Are you familiar with the saying "In Europe 100 miles is a long way, In the US 100 years is a long time"?

In Europe 100 miles is... an anglicism :-)

No, but now I am.

> 25 minutes on foot? It's more of a village than a city.

you can walk from side to side of Paris in a tad more than one hour with a good rhythm, and two hours if you take it normally.

Paris is ~10km across. The metropole region around it is much larger.

Considering Paris is roughly 10 km across North-South, that's about 12 min/km at an average human walking speed.

So, this city is about 2 km across, which is very small, a village, considering smaller cities are more sparsely populated than an European metropolis.

You're really fixated on this village thing.

Drop into street view in the city centre and have a look around. It's not a village.

1/25th the size of Paris is not what I would call a "village". Paris is a huge metropolis. It is a small-medium sized city.

Additionally, Paris is not exactly a demonstration of how larger cities need cars considering that about 70% of its inhabitants commute without using a car at all.

Depends on the country probably.

In my country villages are very often https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_settlement , going on for kilometers along some road, with farming land on both sides.

Small to medium cities (< 100 000 people) are often very dense because they're mostly made out of commieblocks or old tenament houses.

It's much easier to live without a car in a city.

BTW: this village goes on for 20 km. It has 6000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawoja

For comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionowo is the most densely populated city in Poland, it has about 50 000 people, and is about 3x5 km of low buildings. And still about 10% of the city is a forest :)

Cars waste so much space that people are used to bloated cities.

I'll settle for 3 hours and a croque-monsieur :)

It's the old town area only, of a city of 80,000 people.

with 80 000 people living there, it is not a village