Europe's "law and order" urbanism

Stricter gun laws and stricter enforcement

I love walkable cities with mass transit and traditional urbanism, but I actually don’t love huge cities.

In the United States, these things tend to go together. New York City is gigantic and accounts for a huge share of America’s transit usage, and the other cities with meaningful transit ridership also anchor really large metro areas. Something that I always enjoy about visiting Europe is the prevalence of small city urbanism. We spent a few days earlier this summer in Juan-les-Pins, a small beach town full of mid-rise apartment buildings. You can walk to restaurants and supermarkets and the beach, and a train station nearby offers frequent service to other Riviera towns, as well as Nice and Marseille.

Beyond public policy, there are historical and economic reasons why the United States doesn’t have a lot of places like that. But it’s cool.

We also went to Lyon, which is beautiful, and a real city but not a gigantic one. The metro area has 2.3 million people, comparable to the Pitts…