I’m not an urban planner … but I play
one on TV. So you might ask, “why do you run a YouTube
channel about urban planning and walkable cities then?” And I would say, “what a coincidence! That’s the topic of this video.” I grew up in a car-dependent, car-infested
city called London. To avoid confusion on this channel, I usually
refer to it as “Fake London”, or sometimes something derogatory. By the time I was a teenager, I was pretty
bored of Fake London, so I wanted to get out as quickly as possible and see the rest of
the world. So while I was in University, I took advantage
of internships to live in several different cities in Ontario, as well as in the San Francisco
Bay Area. During this time I also drove across the United
States 7 times, and across Canada once. And I stayed in dozens of cities and towns
along the way. Apart from some minor differences, all of
these places were pretty similar. There’s an overwhelming sameness between
almost all cities in the US and Canada, primarily due to their car-centric design. In the end, I decided to live in downtown
Toronto. This was a place that was interesting to me,
but I didn’t really know why at the time. I just knew I liked it a lot more than suburbia. Incidentally, when I lived in downtown Toronto,
I was able to easily live car-free, and this allowed me to save a huge amount of money
when I was young. After the dotcom crash of 2000, [Pets.com, because pets can’t drive]
[Ooh, yeah. This is my kind of party] I was laid off from my first job out of school,
and I was left unemployed for a very long time. When I finally did find a job, it was at a
significantly lower salary than what I was earning before. There’s simply no way I could have gotten
through that time in my life if I had to own a car to buy food, to apply for unemployment
benefits, to go to job interviews, and to go to work. This is one of the reasons why I am so hostile
towards car-dependent places. Because they are burdening everyone with thousands
of dollars per year for the costs of an automobile, just so that they can work and feed themselves. This is fundamentally wrong. Nobody should have to own a car, just to participate
in society. And designing a city that way on purpose,
is criminal. But what really opened my eyes is when I got
a job that required me to travel. Suddenly I was being sent to the UK, Germany,
Taiwan, Japan, and all over the United States. I started realizing that there was a whole
world of interesting cities out there, and they weren’t all the same car-centric sprawl
of the GTA or the Bay Area. During this time, I travelled excessively,
for both personal and business trips. There was a period of several years where
I wasn't in the same time zone for more than about 3 weeks at a time. One thing this insane amount of travel did
provide me with, was the opportunity to see how people lived all over the world. I wasn’t going places as a tourist; I was
going to where people actually lived and worked. I was taking local trains in Tokyo. I was stuck in rush-hour traffic in Boston. I was taking the S-Bahn in Berlin. I was taking taxis to remote factories in
Shenzhen. And I was going between these drastically
different cities on a nearly weekly basis. It was amazing to me to see how different
all of these cities were, and the different ways that people lived. But at the time I never really thought about
why this was the case. Like most people, I assumed it was for cultural
reasons, or due to the weather and local environment, because I was completely ignorant about urban
planning. That all changed during a trip to Houston. I was in the middle of an “around the world”
trip. These are discounted tickets for travelling
to multiple cities, but you need to travel only in one global direction -- always East,
or always West -- until you’ve flown all the way around the world. For most of my trip I had taken public transportation
in the cities I had visited, but I had been to Houston many times before, and knew I needed
to rent a car. However, I had met up with some coworkers
for this leg of my journey, so we shared one car between the three of us. We had a day off on Sunday, and my coworkers
had taken the car. When I was unpacking in my hotel room, I noticed
that my suitcase was falling apart, so I searched for a luggage shop nearby. Thankfully, there was one 800 meters away. No problem! I decided to walk there. That, was a terrible, terrible mistake. I exited the hotel to find that it was on
a street with no sidewalks. None at all. So I crossed through the adjacent parking
lots. It is disturbingly common to find places without
any sidewalks in American suburbia. But I had grown up in a car-infested city,
so I was used to it. As I got out to the main road, there was a
sidewalk. I didn’t know it at the time, but this road
was what Strong Towns refers to as a stroad: a street that is designed like a road, and
in doing so, is expensive, inefficient, and dangerous. This walk was pretty uncomfortable. The weather was nice, but there were no trees
to provide any shade. The landscape was boring and I was surrounded
by asphalt. All of the businesses I passed were far in
the distance, behind giant parking lots, and the signs were all oversized, and only meant
to be read while driving. In a place like this, you’re walking next
to polluted air and the constant noise from high-speed vehicles. And you always need to be alert for any cars
going in and out of driveways, as drivers are only looking at oncoming traffic; they
are not looking for pedestrians, and in America, people will blame you if you’re hit by a
car. Stoplights are long and there are too many
of them. And because cars can turn right on red lights
in America, you have to be hyper-aware when crossing the stroad. This is the kind of pedestrian experience
that people who never walk anywhere think is acceptable. But then I got to this spot and the sidewalk
just … ended. No warning. No alternative. It was just gone. But there was a well-trodden path through
the grass, so I followed it to this bridge. Where there was ... nothing. As I shimmied along the curb next to the guardrail,
with high-speed cars and trucks passing by me, I thought about how ridiculous this was. I was balancing on a few centimeters of curb
while crossing a 28 metre bridge with 7 lanes of car traffic. There was no consideration given to anybody
who wasn’t in a car, and there was no other alternative for people walking. At that moment, I decided that, if I lived
through this walk, I wanted to live in a place that was the exact opposite of a place like
this. When I made it to the other side, there was
also no sidewalk, of course, And I crossed through some more parking lots to get to the
luggage shop. Needless to say, I took a cab back to the
hotel. Yeah. I took a taxi, to go 800 meters. In the United States, over 45% of car trips
are 3 miles or less. Less than 5 kilometers. That’s insane. Europeans assume Americans drive everywhere
because they’re fat and lazy, but it’s not. It’s because these trips simply can’t
be done any other way. When I got back to my hotel I started reading
about how cities were designed. I learned about car-dependency and I learned
about walkability. And I learned about how these places have
changed over time, and how some places have designed their cities for humans, not just
for motor vehicles. One of the things that really upset me is
that the desolate asphalt-covered cities I had visited in the US and Canada weren’t
always this way. I was told that these cities were like this
because they were “designed for the car.” That’s not true. They weren't designed for the car, they were
bulldozed for the car. Look at these pictures of my hometown of Fake
London. This city is beautiful. Now it looks like this. This is a picture of Houston in the 1970s. No, it wasn’t bombed. They did this to themselves. This used to be a compact walkable city that
was just as good as those in Europe or Asia. And they destroyed it. When you see a place like this, you think
the developers must’ve got away with something, but literally everything you see, right down
to the colour of the paint of the lines in the parking lot, are defined in some book
of regulations. And those regulations are overwhelmingly designed
to make places that are only accessible by car. This is entirely by design. And it’s entirely by choice. It didn’t need to be this way. And it doesn’t need to stay this way. And that is why I became interested in urban
planning. My walk in Houston was not the first or the
last terrible experience I would have walking in an American city, but it was the most memorable. And I have absolutely zero patience for apologists
for this kind of car-centric anti-human design. I clearly wasn’t the only person who had
ever walked here, as proven by the path in the grass. You can see people walking here on Google
Street View. In a place like this, if you’re too poor
to drive a car, then you’re literally forgotten about. And this situation hasn’t changed at all
in the last decade, which is why I was able to get this video of it. There’s no excuse for this. If you have enough room for 7 lanes of car
traffic, then you have enough room for a sidewalk. Or a bicycle path. This is what a 28 metre bridge looks like
in Amsterdam. It has a sidewalk, and a two-way bicycle path
on both sides of the road. And yeah, this area in Houston is very suburban;
almost 30 kilometers from the city center. But that’s no excuse. The area is lined with businesses and shops,
many of which are staffed by minimum-wage workers. In America, housing prices are talked about
a lot, but the most important metric is housing + transportation costs. How are these employees supposed to get to
work? Do they all need to drive? Can they even afford to do that? Here’s what an industrial park in the middle
of nowhere looks like in the Netherlands. The street is only two lanes wide, and there’s
a beautiful two-way cycling path that can be used for people walking and cycling. North Americans baulk at designing pedestrian
and cycling infrastructure anywhere but in busy downtowns, but here, employees of the
nearby factories and warehouses can use these safe paths to get to and from work, and for
other trips like going for lunch, too. There is always a long list of excuses people
make as to why nobody walks or cycles in North America. But that’s what they are: excuses. The real reason is that it’s not enjoyable,
comfortable, or safe to walk or cycle in a place like this. Yeah, the weather is bad sometimes. Or there might be hills. But don’t you think that this guy would
appreciate a sidewalk? Houston, is one of the worst examples of urban
sprawl. For my Dutch viewers, if Amsterdam were as
sprawling as Houston, then a circle including Alkmaar, Leiden, Utrecht, and Lelystad would
all be connected by continuous car-dependent sprawl. There is a right and a wrong way to design
a city, and this is decidedly the wrong way, for so many reasons. And by the way, the BBQ joints in Houston
are good, but the best brisket I ever had in my life was at Mighty Quinn’s. And you know where that restaurant is? New York City [New York City!?] [Get a rope] But the sad part is, Houston is not even the
worst city in the US, and the city is actually doing more to change things than many other
US cities. For example, Houston recently deployed a completely
new bus network literally overnight, and it has led to significantly higher ridership. Streetfilms made an excellent video about
these changes. They’re really great. Bravo to Houston Metro for doing this. Houston has been installing several bicycle
lanes as well. And the city has removed minimum parking requirements,
for two downtown neighbourhoods, in an attempt to build a more walkable mixed-use downtown. Speaking of mixed-use, it is a common myth
that Houston does not have zoning. It’s true that the city does not have a
thing called zoning, but they have lots of other restrictions, such as minimum parking
requirements, minimum lot sizes, and other regulations that cities would normally put
into their zoning codes. And they also have city-enforced deed restrictions
that limit what you can built on certain parcels of land, that allows, for example, only single-family
homes to be built in many neighbourhoods. In short, Houston has all of the worst parts
of a zoning ordinance, they just don’t call it zoning. City Beautiful has a great video about this
if you’re interested in learning more. But despite all the work that is being done,
Houston has a very, very, very long way to go. The city recently completed a multi-million
dollar project that is called a “protected intersection for pedestrians.” Does this look pedestrian-friendly to you? It is the intersection of two six-lane stroads
and it literally has high-speed slip lanes for drivers so that they can bypass the traffic
light when turning right. Slip lanes are insanely dangerous for people
walking. It’s absolutely ridiculous that engineers
would purposefully design slip lanes in a place that’s supposedly meant for pedestrians,
and being billed as pedestrian-friendly. I mean, I guess it’s better than walking
through the grass and across a death-bridge with no sidewalk, but c’mon. This is what counts as pedestrian infrastructure? And of course Houston is also home to the
Katy freeway, the widest freeway in the United States. In 2011, 2.2 billion dollars was spent widening
the highway to over 20 lanes, and as a result, travel times out of downtown have increased
by up to 30%. This is a massive sum of money that could
have been better spent on public transit or other alternatives to driving that are proven
to reduce car traffic, but instead it was used as an expensive demonstration of induced
demand. And no lessons have been learned here. The city and state are planning an additional
7 billion dollars on highway expansion. This project will demolish 4 religious buildings,
2 schools, 168 homes, 1,067 multifamily units, and 331 businesses that employ almost 25,000
people. It is literally never ending. It’s often said that the truth about a city’s
aspirations isn’t found in its vision, it’s found in its budget. So despite the millions spent on pedestrian
improvements that somehow also include faster turning lanes for drivers, Houston is still
spending billions on car-infrastructure, and is fully addicted to car-dependency. I just don’t know how you undo the damage
caused by a place designed like this. How does this ever become sustainable? Financially or environmentally. And to me, the most sad part is that people
who have grown up only knowing car-dependence don’t see a problem with this. To them, restricting cars is literally taking
away their freedom, because they have become so addicted to car-dependency that they are
incapable of understanding that it is possible to design places where, not only do you not
need to drive, you won’t even want to drive, and that lifestyle can be better in almost
every way. My travels gave me the opportunity to visit
every major city in the United States, most of them multiple times, and as a result, I
have absolutely no desire to go back to any of them. But those experiences shaped the way I think
about cities and they're what ultimately resulted in our family moving to the Netherlands, the
country that has the best cities in the world. And hey, if Houston weren’t so terrible,
we never would have had this YouTube channel. So thanks, Houston. I owe you one. I’d like to thank my supporters on Patreon,
who pay me to relive the bad ol’ days. If you’d like to support the channel, and
get access to bonus videos, visit Patreon.com/notjustbikes.
Another thing that isn't talked about much is how there is such a scarcity of walkable areas that the few places that are, are now insanely expensive. We know people want to live in walkable areas but we still don't build them
The noisy car going by him at the end was just [chef’s kiss].
I tried to walk to my "nearby" Starbucks. It was 30 minutes away. Once I left my subdivision, that has decent sidewalks. The next section had none. Then the other side of the road randomly started a sidewalk, so I crossed in the middle of the street. Only to discover that a soon enough the widewalk was completely overgrown. The weeds in the area will have little spikey seeds that stick to you legs and I had on shorts, so I turned around a bit and crossed again, back to the side with no sidewalks. Only for eventually that path to be unwalkable. So, I crossed again, passed the weeds. Finally, the sidewalk came to an end just short of the parking lot (it could have gone all the way to curb but didn't for some reason) that I walked through to finally get to the Starbucks. The entire time, cars would fly pass at 45 mph along a 4-5 lane stroad.
I had been thinking I should try that walk at some point for a while, knowing that it would be bad, I just wasn't expected it to be that bad.
As always great video from this channel, this one in particular feels like a great video to show to friends and family to explain why American planning is so bad, and also why it's a problem. I've found that you can recite statistics and quality-of-life metrics at people all you want, but it's first hand experiences with bad planning that end up shaking people out of their current mindset. For NotJustBikes, it was a horrid suburban stroad in Houston. For me, it was getting stranded with no car in Columbus and having to bike 8 miles home in the middle of winter. For some of my friends, it's been going car-free for days or weeks at a time while theirs was in the shop, or being close to victims of car violence.
Stuff like this is why I always advocate for people to pretend like they don't have a car for a few weeks and try to go about their life like they normally would. When you actually take the bus or actually walk the sidewalk or actually bike in the bike lane you very, very quickly realize just how wrong things are. Great vid all around.
I spent last Friday walking 20 miles around our town, down a busy road, around a natural park, through our old town and through downtown and beyond to suburbia. While the walkability definitely seems better overall than what he showed of Houston, I was absolutely on my toes when it came to people turning right, I was constantly searching for a sidewalk and on a long walk like mine, there was absolutely nowhere to just park my butt and rest. It is absolutely hostile to urban hikers outside of downtown and while suburbia does have a number of sidewalks, combine that with the relative distance of everything to everything else, it becomes a hard time fairly quick.
I thought I would be able to change things here in Australia getting into urban planning, but I’ve realised that the task is much bigger than I first thought
The thing that gets me about Houston, as someone who just (finally) escaped after growing up there, is not just that it has terrible sprawling suburbs as depicted in the video--which is near where I grew up, incidentally--it's the almost-total lack of places that are not like that. Sure, there are places that are better, but there are not places that are good. Even Dallas, much as I hate to admit it, has a handful of spots you can live where it's pleasantly walkable for most trips, even if you're probably going to have to commute to your job via car. The Houston area just... doesn't. Yes, there are places where you can technically walk to things, but there's not even one neighborhood with a legitimately excellent main street. For a city of 2.3 million people anchoring a metro area with over 7 million, that's beyond sad--it's pathetic.
I beat you to it slightly but I'm happy to go with whichever thread gains traction.
So at around 00:57 he starts talking about the boring sameness of car-centric design and then shows 6 consecutive shots of boring nowherevilles in North America and each one of those shots has a macdonald's in it and that's somehow perfect. I'm sure it wasn't an accident.