My experience in continental Europe differs from Catsby and is more akin to CD's. Working class families only have one car, even in small cities/towns and suburbs that aren't walkable for everything you need, as you'd find in the large cities.
Crime is crazy-- my rental car in Catania, Sicily was stolen right out from in front of the hotel where I'd parked it normally and legally. When I went to the agency and told them, they just issued me another one. They warned me if it happened again then I might need to fill out some paperwork.
On the subject of Crime—
America’s underlying ‘drug despair’ causes and reinforces a different reality of crime not readily seen in Europe. America’s drug culture is more deeply rooted. Not only are ‘street drugs’ (heroin, meth) and ‘party drugs’ (cocaine, ecstasy) more prevalent, but Americans are uniquely conditioned into a runaway drug culture through several generations of addictive prescriptions. Benzos, Ambien, Percocet, Adderall, Lexapro – all of which (except Lexapro) are substituted for and cut into street drugs, widening the road to heroin or crack addiction that much more for a decreasingly religious, decreasingly family-strong population.
America’s drug culture is a primary driver behind the enthused state level legalization of marijuana, something for which there is almost no demand for in Europe.
To those who might counter with Amsterdam’s cannabis bars, the Netherlands has spent decades deemphasizing their cannabis tourism by not granting any new cannabis bar licenses since the 80s. What’s left of Amsterdam’s cannabis tourism is dependent on bars retaining their licenses. By the 90s their cannabis tourists were almost exclusively American or British; the French, Germans, and Russians were more interested in the prostitutes. And by the 2010s much of the American ‘pot tourists’ dropped off once Colorado and others legalized their own cannabis sales.
Nowhere in Europe does city center reek of lingering pot fumes that’s overtaken the downtowns of our Western cities. And outside of a few slums, nowhere in Europe is drug abuse as visible as on street-level America with its increasing overdoses and homelessness.
Take for example my recent morning commute to work. I called an ambulance because of a body in the street. Thankfully he was alive, still in his hospital gown and just discharged from the hospital for an overdose that he was still coming down from.
