Originally Posted by
McBTC
It seems pretty much, jam-packed. Even The Hague which is Netherlands 3rd third-largest city (after Amsterdam and neighboring Rotterdam) with its >500K population has a suburban area where >1M people live.
Stadjer would know better than I would, but I think there are relatively few Dutch cities where much housing exceeds three stories high. There are downtown areas with taller buildings, but they're certainly not jam-packed with sky scrapers. I think you're right about bustle, but I think that is caused by a lot of human traffic, because people can walk out of buildings to go shopping, visit others, go to cafes and restaurants, etc. a lot.
I think there are a lot of suburbs that are biking distance, so they're not that close to the city center, but also not that far.
California's 39M population may be more than 2x as large as Netherland's but Cali is also >11 times bigger. You also get a lot less square footage of living space per person in all of the old Euro cities. Many have a more car-intensive lifestyle than what the LCF movement approves but I wouldn't be surprised if many of them put a lot more miles a year on the bikes that they also own.
From what I've read/seen, CA has 10-lane highways with congested traffic, and there are people who have multi-hour driving commutes to suburbs many miles from their workplace.