Not Just Bikes
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2021–2025
17:03 · 7.2M views · Jul 19, 2021
Not Just Bikes explains why the channel exists, through the creator's walk in suburban Houston. It shows how car-dependent design makes cities hostile to pedestrians.
Strongly recommended as the entry point to a channel on urban planning and car dependency in North America.
19 comments from Hacker News
For anyone who has trouble understanding this perspective because they've lived in car-dependent hell their entire lives, I recommend the Not Just Bikes channel. He does extremely detailed comparisons of US cities vs Netherlands and other places. Here is a recent one [1]. For me, I always felt that something was wrong about American cities / suburbs but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then, I spent a few months in Tokyo and something "clicked". It's an entirely different paradigm that forced me to reevaluate what I thought was possible. When I returned to the US, on the ride from the airport my first thought was: Everyone in this traffic jam is going the same direction, and would fit in a handful of train cars. Why are we OK with this?? People say trains are expensive, but they don't realize how much money we spend on cars. Americans spent $1.1 TRILLION on personal vehicles in 2017 [2], not including the hundreds of billions spent yearly on road maintenance. Redirecting a fraction of that money would more than pay for high-speed rail. Let's do a crude estimate. Using the chart here [3], we can expect to pay somewhere between $3-163 million USD per mile of high-speed rail. The distance from NY to LA is 2789.9 miles. At $100M/mile, which is excessive, it would still only cost $279 billion. We could build THREE transcontinental high-speed rail lines every year with the money we spend on personal automobiles. If we're as cost-effective as Japan at $2.6 M / mile, we could af
> The reality is the western world is falling behind in essential infrastructure in every capacity. Could you expand on this? What do you mean? > Its hard to build roads, highways, sewers these days without some pushback. We need to start changing our views and start seeing constriction as an essential human need and return to the old view of infrastructure as something we take pride in For me, it's not "construction" by itself, but I suspect it's pushback against urban sprawl and poor urban design. I watched an excellent video about Houston: this video It takes awhile to get to the point, so you might want to skip to 3:42.
It also has a lot with the car-centric nature of urban planning. Can't recommend this guys entire channel of videos enough: [LINK] He delves into a movement known as "Strong Towns" that look to undo a lot of the mistakes city planners have been making for the last half century. Edit: Here's a link to another of his videos where he shows why it is dangerous to walk in many North American cities: this video
For those interested in urban planning, including contrasts between the US and places that do it well, I highly recommend the Not Just Bikes youtube channel. The intro video details a short walk in Houston, which is pretty alarming: this video
There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station , and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. "The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail" - [LINK] - "Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)" [it's not walkable] - this video - How American urban transit is built misunderstanding the way transit needs to work to be successful, notably trying to build transit as a bandaid over car problems, but not making it regular, frequent, reliable, fast, convenient, instead plonking an isolated transit connection from nowhere to nowhere which runs once every couple of hours and then pointing to it as an example of how transit doesn't work in America - "America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)" - [LINK] - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - [LINK]