Most people. I lived in Ann Arbor, quality of life was a smidge better (horrible food compared to California, bad climate, very high property taxes, horrifying roads...) but jobs for a tech worker were really few and far in between.
Let's face it, if you don't find a remote job (and they are still difficult to find) then your reality is probably a lot more likely to look like mine than yours.
The US is a lot more car dependent than any other place on earth, like it or not.
Even then... I have the full-time remote job. The prospect isn't getting the remote job, it's hanging onto it _for the rest of my career_. I still live in SoCal, despite desperately wanting to leave it behind, almost entirely because I feel compelled to live near a strong tech / job market for the job security that it provides myself and my family.
I would say largely the same, but mostly put the emphasis on housing. Capital isn't regional anymore, meaning housing largely goes for whatever people dare to sign for. This makes it a lot harder to live a more modest life. Disproportionately hurting smaller cities since being cheap is part of what they have/had going for them. Basically if housing was significantly cheaper for a decent quality of life, rather than mostly just somewhat cheaper, job security would be less of a concern.
No argument from me that most of the US is car dependent, but I will contend that it's a personal choice.
I've only been working remote for 5 months - before that I biked to work for 10 years. In fact, I still do all of my errands, shopping, etc. by bike. No doubt it's not as easy as in some European cities, but it's a possibility for people who prioritize it.
I've never lived in a place where going without a car was remotely feasible - at least not in the US. I've lived in Norway for some years, and do not drive.
First and foremost, lets be clear: I lived in small to medium-sized towns in the midwest. Two towns had taxi service, and one had a limited bus service. The town with taxis only... well, those taxis weren't reliable. You couldn't pre-order a taxi to go to work and the waiting time could be anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours. They weren't cheap: Taking a taxi to a minimum wage job would usually cost an hour of work.
Living outside of the small towns was no picnic without a car: You couldn't ride a bike on the shortest route, and it took more time. Biking was often unsafe: You were expected to use the road much like a car. Except lesser.
All of the places had a lack of continuous sidewalks to walk on and drivers that rarely slowed down for you. Pedestrians have the right of way in name only.
Not to mention... distance. In the small town, I tried walking everywhere for a while. I could not buy clothes outside of dollar general. Lots of things weren't possible to find in town. I was lucky enough to have a grocery store: Good thing, too, because there was a 20 minute drive to the towns with larger ones.
IN the larger cities, most residential areas were kept away from the areas with commerce. Wal-mart did not have sidewalks leading to it in one town.
IF you do it despite all of this, you still have to have the right job. Retail is going to expect you to be clean and dry when you get to work. SO will a restaurant. Some of these places have little to zero break room and no safe place to keep a bicycle or your helmet.
Oh, yeah: In almost all of these places, you were expected to only walk during "normal" hours. IF you walked to a 24-hour store at 2am or home after getting off work at 3am, you drew police suspicion, doubly so if you are young, look poor, a minority.
Some jobs won't hire you if you don't have a car or steady transportation. Walking and cycling did not count.
And sure, all this is still technically a choice, but not much of one. You have to reach a level of privilege before you can do this stuff safely and reasonably - at least in the states.
I can so much see my own US experience in this. And it was not some remote rural place, but center of LA - Hollywood. I did some 'work'and'travel' (without that travel part) during summer break on university, worked for Universal studios theme park. They got us accommodation nearby just next to Warner bros studios, straight distance to work was maybe 500m, but since there were only highways/fast roads and nothing for pedestrians, it took me 45 minutes of walk to get to the work. I could cut it to 35 min if I walked on the side of the roads, quite unsafe and asking for some police trouble.
It was not just this - public transport was abysmal, nothing reliable, bus could be easily 1 hour late or just wouldn't show up. Many places simply didn't have a pedestrian path to them. It was 2004 but I don't think major shift happened since.
I have lived in Washington in the mid 2000s and now for 5 years, in Olympia and in Seattle. I have experienced none of these issues and much prefer the attitudes of drivers here toward pedestrians than drivers in my home country, FWIE. I do not know how to drive.
This is why I stated where I lived - I always figured a few communities actually does things better. I'm happy it isn't everywhere, but boy oh boy was it like this in the Midwest (Indiana, to be precise).
Moving to Norway was night and day, though. Busses that run basically on time. Pedestrian paths all over that cut through neighborhoods and are safe. Actual right of way for pedestrians. Bridges or tunnels over busier roads and in my city, they are slowly routing traffic away from congested areas to make them walkable. I can get to other cities using public transportation as well, including the airports. I am not legal to drive here. We own a car (Spouse drives), but we only use it a few times a month.
This is basically "bootstraps" talk applied to transportation. Biking in most of the US feels uncomfortable and dangerous. Bike lanes are scant, protected bike lanes rarer still, where they do exist they tend to pop in and out of existence at random intervals, so it's not exactly a surprise that most avoid it.
There's a reason few people bike for transportation in the US, and that's that biking in the US is mostly really terrible. It can be done, sure, but it sucks enough to where very few want to do it. Saying "well it's still a personal choice" is like looking at the cycle of poverty and saying, "yeah poor people in poor neighborhoods have some serious systemic problems, but if they really tried they could still make it work!"
Bicycling in general is terrible, though. I say this as someone who did bicycle and walk as primary transport for a lot of their life. Bicycling is a lot of fun in good weather and on a gentle route, but really sucks otherwise, and that's often a lot of what happens in areas of the USA. Even if lanes were made and infrastructure was better, it doesn't change the climate, the slope of the roads, the effort expended for a mild speed boost, or the distance between things.
The problem is there's a large, noisy cadre of bicycle enthusiasts who spend tons of money on their hobby and think it's the answer to the world's problems. They tend to dominate conversations like this.
It's really not. It has its disadvantages, sure, but there's plenty of advantages to it, too. In comparison to cars, it's healthier, kid-friendly, cheaper for the user, cheaper for the government, less noisy, less pollution, less danger generation, better for the community, etc. And it's quite pleasant with the right infrastructure.
You're exaggerating the downsides here. Climate? Tokyo has a high bike mode share with plenty of heat and humidity in the sumnmer, Oulu a high bike mode share even with near-endless winter. Hills? E-bikes are rapidly becoming cheaper and more common. Distance? Well, that's part of the land use/infrastructure problem. America in general has been designed to be hostile to anything that's not a car, and that hurts walking, it hurts transit, and it hurts biking. It needs to be fixed for all those.
Biking doesn't have to cover every person or every trip, but declaring that it's "terrible in general" is just projecting your own preferences onto the world. Reality begs to differ: we can see that places that have the right infrastructure and land use see high bike rates. Period.
Now, maybe you personally would still avoid biking in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but that has little to do with whether it's good general policy.
> The problem is there's a large, noisy cadre of bicycle enthusiasts who spend tons of money on their hobby and think it's the answer to the world's problems. They tend to dominate conversations like this.
This is wrong for a couple reasons:
1. Biking is an excellent option for a variety of reasons. Most Americans are plainly ignorant of how it can work. Not that it's their fault, really: everywhere they've lived, biking is awful, so naturally it must be always be awful, right? Same thing with public transit.
2. The kind of people that would benefit most by things like protected intersections and protected bike lanes is not the lycra-wearing, dentist-bike-riding, "take no prisoners in the war against cars" crowd. The kind of people that benefit from Dutch-style bike infrastructure are ordinary people who do not think of themselves as cyclists, but just people who happen to bike.
Let's face it, if you don't find a remote job (and they are still difficult to find) then your reality is probably a lot more likely to look like mine than yours.
The US is a lot more car dependent than any other place on earth, like it or not.