I live in the Rosemont neighbourhood of Montreal. It was a blue collar neighbourhood when it was developed. A lot of buildings were built by these blue collar workers. It is a walkable neighbourhood because these people were not rich enough to own cars. It boggles the mind that i can only live here as a renter now. Every home is near one million in value so there is no way I could ever buy here. If I ever buy, I need to go out of the city far away and get stuck in traffic for hours. This kind of neighbourhood would never be built in this city even though people like to live here.
Same problem with trying to live in any walkable California beach town. Could only ever rent a shack. Only affordable housing is far inland in the usual suburban hell.
In contrast: I'm living in a village in Europe with 6000 inhabitants. One hour train ride from the center of the capital, I suppose it's still counts as the metro area in the US. We got 3 small grocery stores in walking distance, where you can still buy 97% what you need daily. We got also 2 bakeries and a butcher shop, 2 hardware store, a car mechanic, etc. Yes, if you want to by TV set or clothes, you have to drive 25-30 minutes (or take a bus of course, but it could take an hour).
Affordable even when you factor in gas? If I move from where I am (high rent yes, but a walkable town with access to great public transportation.) my fuel bill will go up by at least 500 bucks a month. For me the total cost would be higher if I move from where I am now. And people don't understand that
Great episode, great guest, I've been following NJB for years. I was entertained to discover that him, like me, we were both keen at the youngest possible age to get our driver's license as neither of us knew better, but now both of us are keen to advance the walkable neighbourhood idea.
I wish more people would put dollar values on the 'suburbs are subsidized' idea. Trying to contain expansion in places like (say) Kitchener-Waterloo has increased the prices of suburban homes by hundreds of thousands of dollars. If some people are paying that, could they really not pay for infrastructure if they were not also paying for artificial scarcity? Building costs for high-density housing are also higher (per square foot), so there's a trade-off with infrastructure costs even if the homeowner is paying both. I'm fine with the idea there's some kind of goldilocks level of density here, but I'm less convinced it's obvious you wouldn't get suburbs if you were just relying on price. Transit is (heavily) subsidized too. People don't seem to have very consistent views on subsidy being bad, and it nearly seems like hypocrisy when you see it sometimes from people who are wealthy enough to get the best of both worlds (e.g., single-family housing or townhouses in mixed-density central neighbourhoods) to complain about other people being 'subsidized' to get the same kind of housing in the places they can afford, especially because for most public services we consider some level of cross-subsidy the default. Good point about many places now having less desirable housing without any of the benefits of neighbourhood density, though.
This differs wildly by province, state, and even city due to differing policies and exact numbers requires the help of the municipality. Check out StrongTowns.org though: they routinely publish exact numbers for several different regions they've worked with.
@@NotJustBikes Thanks for the link. I've seen some the Strong Towns numbers, but mostly they don't seem all that transparent to me about how they are allocating *costs* to individual neighbourhoods (vs implicitly assuming those costs scale with area). I get some of these things are tricky. But given some of the estimates on the order of a few thousand dollars a year, I still don't personally see how this would be tipping the scales for most people or adds up to 'unsustainability' vs taxes just being a little too low.
@@user-64962Have you never met an American single detached homeowner? These people are in debt up their eyeballs. My neighborhood needs to levy a $500 fee because some homes in the neighborhood are refusing to contribute to maintain public spaces. Meaning for example, every body of water is full of mosquitoes right now. There was such outrage, the association has tried to compromise to spread the payments out over 6 months. And again, this is affecting people presently. The mosquito situation is awful. And $500 to take care of the mosquitoes is causing an absolute riot. Charging "a few thousand" for sewer and blacktop would cause literal riots. Suburban NIMBYs are something.
@@KevinJDildonik Do you understand that the US is not the whole world? I think you are misunderstanding what the current situation in Canada is, which is that 60% of new builds in the Canadian province in which 2/3 of the people this podcast (and me) live are apartments, and average houses cost a million dollars because they have been made artificially scarce. There is a totally reasonable question about whether that is a false economy just to save some infrastructure costs. Most suburbs here are also a little denser than American suburbs, so again, I just don't think it's that comparable or even that 'single-family suburbs' are meaningfully one thing.
I live very close to Main Street Unionville. Semi walkable community but dozens of condos are being built just south of us. Lots of retail and it’s only getting more dense. Some places are fixable.
Great interview. I love European towns for their architecture, walkability and bikability. Canada has never felt like home to me despite my having lived here for most of my life. My parents immigrated here from Northern Ireland when I was age 7. Canada has always felt too big for me - too expansive. In Ireland the sea was just minutes away. I only stay here because my children and grandchildren are here, but I'm far from happy or content. I live in Montreal because I like getting around using my body on my bicycle - great for good weather, not so great in winter.
You mentioned Mississauga where the Bloor st redesign will turn a 4 car lanes into 3 car lanes and add bike lanes, there are signs on lawns on Bloor st that say 'save Bloor street' keep car lanes. Suburban people are Car-brained and can't fathom a city from not inside a car. Lots of big pickup trucks in driveways too.
I would really like to understand better how gas and infrastructure is subsidized for the suburbs, wonder if they have something going into more detail on the nuts and bolts of that part
The videos on this subject are great. The short answer, though, is that they're not. Suburbs were designed by profiteers. They already made their money. The designers and builders don't need to maintain the neighbourhoods they were allowed to build and sell. We maintain suburbs through abuse of tax revenue and procrastinating expensive issues unrelated to roads and cars.
In short, he means the elevated costs of both infrastructure and fuel that is used by suburbanites are actually paid by people who live in cities. Fuel part is simple. Fuel in the US is very cheap, the $0.50 federal tax per gallon hasn't changed since the 80s or 90ties I think, and the revenues from this tax don't even come close to expenditures to grow and sustain the road network in the US. Now keep in mind that a good number of suburbanites will commute to the cities daily using their cars without actually paying their fair share whereas people in cities will either walk/cycle or use public transit but will pay the same amount of taxes. The story is more or less the same with infrastructure and public services, suburbanites receive the same level of public services and infrastructure for similar prices, when in reality the costs of providing these services to the suburbs are a lot more expensive, because of sprawl. Hope this helps! Edit: I've just rechecked and the federal tax is less than 20 cents per gallon, so suburbanites are even more subsidized lol
The money cities can realistically take in is a function of how many people and how many businesses it has. A lot of the costs for a city are a function of distance and area; things like roads and lights and sewer pipes and patrol routes. Thus, mixed dense places make a city a lot more money. For every city people have looked at, downtowns and even ghettos make a city money, while suburbs are net negative. Then there's second order effects where suburbs generate an abnormal number of car trips because no work, social space or shop is there and because they are hard to service with transport, by intention. This generates a need for more roads, more lanes, more parking, all things that are costs and dilute the useful things in the near city making it less economically productive. Cities borrow and tax their productive businesses more to cope, making them more fragile. This model is subsidized at state and federal levels. It's a lot harder to get direct or indirect state support for an apartment compared to a house. Massive amounts of money are thrown at ever more highways constantly, while more productive transport like rail (huge volumes, high speed, low land use) or bike trails (really cheap, low maintenance) doesn't get a look in. This development pattern only makes sense for suburbs, and it routinely demolishes swathes of city. And of course fuel in the US context is kept dirt cheap due to very low taxation: Gas in Brussels costs like 135% more than Baltimore, and the difference is almost entirely tax. Energy cost for other modes of transport roughly matches.
@@andrewkerr5296 Check what happened with the former tram capital of the world: Los Angeles. Spoiler: GM bought it and destroyed it, and replaced it with buses. Buses get stuck in the traffic, they are less efficient and GM made a huge profit.
10:14 You should not just change your regulations once. You really need to keep improving and changing your regulations. What really seems to hold the USA back is how hard it is to change things once a first version of the rules has been created. This is even true of the Constitution. Things in the USA are just hard to improve.
He said no to 4-plexes province-wise, but the federal government tied a bunch of infrastructure money to upzoning, and went directly to municipalities. Many in Ontario have agreed to allow them to access that money.
Thankfully I went to university in Victoria BC in the 1980's. Everyone I know biked to school, work,parties, shopping. Having a car was out of the question. Now I live in a suburb of vancouver, and my husband bikes downtown van 5 times a week. He takes bile lanes all the way. I can't relate to your conversation. Sounds so dismal.
Growing up in a wealthy suburb of Houston, all my highschool friends had cars or rode a school bus. I had no car, & hated catching the bus so early, so I rode a bike -- everywhere. I'm so glad now.
"This is how we've always done things" North America seems really conservative and resistant to change. One of the things the Dutch do, is try to continuously improve. Every project should be better than the last one.
I can confirm from the front lines of mortgage banking that underwriters and official loan guidelines make any sort of mixed use or multi unit co ownership buildings very difficult to finance. Want to get a single family house in a suburb with an HOA? Step right up, you are pre-approved!
I suspect one of the reasons we don't pre-build rapid transit into undeveloped areas is because we're so far behind in actually building it out to what already exists. If your rapid transit line has only so far reached the suburbs of the 1980s, you've still got those of the 90s, 00s, 10s and 20s to build through before you can push it on out into yet-to-be-developed areas. Then on top of that is of course cost: if your city didn't plan for having rapid transit through all those decades, then it probably doesn't have a reserved corridor for it either (somewhat ironically, Alberta's two major cities along with Ottawa to some degree actually seem to be ahead of the larger Canadian city-regions in reserving corridors). With no reserved corridor, and unless there's a handy old railway line lying around that hasn't been converted into a path, you've got to try to hack it out of the suburban fabric somehow, which most of the time means using one of those infamous stroads - and Toronto's Eglington LRT is giving us a good indication of how much a costly pain that can be. But even when we have an available corridor, we still seem to manage to find ways to make construction prohibitively expensive. Interestingly, Ottawa currently *IS* building a line into largely undeveloped suburbia south of the city. In this case, it actually does have a reserved corridor that's part old railway line and part new reserved corridor through suburbia - and to be clear, this RoW is NOT within the confines of a road RoW; it's its own dedicated, separate RoW with minimal interference (i.e. local neighbourhood streets don't cross it). But instead of building a low cost line with grade crossings and relatively simple, easy-to-access stations, Ottawa is building that line with overpasses and elevated stations, the primary beneficiary of which (apart from the builders, of course) are drivers who will be spared having to occasionally stop for a train and wait 15" for it to pass. Also interestingly though, a number of Ottawa's developers with land immediately adjacent to these stations are determined to build classic suburban retail-pad plazas with acres of parking.
Oddly, as a teenager I wasn't in a rush to get a driver's license. I walked to school most of my youth, except a few year period in which the powers that be decided that a certain road was too busy to cross.
I REALLY enjoyed this episode. This podcast has great potential for growth. Would be great to see other guests in the urbanist space. E.g. Reece from RM Transit would be a great guest.
I would really like it if some people went and dug into the reasons behind the designs, regulations and laws. Like the example you gave at the end that car lanes can never be turned into bike lanes. Where does that come from, who lobbied the major for that, how? It would also be interesting to interview city managers, city designers, traffic engineers, politicians, etc. To explain what would need to change to make changing things easier.
As a cynical communist i say the Dutch avoided the car centric trap, due to a few good political decisions, but we are more lucky then smart to be in this position, or we should thank the protesters and not politics. The slowness and liberal capitalistic pampering stance of the government, allows for some smears on "our" nice bike infrastructure. Meet the fatbike, there is a lot to do about these vehicles, but politics is sooo slow to actually respond. Maybe when there wil be enough outcry, like with the cars in the past, politics will act. Politics here has a tendency to hear the loudest groups, not always bad but dangerous, and a overall tendency to follow the money. An examples is that companies here are allowed to sell rigged mopeds that are too fast, but people using them get a fine when caught. Also like in the US rights are not basic but something buyable, and punishments not hurting all incomes the same. All for the sake of money and personal possesion, always finally based on violence and not work. We don't live in a car dependent country but we do live in an overly glorified free market dependent country. So we are basically a moral heap of..., as in the US but still a bit milder, Buuuut with a nice bike infrastructure 🎉
As somebody from the former eastern block I can tell you that communism is very-very bad. It is as bad as capitalism, it just make you life hell in other ways. :D
US American here. I don't think most US suburbs are at all fixable or redeemable due to their low density and street layout that dumps alk the traffic on the great arterial stroads. What's going to happen to them is what happened to the neighborhoods of Detroit: they're going to become blighted and abandoned, allowed to rot, and revert back to nature.
i don't see that at all in the Northeast...i see the suburbs having much better infrastructure than the nearby cities. the comments here are the complete opposite of what my two eyes see.
Grew up in the 2nd largest city in Massachusetts during the 70s and 80s...until crime and rent became too much and my parents moved us to a Suburb. My personal experience has been the complete opposite of everything in this video. In the city, i lived on the public transit schedule not my own, no green spaces unless you went to a park about a mile away, we had to deal with crime when a drug dealing family with a live in prostitute moved in above us (we lived on the first floor of a three decker) and overall, life was depressing. In the suburb, we experienced things we had never known; over an acre of a backyard to play in, almost non existent crime rates, met my wife at a summer job that i could walk to, built a house with a pool and now get to watch my kids grow up with all the things i didn't. Urban life is for people without kids, who crave to be controlled and like living in conditions that are substandard. I weep for people that live in the city.
This is rarely happening in Europe. Sometimes it does, but because the wealthy families did not left the city center, and the local businesses are generating way more tax, and the local businesses are also generating way more workplaces the things are under control in European cities. The police are frequently involved in similar situations. In the last years it changed a bit, especially in western Europe when the migrants are arrived from the middle east. It seems despite all the efforts they don't want to integrate to the society, and start ruining the cities.
Personally, this is why I think we should fix the suburbs rather than trying to make everything a city. Keep the white picket fences, single family homes, and large back yards; community watches and functional police; and community spaces and sense of community. But: allow coffee shops, corner stores, and other small businesses to be opened right in the middle of these single family homes. And make sure to design walking and biking paths so that you can walk and bike in as close to a straight line as possible to anything within 3 miles or so.
@@ivanalexandrovichchernyshe7126 Currently I'm living in a village with 6000 inhabitants. It's 50m train ride from the city center of the capital, I would say it counts as metro area in the US. But if I could I would move back to the city center. It can offer so much more that I would happily give up my family home and move to a flat in the cit center. City centers are not that ***** in Europe, they are not bulldozed for highways and parking lots. And the crime rate is acceptable. And yes, they are walkable. :) I even haven't got a car before 31, and honestly I didn't needed that at that time. :)
North America is different than Europe, Japan or Korea. So many different cultures, religions and values. You need space to keep your sanity. We will always want single family and put up with traffic. Especially women who have to deal with aggressive and idiot behaviour a lot more than men.
Hope you're prepared to pay for it as well, as there will be a moment in time that the society (you know, the people you apparently want to escape from), will stop paying for the services and infrastructure you receive.
I'm waiting for the moment when cities starting to increase taxes of suburban home owners to truly cover the maintenance expenses of their neighborhood. Suddenly many people will change their mind about dense housing.
@@NapiRockAndRoll And transit users can pay full fare recovery, and suburbanites can stop funding the social services made necessary by expensive housing in cities. This idea that suburbs are losing money or heavily subsidized is not really consistent with cities throwing tantrums when suburbs are their own municipalities and not paying taxes to cities. (If the suburbs were really a money pit, the added liabilities should outweigh the added tax base.) It's also not consistent with actual spending patterns between high- and low-density municipalities either. If they can actually allocate costs reliably, fine. But it might not be the results you think.
Oh, looking forward to listening to this podcast! Great guest, NotJustBikes!!
I live in the Rosemont neighbourhood of Montreal. It was a blue collar neighbourhood when it was developed. A lot of buildings were built by these blue collar workers. It is a walkable neighbourhood because these people were not rich enough to own cars. It boggles the mind that i can only live here as a renter now. Every home is near one million in value so there is no way I could ever buy here. If I ever buy, I need to go out of the city far away and get stuck in traffic for hours. This kind of neighbourhood would never be built in this city even though people like to live here.
Same problem with trying to live in any walkable California beach town. Could only ever rent a shack. Only affordable housing is far inland in the usual suburban hell.
In contrast: I'm living in a village in Europe with 6000 inhabitants. One hour train ride from the center of the capital, I suppose it's still counts as the metro area in the US. We got 3 small grocery stores in walking distance, where you can still buy 97% what you need daily. We got also 2 bakeries and a butcher shop, 2 hardware store, a car mechanic, etc. Yes, if you want to by TV set or clothes, you have to drive 25-30 minutes (or take a bus of course, but it could take an hour).
Affordable even when you factor in gas? If I move from where I am (high rent yes, but a walkable town with access to great public transportation.) my fuel bill will go up by at least 500 bucks a month. For me the total cost would be higher if I move from where I am now. And people don't understand that
Great episode, great guest, I've been following NJB for years. I was entertained to discover that him, like me, we were both keen at the youngest possible age to get our driver's license as neither of us knew better, but now both of us are keen to advance the walkable neighbourhood idea.
Same here!
I have more faith in Canada to fix their infrastructure than the US. 😢
Its definitely a lot easier for Canada, because they are not populated all over the country like the US.
I escaped Suburbia for north Toronto, and I don't miss it one bit.
I wish more people would put dollar values on the 'suburbs are subsidized' idea. Trying to contain expansion in places like (say) Kitchener-Waterloo has increased the prices of suburban homes by hundreds of thousands of dollars. If some people are paying that, could they really not pay for infrastructure if they were not also paying for artificial scarcity? Building costs for high-density housing are also higher (per square foot), so there's a trade-off with infrastructure costs even if the homeowner is paying both. I'm fine with the idea there's some kind of goldilocks level of density here, but I'm less convinced it's obvious you wouldn't get suburbs if you were just relying on price.
Transit is (heavily) subsidized too. People don't seem to have very consistent views on subsidy being bad, and it nearly seems like hypocrisy when you see it sometimes from people who are wealthy enough to get the best of both worlds (e.g., single-family housing or townhouses in mixed-density central neighbourhoods) to complain about other people being 'subsidized' to get the same kind of housing in the places they can afford, especially because for most public services we consider some level of cross-subsidy the default. Good point about many places now having less desirable housing without any of the benefits of neighbourhood density, though.
This differs wildly by province, state, and even city due to differing policies and exact numbers requires the help of the municipality. Check out StrongTowns.org though: they routinely publish exact numbers for several different regions they've worked with.
@@NotJustBikes Thanks for the link. I've seen some the Strong Towns numbers, but mostly they don't seem all that transparent to me about how they are allocating *costs* to individual neighbourhoods (vs implicitly assuming those costs scale with area). I get some of these things are tricky. But given some of the estimates on the order of a few thousand dollars a year, I still don't personally see how this would be tipping the scales for most people or adds up to 'unsustainability' vs taxes just being a little too low.
@@user-64962Have you never met an American single detached homeowner? These people are in debt up their eyeballs. My neighborhood needs to levy a $500 fee because some homes in the neighborhood are refusing to contribute to maintain public spaces. Meaning for example, every body of water is full of mosquitoes right now. There was such outrage, the association has tried to compromise to spread the payments out over 6 months. And again, this is affecting people presently. The mosquito situation is awful. And $500 to take care of the mosquitoes is causing an absolute riot. Charging "a few thousand" for sewer and blacktop would cause literal riots. Suburban NIMBYs are something.
@@KevinJDildonik Do you understand that the US is not the whole world? I think you are misunderstanding what the current situation in Canada is, which is that 60% of new builds in the Canadian province in which 2/3 of the people this podcast (and me) live are apartments, and average houses cost a million dollars because they have been made artificially scarce. There is a totally reasonable question about whether that is a false economy just to save some infrastructure costs.
Most suburbs here are also a little denser than American suburbs, so again, I just don't think it's that comparable or even that 'single-family suburbs' are meaningfully one thing.
I live very close to Main Street Unionville. Semi walkable community but dozens of condos are being built just south of us. Lots of retail and it’s only getting more dense. Some places are fixable.
Great interview. I love European towns for their architecture, walkability and bikability. Canada has never felt like home to me despite my having lived here for most of my life. My parents immigrated here from Northern Ireland when I was age 7. Canada has always felt too big for me - too expansive. In Ireland the sea was just minutes away. I only stay here because my children and grandchildren are here, but I'm far from happy or content. I live in Montreal because I like getting around using my body on my bicycle - great for good weather, not so great in winter.
There are places in Canada by the Ocean...
Be happy
You mentioned Mississauga where the Bloor st redesign will turn a 4 car lanes into 3 car lanes and add bike lanes, there are signs on lawns on Bloor st that say 'save Bloor street' keep car lanes. Suburban people are Car-brained and can't fathom a city from not inside a car. Lots of big pickup trucks in driveways too.
I would really like to understand better how gas and infrastructure is subsidized for the suburbs, wonder if they have something going into more detail on the nuts and bolts of that part
I'd recommend NotJustBikes' videos on Strong Towns for that
The videos on this subject are great. The short answer, though, is that they're not.
Suburbs were designed by profiteers. They already made their money. The designers and builders don't need to maintain the neighbourhoods they were allowed to build and sell.
We maintain suburbs through abuse of tax revenue and procrastinating expensive issues unrelated to roads and cars.
In short, he means the elevated costs of both infrastructure and fuel that is used by suburbanites are actually paid by people who live in cities.
Fuel part is simple. Fuel in the US is very cheap, the $0.50 federal tax per gallon hasn't changed since the 80s or 90ties I think, and the revenues from this tax don't even come close to expenditures to grow and sustain the road network in the US. Now keep in mind that a good number of suburbanites will commute to the cities daily using their cars without actually paying their fair share whereas people in cities will either walk/cycle or use public transit but will pay the same amount of taxes.
The story is more or less the same with infrastructure and public services, suburbanites receive the same level of public services and infrastructure for similar prices, when in reality the costs of providing these services to the suburbs are a lot more expensive, because of sprawl.
Hope this helps!
Edit: I've just rechecked and the federal tax is less than 20 cents per gallon, so suburbanites are even more subsidized lol
Every time you don't need to pay a toll to use a piece of road you are enjoying everyone's tax dollars. And suburbs have a lot of road per house.
The money cities can realistically take in is a function of how many people and how many businesses it has. A lot of the costs for a city are a function of distance and area; things like roads and lights and sewer pipes and patrol routes. Thus, mixed dense places make a city a lot more money. For every city people have looked at, downtowns and even ghettos make a city money, while suburbs are net negative. Then there's second order effects where suburbs generate an abnormal number of car trips because no work, social space or shop is there and because they are hard to service with transport, by intention. This generates a need for more roads, more lanes, more parking, all things that are costs and dilute the useful things in the near city making it less economically productive. Cities borrow and tax their productive businesses more to cope, making them more fragile.
This model is subsidized at state and federal levels. It's a lot harder to get direct or indirect state support for an apartment compared to a house. Massive amounts of money are thrown at ever more highways constantly, while more productive transport like rail (huge volumes, high speed, low land use) or bike trails (really cheap, low maintenance) doesn't get a look in. This development pattern only makes sense for suburbs, and it routinely demolishes swathes of city. And of course fuel in the US context is kept dirt cheap due to very low taxation: Gas in Brussels costs like 135% more than Baltimore, and the difference is almost entirely tax. Energy cost for other modes of transport roughly matches.
Wow!
A 🔥 Collab!! 😃
Hello, new viewer here!
Mike reminds me a bit of John Oliver
except without the humor, or accuracy...
Great guest.
he's a moron..
You have a Belgian licence plate in your house. I always knew you secretly can't miss our country even though you hate it 🙂
"In the United States, car companies literally bought up public transit, and destroyed it"! I didn't know that, but doesn't surprise me!!
Because it's a lie lol
@@andrewkerr5296 Check what happened with the former tram capital of the world: Los Angeles. Spoiler: GM bought it and destroyed it, and replaced it with buses. Buses get stuck in the traffic, they are less efficient and GM made a huge profit.
@@NapiRockAndRoll
Lol who sold it to them?
GM didn't take it by force
@@andrewkerr5296 The private companies sold the tram network to the GM. Then GM closed the networks, making demand for buses. Capitalism at the peak.
@@NapiRockAndRoll
Yea so what
It was Private Property
Please come visit Lehigh Acres, Florida. You will have content for years!
10:14 You should not just change your regulations once.
You really need to keep improving and changing your regulations.
What really seems to hold the USA back is how hard it is to change things once a first version of the rules has been created.
This is even true of the Constitution. Things in the USA are just hard to improve.
If only you guys could have recorded after the premier musing about the 401 tunnel
Didn't Doug Ford say no fourplexes, one of the solutions to the missing middle.
He said no to 4-plexes province-wise, but the federal government tied a bunch of infrastructure money to upzoning, and went directly to municipalities. Many in Ontario have agreed to allow them to access that money.
Thankfully I went to university in Victoria BC in the 1980's. Everyone I know biked to school, work,parties, shopping. Having a car was out of the question. Now I live in a suburb of vancouver, and my husband bikes downtown van 5 times a week. He takes bile lanes all the way. I can't relate to your conversation. Sounds so dismal.
Growing up in a wealthy suburb of Houston, all my highschool friends had cars or rode a school bus. I had no car, & hated catching the bus so early, so I rode a bike -- everywhere. I'm so glad now.
You're going to love Doug Ford's concept of a plan to put another 401 under the 401
Great call out for Wortley Village. The first walkable neighborhood I moved to in my 20s.
"This is how we've always done things"
North America seems really conservative and resistant to change.
One of the things the Dutch do, is try to continuously improve. Every project should be better than the last one.
Great analysis!
I can confirm from the front lines of mortgage banking that underwriters and official loan guidelines make any sort of mixed use or multi unit co ownership buildings very difficult to finance. Want to get a single family house in a suburb with an HOA? Step right up, you are pre-approved!
I suspect one of the reasons we don't pre-build rapid transit into undeveloped areas is because we're so far behind in actually building it out to what already exists. If your rapid transit line has only so far reached the suburbs of the 1980s, you've still got those of the 90s, 00s, 10s and 20s to build through before you can push it on out into yet-to-be-developed areas.
Then on top of that is of course cost: if your city didn't plan for having rapid transit through all those decades, then it probably doesn't have a reserved corridor for it either (somewhat ironically, Alberta's two major cities along with Ottawa to some degree actually seem to be ahead of the larger Canadian city-regions in reserving corridors). With no reserved corridor, and unless there's a handy old railway line lying around that hasn't been converted into a path, you've got to try to hack it out of the suburban fabric somehow, which most of the time means using one of those infamous stroads - and Toronto's Eglington LRT is giving us a good indication of how much a costly pain that can be. But even when we have an available corridor, we still seem to manage to find ways to make construction prohibitively expensive.
Interestingly, Ottawa currently *IS* building a line into largely undeveloped suburbia south of the city. In this case, it actually does have a reserved corridor that's part old railway line and part new reserved corridor through suburbia - and to be clear, this RoW is NOT within the confines of a road RoW; it's its own dedicated, separate RoW with minimal interference (i.e. local neighbourhood streets don't cross it). But instead of building a low cost line with grade crossings and relatively simple, easy-to-access stations, Ottawa is building that line with overpasses and elevated stations, the primary beneficiary of which (apart from the builders, of course) are drivers who will be spared having to occasionally stop for a train and wait 15" for it to pass. Also interestingly though, a number of Ottawa's developers with land immediately adjacent to these stations are determined to build classic suburban retail-pad plazas with acres of parking.
Oddly, as a teenager I wasn't in a rush to get a driver's license. I walked to school most of my youth, except a few year period in which the powers that be decided that a certain road was too busy to cross.
I REALLY enjoyed this episode. This podcast has great potential for growth.
Would be great to see other guests in the urbanist space. E.g. Reece from RM Transit would be a great guest.
I would really like it if some people went and dug into the reasons behind the designs, regulations and laws.
Like the example you gave at the end that car lanes can never be turned into bike lanes. Where does that come from, who lobbied the major for that, how?
It would also be interesting to interview city managers, city designers, traffic engineers, politicians, etc.
To explain what would need to change to make changing things easier.
He really looks like Tim Robinson
I see Not Just Bikes and I automatically like.
As a cynical communist i say the Dutch avoided the car centric trap, due to a few good political decisions, but we are more lucky then smart to be in this position, or we should thank the protesters and not politics. The slowness and liberal capitalistic pampering stance of the government, allows for some smears on "our" nice bike infrastructure. Meet the fatbike, there is a lot to do about these vehicles, but politics is sooo slow to actually respond. Maybe when there wil be enough outcry, like with the cars in the past, politics will act. Politics here has a tendency to hear the loudest groups, not always bad but dangerous, and a overall tendency to follow the money. An examples is that companies here are allowed to sell rigged mopeds that are too fast, but people using them get a fine when caught. Also like in the US rights are not basic but something buyable, and punishments not hurting all incomes the same. All for the sake of money and personal possesion, always finally based on violence and not work. We don't live in a car dependent country but we do live in an overly glorified free market dependent country. So we are basically a moral heap of..., as in the US but still a bit milder, Buuuut with a nice bike infrastructure 🎉
As somebody from the former eastern block I can tell you that communism is very-very bad. It is as bad as capitalism, it just make you life hell in other ways. :D
US American here. I don't think most US suburbs are at all fixable or redeemable due to their low density and street layout that dumps alk the traffic on the great arterial stroads. What's going to happen to them is what happened to the neighborhoods of Detroit: they're going to become blighted and abandoned, allowed to rot, and revert back to nature.
i don't see that at all in the Northeast...i see the suburbs having much better infrastructure than the nearby cities. the comments here are the complete opposite of what my two eyes see.
Grew up in the 2nd largest city in Massachusetts during the 70s and 80s...until crime and rent became too much and my parents moved us to a Suburb. My personal experience has been the complete opposite of everything in this video. In the city, i lived on the public transit schedule not my own, no green spaces unless you went to a park about a mile away, we had to deal with crime when a drug dealing family with a live in prostitute moved in above us (we lived on the first floor of a three decker) and overall, life was depressing. In the suburb, we experienced things we had never known; over an acre of a backyard to play in, almost non existent crime rates, met my wife at a summer job that i could walk to, built a house with a pool and now get to watch my kids grow up with all the things i didn't. Urban life is for people without kids, who crave to be controlled and like living in conditions that are substandard. I weep for people that live in the city.
This is rarely happening in Europe. Sometimes it does, but because the wealthy families did not left the city center, and the local businesses are generating way more tax, and the local businesses are also generating way more workplaces the things are under control in European cities. The police are frequently involved in similar situations.
In the last years it changed a bit, especially in western Europe when the migrants are arrived from the middle east. It seems despite all the efforts they don't want to integrate to the society, and start ruining the cities.
Personally, this is why I think we should fix the suburbs rather than trying to make everything a city. Keep the white picket fences, single family homes, and large back yards; community watches and functional police; and community spaces and sense of community. But: allow coffee shops, corner stores, and other small businesses to be opened right in the middle of these single family homes. And make sure to design walking and biking paths so that you can walk and bike in as close to a straight line as possible to anything within 3 miles or so.
@@ivanalexandrovichchernyshe7126 Currently I'm living in a village with 6000 inhabitants. It's 50m train ride from the city center of the capital, I would say it counts as metro area in the US.
But if I could I would move back to the city center. It can offer so much more that I would happily give up my family home and move to a flat in the cit center.
City centers are not that ***** in Europe, they are not bulldozed for highways and parking lots. And the crime rate is acceptable.
And yes, they are walkable. :) I even haven't got a car before 31, and honestly I didn't needed that at that time. :)
North America is different than Europe, Japan or Korea. So many different cultures, religions and values. You need space to keep your sanity. We will always want single family and put up with traffic. Especially women who have to deal with aggressive and idiot behaviour a lot more than men.
No it's not different. Same old ignorant excuse that's been proven wrong.
Forgive my indiscretion, but it almost sounds like bait.
And if not it, then it almost sounds like you've been fear-mongered to hate your neighbors.
Hope you're prepared to pay for it as well, as there will be a moment in time that the society (you know, the people you apparently want to escape from), will stop paying for the services and infrastructure you receive.
I'm waiting for the moment when cities starting to increase taxes of suburban home owners to truly cover the maintenance expenses of their neighborhood.
Suddenly many people will change their mind about dense housing.
@@NapiRockAndRoll And transit users can pay full fare recovery, and suburbanites can stop funding the social services made necessary by expensive housing in cities. This idea that suburbs are losing money or heavily subsidized is not really consistent with cities throwing tantrums when suburbs are their own municipalities and not paying taxes to cities. (If the suburbs were really a money pit, the added liabilities should outweigh the added tax base.) It's also not consistent with actual spending patterns between high- and low-density municipalities either.
If they can actually allocate costs reliably, fine. But it might not be the results you think.