I often hear disabled people on reddit complain about how bad united states infrastructure is compared to the EU. But anyone who believes the they will have a better life in Europe because of the generally more extensive use of public infrastructure stronger and emphasis on walkability doesn't understand how broken and god awful accessibility is in the EU.

The last time I went to Spain, fully half of the streets in Madrid didn't have curb cuts. In London and Paris, they have much more extensive urban transit networks than in most cities of the United States, but you can almost make a drinking game out of whether or not there will be an actively maintained working elevator the near either your entry point or your destination.

And don't even get me started about the cobblestone sidewalks. Trips to Paris, London, Madrid, Warsaw, and Antwerp all required massive chair repairs when I got home, because the constant bumping of the rounded cobblestone streets literally rattled my chair to pieces. there is zero standardization of door thresholds, either for businesses or for public transport, so you are left at the whims of whether or not they have dedicated people ready to scurry out and haphazardly jam ramps in front of where you need to go.

All of this to say, the US isn't perfect, but people who criticize it for how hostile it is to disabled people on the basis of infrastructure have no conception of the role good architecture plays in determining quality of life and the good that laws like the ADA have done to mitigate all of the problems I mentioned above. And this isn't even unique to new construction. I have now lived in historic districts in the United states and traveled to many more, and i can say that even infrastructure dating back to the civil war is very often retrofitted to accommodate wheelchairs. good luck finding any of that in the EU. and if you do find it, the attempt to modernize oh places for accessibility or a haphazard and half-hearted at best.

I say this as somebody who has used a wheelchair since high school, no country I have yet visited beats the United States on ADA-style accessibility. Not a single one.