I’m traveling through Puerto Rico. On every nice beach, when there are people, they are playing loud music. Now that is part of the local culture. To me (a European), it is abhorent, ruining the supposedly relaxing atmosphere of a beach (even more so that the music to me seems extremely repetitive).

I could not convince anyone here to stop doing this. Again, for locals, this is their culture.

Similarly, I don’t think most Americans can grasp the difference between American cities (including in Puerto Rico) built for cars vs for pedestrians. Most will argue (including here), that this is a function of the size of the place. And America is big, and in places sparsely unpopulated, undeniably. But this is not the reason. Europe too is big. With many less populated places. And there are cars everywhere, most people own one.

It’s now cultural. Culture can change, but when combined with architecture at an industrial scale, I’m afraid the change will take much longer than a natural human lifetime.

People can rant and rail about America's car-centric culture, or they could just accept that the culture is what it is and work to mitigate the negative aspects of it. I don't get why so many people feel they need to tilt at windmills this way.

They probably find it equally abhorrent that a European would come and police their culture. Please don't travel somewhere and complain about local culture. You're a guest, possibly and unwanted one.

This interview needs to be edited a bit; just posting the transcript of the zoom call really hampers the readability and flow. What works for a podcast is not the same as what works for a written piece.

A big part of why college towns work so nicely is economic circumstances of the student body. Simply put most students aren’t bringing a car to campus and by definition now need to live somewhere closer to get to class. And on top of that the town is a monocrop where maybe the couple tens of thousands of kids are the vast majority of the population.

This is why it can’t really play out as nicely everywhere. You might work across town from your partner vs merely across campus, or in another town. Your location is compromised by definition and not benefiting from economies of scale like it was when it was at least compromised with another 40k people in your demographic with a similar commute and life pattern within 2 square miles. And you don’t have to pay a couple thousand a year for parking privileges either so you might be taking the car on trips that would have been a forced walk in college for lack of car.

The disneyland point is a bit tired and worn imo among internet urbanists and doesn’t even make sense in practice if you’ve ever been to disneyland. Main street isnt the draw. It is this strip of shops you are obligated to walk through as you enter the park to try and tempt you from your dollar. You can’t even hang out there; all the shops are packed with people looking at merchandise, all the restaurants on main are like coffee and ice cream “please leave and keep walking” places, and during fireworks display it is a miracle and a testament to the staffing that there isn’t a crowd crush from people leaving through the bottleneck as well as people staying to see fireworks framed with the castle. In these situations they actually open up a staff only alley to the public that is parallel to main street to relieve some of this bottleneck.

In my experience the transient nature of the college town population means that they're all kind of run down in a particular kind of way, especially housing (how many drunken ragers can a 1 bedroom apartment really handle?). It's nice that they can be beacons of culture in otherwise rural areas, but there's definitely downsides to having a bunch of kids move in and out constantly.