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 U.S. 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 dot-com crash of 2000, "Pets.com." "Because pets can’t drive!" "Oh, yeah!" "Ooh, 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 U.K., 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 other 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 I knew I needed to rent a car. However, I had met up with some coworkers for this leg of the 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 U.S. 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 have 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 PLUS 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 2 lanes wide, and there’s a beautiful two-way cycling path that can be used for people walking and cycling. North Americans balk 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 way and a wrong way to design a city, and this is decidedly the wrong way, for so many reasons. And by the way, the barbeque 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 U.S., and the city is actually doing more to change things than many other U.S. 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 2 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 build 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 multimillion-dollar project that is called a “protected intersection for pedestrians". Does this look pedestrian-friendly to you? It is the intersection of two 6-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 come on! 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 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 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. ~ Self Promotions Segment Removed ~ Back To Top