Reasons you wouldn’t move to US

[Preiu]

Dh has been offered a job in the US. The increase in salary would put us into a completely different wealth bracket but I really don’t want to move.

• fear of home invasion with guns
• school shooting - guns in general I guess
• American exceptionalism attitude annoys me
• Being away from family
• Not having Europe on doorstep

Can I ask if you have any other reasons

You need reasons why car dependency (i.e. being forced to use a car for every task) is a bad thing? Ok, here goes (in no particular order):

CO² emissions
Air quality
Noise pollution
Social isolation (particularly for kids, the elderly, and people with disabilities)
Visual blight (see photo)
Financial burden of maintaining roads and utilities
Financial burden of car ownership on poorer people
Unpaid labour for mothers having to ferry their kids everywhere
Road rage
Stress
Racism (zoning codes and highway expansion were designed to keep minorities away from white people)
Sedentary lifestyles
Favouring big box stores over 'mom & pop' stores

But most importantly of all, last year there were 42,514 people killed on American roads, with millions more injured. Motor vehicle crashes are neck-and neck with gun violence for being the leading cause of premature death in Americans. Even Washington DC - the state (I know that it isn't technically a state) with the best traffic safety record - has 65% more traffic fatalities per 100k pop than the UK. Mississippi's fatality rate is at third world levels, worse than Libya, Mali and Senegal.

That's why car dependency is a bad thing.

Sorry about that.

@LifeExperience

Healthcare is expensive in the US, but that is because it is very, very good and worth every penny.

Healthcare is expensive in the US, but that is because it is very, very good and worth every penny. generates vast profits for huge corporations.

@britinnyc

Why is driving everywhere always posted as a negative?

That attitude is why the US's carbon emissions per-capita are absolutely off the scale, making most of the rest of the world's efforts in curbing their own emissions to save the planet a lost battle.

I happen to agree car dependency is not such a great thing, but: The UK is still quite car dependent.

Also, posting single photos like that isn't terribly representative. I happen to know where that one is as I've been there (it's the main road leading out of Allentown, PA). Yes, many cities and towns do have similar commercial strips along highways, but it's hardly what all of the US looks like. I could post a photo of a British high street, or I could post one of the out of town retail park with the Tesco Extra.

People here seem to act as if no one in the UK even owns a car! Most of these things listed can also be true in the UK, you still have to maintain, pollution, road rage ugly street and accidents! It ain’t as if everyone is walking everywhere and super fit and active just because you have better public transit! And mothers still have to take their kids places/do the school run be it by car foot bus or train. My only point is driving places isn’t all that terrible. And electric cars are extremely popular in a lot of places, we don’t have a regular car anymore just electric. The “you have to drive everywhere is just one more way people from the UK like to be on their high horse about how morally superior they are to Americans yet I don’t know a single person in the UK who doesn’t own a car and doesn’t drive (it is only on Mumsnet that I encounter these people)

Also, Americans have school buses (apparently California really is a laggard for these). MUCH better than the school run!

Yes, school busses are great!

It’s one of the things that work really well over here - ours picks up DD at the top of our driveway! Although the downside is she has a very long bus ride because we are quite rural.

If I take her in the car it takes about 20-25 minutes but the bus takes nearly an hour.

The UK is more car-dependant than it should be. But the fact remains that I (in a village in coastal Wales, not a city or a commuter town) can easily live car free, with six buses per hour in each direction stopping within a 10 minute walk and a railway station 15 minutes away by bike.

Most people in the UK could survive if they lost their licences tomorrow. It's not as easy as it should be, but not as bad as most of the US.

The stroad photo was just an example of the visual blight caused by car-centric planning. For balance I'll include a British photo from the 1970s to show that cars cause concrete jungles all over the world:

It would depend on where exactly you would be and how far would the salary go in that area.

The north east has walkable cities with quite good public transport (it's said it is the only area in the US with intercity passenger trains relevant for commuting)
School buses.
I love Whole Foods market chain for food shopping - more expensive, but great offering.
The job might come with good health care package (or not)

I would say inquire about the annual leave - some Europeans managed to negotiate European like number of vacation days, but it definitely isn't common and he might end up with two weeks. The time off would be a deal breaker for me.

This highway in Texas has 26 lanes in total, 13 in each direction. I can't even imagine it.

You're not getting the point, are you? This is about car dependency. No one is suggesting that every last car should be scrapped, we are saying that lacking a choice in how to get around is a bad thing. Yes, many British (and Dutch and Danish) people own cars. But most of them don't use their cars for everything. They use the most appropriate method of transport for the situation.

For example, a fairly well-known hill farmer near here obviously mostly uses Land Rovers, tractors and quad bikes to go about his business, because they are the most effective transport when you live on a hill farm. But when he and his wife head down to London, they take the train. Because the train is a viable option for getting to London (even on a route served by the hapless Avanti), the heart of the city hasn't been decimated to build car parks and motorways (see artist's impression below).

In the US, many people have no choice but to drive. Walking to a grocery store is often dicing with death. Zoning codes in many jurisdictions prevent shops and bars from being opened in residential areas, so people are forced to drive to them. And then drive back, after a few drinks.

And yes, the UK will have to shoulder the cost of maintaining aging motorways too. But trust me, the cost per mile of maintaining the Katy Freeway will far exceed the cost per mile of maintaining the M4

I live in a suburban area outside of NYC that is 100% walkable. Very safe, great schools and award winning restaurants. This town isn't unique. There's loads of them! I have also lived in a car reliant area where my next door neighbour was about 1/4 of a mile down the street.

In both places, the one thing I don't/didn't do is sit in the kind of traffic the M25 offers on a pretty much daily basis.

Better than the kids walking/cycling to school (by themselves once old enough)? I think not.

That would be lovely if they could. And yet, even in North London (where I did not drive regularly until having my first child) I saw school run mums all the time. And children do walk and cycle: you need to live a certain distance away to get the bus. My kids did walk to elementary school in one house we lived in.

By the way, the 26 lane figure on the Katy Freeway includes frontage roads, which shouldn't count according to transport engineers. The widest highway in North America is actually the 401 in Toronto near the airport. I have driven on it, and do not recommend doing so.

My kids have actually never been driven to school or taken a bus, they have always walked and we have lived in both NYC and CA. My point about driving is not to debate car dependency, I was trying to point out that driving places can be fine and that life in the US isn’t actually that different. But of course as with all US threads here it becomes some sort of philosophical debate on why the U.S. is so morally destitute and the UK is so much superior. Even if the OP kind of baited that type of response it is supposed to be a thread about actually moving the the US which should, in my opinion, focus more on the day to day. We don’t all love Trump and think the US is the greatest but in reality very few pole have the privilege of being able to pick where to live based on their morals, reality just that idealistic and we choose to live where life offers us what we need for our families. Any poor soul trying to objectively evaluate moving to the U.S. would need to stay far away from these posts so as not to feel like a morally bankrupt fool for even considering it, even more so when you couple the moral high ground with the highly reliable information passed on based on one visit to Orlando in 2015. U.S. posters aren’t defensive we just want to be able to give a full picture, good and bad, but are drowned out by blanket statements that are entertaining in how factually inaccurate they are.

It's actually the same sort of rubbish which is spouted about any country which isn't the UK - have you ever read a thread about life in Australia?

And posters have the audactiy to complain that Americans think they live in the greatest country on earth! 🤔

All of those, plus:

Trump
Politics in general
Healthcare
Employment law
Lack of culture/arts/history
Food quality/chemical additives - much of what's classed as food ingredients is actually banned in the most of the world
Insincerity/fakery in customer service
Drive everywhere culture
Flag-waving 'patriotism' (it's cultish)

"Lack of culture/arts/history"

That says an awful lot more about your ignorance than it does about the US. And I quite like the supposed insincerity in customer service - it makes my day go better than rudeness (when I come back to the UK it's always a bit of a shock to the system.)

I have lived in three different US cities. One was fabulous for culture and it was all quite accessible. One was fabulous for culture but it was all very hard to get to (hours driving/on public transport, and very expensive) and one had (I remember sending this to my mother in amusement) 5 performances of the Nutcracker and 5 of The Messiah within a few weeks at Christmas by different groups, and that was it for culture.

No, "much" of what's allowed isn't banned. (Not to mention, some of it is politics. Like the whole chlorinated chicken row? It's allowed but only a tiny percentage of US chicken is treated that way. It suddenly became an issue because a trade deal was on the table and British farmers were worried about dumping. That's happened with other products. And the GMO ban isn't at all scientific. No study has established that GMOs are unsafe for health.)

I absolutely despise when people say the US (or Canada, or Australia) has no history. Go visit Canyon de Chelly. People have lived in that canyon for 5,000 years.

I was trying to point out that driving places can be fine

No one said that it isn't. What various posters have said is that they would hate to be forced to drive everywhere. Many suburbs are like that, you're pretty much stranded without a car.

No one has said that the UK's perfect either. I'm envious of the Dutch way of life, and the public transport provision in Switzerland.

To play devil's advocate, I have friends that have moved to Arkansas due to a very lucrative job offer - big salary, all the perks. They lived in a 1950s 3 bed semi in Woking and commuted into London. They now have a HUGE house, hang out with sports mad people and their DC are thriving at school.

They frequently go on wilderness breaks. They look like they are having a great time on FB

Health care, guns and their now frankly insane politics.