Rick Steves: What Americans Can Learn From Europe’s People-Friendly Places
Rick Steves bicycling in Oslo, with guidebook notes in hand. (Source: Rick Steves.)
If Strong Towns and our members had their way, North America would have: more people-friendly places that foster commerce and interaction; transportation options that are safe, affordable, and often human powered; and infrastructure that enhances rather than menaces surrounding neighborhoods.
Rick Steves has spent a lot of time in places with all of these features. The guidebook author, tour operator, and PBS travel host has spent decades exploring the cosmopolitan capitals and lesser-known backroads of Europe. On his broadcasts, he’s often seen in urban settings, chatting with locals while buying ice cream or enjoying a picnic in a bustling piazza.
So, we thought Steves would be a great observer to cut through all the jargon and describe the lived experience in places that have prioritized people over cars and infrastructure.
Our conversation ranged from the importance of populated downtowns, to the social and economic benefits of shared spaces, to how every great place has hidden heroes who helped make it that way. Here are his insights (note that the transcript has been edited for length and context):
Reclaiming Cities From Cars
You know, it's funny, when Americans are in Europe, they marvel at the energy and the people friendliness of the urban cores. But oftentimes, they don't put it together.
But you walk around these towns—you walk around Rome, you walk around Copenhagen, you walk around Amsterdam and Warsaw—and think, “Where are all the cars? There's just happy people.” I was in Copenhagen once when they were really getting into this: people were walking around the streets wearing plywood cut out the size and shape of a car. And they would walk down the sidewalks in the streets, walking, taking up as much space as a car to make the point. And now when you look around, you realize there's no traffic in Copenhagen downtown. Stop, where are the cars? No cars. Where are the vehicles? 200 bicycles. You stop anywhere, you can see 200 bicycles, but you don't even notice them. And that's how people got there.
Just this last summer, I was in Copenhagen working on my guidebook. They create basins there where the people leave their bikes that are about two feet below street level. It's just an incline and then a basin, and everybody leaves their bikes there and they're out of your sight. It is right there at the station for the trams and the metro, and it's not accidental. It's leadership. And it's a community that is willing to bite the bullet and commit themselves to a pedestrian-friendly core.
A bike basin at a transit hub in Copenhagen. (Source: Rick Steves.)
“[I]t’s not accidental. It’s leadership. And it’s a community that is willing to bite the bullet and commit themselves to a pedestrian-friendly core.”
The pedestrian streets of Europe are beloved by locals and by travelers. You think of the Ramblas in Barcelona, think of Stroget in Copenhagen, you think of the big pedestrian street in Munich. But you know, Stroget in Copenhagen and the one in Munich were revolutionary when they happened. And the businesses along those streets were adamant against it. They just didn't want to be inaccessible by cars, but [ultimately] they went with it. And within a few years, they were glad they did. They were thriving, because there was no traffic, there were just a lot of people there—and the businesses on the neighboring streets wanted to go traffic free, too.
The Priorities of American Infrastructure
I think we have the infrastructure, but the priority for the infrastructure is not people, it's cargo. For Seattle or Portland in Europe, there would be a train every half hour. I wouldn't need a schedule, I would know that at 10 minutes after and at 40 minutes after, there's a bullet train going from my town to Portland, and it would have maybe five stops along the way. It would go 100 miles an hour, and it'd be affordable, it would build community, it'd be sustainable. But what happens when I take the train to Portland from Seattle? It stops in the middle of nowhere for 20 minutes because it's waiting for a freight train to go by. So, our priority is that kind of commerce. I've given up on taking the train to Portland; now I drive. It's just because I'm not cargo: If I was cargo, I'd love to be on a train. But I'm a human being. So, I have to wait.
“If I was cargo, I’d love to be on a train [in the United States]. But I’m a human being. So, I have to wait.”
The Piazza dei Signori in Padua, Italy. (Source: Rick Steves.)
What We Can All Learn From Italians
My favorite country is Italy. I often wonder why that is, and it’s occurred to me: it's the piazza. That's core, that's integral to what it is to be Italian in an Italian community, and it goes all the way back to Roman times. The piazza is where people come together, person to person without televisions, without locked doors, without garages, without siloing. It's young people, old people, romantic couples, people with babies, poor people, rich people—everybody's out licking their ice cream cones and checking in. The whole society is wired where people get together.
You have markets in each community, and people almost intentionally have small refrigerators under their sink rather than big refrigerators, and freezers in their garage so they only need to go shopping to the big box store every other week. They like to have to go shopping every morning. Not because it's cheaper—because it's not, it’s more expensive—but because it's part of the fabric of their community. They check in with the butcher, they check in with the baker, they check in with their neighbors. In the summer, we have a-once-a-week market in [Edmonds], my little town north of Seattle. And it's remarkable how everybody goes, “Wow, I haven't seen you for so long.” Well, it's because we are all in our cars and inside.
“They like to have to go shopping every morning. Not because it’s cheaper—because it’s not; it’s more expensive—but because it’s part of the fabric of their community. ”
In Europe, it's almost a conspiracy to have people together through markets and through piazzas and through traffic-free zones. Friends from school, they've been walking from one end of the traffic-free zone to the other, from the post that keeps the cars out at the top of the town, to the beach, where they launched their boats at the bottom of the town. And they just stroll and connect with their neighbors. And connecting doesn't happen accidentally, it happens intentionally.
Steves biking on a green arterial with tram tracks and bike lanes in Amsterdam. (Source: Rick Steves.)
The Netherlands Deserves Its Stellar Reputation
I was just in Amsterdam, and I took a picture of a green sweeping arc through the town. It had four shiny black stripes on it, and those were tram rails. There was foliage. There was the birdsong. There were cobbled pedestrian lanes, there were smooth bike lanes. And then there was that green park's swoop, which was the track for two trams. That was a congested car boulevard 10 years ago. Today, it's a success.
You just don't drive in Amsterdam; you bike or you take the tram or you walk. I looked at that, and I just thought, “That's the future.”
Populated Places Are More Welcoming
You know, I've interviewed people on my radio show who write books about [urban planning], and it's a science. I don't know all the numbers and the formulas, but in Europe, clearly, they're interested in keeping places with people living in them. You have people living upstairs and you have shops downstairs. You have your skyscrapers, oftentimes banished to the fringes of a city.
“When [an American city] vacates at night, it becomes dangerous. ”
When [an American city] vacates at night, it becomes dangerous. You get afraid when there’s no people out, and it causes people to have to travel more, and spend more time in traffic to get in and out of work. It doesn't lend itself to a vital community. So, what do you have? You've got a situation where, after dark, the urban core is just a scary, depressing place, and in a lot of cases in Europe, it'd be a thriving place. It's pretty simple, isn't it? People live there. There's public transit, and it's not ruled by cars.
How Short-Term Rentals Can Harm a City
I was just in Iceland filming and if there wasn’t an Airbnb, we wouldn't have had a place to stay. It was somebody's cabin way out in the middle of nowhere and it was just great. I don't think that caused a problem, but if you go to the Ramblas right now in Barcelona, I mean, it's a beloved pedestrian boulevard that used to be such a slice of life. There was the flower market, the bird market, the old timers who would sit and chomp on their cigars and read the paper—it was all just a festival of local living.
Now, there's none of that left. It's all tourism. There's no bird market, there's no flower market. There's nobody reading the newspaper. It's just slushies and fancy fruits on skewers for the tourists. And that's because of short-term rentals. Landlords realize that you can make more money by renting for five days to a tourist than renting all month to a pensioner. So it's just common sense: they're going to make more money, and they're going to raise their rent to the point where locals have to move out to the less desirable suburbs. The charming districts become overrun by tourists. But what made them charming was the little business metabolism that was made possible because local people lived there.
So, the irony is we come in and we take all the accommodations, the people who made the communities charming with all the businesses leave, those businesses then morph into tourist-serving businesses. And all you have is this big, disappointing place that used to be the Ramblas. In my guide book, it says “Ramblas RIP,” and that's the case in charming downtowns all over Europe. It's something that communities are struggling with.
Rick Steves’ schematic map of Istanbul’s public transit. (Click to enlarge. Source: Rick Steves.)
Why Steves Chooses Public Transit
I'm all excited about a new map I've written for my Istanbul guidebook (shown above). It’s a schematic-type thing to make transit so easy that even a tourist who doesn't speak a word of Turkish could use it to navigate the city of almost 20 million people with horrible traffic. But it's remarkable how well it works with just a handful of metro lines and tram lines. This is Istanbul, this is Turkey. This is a godsend for the locals, and they've committed themselves to that. And in my work as a travel teacher, I tell people: You could have your own limo parked outside of your hotel, but I'd rather have a transit pass.
“You could have your own limo parked outside of your hotel, but I’d rather have a transit pass.”
Even Europe Wasn’t Always Like This
In Europe, you see this commitment, and it's a slow morphing from traffic congestion. [Before these changes] I remember blowing my nose and the hankie would be black. I remember being bullied up against the wall and little narrow sidewalks by all the traffic, as I tried to go from one spot to the next in a town. And now, the roads are thinner, the sidewalks are wider. And the roads are used by local residents and service vehicles and police and public transit. And you can't get in there if you're just anybody who doesn't live there. They have a congestion fee: To go downtown, you have to pay a lot of money. I understand that keeps the traffic out, and it also provides a pool of revenue that can subsidize public transit. So, public transit can be more affordable and more frequent.
I was just in Warsaw and 70 years ago, there was not a building standing. And today, Warsaw is a thriving city, with a great public transportation system, nowhere near as wealthy as we are, but they have built that city from scratch. And it just reminds me we are not stuck with what we've got.
The Importance of Travel
We're in a crisis right now of governance in our society, with all the division we have and in a government that can't really function well. And it's because a good part of our society just is not very, let's say, engaged. That's one reason I'm an advocate for traveling. I think travel engages you. It inspires you to make a difference and lets you see what other societies are doing. So, you come home and you think, “Yeah, we could do that here in my town,” but it would take some local leadership.
Seeking Changes at Home
In my little town, I'm notorious as a crusader for a traffic-free downtown. We have a made-to-order traffic-free zone in the middle of our town—Edmonds, Washington—where you have a fountain and the oak trees, and theater and the cafes, and it's one block on either side of our Fifth and Main fountain. It's screaming “pedestrian zone!” And, you know, we try, and it's very controversial. I write an editorial about it. And people say, “Well, Rick, if you like Europe so much, why don't you just go back there to Europe? This is not Europe.” And then there's excuses, you know: “How can old people get to the shop if they can't park their car right in front of it?”
“In my little town, I’m notorious as a crusader for a traffic-free downtown.”
On the West Coast, we've had wide forks in the road and we've taken the wrong fork for all my life. When we look back on it, you can't Monday morning quarterback, but we built that freeway instead of building that metro.
What It Takes to Build a Strong Town
I live in a beautiful community, and it's so clear to me that beautiful communities don't just happen. They happen because of quiet heroism of local citizens who get involved, sit in meetings, stick at something they're passionate about, and make a difference in a grassroots kind of way. And whether you like the arts, or whether you like the marshlands, or whether you like the environment, or whether you like the beach walk, or whether you like a place for dogs, or whatever it is, if you just complain at your TV, you're part of the problem. And if you care about strong towns, there's probably an organization called exactly that.
Be a part of the bottom-up revolution. Become a Strong Towns member today.
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.