Oh The Urbanity!
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2021–2024
8:44 · 177K views · Oct 9, 2021
Oh The Urbanity! questions the framing that urban planning reforms like bike lanes and traffic calming wage war on suburbanites. It argues that suburban and urban residents alike want less traffic on their own streets.
Cited in urbanism threads as a clear argument that car-dependent suburbs impose traffic on everyone.
8 comments from Hacker News
Yes, cul-de-sacs are a design element that can help to reduce the negative impacts of cars - in the immediate area. Though if you build an area out of cul-de-sacs with no bike/pedestrian shortcuts, you end up not being able to practically get around without a car, so the area around the cul-de-sacs needs lots of car infrastructure. (Which is not so great if your kids are unlucky enough to live across a wide arterial from their friends from school.) But ultimately yes, reducing through traffic can be a good thing, and there are ways to do that in cities too. There's a good video on this here: this video
There's a great video about that too. "The Suburban Traffic Contradiction" by Oh The Urbanity. this video One of the interesting points is that there is a commonality between those suburbans and people who want walkable urban areas: few of us want to deal with the problems of lots of cars driving around us.
Correct. Suburbanites want the freedom to drive everywhere but also limit through-traffic and noise on the street their house exists on. That's why twisty roads and culs de sac exist. "Oh The Urbanity!" argues this point elegantly in: this video "The Suburban Traffic Contradiction"
Exactly. This video makes that point so crystal clear: this video Car-dependent suburbia is about imposing your car on everyone else while not allowing anyone else to impose their cars on you. It is inherently selfish city design.
There's a good video explaining how urban and suburban residents alike want less traffic in their neighborhoods: this video