[wott]

> Every city, no matter the size, feels alive. People live there. They don’t sleep in one area then go live in another.

Average commute time is the same in France as it is in the USA. (Of course, in both cases, it varies a lot depending on the area.)

I lived a short while in a suburb of Paris; that municipality had 1 bar/café/pub for 50,000 inhabitants...

I worked in a suburb of Toulouse in a public service. I was walking 1/2 or 3/4 of a mile to have lunch in 2 different schools depending on the day, that's about 30-40 minutes there and back; I basically never walked across any fellow pedestrian, even though most of the time I was walking along main streets and crossing part of the 'centre'. The whole place was covered in private housing developments, same as neighbouring suburbs. Everyone drives to the central area or to other suburbs specialized in offices, industries or retail where they have their job.

I worked in another suburb, just next to the border of the city. I was the only one in the whole building (shared by several small companies) who lived in the city, all other people lived in suburbs, often remote ones.

I am now back in the countryside. There are still a few shops where I am, but their disappearance (started looooon ago) hasn't completely stopped. People don't walk or ride to the shop 1/4 mile away from their home, they rather drive 2 times 10 miles to get to large supermarkets. The population slowly changes, many newcomers never walk out of their house, they only drive out of it. Recently a few shops/services have even closed doors in the centre, and reopened out of the village, on the side of the main road, with parking lots. Elders cannot get there by foot easily any more; one of those place even only planned an entrance for cars, not for pedestrians. Despite all the nice discourses, in the 2020s it keeps on evolving as it did in the 1970s.