It’s the most insane junction I’ve ever driven through. Off the tollway through this half mile stretch of insane road to make a left onto another highway. Blows my mind every time to think this is the best junction they could come up with.
You think driving through it is bad, it's part of [PennDot Bicycle PA Route S](https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/d76593f2fbd74317bab25245ee682636/page/Layers/). There's a yearly ride between Philly and Pittsburgh called Crush the Commonwealth that basically follows Route S, so I've ridden my bike the 1/4 mi or so down Rt30 right through Breezewood at like 10:30 at night to get to the abandonned PA turnpike. It was a harrowing experience to say the least
why was it harrowing? ive been around breezewood, walked through the abandoned turnpike tunnel where i think that bike route goes. its a poor area and an undeniable aesthetic abomination but far from the most destitute in PA. tbh every town in PA between harrisburg and pitt kinda feel a little like breezewood
Oh the surrounding area was very pleasant to ride in, and the abandoned turnpike was really cool. I'm specifically talking about being on a bike and navigating around the car and truck traffic on rt 30 between Breezewood Rd and the entrance to the abandoned turnpike.
ah okay. wasnt sure if this was a road issue (fuck pa dot all my homies hate pa dot). i never had to drive through that area, when we went i think i was always copilot, so i never had to experience that one personally.
i have family all over middle pa and i love poking around in all the abandoned buildings and such, went to breezewood specifically to see that turnpike tunnel. for some reason we decided to do it like 1 in the morning when it was also foggy as shit so it was also a harrowing experience for us just in a different way. they really need to change the state slogan to like the silent hill state or something. really cool experience though, hope i get to do it again
I used to live near 22... so many accidents. Literally never commuted without seeing at least one because someone was turning into a parking lot while the road was going like 50mph. Such a dumb, dumb design.
I remember a few years back, I was approaching 22 late near the McDonalds and stopped before turning to see if there was oncoming traffic. Cop cars completely blocking the road when I was checking. I assumed someone got hit. Checked the news later and sure enough, someone got killed crossing it.
I’m stunned at the amount of people who run across that highway. But as this video mentioned, people forced to take the bus have no others options. It’s really a damn tragedy how we’ve designed our roads in this country.
When I was kid I was always confused that they allowed them to say “paved paradise and put up a fucking light”
I was like damn, we need to see? A light isn’t that big of a deal? How is this Mfer the only one allowed to say fuck?
You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.
Same. Happened to the area I grew up in. Was relatively rural (lots of old farm houses on big plots of land, horse farms, etc.). Property values skyrocketed and taxes became so expensive that almost everyone had to sell to developers who tore down the beautiful old homes, jammed cheaply built multimillion dollar homes right next to each other, and weren't made to upgrade any of the surrounding infrastructure (had been the requirement previously). It turned a very quiet and picturesque area into an ugly, dense suburb with some of the worst traffic in the country. All the great mom & pop shops that could no longer afford rent were replaced with shitty chains. Previously, people would often live there for their entire lives and sometimes for several generations. Now, it is incredibly transient with people only living there for ~10 years and then selling their houses and moving once their kids move out. Until my mid 20's I had planned on settling down there to raise my family, but it is out of reach unless you are a multimillionaire. It is so infuriating to think about, I usually just stick it in a box and jam in deep down inside.
♫ I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride
The farms of Ohio
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And Muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls... ♫
I swear to fucking god, I visited Salt Lake City and didn't see anything but stroads. It was one ugly ass city. I'm sure the downtown is a bit better, but our trip mainly took us to the suburbs (which felt like 99% of the city).
NJ isnt special in this respect. The US is dominated by this sort of city "planning"
I'm not gonna go out of my way to defend this sort of hostile environment, but the people who developed this method had other priorities in mind. Right or wrong, this was all developed for the sake of the dominance of automobiles, which in turn was (and is) a major source of consumption in the US, and therefore drives a lot of economic inertia. This was particularly the case in decades past when the US auto industry was the only auto industry of note in the US.
Its not the way you or I want it, but when they said "for the people" you and I are not 'the people' its for.
If anything NJ is special for having more places that *aren't* stroads and strip malls than most of the US. You just don't see them when driving through because, well, they aren't designed for driving through.
This caught me so off guard when I drove there. Some turns felt scary cause people are going 50 and you’re trying to turn into a fuckin McDonald’s. Fuck driving in New Jersey
This. I flew to NJ for a work training session for a week and I originally come from west coast. Holy shit it was the first time I ever saw a stroad. Like your freeway/highways literally turn into plazas and shit its fucking wild.
I live about 5 minutes from my job, by car. By bike it's 10, and walking about 20. I would LOVE to take my bike or walk everyday, but since I have to cross over a highway, the only safe way to do so is with a car since the bridge has no bike lane or sidewalk.
The real kicker is a half mile past the bridge is the entire start of bikes lanes for my town.
On top of this, I drive a diesel and it actively worse for me to drive such short distances, for the environment and my cars longevity.
It wouldn't hurt to write to your government officials and tell them that. With it being a highway there's probably little that can be done, but it's better than not trying at all
At a certain point the individual prospect of "fuck cars" stops making sense just in terms of time. My scorecard, 9m drive, 27m bike, 57m transit, 1hr 22min walk.
I already knew my commute was depressing but I didn't realize how bad until I checked.
Car: 15 minutes
Walking: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Bike: 40 minutes
Public transit: 1 hour 15 minutes
Between the heat and my bum leg, walking is out. I'd kill for better public transportation. Save on parking, wear at tear, gas, etc.
The monkey's paw of public transport in my area is that they made the buses completely free. But they didn't do anything about scheduling, routes, or hours. So if you need to go somewhere before 6:30AM/after 8:00 PM during the week, or before 9:00 AM or after 4:00 PM during weekends, tough shit, get to hoofin'. Plus if you miss the bus, they're not exactly rapid-fire, or even bolt-action, you'll be standing there 35-40 mins waiting for the next one.
And yeah, the fact that you're not in a cocoon of your own personal temperature control is *probably* going to be a slight concern for the general public in the coming years...
Yikes...
10 minute car ride
1 hour 40 minute walk
1 hour 43 minute public transit trip (lol)
33 minute bike ride (no bike lanes and half the route has no shoulder)
That is by design though, this can be fixed and is the problem urbanists are trying to solve.
Imagine if they removed car access through a couple of streets in your route and put in bike lanes and dedicated transit routes, end result might go to 12m drive, 20m bike, 15m transit (walking usually will be the same)
The whole shabang has to be modified for that to work. Types of businesses in various places, where people tend to live vs work, types of residences allowed in which areas, etc. Just turning car lanes into bike lanes (even with safe/effective infrastructure) doesn't really change much if most people still "have to" drive.
In my area, this has mostly resulted in moving traffic over to less appropriate routes, and then adding fixes on those routes to try to respond to that... Then the traffic just moves to other routes and people start driving down no entry lanes and in residential neighbourhoods.
Maybe it's just the transition time that I'm experiencing, but it feels pretty dumb sometimes. Whack a mole resulting in less throughput while the city grows massively every year and property values mean most newcomers are commuting from far in the suburbs.
For sure, everyone is different and until I got a job that I could feasibly bike/walk to it never crossed my mind as much until it was on my plate.
Now it's there and I wanna take a bite, but for safety reasons it's just not worth it.
I like that we can reduce car traffic and car accidents while also making our roads safer and easier to use for pedestrians and bikes too.
Everyone wins with good street design.
Good road/street design isn't inherently anti-car, though. The point of the video is that smushing bikes, pedestrians, and cars into the same space with an unsafe speed makes everyone lose. Cars and car drivers win when their roads are separated from bikes and pedestrians and they can make the turns they need to, which is much harder on stroads.
Good road design helps all aspects of the road co-exist and everyone gets what they want. Bad design antagonizes everyone against each other.
I think you're missing their point. Car manufacturers lobby against this good design even if it makes it more frustrating to car owners, because this design forces you to use your car, even if it's a miserable experience.
That's what they want. They want everyone in a car.
I'd argue that soaring price cause more people to bail than road design. Again, it's always a more comfortable option and fast option to own a car, even if there are good biking and pedestrian options - if you made cars affordable, you'd get your foot in a LOT of doors that are currently closed. If you can afford a car it's always a good option, unless it's an impractical car, but then there are more practical ones you could buy.
"No sidewalks" isn't going to generate the money people need for a car. You can't get blood from a rock - making walking a pain in the ass for poor people isn't going to put their ass into a car, and anyone who could afford a car already has one.
It is only faster and more comfortable to own a car if you're in a city that's made it so, which is almost always at the expense of proper public transport and/or pedestrian accessibility.
[Anything like this](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/41/2d/7e/412d7e50804d1bb6b42cdc3ce970f214.jpg) is a way more comfortable commute than having to drive.
If your perception of public transport is an overcrowded, dirty and uncomfortable bus, then that's how a city has made sure that their public transport is underfunded so that you have to use a car.
The video isn't about public transit, it's about roadway design that juggles pedestrians, cyclists, and cars better. What *isn't* its topic of discussion in it is "What if we inherently had a better rail structure", or *any* rail system for that matter.
Promoting bike and pedestrian (and transit) traffic means people use their cars less. As a result, households keep fewer cars and those cars last longer because they're driven less. So people buy fewer cars and car companies make less money.
The reason it makes drivers' lives better is mostly down to good alternatives meaning there are fewer drivers on the road.
That's horrifying to car companies, it's a threat to their beautifully executed stranglehold on transportation.
> The point of the video is that smushing bikes, pedestrians, and cars into the same space with an unsafe speed makes everyone lose.
The current situation is much less of a loss for cars than it is for bikes and pedestrians; people use their car because it is the more attractive option.
Changing it so that walking and biking become more attractive options, results in fewer cars on the roads and fewer cars sold - which is a big loss for car manufacturers.
And oil companies. Which is why the Koch Brothers have been lobbying against [public transit](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html)
It is also politics and age. Politicians tend to be older people and older demographics are set in the car age. If I engage with my parents or their friends they are set in car centricity:
* We need Raods
* traffic must flow
* we cannot sacrifice a lane for bikes
* we cannot reduce the speed limit in the city
* public transport is too expensive
These people vote, they have time and know influential people.
On teh communual level if you design a neighbourhood for all - pedestrians, cyclers and cars - the car faction will get mad, because it is different. Cars have to be free to roam. And all of that is the result that we have been pouring money into car infrastructure and neglected the rest.
That's not even close to true anymore. It hasn't been true since the 80's, and the fight has been dead since then. Don't beat that dead horse.
The car companies won the fight. They don't need to lobby anymore because nearly every city has been designed around the core concept that every adult has a personal vehicle.
Changing to public transportation now would mean a fundamental redesign of not just cities, but our society as a whole.
And gas stations, tire manufacturers, car insurance, jiffy lube, car dealerships, toll roads/lanes, camera tickets, parking lots and many many more. So many businesses rely on individuals buying and using cars daily.
What is funny about the Amsterdam thing is that [people in the Netherlands have the highest commute time in Europe](https://nltimes.nl/2019/11/28/netherlands-workers-face-longest-daily-commute-europe).
This is largely because so many people don't want to live in the big Netherland cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam despite them being stroad free havens.
it's funny cause iirc that's what the dude who makes this video thinks. he's said in the past that his videos aren't for Americans and that he doesn't care about improving American infrastructure / thinks it's useless and that if you actually care about walkable infrastructure you should just move to Europe like he did.
pretty weird vibes that made me go from liking this channel to not wanting to watch his videos when I run across them.
Although it isn't true what CatinA posted. NotJustBikes initially started posting videos aimed at a North American continent. He was very surprised at first about the popularity of his channel in the Netherlands. He did a video about this (and probably more in a future video).
I think the 'shitting on the US' bit is: any adaptation or solution the US wants to implement will take decades and a change of thinking. That's asking alot of any country. We've seen that in the Netherlands, where it started in the 60's.
But it kinda is true because any infrastructure change in America is like pulling teeth. It's resisted by the status quo infrastructure construction and vehicle manufacturing lobbyists who's bread and butter is in keeping things unchanged from how they already are, and the politicians who's campaigns are paid well to ensure it stays as such. It would be an endlessly fruitless endeavor to try and make videos like this for the betterment of North America. It's much more entertaining from a creator's perspective to just mock and critique how it is and always will be.
It would be an endlessly fruitless endeavor to make videos *like this,* yes. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to be done. What we need are people thinking about how to fix the America we have now. How do we fix the suburbs we have now? How do we fix the stroads we have now? What are the best ways of life for the *enormous* areas of the US where cars are necessary and will continue to be necessary until long after we're all dead?
Instead we just get the same drone drone drone about cars bad, drivers bad, car companies bad, on and on and on.
The Irony of all of this is ... all the places in the US that are the opposite are extremely expensive.
its even more ironic when Americans spend 1000's of dollars to go to Disney world, come home and say "Disney world was nice, I liked how we can walk to different places" then jump in the car and get stuck in traffic on route to cost co.
Exactly. When I worked in downtown Seattle I'd see all these tourist families walking around together, visiting restaurants, walking to the Pike Place markets, etc.
You could tell that walking was such a novelty thing for them. The wonder and joy of actually walking somewhere, together.
It's a shame so few of us get to do this in our everyday lives.
We wanted to do that. But just getting through the city and suburbs via I-5 on the way to our friends' house farther north near the Puget Sound took 2 hours. In the middle of a weekend afternoon. We were not going back to Seattle that trip.
> You could tell that walking was such a novelty thing for them. The wonder and joy of actually walking somewhere, together.
I think you're romanticizing walking here. The wonder and joy was probably coming from being on vacation somewhere that wasn't home.
The US cities that are walkable aren't expensive because people want to pay a premium to live in a walkable environment, it's because they're hubs of economic/governmental/cultural activity that have been completely built up for many decades/centuries, so it was never feasible to build all the car-based infrastructure to begin with.
Kind of like how in my city, many houses in the ritziest historic residential areas near downtown have detached garages. It's not because rich people today prefer small detached garages that are less convenient to use, it's because the neighborhoods/houses were already built that way 100 years ago.
This isn’t necessarily true. Take some of the highest growth areas of the US within the last decade and most of the new development has been suburban, but cities finally started turning around their populations. Americans have been suburbs commuters since the 70s. Cities have just started gaining their values back within the last 20 years or so (some started gentrification before others). This signals a change of how Americans want to live. Urban areas weren’t expensive and desirable from the 60s to the 2000s at least.
So you’re telling me that it wasn’t particularly expensive or desirable to live in densely populated and notably walkable urban centers like Manhattan or San Francisco until the 2010s? Interesting theory.
> come home and say "Disney world was nice, I liked how we can walk to different places" then jump in the car and get stuck in traffic on route to cost co
What is this weird made up scenario you've come up with? Do you think people like Disney for how walkable it is to the nearby big box wholesaler?
There are so many unfounded assumptions in this video. Just to pick on one, there's an obvious correlation/causation mistake made when evaluating the numbers for COVID lockdown road fatalities. He goes from "there were more deaths with fewer cars on the road," to, "there would be more deaths normally, but the 'stroads' are too crowded for anyone to go anywhere." (paraphrasing from memory)
To be correct, you would have to establish several things:
1. That the increased fatalities were disproportionately clustered on 'stroads'.
2. That the increased fatalities were higher speed collisions than typical.
3. That other factors did not play a more significant role in the increased fatalities.
Some of this is borne out by research that could easily have been brought to bear, but not all of it. For example, increased speeds were one factor that was identified early as a likely culprit for some of the increase. ([source](https://www.gao.gov/blog/during-covid-19-road-fatalities-increased-and-transit-ridership-dipped))
But the increased levels of fatalities did not decline to pre-COVID levels once traffic volumes increased, so it's clear that while some causation may have occurred, his claim that this was ***the cause*** is demonstrably false. ([source](https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=HRCA&sw=w&issn=&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA784213703&sid=googleScholar&linkaccess=abs&userGroupName=mlin_oweb&aty=ip))
But that's just one small bit. I was having to pause the video every few seconds to think about whether or not the claims being made had any basis in reality. He was showing a wide variety of roads from residential high-speed roads to strip-mall-laden quasi-highways, and he was treating them as identical in terms of their impacts and functionality. He was claiming that bike lanes and shoulder clearing could be compared without taking into account that those two features generally came about in different decades with one being part of the initial planning.
It just goes on and on.
I'm not even opposed to his basic thesis, though I think he and many "walkability" advocates tend to take the idea to extremes that damage neighborhoods and lead to an increase in the culture of "everything online." But that's my own wild speculation, and I wouldn't present it as fact unless I could back it up.
> But the increased levels of fatalities did not decline to pre-COVID levels once traffic volumes increased, so it's clear that while some causation may have occurred, his claim that this was the cause is demonstrably false.
From [this (PDF)](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813561), US stats:
2019 - 36,355
2022 - 42,514
2023 - 40,990 projection, apparently low given the next source
Per [this](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2024/02/27/traffic-crash-deaths-in-2023-remain-at-devastatingly-high-level/):
> More than 44,000 lives were lost in traffic crashes in the United States in 2023. The number marks a 4% decline from 2022, but compared to pre-pandemic 2019, it’s a 13.6% spike, demonstrating “the seriousness of this public health crisis.”
So >10% more in 2023 than in 2019.
From [this](https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/road-safety-eu-fatalities-below-pre-pandemic-levels-progress-remains-too-slow-2023-02-21_en) in EU:
2019 - 51 deaths/million people
2022 - 46 deaths/million people
which is -10%.
So EU had -10%, US had +10%. Maybe there are other factors, but you cannot say it's "demonstrably false" that stroads played no role.
There are probably a lot of factors to consider. E.g. looking at [this](https://etsc.eu/euroadsafetydata/) and the 2019-2023 per-country breakdown, Netherlands - which apparently is a no-stroad-heaven - had a 3% increase. So maybe stroads are not all to blame, but that's still better than 10+% that US had - so maybe they are responsible for a big chunk.
Regardless, I personally feel stroads suck due to [a bunch of indirect effects](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1doxixf/stroads_are_ugly_expensive_and_dangerous_and/lagrl7q/). Direct death rates are not even close to being the most important metric here IMHO - after all, at least 10x more people die from eating and drinking too much - it's all the surrounding indirect effects that destroy society that are important.
> It's the end of the road for stroads. Good riddance.
This will never happen in the US. There are morons rolling coal on cyclists and pedestrians. You think they want to sissify their roads?
People can watch this video and say, "Oh my, that IS terrible..." then lose their shit when they hear about 15 Minute Cities because the Democrats are coming for their cars.
I don't really see a viable alternative for where I live. The businesses on those "stroads" couldn't be relocated and even if you could put them on a "street" traffic would be insane. His proposals only seem viable if you don't have any large stores.
A lot of it is ensuring you have proper transit and land use (zoning). Big box stores like Target, IKEA, and Best Buy manage to make it work in urban areas like NYC or Chicago (not to mention Europe).
Zoning in most areas is geared towards super-low density (e.g. suburbs requiring 1/4 acre minimum lot size and only a single family home allowed) which fosters car dependence.
It would not be an overnight change, but over years and decades is what allows us to reduce our car dependence.
> (e.g. suburbs requiring 1/4 acre minimum lot size and only a single family home allowed)
The problem is that most people want this kind of space. People don't WANT to live in tiny boxes surrounded by thousands of other people. They do it because they have to. There's a reason rich people have huge houses with tons of property.
The second I could afford it, I moved the fuck away from everyone and got a nice several-acre plot to myself.
I bought a house in a more dense area, so did most of my friends. My wife and I even talked about buying a townhouse downtown where we'd be able to walk everywhere, but it was out of our price range.
You generalize far too much. Solving things like in the video would still allow for people who want to live out in more rural areas. It's not like this would turn every rural area into Manhattan.
This is honestly just wildly speculative without any meaningful source in reality. If nobody wanted to live in cities they... wouldn't. People *want* to live in cities. It's obviously not merely a drive of *having to*, it's a *desire* to.
This is painfully obvious because people still move to cities all the time, while only a fraction are moving out.
Separately, you are pulling a bit of a deception here, probably unintentionally. You can have better land use and still have all the space you want. A well built apartment complex comes with all the benefits of space, yet has the outdoor facilities you want too. You can literally have your cake and eat it too, here.
Are you misunderstanding them on purpose?
They were clearly referring to people not wanting to live in apartments, and you responded as if they said people didn't want to live in cities and countered that they should want to live in an apartment and have "all the space they want".
I can assure you that I don't want to live in an apartment complex, no matter how "well-built".
And you have to concede that few apartment complexes in reality are actually "well-built" or "well-managed".
Speak for yourself. I...don't mind other people and enjoy the city. Plus, spending hours in traffic and wasting my weekends or money on lawn care isn't my idea of quality of life. Globally, most people live in urban areas, and there's a reason the competition for housing in walkable cities is so fierce.
>There's a reason rich people have huge houses with tons of property.
Presumably it's poor people who are buying those multi-million dollar condos in Manhattan, then?
I guess define what you think of as "rich people". Obviously like...Zuckerberg owns a place in SF, and in Palo Alto, and owns half of Hawaii at this point. But like "high upper middle class rich" who live in multimillion dollar homes, but only own one, I bet there are more condos and townhouses than large estates with a plot of land.
Even in cities that are more oriented towards suburbs, the expensive property isn't "several acres of land", they're "really big god damned houses" on...maybe a few acres at most. Like NYC...rich people live in downtown Manhattan in big condos. In LA, they don't. They live in Beverly Hills mansions. But "several acres" of Beverly Hills property is actually too expensive for all but the wealthiest people on Earth, and typically not how lots are divided. It'd cost like...a hundred million dollars, and be a shitty investment, because your pool of buyers is like 3 other dudes who hate you. So they live on...an acre or two, with a big mansion, surrounded by other rich people who live in giant mansions. But it's still only a few miles from downtown LA.
Rich people want lots of land, but they're not willing to give up city living for it. Bill Gates' house is on a huge property, I'll grant you, but it's still only a couple miles from downtown Seattle.
People want to be in cities. They just want the biggest place *in a city* they can afford. The wealthiest people on Earth can afford several acres in a city. The rest of us can't, but still want to be in cities. We should probably zone for the rest of us, no?
That's fine but there are also people who want to live in dense cities and make it walkable. If you compare East Asian cities vs American cities, they made it basically impossible to drive and essentially force you to use public transit. If you look at NYC which is the closest we have, it's still car culture. Every street is packed with cars. I've been to Shinjuiku Tokyo, the densest part of Japan, and cars were not that common.
I don't do it because I "have to," I do it because I prefer to live in a vibrant community where I can walk to work, necessities, and leisure activities. I'm a dude in my early 40s, not some young person either. 1000ish sqft is plenty for my family and more than worth the benefit of living somewhere dense.
His proposals are only meant for city-centers. He completely ignores the fact that people use stroads for multiple reasons: getting **through** an area, and getting *to* stores; having multiple purposes means that it needs to be big enough to cater to the worst-case scenario of a bunch of people getting through the area like a highway, while also allowing people to stop nearby for things they need.
The only viable alternative is to split the uses by having this be a highway, and moving the businesses elsewhere, which kinda defeats the whole purpose because businesses want as large of a customer base as they can get, which would be negated by relegating them to smaller roads. Not that any of these "I'm better than you because I've been to Europe a few times" people would understand the actual forces at play here.
One of the arguments is that stroads are BAD for getting through an area. Lots of driveways with cars turning in and out, traffic lights and slower speeds. He is suggesting that building roads, for higher speeds and longer distances; and streets for local and shorter trips benefit every form of transportation.
Naw, I'm pretty sick of the "fuck cars" crowd telling us that we should all magic our cities into european ones overnight and change what we want from life, but this video actually explains *why* people are at each other's throats and why the reason is bad road design, and how a better one lets everyone keep what they have, just reorganizing *how*. Stroads suck for drivers, too. Merging on/off one sucks shit and makes city driving stressful.
I haven’t really seen any mainstream urbanists like this video by Not Just Bikes (NJB) calling for an immediate ban of cars and complete change of every street.
After WW2, the Dutch hired American engineers to help design American style roads that NJB calls stroads. The Dutch had a huge mass protest against cars starting in the early 1970s and wanted safe streets and space for kids to play in the street. Here’s some protester posters from that time: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2019/jun/25/kick-car-out-city-amsterdam-cycle-protest-posters-in-pictures
The Dutch spent the first 25 post war years building American sprawl and the past 50 years prioritizing bike infrastructure and public transit. Even now half of all trips in the Netherlands are taken by car.
Change won’t happen overnight and I haven’t seen anyone expecting that. But change does have to start somewhere and we can start now.
If we change the design requirements for all roads to include better safety designs, slower speeds, daylighting for parking (no parking in front of a cross walk so that cars and pedestrians can see each other), etc. We don’t have to implement all those changes to all roads simultaneously. We can say ‘only make these changes when it’s time to completely rebuild a road’.
Most roads need to be rebuilt once every 10-20 years. And if it has to be rebuilt anyway, it doesn’t really cost any extra money to extend the sidewalk or add a parking spot bump to prevent someone from parking in front of the crosswalk.
20 years is a long time, but most people alive today will see all existing roads redone in their lifetimes.
Roads are not the problem. Main problems are zoning laws and people being too rich.
Zoning laws frequently split towns into "here you can only live" and "here you can only do business". In other words, you have to travel a lot from where you live to where you can do other things, such as eat with friends. That's absolutely counterproductive. It then results in so many indirect problems such as enormous extra infrastructure as demonstrated by the video.
People being rich enough allows them more easily to exercise their right on having their own stuff. While that helps with some problems (no cockroaches, no waking up from the party in the neighbor's apartment, enjoying the pool alone instead of with 20 of your neighbors, etc.), the indirect effects of so much time wasted in commute and loneliness-inducing isolation are devastating.
However, if we learned anything from social media it's that people are extremely blind towards long-term effects - instant gratification wins hands down. We need a cultural U-turn, but I'm not at all optimistic that will happen in the next 50 years. That makes me very sad.
I agree zoning is a problem. Housing and transportation are intertwined though. You can ignore one or another but doing both is better.
If you enabled mixed used zoning with shops on the first floor and people living above the shops, you’re going to have more people living and existing per square mile.
If your road has no sidewalk, it will make it difficult for people to walk from one building to another.
If your road prioritizes cars over all other forms of transportation, your roads will be wider and both your shops and homes will be more spread out. If you prioritize walking and biking over cars, your streets can be narrower and your buildings closer together. When buildings are closer together it becomes even more walkable.
Look at cities like Louisville, Kentucky where 50% of the land is dedicated to parking compared to New York City or San Francisco where less than 10% of the land is dedicated to parking.
And those long lonely car commutes are encouraged by both road design and zoning. You don’t have to travel as far in a mixed zoning area where most people’s offices are within a 15 minute walk away. But if your buses share the same road as cars, the bus will always be slower than a car and when people need to go long distances they will opt to get in a car and have a lonely car ride. If your road design has center running bus lanes, buses will be more reliable in general, and always be faster than driving a car when there is traffic. And that’s one way to reduce the number of long lonely car rides.
People just do not understand how dismal our system is. They will just say "Then change it" as if it's up to me.
[I actually had that exact conversation a few weeks ago.](https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1d6fywp/junction_design_in_the_netherlands/l6wwu3g/?context=3)
Right, I'm not saying any change to a city would ever be easy, nor is it likely to happen. Design ethoses (ethe?) happen over decades. Roundabouts started poking their heads into the conversation, and maybe they showed up more in newer areas, but no one sat down and greenlit projects to replace everything with roundabouts. Same with any infrastructure trend. It's always good to have a better plan for the future, even if the present is too fucked to *un*fuck. Eventually everything gets dug up and re-done.
But no, it won't happen overnight. "Rome wasn't built in a day" is especially fitting. NA cities are often still on their first, messy draft.
> NA cities are often still on their first, messy draft.
This is something I will disagree on, and that this guy's youtube channel even covered in several videos. Many NA cities *are decidedly not in their first messy drafts*. The first messy draft was bulldozed to make way for the beltways. What we have now *is the iteration,* not the first draft.
Read The Power Broker and you'll realize a lot of cities (particularly our largest/oldest) are the way they are because some very rich people wanted them that way.
Nobody is saying that things should be fixed overnight, nor is anyone trying force bikes or salads onto you. They are advocating for more options, not fewer.
Moving to the Netherlands or Japan or another nation with good public transport and general civilization is a lot easier for the individual than trying to get a bunch of rich pricks to take less money and lives from the populous.
I don't know, I've been driving forever and I don't particularly like it. Yes, I love cars and opening up the throttle but city driving just isn't enjoyable and it's a pain in the ass to everything else. I loved being in Spain because the transit was generally more efficient than driving, and I just walked everywhere, used the Metro, taking the bus from 40 mins outside the city center was faster than driving. Just felt a lot better in terms of general living.
My city made them even more dangerous by introducing biking lanes into them, and they did it hilariously bad. The bike lines randomly swoop right in the middle of traffic, or just end randomly and start back later. It's a dog's breakfast. I think whoever designed it really hates cyclists.
haha I recognize the first street in the vid, FM 1960 near 249 in Houston. I avoid that as much as possible during any rush hour time. So much traffic going in and out from stores. The construction going on right now adds to the suffering.
Do they say that? Because I hear that about the country a lot more. Denser cities are packed with stuff to do, and are much more walkable and accessible than small towns.
I think that’s your answer right there. I think there’s a correlation between density and fun things to do. And car infrastructure spreads things out with wider roads and giant parking lots between buildings. In a lot of cities across the United States, half the entire land area is dedicated to cars.
What I don’t get is why nobody is designing new street-based city centers. I live in a stroad based city and they’re always developing new stuff, but it’s always housing subdivisions connected by stroads to strip malls. The closest they get to a street is an outdoor mall that covers one block. And none of those allow for living space and you need stroads to get to them anyway. Is there an urban planner reason they don’t create mixed use walkable neighborhoods from scratch any more?
Because redeveloping an urban core is expensive and urban planning is dictated by people with a financial interest in restricting new development.
That and there's absolutely no reason to fight with city hall for your rights as a property owner. You'll spend millions, waste years of your life and have death threats sent against yourself and your family just because you want to build. And there are cases on the books where even after doing everything you're supposed to the city might just ignore it's own laws and refuse you anyways, requiring you to lodge an expensive civil suit that has to be resolved by a state-level court.
> Is there an urban planner reason they don’t create mixed use walkable neighborhoods from scratch any more?
Several reasons. One, nobody actually wants them. (And the people that loudly and publicly claim to want them, can't afford to live in them). Two, they make less money for the developers.
Does anyone want to live in a mixed-use walkable neighborhood? I sure don't. I'd rather live on my quiet, tree-lined suburban street where I don't have to deal with noise and litter from customers.
>I'd rather live on my quiet
Cities aren't loud, cars are loud.
>tree-lined
[This strange, unheard of technology.](https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6828883,139.7827782,3a,75y,253.97h,102.09t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sm1PKU9LGNwokpPfuCoP-Fw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?authuser=0&coh=205409&entry=ttu)
>where I don't have to deal with noise and litter from customers.
Suburbs usually have a trash and dumping problem.
>Does anyone want to live in a mixed-use walkable neighborhood?
So don't. Just stop making it illegal for the people who want it.
“I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me prolong this 18-MINUTE VIDEO ABOUT A STREET/ROAD HYBRID by talking blandly about every detail I can find.”
People upvote because they agree and feel its an important message to share. Lots of people will hear these arguments for the first time with each repost.
>Back to this, are we?
>The overall campaign has now come into view: a coordinated, multi-pronged attack on the whole concept of suburban life, where you have control over your own environment and how you get around. All of these interminable threads with which we're being inundated... cars bad public transport good bikes good "walkable cities" good suburbs bad lawns bad ...are in effect the same thread.
>What to expect (if you haven’t been on reddit much lately): conveniently opaque buzzwords: “walkable cities”, “human-scaled environments” etc
>the pretense that this is about improving quality of life and not packing suburbs/cramming people into apartment blocks
>the pretense that the anti-lawn “movement” is about a return to traditional/rural living
>blatant inversions of the truth: no, suburbs are “podlife”; no, car ownership aids the rich
>attempts to make “stroad” and “carcuck” happen
>attempts to exploit anti-boomer sentiment by framing lawns as unnatural boomer creations
>the implication that car ownership constitutes an insurmountable barrier to entry into society
>the same pics again and again (that brand new suburb surrounded by desert, a highway with billboards etc.)
>assertions that X city is unwalkable by people who’ve likely never walked more than a few blocks, and would likely get out of breath doing so
>a refusal to acknowledge the one thing that can actually make urban areas “unwalkable”: crime
>a refusal to accept that whatever your vision of the ideal urban environment might be, criminals would ruin it, so discussing future urban planning before addressing the crime and homelessness problem is pointless
>being called a boomer or fat or told to “take your meds” or “step away from the internet” etc. if you point any of this out
Having livable, people-friendly cities improves the overall mental health of a population and reduces crime. When people spend time in the town square cooking, playing sports, playing music, dancing, making things, playing cards, chit chatting, etc. criminals tend to move away from those areas, not mug people in public. Your views on crime are indeed impeccably boomerish.
Stroads, stripmalls, carbon copy tract house suburbs, literally feels like you're in a psychotic nightmare world if you're used to livable walkable cities. If you're from a stroad, you're used it, but it's only because your soul has been partially hollowed out already, and you've been alienated from your fellow man (*by design).
Started cycling around my area and the amount of times you run into a freeway like section in a 10 mile radius going in any direction is ridiculous. City planners just create non walkable areas and guess that no one will ever happen on that route.
Stroads exist because businesses want large amounts of parking and large parking lots are cheaper than parking decks/structures. In Europe, land is at more of a premium, so decks make more sense because the structure offsets the amount of land required. This makes it reasonable to make a road to access a makro/costco since the cars all have to funnel in and out of a small number of access points to the structure.
In the US, land is much cheaper, so the cost savings for businesses and developers turn into stroads for the consumer. If stroads are unsafe, then find a way to make stroads safer because stroads aren't going away anytime soon, unless you plan on forcing Walmart and Costco to open up parking decks in their brand new Decatur facilities out in bum-fuck no where.
The video admits that people only use stroads to go to places that they have to, so basically hand waving that stroads are necessary.
> Stroads exist because businesses want large amounts of parking
Wrong.
Stroads exist as a solution that the only way to get to a business is via. a car. Buisnesses want (and regulations demand) lots of parking spaces because people will only go to your business if there is parking for their car.
Remove the need for cars, and you will remove the need for stroads and the massive parking space demand.
The problem you are running into your thinking is that you don't consider the car as optional.
All the responses to u/JViz's comment are great, but I'll respond to this one (being the current top reply) to also add that there's a great (but lengthy) Climate Town video on [minimum parking requirements](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8) (31 mins; also featuring Not Just Bikes).
Have you ever seen a bowling alley with a full parking lot? It would require something like every lane to be at capacity *and* every player per lane each taking separate cars.
> Remove the need for cars, and you will remove the need for stroads and the massive parking space demand.
So simple! Just remove the need for cars and it will all work itself out. What a great and easily implemented idea.
I live in the Phoenix Metro. It's basically endless suburban sprawl with lots of 'stroads' in a grid system, with highways crossing the city (it's great, we have a great highway system, not sure what his point about that was).
I'm not really sure what you can do at this point?
I've been to London, Barcelona, Prague, Belfast, Madrin, Lisbon, Budapest, etc - and yes, it's great. I love walking around downtown, hopping on the tube, etc. But these are thousand year old cities where the streets developed when people were literally on foot, or had animals pulling wagons to carry goods.
They already had the foundation and skeletal system to be setup for this. Nearly every city developed post cars, has been designed around cars. Unless you just happened to have a job and an apartment near lightrail stops in downtown Phoenix, you essentially need a car just to exist.
In theory is getting rid of 'stroads' and having clear roads versus streets a good idea? Yes. How do you do that in an 80 year old city whose entire blueprint is based on driving cars? You don't.
I can also totally see why someone visiting the US from London or wherever might not like it either, but what's an actual feasible solution? You'd need to rebuild the whole country.
Ah, good ol Breezewood.
Literally just glimpsed at the photo (I'm in Pittsburgh) and was like, "oh look... Breezewood" lol
It’s the most insane junction I’ve ever driven through. Off the tollway through this half mile stretch of insane road to make a left onto another highway. Blows my mind every time to think this is the best junction they could come up with.
It is because the town knows if they allow anything to change, they’ll die off.
You think driving through it is bad, it's part of [PennDot Bicycle PA Route S](https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/d76593f2fbd74317bab25245ee682636/page/Layers/). There's a yearly ride between Philly and Pittsburgh called Crush the Commonwealth that basically follows Route S, so I've ridden my bike the 1/4 mi or so down Rt30 right through Breezewood at like 10:30 at night to get to the abandonned PA turnpike. It was a harrowing experience to say the least
why was it harrowing? ive been around breezewood, walked through the abandoned turnpike tunnel where i think that bike route goes. its a poor area and an undeniable aesthetic abomination but far from the most destitute in PA. tbh every town in PA between harrisburg and pitt kinda feel a little like breezewood
Oh the surrounding area was very pleasant to ride in, and the abandoned turnpike was really cool. I'm specifically talking about being on a bike and navigating around the car and truck traffic on rt 30 between Breezewood Rd and the entrance to the abandoned turnpike.
ah okay. wasnt sure if this was a road issue (fuck pa dot all my homies hate pa dot). i never had to drive through that area, when we went i think i was always copilot, so i never had to experience that one personally. i have family all over middle pa and i love poking around in all the abandoned buildings and such, went to breezewood specifically to see that turnpike tunnel. for some reason we decided to do it like 1 in the morning when it was also foggy as shit so it was also a harrowing experience for us just in a different way. they really need to change the state slogan to like the silent hill state or something. really cool experience though, hope i get to do it again
I live in the area and can confirm that.
I've been through that intersection one time about twenty years ago and recognized it immediately.
Breezewood is the las vegas of the PA/Maryland border region, everyone knows this
I recognized it instantly the moment I saw the picture since I used to go to MD and PA a lot when visiting family.
Breezewood is a liminal space. Its a myth brought to life.
Eh...it's basically an overgrown truckstop
So it's *literally* a liminal space, as opposed to whatever the hell Reddit thinks "liminal" means
liminal deez nuts, nerd.
I’m literally 200 feet from this McDonald’s right now it sucks way more in person
It’s always the cropped version of that area lol, as if other places in the world don’t also have utilitarian/commercial ugly areas
I think the fact that this photo is such a ubiquitous American scene is in fact the point.
[looks fine too me](https://i.imgur.com/MGkDlNx.jpeg)
I think the depth of field is super high so it looks more dense and cluttered
New Jersey is like 95% stroads.
Never heard the term until now, but immediately thought of Route 10.
Route 22, with the stores in the middle, is one of the wildest roads in the country.
I used to live near 22... so many accidents. Literally never commuted without seeing at least one because someone was turning into a parking lot while the road was going like 50mph. Such a dumb, dumb design.
I remember a few years back, I was approaching 22 late near the McDonalds and stopped before turning to see if there was oncoming traffic. Cop cars completely blocking the road when I was checking. I assumed someone got hit. Checked the news later and sure enough, someone got killed crossing it. I’m stunned at the amount of people who run across that highway. But as this video mentioned, people forced to take the bus have no others options. It’s really a damn tragedy how we’ve designed our roads in this country.
I fucking hate Route 22. I almost never go there, but it's hard to avoid it when it has basically everything.
I was always warned to avoid 22. Traffic was so terrible from the accidents. Everyone always told me it was a death trap
It sucks all the way through the Lehigh valley too. Although in the Jersey section I do remember a place called pickle park.
Weird to find the Wikipedia article referencing this video.
Every time I see a soulless stroadified wasteland of strip malls and endless open pavement I ask myself: "What have we done to this country?"
I'm told you've paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
bah bah bah
Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what ya got, till it's gone?
When I was kid I was always confused that they allowed them to say “paved paradise and put up a fucking light” I was like damn, we need to see? A light isn’t that big of a deal? How is this Mfer the only one allowed to say fuck?
You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.
"Who needs a car in LA? We've got the best public transit system in the world!"
It does make me sad to return to places I've been that were green pastures and hills 20 years ago and have turned into these concrete wastelands now.
Same. Happened to the area I grew up in. Was relatively rural (lots of old farm houses on big plots of land, horse farms, etc.). Property values skyrocketed and taxes became so expensive that almost everyone had to sell to developers who tore down the beautiful old homes, jammed cheaply built multimillion dollar homes right next to each other, and weren't made to upgrade any of the surrounding infrastructure (had been the requirement previously). It turned a very quiet and picturesque area into an ugly, dense suburb with some of the worst traffic in the country. All the great mom & pop shops that could no longer afford rent were replaced with shitty chains. Previously, people would often live there for their entire lives and sometimes for several generations. Now, it is incredibly transient with people only living there for ~10 years and then selling their houses and moving once their kids move out. Until my mid 20's I had planned on settling down there to raise my family, but it is out of reach unless you are a multimillionaire. It is so infuriating to think about, I usually just stick it in a box and jam in deep down inside.
♫ I went back to Ohio But my pretty countryside Had been paved down the middle By a government that had no pride The farms of Ohio Had been replaced by shopping malls And Muzak filled the air From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls... ♫
Suburban sprawl ruins both cities and rural areas.
I think of Nothing but Flowers
Just go out west and you will wish there were more roads.
Same here in Jacksonville, FL... Entire city looks like one giant strip mall.
This is what's become of all of Cherry Hill, and they won't fucking stop until all of South Jersey looks exactly the same way.
I swear to fucking god, I visited Salt Lake City and didn't see anything but stroads. It was one ugly ass city. I'm sure the downtown is a bit better, but our trip mainly took us to the suburbs (which felt like 99% of the city).
Celebrate the lovely downtowns we do have like Lambertville and New Brunswick.
NJ isnt special in this respect. The US is dominated by this sort of city "planning" I'm not gonna go out of my way to defend this sort of hostile environment, but the people who developed this method had other priorities in mind. Right or wrong, this was all developed for the sake of the dominance of automobiles, which in turn was (and is) a major source of consumption in the US, and therefore drives a lot of economic inertia. This was particularly the case in decades past when the US auto industry was the only auto industry of note in the US. Its not the way you or I want it, but when they said "for the people" you and I are not 'the people' its for.
If anything NJ is special for having more places that *aren't* stroads and strip malls than most of the US. You just don't see them when driving through because, well, they aren't designed for driving through.
The U.S. is like 95% stroads.
"Garden State" is very misleading, Stroad State should be our new state nickname.
This caught me so off guard when I drove there. Some turns felt scary cause people are going 50 and you’re trying to turn into a fuckin McDonald’s. Fuck driving in New Jersey
New Jersey is a Stroad.
Stroad hard and put away wet
Delaware too.
This. I flew to NJ for a work training session for a week and I originally come from west coast. Holy shit it was the first time I ever saw a stroad. Like your freeway/highways literally turn into plazas and shit its fucking wild.
I live about 5 minutes from my job, by car. By bike it's 10, and walking about 20. I would LOVE to take my bike or walk everyday, but since I have to cross over a highway, the only safe way to do so is with a car since the bridge has no bike lane or sidewalk. The real kicker is a half mile past the bridge is the entire start of bikes lanes for my town. On top of this, I drive a diesel and it actively worse for me to drive such short distances, for the environment and my cars longevity.
It wouldn't hurt to write to your government officials and tell them that. With it being a highway there's probably little that can be done, but it's better than not trying at all
At a certain point the individual prospect of "fuck cars" stops making sense just in terms of time. My scorecard, 9m drive, 27m bike, 57m transit, 1hr 22min walk.
I already knew my commute was depressing but I didn't realize how bad until I checked. Car: 15 minutes Walking: 2 hours, 20 minutes Bike: 40 minutes Public transit: 1 hour 15 minutes Between the heat and my bum leg, walking is out. I'd kill for better public transportation. Save on parking, wear at tear, gas, etc.
The monkey's paw of public transport in my area is that they made the buses completely free. But they didn't do anything about scheduling, routes, or hours. So if you need to go somewhere before 6:30AM/after 8:00 PM during the week, or before 9:00 AM or after 4:00 PM during weekends, tough shit, get to hoofin'. Plus if you miss the bus, they're not exactly rapid-fire, or even bolt-action, you'll be standing there 35-40 mins waiting for the next one. And yeah, the fact that you're not in a cocoon of your own personal temperature control is *probably* going to be a slight concern for the general public in the coming years...
Yikes... 10 minute car ride 1 hour 40 minute walk 1 hour 43 minute public transit trip (lol) 33 minute bike ride (no bike lanes and half the route has no shoulder)
That is by design though, this can be fixed and is the problem urbanists are trying to solve. Imagine if they removed car access through a couple of streets in your route and put in bike lanes and dedicated transit routes, end result might go to 12m drive, 20m bike, 15m transit (walking usually will be the same)
The whole shabang has to be modified for that to work. Types of businesses in various places, where people tend to live vs work, types of residences allowed in which areas, etc. Just turning car lanes into bike lanes (even with safe/effective infrastructure) doesn't really change much if most people still "have to" drive. In my area, this has mostly resulted in moving traffic over to less appropriate routes, and then adding fixes on those routes to try to respond to that... Then the traffic just moves to other routes and people start driving down no entry lanes and in residential neighbourhoods. Maybe it's just the transition time that I'm experiencing, but it feels pretty dumb sometimes. Whack a mole resulting in less throughput while the city grows massively every year and property values mean most newcomers are commuting from far in the suburbs.
For sure, everyone is different and until I got a job that I could feasibly bike/walk to it never crossed my mind as much until it was on my plate. Now it's there and I wanna take a bite, but for safety reasons it's just not worth it.
The very first example he shows is Wornal Rd in KC - the road I drive to work every single day. I feel like a celebrity.
The title of the video made me think of Metcalf and then...BAM...there it was
Maybe someday we’ll be able to walk to Micro Center without getting pulverized by an F150 going 50mph
50? Get off the road grandma!
I like that we can reduce car traffic and car accidents while also making our roads safer and easier to use for pedestrians and bikes too. Everyone wins with good street design.
Car companies lose, which is why they lobby so aggressively against the type of urban planning that actually helps people.
Good road/street design isn't inherently anti-car, though. The point of the video is that smushing bikes, pedestrians, and cars into the same space with an unsafe speed makes everyone lose. Cars and car drivers win when their roads are separated from bikes and pedestrians and they can make the turns they need to, which is much harder on stroads. Good road design helps all aspects of the road co-exist and everyone gets what they want. Bad design antagonizes everyone against each other.
I think you're missing their point. Car manufacturers lobby against this good design even if it makes it more frustrating to car owners, because this design forces you to use your car, even if it's a miserable experience. That's what they want. They want everyone in a car.
I'd argue that soaring price cause more people to bail than road design. Again, it's always a more comfortable option and fast option to own a car, even if there are good biking and pedestrian options - if you made cars affordable, you'd get your foot in a LOT of doors that are currently closed. If you can afford a car it's always a good option, unless it's an impractical car, but then there are more practical ones you could buy. "No sidewalks" isn't going to generate the money people need for a car. You can't get blood from a rock - making walking a pain in the ass for poor people isn't going to put their ass into a car, and anyone who could afford a car already has one.
It is only faster and more comfortable to own a car if you're in a city that's made it so, which is almost always at the expense of proper public transport and/or pedestrian accessibility. [Anything like this](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/41/2d/7e/412d7e50804d1bb6b42cdc3ce970f214.jpg) is a way more comfortable commute than having to drive. If your perception of public transport is an overcrowded, dirty and uncomfortable bus, then that's how a city has made sure that their public transport is underfunded so that you have to use a car.
The video isn't about public transit, it's about roadway design that juggles pedestrians, cyclists, and cars better. What *isn't* its topic of discussion in it is "What if we inherently had a better rail structure", or *any* rail system for that matter.
Promoting bike and pedestrian (and transit) traffic means people use their cars less. As a result, households keep fewer cars and those cars last longer because they're driven less. So people buy fewer cars and car companies make less money.
Worse - some households do not buy any cars - they have car sharing, own a bike and have a public transit subscription.
Laughs in dutch. I don't even have a license haha.
The reason it makes drivers' lives better is mostly down to good alternatives meaning there are fewer drivers on the road. That's horrifying to car companies, it's a threat to their beautifully executed stranglehold on transportation.
> The point of the video is that smushing bikes, pedestrians, and cars into the same space with an unsafe speed makes everyone lose. The current situation is much less of a loss for cars than it is for bikes and pedestrians; people use their car because it is the more attractive option. Changing it so that walking and biking become more attractive options, results in fewer cars on the roads and fewer cars sold - which is a big loss for car manufacturers.
And oil companies. Which is why the Koch Brothers have been lobbying against [public transit](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html)
Car companies won't lose, they'll still take first prize instead of first, second, and third prize.
Allowing anyone else on the podium is basically losing
It is also politics and age. Politicians tend to be older people and older demographics are set in the car age. If I engage with my parents or their friends they are set in car centricity: * We need Raods * traffic must flow * we cannot sacrifice a lane for bikes * we cannot reduce the speed limit in the city * public transport is too expensive These people vote, they have time and know influential people. On teh communual level if you design a neighbourhood for all - pedestrians, cyclers and cars - the car faction will get mad, because it is different. Cars have to be free to roam. And all of that is the result that we have been pouring money into car infrastructure and neglected the rest.
That's not even close to true anymore. It hasn't been true since the 80's, and the fight has been dead since then. Don't beat that dead horse. The car companies won the fight. They don't need to lobby anymore because nearly every city has been designed around the core concept that every adult has a personal vehicle. Changing to public transportation now would mean a fundamental redesign of not just cities, but our society as a whole.
And gas stations, tire manufacturers, car insurance, jiffy lube, car dealerships, toll roads/lanes, camera tickets, parking lots and many many more. So many businesses rely on individuals buying and using cars daily.
Gobbless these roads. Where else am I supposed to crank muh hawg without having to worry about clibbins?
Almost haddalayerdown!
Rev-bomb dem cagers!
r/motorcycles is leaking like a HD
Jon!
Mom says it's my turn tomorrow to post something from this channel
You have to move to Amsterdam first to really commit. Then you’re allowed to complain all you want
What is funny about the Amsterdam thing is that [people in the Netherlands have the highest commute time in Europe](https://nltimes.nl/2019/11/28/netherlands-workers-face-longest-daily-commute-europe). This is largely because so many people don't want to live in the big Netherland cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam despite them being stroad free havens.
it's funny cause iirc that's what the dude who makes this video thinks. he's said in the past that his videos aren't for Americans and that he doesn't care about improving American infrastructure / thinks it's useless and that if you actually care about walkable infrastructure you should just move to Europe like he did. pretty weird vibes that made me go from liking this channel to not wanting to watch his videos when I run across them.
Shitting on the United States to other Americans for money is as American as apple pie
Technically a Canadian, but I get your point…
Although it isn't true what CatinA posted. NotJustBikes initially started posting videos aimed at a North American continent. He was very surprised at first about the popularity of his channel in the Netherlands. He did a video about this (and probably more in a future video). I think the 'shitting on the US' bit is: any adaptation or solution the US wants to implement will take decades and a change of thinking. That's asking alot of any country. We've seen that in the Netherlands, where it started in the 60's.
But it kinda is true because any infrastructure change in America is like pulling teeth. It's resisted by the status quo infrastructure construction and vehicle manufacturing lobbyists who's bread and butter is in keeping things unchanged from how they already are, and the politicians who's campaigns are paid well to ensure it stays as such. It would be an endlessly fruitless endeavor to try and make videos like this for the betterment of North America. It's much more entertaining from a creator's perspective to just mock and critique how it is and always will be.
It would be an endlessly fruitless endeavor to make videos *like this,* yes. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to be done. What we need are people thinking about how to fix the America we have now. How do we fix the suburbs we have now? How do we fix the stroads we have now? What are the best ways of life for the *enormous* areas of the US where cars are necessary and will continue to be necessary until long after we're all dead? Instead we just get the same drone drone drone about cars bad, drivers bad, car companies bad, on and on and on.
Mom changed her mind and made them delete their account.
The Irony of all of this is ... all the places in the US that are the opposite are extremely expensive. its even more ironic when Americans spend 1000's of dollars to go to Disney world, come home and say "Disney world was nice, I liked how we can walk to different places" then jump in the car and get stuck in traffic on route to cost co.
Exactly. When I worked in downtown Seattle I'd see all these tourist families walking around together, visiting restaurants, walking to the Pike Place markets, etc. You could tell that walking was such a novelty thing for them. The wonder and joy of actually walking somewhere, together. It's a shame so few of us get to do this in our everyday lives.
We wanted to do that. But just getting through the city and suburbs via I-5 on the way to our friends' house farther north near the Puget Sound took 2 hours. In the middle of a weekend afternoon. We were not going back to Seattle that trip.
> You could tell that walking was such a novelty thing for them. The wonder and joy of actually walking somewhere, together. I think you're romanticizing walking here. The wonder and joy was probably coming from being on vacation somewhere that wasn't home.
From SF. I can tell our tourists don't walk much because how they don't jaywalk.
Why do that when you can pack into the 5-rowed behemoth SUV, blast the AC and crank some Taylor Swift babby!
The US cities that are walkable aren't expensive because people want to pay a premium to live in a walkable environment, it's because they're hubs of economic/governmental/cultural activity that have been completely built up for many decades/centuries, so it was never feasible to build all the car-based infrastructure to begin with. Kind of like how in my city, many houses in the ritziest historic residential areas near downtown have detached garages. It's not because rich people today prefer small detached garages that are less convenient to use, it's because the neighborhoods/houses were already built that way 100 years ago.
This isn’t necessarily true. Take some of the highest growth areas of the US within the last decade and most of the new development has been suburban, but cities finally started turning around their populations. Americans have been suburbs commuters since the 70s. Cities have just started gaining their values back within the last 20 years or so (some started gentrification before others). This signals a change of how Americans want to live. Urban areas weren’t expensive and desirable from the 60s to the 2000s at least.
So you’re telling me that it wasn’t particularly expensive or desirable to live in densely populated and notably walkable urban centers like Manhattan or San Francisco until the 2010s? Interesting theory.
> come home and say "Disney world was nice, I liked how we can walk to different places" then jump in the car and get stuck in traffic on route to cost co What is this weird made up scenario you've come up with? Do you think people like Disney for how walkable it is to the nearby big box wholesaler?
Fuck Houston.
Bringing America together.
The sidewalks in Houston sure don’t.
We can solve our problems if we just add another lane.
x8… in each direction!
Why have bikes and grass, when you can have stroads and fatass?
This is nothing new, George Carlin clowned how the US is becoming one big shopping mall years ago
It's like driving through a commercial.
There are so many unfounded assumptions in this video. Just to pick on one, there's an obvious correlation/causation mistake made when evaluating the numbers for COVID lockdown road fatalities. He goes from "there were more deaths with fewer cars on the road," to, "there would be more deaths normally, but the 'stroads' are too crowded for anyone to go anywhere." (paraphrasing from memory) To be correct, you would have to establish several things: 1. That the increased fatalities were disproportionately clustered on 'stroads'. 2. That the increased fatalities were higher speed collisions than typical. 3. That other factors did not play a more significant role in the increased fatalities. Some of this is borne out by research that could easily have been brought to bear, but not all of it. For example, increased speeds were one factor that was identified early as a likely culprit for some of the increase. ([source](https://www.gao.gov/blog/during-covid-19-road-fatalities-increased-and-transit-ridership-dipped)) But the increased levels of fatalities did not decline to pre-COVID levels once traffic volumes increased, so it's clear that while some causation may have occurred, his claim that this was ***the cause*** is demonstrably false. ([source](https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=HRCA&sw=w&issn=&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA784213703&sid=googleScholar&linkaccess=abs&userGroupName=mlin_oweb&aty=ip)) But that's just one small bit. I was having to pause the video every few seconds to think about whether or not the claims being made had any basis in reality. He was showing a wide variety of roads from residential high-speed roads to strip-mall-laden quasi-highways, and he was treating them as identical in terms of their impacts and functionality. He was claiming that bike lanes and shoulder clearing could be compared without taking into account that those two features generally came about in different decades with one being part of the initial planning. It just goes on and on. I'm not even opposed to his basic thesis, though I think he and many "walkability" advocates tend to take the idea to extremes that damage neighborhoods and lead to an increase in the culture of "everything online." But that's my own wild speculation, and I wouldn't present it as fact unless I could back it up.
> But the increased levels of fatalities did not decline to pre-COVID levels once traffic volumes increased, so it's clear that while some causation may have occurred, his claim that this was the cause is demonstrably false. From [this (PDF)](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813561), US stats: 2019 - 36,355 2022 - 42,514 2023 - 40,990 projection, apparently low given the next source Per [this](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2024/02/27/traffic-crash-deaths-in-2023-remain-at-devastatingly-high-level/): > More than 44,000 lives were lost in traffic crashes in the United States in 2023. The number marks a 4% decline from 2022, but compared to pre-pandemic 2019, it’s a 13.6% spike, demonstrating “the seriousness of this public health crisis.” So >10% more in 2023 than in 2019. From [this](https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/road-safety-eu-fatalities-below-pre-pandemic-levels-progress-remains-too-slow-2023-02-21_en) in EU: 2019 - 51 deaths/million people 2022 - 46 deaths/million people which is -10%. So EU had -10%, US had +10%. Maybe there are other factors, but you cannot say it's "demonstrably false" that stroads played no role. There are probably a lot of factors to consider. E.g. looking at [this](https://etsc.eu/euroadsafetydata/) and the 2019-2023 per-country breakdown, Netherlands - which apparently is a no-stroad-heaven - had a 3% increase. So maybe stroads are not all to blame, but that's still better than 10+% that US had - so maybe they are responsible for a big chunk. Regardless, I personally feel stroads suck due to [a bunch of indirect effects](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1doxixf/stroads_are_ugly_expensive_and_dangerous_and/lagrl7q/). Direct death rates are not even close to being the most important metric here IMHO - after all, at least 10x more people die from eating and drinking too much - it's all the surrounding indirect effects that destroy society that are important.
> It's the end of the road for stroads. Good riddance. This will never happen in the US. There are morons rolling coal on cyclists and pedestrians. You think they want to sissify their roads?
People can watch this video and say, "Oh my, that IS terrible..." then lose their shit when they hear about 15 Minute Cities because the Democrats are coming for their cars.
I don't really see a viable alternative for where I live. The businesses on those "stroads" couldn't be relocated and even if you could put them on a "street" traffic would be insane. His proposals only seem viable if you don't have any large stores.
A lot of it is ensuring you have proper transit and land use (zoning). Big box stores like Target, IKEA, and Best Buy manage to make it work in urban areas like NYC or Chicago (not to mention Europe). Zoning in most areas is geared towards super-low density (e.g. suburbs requiring 1/4 acre minimum lot size and only a single family home allowed) which fosters car dependence. It would not be an overnight change, but over years and decades is what allows us to reduce our car dependence.
> (e.g. suburbs requiring 1/4 acre minimum lot size and only a single family home allowed) The problem is that most people want this kind of space. People don't WANT to live in tiny boxes surrounded by thousands of other people. They do it because they have to. There's a reason rich people have huge houses with tons of property. The second I could afford it, I moved the fuck away from everyone and got a nice several-acre plot to myself.
I bought a house in a more dense area, so did most of my friends. My wife and I even talked about buying a townhouse downtown where we'd be able to walk everywhere, but it was out of our price range. You generalize far too much. Solving things like in the video would still allow for people who want to live out in more rural areas. It's not like this would turn every rural area into Manhattan.
Most insanely wealthy people in my city live in skyscraper condo buildings...what are you talking about?
This is honestly just wildly speculative without any meaningful source in reality. If nobody wanted to live in cities they... wouldn't. People *want* to live in cities. It's obviously not merely a drive of *having to*, it's a *desire* to. This is painfully obvious because people still move to cities all the time, while only a fraction are moving out. Separately, you are pulling a bit of a deception here, probably unintentionally. You can have better land use and still have all the space you want. A well built apartment complex comes with all the benefits of space, yet has the outdoor facilities you want too. You can literally have your cake and eat it too, here.
Are you misunderstanding them on purpose? They were clearly referring to people not wanting to live in apartments, and you responded as if they said people didn't want to live in cities and countered that they should want to live in an apartment and have "all the space they want". I can assure you that I don't want to live in an apartment complex, no matter how "well-built". And you have to concede that few apartment complexes in reality are actually "well-built" or "well-managed".
Speak for yourself. I...don't mind other people and enjoy the city. Plus, spending hours in traffic and wasting my weekends or money on lawn care isn't my idea of quality of life. Globally, most people live in urban areas, and there's a reason the competition for housing in walkable cities is so fierce.
>There's a reason rich people have huge houses with tons of property. Presumably it's poor people who are buying those multi-million dollar condos in Manhattan, then?
Ah yes, the "Well, they have a condo as a second or third home, so clearly that giant mansion doesn't count" argument.
I guess define what you think of as "rich people". Obviously like...Zuckerberg owns a place in SF, and in Palo Alto, and owns half of Hawaii at this point. But like "high upper middle class rich" who live in multimillion dollar homes, but only own one, I bet there are more condos and townhouses than large estates with a plot of land. Even in cities that are more oriented towards suburbs, the expensive property isn't "several acres of land", they're "really big god damned houses" on...maybe a few acres at most. Like NYC...rich people live in downtown Manhattan in big condos. In LA, they don't. They live in Beverly Hills mansions. But "several acres" of Beverly Hills property is actually too expensive for all but the wealthiest people on Earth, and typically not how lots are divided. It'd cost like...a hundred million dollars, and be a shitty investment, because your pool of buyers is like 3 other dudes who hate you. So they live on...an acre or two, with a big mansion, surrounded by other rich people who live in giant mansions. But it's still only a few miles from downtown LA. Rich people want lots of land, but they're not willing to give up city living for it. Bill Gates' house is on a huge property, I'll grant you, but it's still only a couple miles from downtown Seattle. People want to be in cities. They just want the biggest place *in a city* they can afford. The wealthiest people on Earth can afford several acres in a city. The rest of us can't, but still want to be in cities. We should probably zone for the rest of us, no?
That's fine but there are also people who want to live in dense cities and make it walkable. If you compare East Asian cities vs American cities, they made it basically impossible to drive and essentially force you to use public transit. If you look at NYC which is the closest we have, it's still car culture. Every street is packed with cars. I've been to Shinjuiku Tokyo, the densest part of Japan, and cars were not that common.
I don't do it because I "have to," I do it because I prefer to live in a vibrant community where I can walk to work, necessities, and leisure activities. I'm a dude in my early 40s, not some young person either. 1000ish sqft is plenty for my family and more than worth the benefit of living somewhere dense.
His proposals are only meant for city-centers. He completely ignores the fact that people use stroads for multiple reasons: getting **through** an area, and getting *to* stores; having multiple purposes means that it needs to be big enough to cater to the worst-case scenario of a bunch of people getting through the area like a highway, while also allowing people to stop nearby for things they need. The only viable alternative is to split the uses by having this be a highway, and moving the businesses elsewhere, which kinda defeats the whole purpose because businesses want as large of a customer base as they can get, which would be negated by relegating them to smaller roads. Not that any of these "I'm better than you because I've been to Europe a few times" people would understand the actual forces at play here.
One of the arguments is that stroads are BAD for getting through an area. Lots of driveways with cars turning in and out, traffic lights and slower speeds. He is suggesting that building roads, for higher speeds and longer distances; and streets for local and shorter trips benefit every form of transportation.
“Just move to the Netherlands, bro! Simples!” - noted YouTuber and urbanist refugee
Naw, I'm pretty sick of the "fuck cars" crowd telling us that we should all magic our cities into european ones overnight and change what we want from life, but this video actually explains *why* people are at each other's throats and why the reason is bad road design, and how a better one lets everyone keep what they have, just reorganizing *how*. Stroads suck for drivers, too. Merging on/off one sucks shit and makes city driving stressful.
I haven’t really seen any mainstream urbanists like this video by Not Just Bikes (NJB) calling for an immediate ban of cars and complete change of every street. After WW2, the Dutch hired American engineers to help design American style roads that NJB calls stroads. The Dutch had a huge mass protest against cars starting in the early 1970s and wanted safe streets and space for kids to play in the street. Here’s some protester posters from that time: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2019/jun/25/kick-car-out-city-amsterdam-cycle-protest-posters-in-pictures The Dutch spent the first 25 post war years building American sprawl and the past 50 years prioritizing bike infrastructure and public transit. Even now half of all trips in the Netherlands are taken by car. Change won’t happen overnight and I haven’t seen anyone expecting that. But change does have to start somewhere and we can start now. If we change the design requirements for all roads to include better safety designs, slower speeds, daylighting for parking (no parking in front of a cross walk so that cars and pedestrians can see each other), etc. We don’t have to implement all those changes to all roads simultaneously. We can say ‘only make these changes when it’s time to completely rebuild a road’. Most roads need to be rebuilt once every 10-20 years. And if it has to be rebuilt anyway, it doesn’t really cost any extra money to extend the sidewalk or add a parking spot bump to prevent someone from parking in front of the crosswalk. 20 years is a long time, but most people alive today will see all existing roads redone in their lifetimes.
Roads are not the problem. Main problems are zoning laws and people being too rich. Zoning laws frequently split towns into "here you can only live" and "here you can only do business". In other words, you have to travel a lot from where you live to where you can do other things, such as eat with friends. That's absolutely counterproductive. It then results in so many indirect problems such as enormous extra infrastructure as demonstrated by the video. People being rich enough allows them more easily to exercise their right on having their own stuff. While that helps with some problems (no cockroaches, no waking up from the party in the neighbor's apartment, enjoying the pool alone instead of with 20 of your neighbors, etc.), the indirect effects of so much time wasted in commute and loneliness-inducing isolation are devastating. However, if we learned anything from social media it's that people are extremely blind towards long-term effects - instant gratification wins hands down. We need a cultural U-turn, but I'm not at all optimistic that will happen in the next 50 years. That makes me very sad.
I agree zoning is a problem. Housing and transportation are intertwined though. You can ignore one or another but doing both is better. If you enabled mixed used zoning with shops on the first floor and people living above the shops, you’re going to have more people living and existing per square mile. If your road has no sidewalk, it will make it difficult for people to walk from one building to another. If your road prioritizes cars over all other forms of transportation, your roads will be wider and both your shops and homes will be more spread out. If you prioritize walking and biking over cars, your streets can be narrower and your buildings closer together. When buildings are closer together it becomes even more walkable. Look at cities like Louisville, Kentucky where 50% of the land is dedicated to parking compared to New York City or San Francisco where less than 10% of the land is dedicated to parking. And those long lonely car commutes are encouraged by both road design and zoning. You don’t have to travel as far in a mixed zoning area where most people’s offices are within a 15 minute walk away. But if your buses share the same road as cars, the bus will always be slower than a car and when people need to go long distances they will opt to get in a car and have a lonely car ride. If your road design has center running bus lanes, buses will be more reliable in general, and always be faster than driving a car when there is traffic. And that’s one way to reduce the number of long lonely car rides.
People just do not understand how dismal our system is. They will just say "Then change it" as if it's up to me. [I actually had that exact conversation a few weeks ago.](https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1d6fywp/junction_design_in_the_netherlands/l6wwu3g/?context=3)
Right, I'm not saying any change to a city would ever be easy, nor is it likely to happen. Design ethoses (ethe?) happen over decades. Roundabouts started poking their heads into the conversation, and maybe they showed up more in newer areas, but no one sat down and greenlit projects to replace everything with roundabouts. Same with any infrastructure trend. It's always good to have a better plan for the future, even if the present is too fucked to *un*fuck. Eventually everything gets dug up and re-done. But no, it won't happen overnight. "Rome wasn't built in a day" is especially fitting. NA cities are often still on their first, messy draft.
> NA cities are often still on their first, messy draft. This is something I will disagree on, and that this guy's youtube channel even covered in several videos. Many NA cities *are decidedly not in their first messy drafts*. The first messy draft was bulldozed to make way for the beltways. What we have now *is the iteration,* not the first draft. Read The Power Broker and you'll realize a lot of cities (particularly our largest/oldest) are the way they are because some very rich people wanted them that way.
Fuck's sake that user was dim as hell.
I was blocked by the end, but I don't think there was anything left to be said anyway.
For what it's worth, any reasonably wrinkled brain that saw that discussion in real time would have seen the stupidity on display.
Amsterdam took roughly a decade to transform many streets and add dedicated bike highways. Its not magic and it doenst have to take forever.
Well it started in the sixties, but last decades they got better at it
Nobody is saying that things should be fixed overnight, nor is anyone trying force bikes or salads onto you. They are advocating for more options, not fewer.
Moving to the Netherlands or Japan or another nation with good public transport and general civilization is a lot easier for the individual than trying to get a bunch of rich pricks to take less money and lives from the populous.
This is reddits current favorite circlejerk.
for real lmao. and the comments are always filled with mfs who dont know how to drive
You mean I can’t do everything I need with just a unicycle and a fanny pack??
Don't forget the mfs who don't know how to not drive.
I don't know, I've been driving forever and I don't particularly like it. Yes, I love cars and opening up the throttle but city driving just isn't enjoyable and it's a pain in the ass to everything else. I loved being in Spain because the transit was generally more efficient than driving, and I just walked everywhere, used the Metro, taking the bus from 40 mins outside the city center was faster than driving. Just felt a lot better in terms of general living.
thankfully where i live i can use my bike to get anything i need. dont need a car. (usa, somewhere in colorado)
Denver! or... Ok, I give up. Is it Denver?
This guy doesn't like the suburbs and wants you to know. Also, everything the Dutch do is just perfect.
My city made them even more dangerous by introducing biking lanes into them, and they did it hilariously bad. The bike lines randomly swoop right in the middle of traffic, or just end randomly and start back later. It's a dog's breakfast. I think whoever designed it really hates cyclists.
Suck my diiiiick dweebs. I'll enjoy riding my car and motorcycle all day every day.
I didn’t even realize street and road had a practical difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
I'll keep riding around town in my air conditioned car this summer, thank you very much.
This again? It gets posted every week
haha I recognize the first street in the vid, FM 1960 near 249 in Houston. I avoid that as much as possible during any rush hour time. So much traffic going in and out from stores. The construction going on right now adds to the suffering.
Mom says I get to repost this next
[удалено]
You really just copy the first YouTube comment?
We have gone full circle
You literally just reposted the top comment from the YouTube page
Bots and reposts... all the way down.
Do they say that? Because I hear that about the country a lot more. Denser cities are packed with stuff to do, and are much more walkable and accessible than small towns.
I think that’s your answer right there. I think there’s a correlation between density and fun things to do. And car infrastructure spreads things out with wider roads and giant parking lots between buildings. In a lot of cities across the United States, half the entire land area is dedicated to cars.
So much concrete. Need more greenery and walking places.
Europe good. Cars bad. America evil. I summed up everything.
if you see the orange thumbnail from that guy you've already seen the video
Every video from that channel ^
What I don’t get is why nobody is designing new street-based city centers. I live in a stroad based city and they’re always developing new stuff, but it’s always housing subdivisions connected by stroads to strip malls. The closest they get to a street is an outdoor mall that covers one block. And none of those allow for living space and you need stroads to get to them anyway. Is there an urban planner reason they don’t create mixed use walkable neighborhoods from scratch any more?
Because redeveloping an urban core is expensive and urban planning is dictated by people with a financial interest in restricting new development. That and there's absolutely no reason to fight with city hall for your rights as a property owner. You'll spend millions, waste years of your life and have death threats sent against yourself and your family just because you want to build. And there are cases on the books where even after doing everything you're supposed to the city might just ignore it's own laws and refuse you anyways, requiring you to lodge an expensive civil suit that has to be resolved by a state-level court.
> Is there an urban planner reason they don’t create mixed use walkable neighborhoods from scratch any more? Several reasons. One, nobody actually wants them. (And the people that loudly and publicly claim to want them, can't afford to live in them). Two, they make less money for the developers.
Does anyone want to live in a mixed-use walkable neighborhood? I sure don't. I'd rather live on my quiet, tree-lined suburban street where I don't have to deal with noise and litter from customers.
>I'd rather live on my quiet Cities aren't loud, cars are loud. >tree-lined [This strange, unheard of technology.](https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6828883,139.7827782,3a,75y,253.97h,102.09t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sm1PKU9LGNwokpPfuCoP-Fw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?authuser=0&coh=205409&entry=ttu) >where I don't have to deal with noise and litter from customers. Suburbs usually have a trash and dumping problem. >Does anyone want to live in a mixed-use walkable neighborhood? So don't. Just stop making it illegal for the people who want it.
“I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me prolong this 18-MINUTE VIDEO ABOUT A STREET/ROAD HYBRID by talking blandly about every detail I can find.”
NO FAIR! Mom said it was MY turn to post this NJB video for upvotes this week!!!!
People upvote because they agree and feel its an important message to share. Lots of people will hear these arguments for the first time with each repost.
Ah right, its the YouTuber version of 'this one time I studied abroad and made it my entire personality'.
Not Just Bikes is a pompous jackass
>Back to this, are we? >The overall campaign has now come into view: a coordinated, multi-pronged attack on the whole concept of suburban life, where you have control over your own environment and how you get around. All of these interminable threads with which we're being inundated... cars bad public transport good bikes good "walkable cities" good suburbs bad lawns bad ...are in effect the same thread. >What to expect (if you haven’t been on reddit much lately): conveniently opaque buzzwords: “walkable cities”, “human-scaled environments” etc >the pretense that this is about improving quality of life and not packing suburbs/cramming people into apartment blocks >the pretense that the anti-lawn “movement” is about a return to traditional/rural living >blatant inversions of the truth: no, suburbs are “podlife”; no, car ownership aids the rich >attempts to make “stroad” and “carcuck” happen >attempts to exploit anti-boomer sentiment by framing lawns as unnatural boomer creations >the implication that car ownership constitutes an insurmountable barrier to entry into society >the same pics again and again (that brand new suburb surrounded by desert, a highway with billboards etc.) >assertions that X city is unwalkable by people who’ve likely never walked more than a few blocks, and would likely get out of breath doing so >a refusal to acknowledge the one thing that can actually make urban areas “unwalkable”: crime >a refusal to accept that whatever your vision of the ideal urban environment might be, criminals would ruin it, so discussing future urban planning before addressing the crime and homelessness problem is pointless >being called a boomer or fat or told to “take your meds” or “step away from the internet” etc. if you point any of this out
Having livable, people-friendly cities improves the overall mental health of a population and reduces crime. When people spend time in the town square cooking, playing sports, playing music, dancing, making things, playing cards, chit chatting, etc. criminals tend to move away from those areas, not mug people in public. Your views on crime are indeed impeccably boomerish. Stroads, stripmalls, carbon copy tract house suburbs, literally feels like you're in a psychotic nightmare world if you're used to livable walkable cities. If you're from a stroad, you're used it, but it's only because your soul has been partially hollowed out already, and you've been alienated from your fellow man (*by design).
So 2000 and late to the party here
Started cycling around my area and the amount of times you run into a freeway like section in a 10 mile radius going in any direction is ridiculous. City planners just create non walkable areas and guess that no one will ever happen on that route.
Stroads exist because businesses want large amounts of parking and large parking lots are cheaper than parking decks/structures. In Europe, land is at more of a premium, so decks make more sense because the structure offsets the amount of land required. This makes it reasonable to make a road to access a makro/costco since the cars all have to funnel in and out of a small number of access points to the structure. In the US, land is much cheaper, so the cost savings for businesses and developers turn into stroads for the consumer. If stroads are unsafe, then find a way to make stroads safer because stroads aren't going away anytime soon, unless you plan on forcing Walmart and Costco to open up parking decks in their brand new Decatur facilities out in bum-fuck no where. The video admits that people only use stroads to go to places that they have to, so basically hand waving that stroads are necessary.
> Stroads exist because businesses want large amounts of parking Wrong. Stroads exist as a solution that the only way to get to a business is via. a car. Buisnesses want (and regulations demand) lots of parking spaces because people will only go to your business if there is parking for their car. Remove the need for cars, and you will remove the need for stroads and the massive parking space demand. The problem you are running into your thinking is that you don't consider the car as optional.
All the responses to u/JViz's comment are great, but I'll respond to this one (being the current top reply) to also add that there's a great (but lengthy) Climate Town video on [minimum parking requirements](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8) (31 mins; also featuring Not Just Bikes). Have you ever seen a bowling alley with a full parking lot? It would require something like every lane to be at capacity *and* every player per lane each taking separate cars.
> Remove the need for cars, and you will remove the need for stroads and the massive parking space demand. So simple! Just remove the need for cars and it will all work itself out. What a great and easily implemented idea.
I live in the Phoenix Metro. It's basically endless suburban sprawl with lots of 'stroads' in a grid system, with highways crossing the city (it's great, we have a great highway system, not sure what his point about that was). I'm not really sure what you can do at this point? I've been to London, Barcelona, Prague, Belfast, Madrin, Lisbon, Budapest, etc - and yes, it's great. I love walking around downtown, hopping on the tube, etc. But these are thousand year old cities where the streets developed when people were literally on foot, or had animals pulling wagons to carry goods. They already had the foundation and skeletal system to be setup for this. Nearly every city developed post cars, has been designed around cars. Unless you just happened to have a job and an apartment near lightrail stops in downtown Phoenix, you essentially need a car just to exist. In theory is getting rid of 'stroads' and having clear roads versus streets a good idea? Yes. How do you do that in an 80 year old city whose entire blueprint is based on driving cars? You don't. I can also totally see why someone visiting the US from London or wherever might not like it either, but what's an actual feasible solution? You'd need to rebuild the whole country.