Why This Channel Exists (and why I hate Houston)

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

> 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.

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

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

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

Deadliest road for pedestrians(in the US). This vid has a good take on the problem of car dependent city designs that is very predominant in the US and Canada. Why City Design is Important (and Why I Hate Houston) ▶ this video

Do you have a source for this claim? All the urbanists will tell you that small grocery stores are a joy to use in Europe due to transit oriented development that makes quick trips by bike to grab groceries fast and easy. But in North America we’ve built out larger and larger car-centric developments which have become so hostile to anyone not in a car that people are forced to drive to the grocery store. This makes the experience way less enjoyable than a quick trip by bike to a small store, the urbanists will say. So your claim is that small stores were essentially selected out of existence by customers, but it may in fact be the case that city planners destroyed walkability in a way that left big box stores as the only viable option. Those two things are not the same, as the theoretical “we could have more smaller stores accessible by bike and foot traffic” would be true in the latter case. For a detailed argument see the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes: ▶ this video

Watch some videos from this channel and you'll be able to see how the US definitely does not do enough in terms of creating safe road infrastructure for all: link ▶ this video link

Oh, the rabbit hole goes much much deeper. American infrastructure is actively hostile to people walking/biking/doing anything else than driving and even then not very safe. I'd recommend the NotJustBikes youtube channel that really drives the point home, e.g. ▶ this video

People in the US have developed an aversion to walking because our built environment makes it terrible. For example, watch this video from about 4:25 on showing a typical urban pedestrian journey the US: ▶ this video (One thing the narrator mentions is shade: Keep in mind that Houston is a hot city, with temperatures often above 30c during the summer.) But that's not unusual at all. In fact, where I grew up in Pennsylvania many roads had literally no sidewalk. Let's say I want to walk into town where my parents live. I'd be going down this road (you can follow along on street view): link That's a narrow road, but don't let it fool you. People there drive fast and they're in a hurry. They certainly do not expect to see someone trudging along the berm of the road. Or more likely in a muddy ditch beside the road, because Pennsylvania is wet and that's the safest way to not get hit by a car. If you walk along into North Wales, PA, pay attention to the pedestrian infrastructure. Where are there sidewalks? Are there crossing signals? How would you know when it's safe to cross? Now imagine doing this in the evening (note: there are no streetlights).

I'm not going to argue with you about the different definitions of public transportation, but for sure "taxi" isn't what comes to mind when someone mentions public transportation. The point you're making is exactly the problem. The reason bus lines aren't used more is because they suck in a lot of cities. Improving the public transportation infrastucture (and no, not taxis), would solve this problem - as demonstrated in many European cities. Here's a good video that compares the city planning of Houston to other cities, and explains why it sucks. It focuses more on cars vs. bikes, but the same basic point also applies to public transportation: ▶ this video

> well-designed human-oriented city like Houston Said no urban planner in the history of urban planning. Or NJB ( ▶ this video ) > FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe. Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US. The internet tells me you’re boasting of 30mn for an “average 6 miles commute”. That’s bicycle distance and speed that you need to drive due to a broken city.