don't understand.
American cities are modern and built for cars, most big european cities have been built for walkers and horses, so now we got a tons of oneway streets and a general lack of space to park cars.
It kind of depends where you live in the US. I live in a rural PA town where they have built highways over dirt roads and the main state route into town is a two lane country street that carries 18 wheelers every hour of the day and has a never ending backup.
Parking on main street, for example, is nigh impossible. Parts of it aren't wide enough for many cars to go past one another while the streetside parking is in use (and it always is, the town has no parking since... who needed parking in 1800?). And then there is a big state university in town, so you end up getting delivery trucks to the campus all the time and some drivers don't have the experience to know not to try taking an 18 wheeler down main street.
> Driving, and worse parking, an american sized SUV in europe is very painful.
This is a very important distinction! What a European considers a huge SUV is a small town car in the US. At least judging from what I've seen on my visits.
Combine that with a fairly sophisticated highway system that runs everywhere around the country, a post-war boom in car and suburban home ownership, and low cost of fuel, and it becomes imbued within the culture as the norm.
It's more the rule than the exception. European car makers have a specific car category named "City cars", big enough to host 4 to 5 people but as small as possible to be easy to park etc.
Driving, and worse parking, an american sized SUV in europe is very painful. This is why he don't understand.
American cities are modern and built for cars, most big european cities have been built for walkers and horses, so now we got a tons of oneway streets and a general lack of space to park cars.