The Not Just Bikes youtube channel was quite the rabbit hole. It has convinced me that I really hate North American car-centric cities. It's a shame there's basically no country in the anglosphere designed for pedestrians like most European countries.
The Netherlands may not be an English-first country, but something like 95% of the Dutch speak English, a higher percentage than in Canada(!). In central Amsterdam, the default language may as well be English.
It is also surprisingly easy for Americans to relocate here if they are in a tech career (keyword: highly-skilled migrant) or remote-working/entrepreneurial (keyword: Dutch-American Friendship Treaty). It's even possible to keep paying an income tax rate similar to that of the USA for the first 5 years. Might even be a lower total income tax rate if you're coming from a high-tax state like CA/OR/NY (keyword: 30% ruling).
Some advantages: safety (both in terms of infrastructure and crime); affordable high-quality universal healthcare; efficient government bureaucracy; fast and easy travel throughout the entire country and to France, Germany and the rest of Europe; relaxed attitudes toward dogs compared to the US (generally off-leash friendly and dogs can go into most shops & cafes)
Some disadvantages: higher cost-of-living and lower salaries compared to the US; narrower variety of consumer products (food, clothing, etc.) available than in the US/UK; many say it's difficult to make Dutch friends, especially if you don't speak Dutch (though on the flip side, this effect makes it exceedingly easy to make expat friends); terrain is mostly flat; weather sucks compared to California; many find the Dutch language difficult to learn in spite of (or because of?) its similarities to English
Canadian living in The Netherlands writing to very much agree with all of this. A few comments:
The "efficient government bureaucracy" is only /relatively/ efficient, but yeah, it's actually less of a hassle as an expat than the Canadian system was as a citizen. The best part is that almost everything can be done online through websites that do not suck, but when you interact with a human they are firm but fair and always pleasant (my sunny disposition may contribute to this). There are no parasitic companies like TurboTax (which should not even exist!). Even in the year I bought a house I could complete my taxes by clicking "next" a bunch of times, because all of the numbers were already there.
Speaking of taxes, I feel like I get what I pay for: great (and always improving!) infrastructure, no violence, pervasive poverty, and ever-growing tent cities. The cost of living is higher because the quality of life is higher. When I visited Seattle a couple of years ago I was astounded by the street-level dystopia.
The biggest difficulty in learning the Dutch language is that the Dutch instantly switch to English when they notice you're not a native speaker. :)
My son (12) has since yesterday started claiming that Netherland has the second highest percentage of English-speakers in the world. After the UK I guess? But apparently beating out several native English-speaking countries according to at least one measure.
No idea what that measure is; I have strong doubts, because as much as the Dutch do indeed have a very strong command of English as a second language, we're really not native speakers, and can be very confidently wrong about idiom or pronunciation, even if we may be better at grammar than many native speakers (your/you're; their/they're/there; could of; etc).
That said, we've got a rather extreme housing shortage at the moment, and just this week I read about foreign students who are homeless or living in tents because there's literally nothing else, so I don't think we can actually accommodate a large influx of North Americans seeking better infrastructure. Focusing on fixing your own country is probably better for everybody in the long run.
> we're really not native speakers, and can be very confidently wrong about idiom or pronunciation, even if we may be better at grammar than many native speakers
Trust me, you have no monopoly on being confidently wrong, I'm in the US and have spent significant time in the Netherlands, and it's my opinion that the Dutch have better English skills than most in the US, precisely because it is learned formally. Many people in the US absorb little from the study of English as a language during education.
The itty-bitty bits of America that have any kind of walkable community are incredibly expensive. It’s basically the equivalent of avoiding mediocre American factory food by doing all your shopping at Whole Foods. Why does it have to be a rare luxury to taste what the Europeans have in overflowing abundance?
Because what they have flowing in abundance is a loss in many other ways. Public transit is a generally a worse experience in all but the most urban of places, and even then there's often enough problems that make it significantly less desirable. Biking in the winter? Doable, but also pretty miserable in much of the world.
People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards. Car-centric cities are the price we pay for these things. Personally I think it's worth the trade-off, I would have spent the same money on my 2000sqft house as a <400sqft apartment, and having kids and a dog would have been entirely impractical.
You write like this was made as a conscious decision, based on city planning somehow. There is significant research that shows people are much happier in walkable communities. Moreover, the car centric solution is not scalable as cities grow. Almost 50% of the world population already live in cities worldwide. That number is estimated to grow to 75% over the next 30 years.
It is also interesting that you mention kids. Amongst the poorer and the elderly children are kids the main group to really suffer from the car centric design of cities. Essentially, you completely restrict their mobility, preventing them to move around on their own accord and instead making them relent on parents to drive them somewhere. I would not be surprised if this significantly contributes to the problems of children becoming less and less resilient and independent.
It's NIMBYism and zoning. People individually may want/demand apartments or townhomes or duplexes, but for various reasons it's common to outlaw all those things via local zoning regulations on most of the residential land in a city or town. Even in major cities, this is usually true (though of course there's some exceptions), that most of the land is reserved exclusively for detached single family homes on large lots.
In contrast, some countries like Germany or Japan don't have that type of zoning anywhere in the entire country. Of course, they still have many single family homes, you're just not required to live in one if you want to live on a particular street.
I don't want to get into the justifications for mandatory SFH zoning, but the results are pretty clear: it makes walking, biking and transit worse (and thus makes people less healthy and fatter); it results in economic segregation, as a working class family can't move to an affluent area by moving into a smaller home there, because smaller homes there are illegal; lastly, it means higher housing costs, because you can't put as much housing in a given area to meet demand (this also tends to increase commute times, as people go further out from the job center area to reduce costs).
It's not that suspicious. People who like their quality of life in their city and neighborhood don't want to lose that. This is perfectly normal and legitimate. Those who want higher density are usually either outsiders who want to live there but can't, or developers (or departing residents) who seek to make money by flipping a property for cheaply-built denser properties. If you increase density, you end up changing people's quality of life, and often for the worse. Density introduces other problems - different neighborhood feel, less intimacy, more traffic, more people crowding up parks, changing local politics, worse public safety, etc. It is because people are fond of a high quality life they enjoy that they're against such change. The other comment here using pejoratives like NIMBY to denigrate those who care about protecting their way of living is just drawing a convenient caricature.
Yeah, this comment is the mindset I'm talking about. Protecting "neighborhood character" by prioritizing cars over people, increasing property values at the expense of affordability, keeping out the poors, etc.
They put a lot of nice words on a lot of very bad results.
Meanwhile, very-dense-by-US-standards cities like Vienna and Munich often top the charts for quality of life. And I can attest to that myself: Munich felt very nice and comfortable to live in. It had far less crime than the US average, you were less likely to get hit by a car, people were much healthier, you had actual options to get around, etc. It was pleasant to be in the city in a way that is rare in the US.
Why are those bad results? Neighborhood character matters - what's wrong with people having a preference for low density, open air, fast access, uncrowded parks, and so forth? You are engaging in the same dishonest recasting of people's personal preferences by summoning a caricature about increasing property values or "keeping out the poors". No one I know who favors low density cares about those things - it is first and foremost about preserving the kind of life and community feel they get from a lower density neighborhood, that you simply cannot get in an impersonal dense city.
I would argue that neighborhood character is prioritizing people. It's prioritizing the ones who live there already, who have built their town into a desirable location, and want to protect what they have. It's about prioritizing a connection with others that you would lose with higher density. There's nothing wrong with that, and I would argue those are very good results.
> Meanwhile, very-dense-by-US-standards cities like Vienna and Munich often top the charts for quality of life.
Based on what opinion? Self-reported opinions of European residents? Why are those a useful measure? It may just be they simply don't know their lives could be better elsewhere or that they have a low bar for quality of life or that they simply hold a different set of preferences culturally. I've traveled and lived all over the world, and have spent a lot of time in both Vienna and Munich. They're fine, but to me they're not amazing and they don't strike me as having a great quality of life. I did appreciate high speed rail providing easy access to other cities and countries. But locally, I didn't feel life was happier or better - rather it felt like these were dull, boring cities that lacked the character of American towns that many people appreciate. To me they felt culturally repressed, with less of an entrepreneurial or lively spirit, and life felt a lot like living in a limited sandbox. That's not surprising, since the urbanist push to design lives within 15 minutes necessarily means living with a small set of hyper-local choices.
> you were less likely to get hit by a car, people were much healthier, you had actual options to get around
There is no rational basis for living in fear of getting hit by a car. It is just something that is exceedingly rare in America. Health is also orthogonal and dependent on so many other factors, including personal choice and priorities. Everyone can certainly choose to be healthy while living a car-centric lifestyle, if they wanted. As for options to get around - cars are the ultimate option, because they give you far more freedom to go where you want, when you want.
> I would argue that neighborhood character is prioritizing people. It's prioritizing the ones who live there already, who have built their town into a desirable location, and want to protect what they have.
No. It is prioritizing the loud ones over everyone else. Also, most people don't understand what makes a good city and have hardly seen anywhere else. They just want other people to pay for their unchanging city.
> There is no rational basis for living in fear of getting hit by a car.
This is so completely wrong. In the US, you have lifetime odds of death in a crash of 1 in 106. That is just for death--the odds of getting struck by a driver are MUCH MUCH higher. That could include permanent injury.
This is one of the most bizarro world comments I’ve ever read. The argument is internally consistent, but so completely opposite of my lived experiences. I nomad around extensively. I am in suburban Florida now and this character and freedom you’re talking about is incredibly absent. I was just in Vienna for a month and my opinion on the city is the opposite of yours in every way. This is a good reminder to me that different people can differ more in just some opinions, but can have absolutely irreconcilably opposing worldviews. I would steamroll your suburbs if I could and you would steamroll my walkable urban core. Cheers!
It’s because people want to live in a specific kind of community. Many Americans want a suburban life, with a cute house on a plot of land, with neighbors also with cute houses on plots of land. Low density, low numbers of cars clogging the local roads.
Introduce an apartment building and the aesthetic changes — lots more people around, more cars on the road, more congestion at the grocery store, less privacy in the yard. Or so the theory goes.
Not to mention cheaper housing nearby might lower your property value.
Yeah, this makes sense. People have economic and political power. It's easier to use the economic power to buy up all the land, but if you don't have that money, collectively you can use the political power to enforce beyond your boundaries. And all you need is 50%+1, with current turnout dropping that to 33%+1. Not bad altogether.
The aesthetic doesn't have to change as much as you think. It does change in the US, because apartment buildings here have largely garbage design. But there are other countries that do the blending better, like Germany.
The problem is not really necessarily that the car centric city exists, though it certainly has externalities related to health and the climate.
The problem is that only the car centric city exists. Nice walkable places are in extremely short supply and fetch a premium, and so there exist people who buy into the detached house, car centric lifestyle because it is the only thing available at their price point. It is illegal to build the traditional way in most of the country’s land. And making it simply legal to build does not mean that the people who like this lifestyle will be forced to densify.
This is the crux of the issue. I've said it before in HN, but urban density advocates need to focus more on why denser urban neighborhoods are good, rather than focusing on why car-centric suburbs are bad. New urbanists need the support of suburbanites whether they want to admit it or not, railing against people who like having space and privacy is less effective at winning allies than making a solid economic and social case for denser developments. Oftentimes urbanists actually explicitly say they want to "ban surburbs", which does nothing to help their cause or suggest that they are looking for a compromise that involves both dense developments and less dense developments.
For anyone interested in what _winter_ biking infrastructure could look like, some places in Finland have done a great job. Not for everyone, but popular nonetheless:
> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards. Car-centric cities are the price we pay for these things.
Maybe people don’t even like Personal transport that much, maybe they only use it because of the lack of suitable alternatives?
Maybe many people don’t have the „single family home whatever it takes“ attitude and would much prefer a suitable apartment in a somewhat dense walkable neighborhood? It’s no coincidence that the few relatively quiet very walkable neighborhoods often are the most desired places in a city, even here in German cities where the issue is nowhere near as extreme as it is in the US.
Also, car dependency is not just a city planning issue. Car dependency increases the risk of obesity and often results in overall bad health. And what about the kids? Children are totally dependent on their parents for anything transport related until they can drive themselves. Cycling doesn’t seem to be encouraged, let alone walking. Public transport maybe works for school, but rarely for leisure activities. How do you want to raise independent adults if they are totally dependent on you for something as basic as transportation?
I use public transit every day, I love it. I used to live in a city with a light rail system 2 blocks away. Even with that, I would still find it easier to drive and park downtown due to the delays, congestion, and slowness of the light rail line. Walk 5 minutes, wait 5 minutes, cram on, take 20 minute ride, walk 5 minutes VS 15 minute drive. Public transit needs to be either faster or cheaper than driving and it rarely is.
> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards.
Then why are even small houses in walkable neighbourhoods so expensive? Maybe not everyone wants to live like that, but there's clearly demand for that kind of living too. Let's build some for people who want it.
>Then why are even small houses in walkable neighbourhoods so expensive
Location
Location
Location
These small houses are pretty much all necessarily in urban areas and the prices reflects what overpaid doctors lawyers and techies are willing to pay for convenience. The not un-walkable suburbs that are roughly the same distance from the city centers suffer pretty much the same price increase for the same reason.
> People like personal transportation and big detached houses with yards
I feel it's more like people are conditioned ro like those things. The first time I visited America, I went to my friend's place. It was just homes with big backyards and nothing else. Coming from india, I was frankly disappointed. Staying in a city now and frankly it has much more charecter than those places
Which goes to prove that those stroads weren't built by some evil conspiracy, but ordered and enjoyed by a (sizeable?) part of the population. Which is why they are meant to stay in the States, and reviled outside.
but NYC and Amtrak aren't dramatically better than Toronto and Canadian rail issues that NotJustBikes constantly bashes as pathetically mediocre compared to the Netherlands.
The U.S. definitely has a range of insanely-awful to decent-enough with small now-premium-priced pockets of great bits (which are almost always pre-car neighborhoods that somehow were spared destruction).
Britain is in the anglosphere. We’re not exactly the Netherlands but we’re a whole heap ahead of the US, and getting (very slowly) better. Same goes for New Zealand.
I guess that's the main thing. I wouldn't particularly expect the US to make huge strides here, but e.g. in London the difference between now and years ago is night and day. The Netherlands didn't get to the present-day infrastructure overnight either. (Like London, my home town also improved a lot in the same period, even if it already was in a rather good place.)
Better? Since when? During my lifetime in Britain it has only got worse. It's so bad now I no longer cycle myself for fear of serious injury or death and don't recommend others do either. Cars have become bigger and there are far more of them. We even see monstrous American cars on our roads now. They've taken more and more of the roads and there's no stopping them. Police don't bother any more.. The roads are in worse shape than ever. Far more money is put into car infrastructure than anything else. I assume you live in London or some other city. Outside of there it's way worse.
I was explicitly talking about cities because that's the context of the subthread (and indeed the OP). London, Cambridge, Birmingham, Manchester etc. are installing protected cycle infrastructure that was basically unheard of 10 years ago. I do agree that rural roads are more hostile for cycling now, and your assumption as to where I live is wrong.
I can only speak for Manchester but people here have looked at the cycle infrastructure and taken it as a signal to ride around dressed all in black with no lights. I don't think the accident rate will go down.
>It's a shame there's basically no country in the anglosphere designed for pedestrians like most European countries.
Was also a bit confused why Britain and Ireland are not considered by the parent. Sure, they do not have as good cycling infrastructure as the Netherlands. But both of them are equally good at being pedestrian friendly - exactly what has been asked - and I'd say are even more pedestrian friendly than most European countries.
That's because people like their cars. You may not, but many people do. And I've traveled in many countries and it's not like cars are uniquely American.
There is a big difference between buying a car and doing literally every trip in a car because the only connection from the place you sleep to anywhere is six lane road with speeds exceeding 40mph.
Of course cars are convenient for some things. I live in a city where the majority of households has access to a car, but only a quarter of the trips (accounting for 40% of the traveled distance) are made by car. I still consider the city to be built very car-centric, but it's a wholly different world from what I experienced when visiting the US.
>There is a big difference between buying a car and doing literally every trip in a car because the only connection from the place you sleep to anywhere is six lane road with speeds exceeding 40mph.
This is a massive over-generalization that pretty much only applies to the suburbs that were built out in the 1950s and 1960s mostly in the southern half of the country. As those suburbs have densified over the decades (where allowed by law, so not the southwest) some of them have become pretty darn walk-able.
There is plenty of space for cars if you stack them. That's a rather successful model in Japanese cities. Free surface parking has an outsized negative impact on cities.
BTW, it's already kind of true that only the rich own cars, car ownership correlates very strongly with household income.
>BTW, it's already kind of true that only the rich own cars, car ownership correlates very strongly with household income.
Of course it correlates. Rich households can afford more cars per person and can indulge in specialized vehicles (e.g commuter car).
Rich families have a sedan for each commuting parent and maybe another less specialized car (e.g. minivan or 3-row SUV) that only sees weekend use. Poor families pile into a Saturn.
That the ability of the poor family to own and operate that Saturn confers a far greater standard of living jump than cars 2-N do for the rich family. It also has a much greater impact on the health of the broader economy.
To intentionally place monetary constraints on vehicle ownership would be unwise because you have to price out all the poor before you start making meaningful dents in the (relatively) wealthy professionals who commute across the inner suburbs and into urban environments.
I have a car, and was excited to get one when I moved out of NYC a couple years back.
But I hate using it for day-to-day tasks. For me, it's a machine that lets me take fun trips on the weekend, or go see family in their car-dependent towns and cities. If I want to go to a brewery, or stop by the post office, or shop for a few small items, or just go to a park, I would literally always rather do it on my bike or on foot. Driving around cities is miserable.
I have a car too. But when the opportunity exists, I will always prefer to go by bike. My kids ride bikes too, and my 7-year old son prefers to ride to his swimming lessons on his own bike. The car is only really for when we leave the city, or occasionally when we quickly need to go to the complete opposite end of the city and it's close to the motorway.
When given the choice between bad bike/walking infrastructure and cars, people prefer cars. But when you give them good infrastructure, many prefer bikes.
If I had a car, my yearly distance might have been similar. But that's because a car would give me most utility in areas that aren't handled by the "shared" car systems, i.e. longer trips outside of public transport system, especially with cargo that can't be reliably transported on a personal trip on train and the like.
And I'd probably still keep to taxis in the city, can't be arsed to drive :D
I find this is true nearly anywhere you go in the world, even in countries with excellent public transit (e.g. Korea, Japan, Taiwan). The moment people have the money to afford a car, they buy one. The only places I've seen that this is not the case are isolated, hyper-dense city states (Hong Kong and Singapore).
People might like their cars for the freedom of movement they provide - like being able to transport cargo without a headache; being able to go on a weekend trip with family; etc. But they certainly don't like their cars for having to spend 2 hours a day just to get to their workplace and back home.
They tolerate it.
That's why manuals are dying, that's why cars now HAVE to have things preventing distracted drivers from dying, that's why autopiloted car manufacturers are swimming in money thrown at them by everyone despite showing no results.
Should you ask why they tolerate it - the reason is very simple. The alternatives - cycling and public transport - have seen close to none of investments in the past decades all over the world. And therefore provide a horrible and humiliating experience to its users.
Also, the focus on cars allowed many cities and even countries to get lazy at planning and providing equal infrastructure to all districts. Having a smaller school in your neighbourhood is better for the kids - they could go there by themselves with friends and not spend much time doing nothing in traffic everyday. But because everyone has cars government will do the cheaper thing and build a bigger school that isn't convenient to anyone.
People shouldn't have to drive everyday.
All neighbourhoods should have adequate commercial and infrastructural exposure on the spot. No driving to school, groceries or GP. And when you have to commute, alternatives to driving should provide a better experience. Then many people would opt not to drive even if commute is needed, and therefore people like me - who like to drive - would have the roads free of traffic jams and distracted drivers, and be able to actually enjoy the experience.
Cars are nice, but I don't think people like being forced to drive because the other options all suck shit.
People like being able to walk and bike places too, IF the walk and bike options are actually decent (in terms of safety/comfort and distance).
And people certainly don't like getting fat, and yet there's a strong link between car-dominant infrastructure and weight. Surprise surprise, getting exercise as part of your transportation is a lot more reliable than getting exercise as leisure.
Is this a chicken and egg thing though? Do people like their cars because the world they live in requires cars, and thus they become part of their identity?
The question is not whether people have cars (they do) or whether they like them or not (some do and some don't). The question is whether the infrastructure forces people to use a car for every single errand. Much less road space is needed if cars are not required for everything. And if one actually likes cars one is more likely to enjoy driving through the mountains than going grocery shopping by car.
of course they do, that's the whole issue. in many situations it is better for the whole if people don't get everything they want. that's where regulation should come in. "people like it" is shortsighted thinking, prone to local optima, and should not be the sole criterion for policy decisions
That's its job. It's there to outrage you, but the reality is it doesn't teach you to do much else. The reality is, low density living in countries like the US rely on this structure.
The same way most of South Korea, including low density zones is built using large apartment blocks... because that's just what works for the country and there's no such thing as being a jack of all trades.
I've disliked the apples to oranges and emotional bias present in those videos since the start. But people eat it up. Shame.
NJB is not an "outrage" channel, that is utterly absurd. It's an information channel that mostly shows you how things work in the Netherlands and makes the case that it's a better way than the idiotic car-centric north American way.
If you're outraged after watching his videos, it's not his fault, it's the fault of your city planners.
I’m mostly outraged that the YouTube algorithm keeps showing me his crap just because I like cities skylines. His content is trash and despite consistently disliking it YouTube just won’t learn.
Dislikes have little effect on whether a channel is recommended, only individual videos and the related videos to that specific one. Also to dislike a video you need to click it in the first place, which tells YouTube you potentially like content of this sort but the individual videos aren't up to your expectations so it's going to keep trying.
As another poster said there is a way to get YouTube to stop recommending the channel to you. Use that instead.
Sidenote: i think it's hilarious that it's consistently the car lovers that think NJB is trash. Loving cars immediately must mean that his high quality, well researched content is "trash". Not something you personally dislike, not something you disagree with, no no, the worst trash in the world.
I guess disliking that channel is a useful shibboleth to spot the guy driving an SUV.
> Loving cars immediately must mean that his high quality, well researched content is "trash".
Why is it surprising that people who love cars don't like a channel that basically says you're a bad person if you don't think cars should be abolished?
Car-centric designs for cities makes living in cities worse, _even for people who like cars_.
The thesis of Strong Towns isn't that we should ban cars, it's that we should stop _subsidizing_ something that we know is bad for us (in economic terms, health terms, quality-of-life terms, and in ecological terms)
It's worth noting that although Dutch infrastructure puts a lot of effort into different modes of transport, especially bikes, it's also excellent for cars. Dutch car drivers often complain about poor road quality in neighbouring countries like Germany and Belgium. There's also a lot of innovation here on smoothing traffic flow, removing traffic lights where possible, and many other things that I'm sure car drivers love.
And if you care about well-maintained roads, it helps if your roads are actually maintainable, and for that, it helps if they're efficient and well-designed. I've read a lot about the poor state of infrastructure in the US, and agree with calls to invest more in infrastructure, but it's been Strong Towns, NJB and similar channels that made me realise why US infrastructure is struggling: it's inefficiently designed, making it way too expensive to maintain. The entire past 70 years of US suburban development is apparently build on massive amounts of debt, which has sent several cities into bankruptcy. If you don't want your cities to go bankrupt, you need more efficient infrastructure. And stroads are clearly not that.
But nobody said that cars should be abolished. The arguments are that cities can (and should) be build for more than just cars. If you're saying content that advocates for more bike/walk centric cities feels like it's calling for the abolishing of cars to someone who likes cars, imagine what this sounds like to someone who likes bikes/walking you are essentially saying I'm not willing to give an inch to you because it's only my way. That's pretty much how you create polarisation.
Have you ever watched anything more than one NJB video?
He repeatedly bashes city centric planning and is a huge advocate for alternatives modes of transport. But to my knowledge he never even implied such a thing. In fact he even shared some videos around driving in the Netherlands and how he still used cars in some circumstances
You can click the three dots beside such videos then select "Don't recommend channel", you won't see these videos in your "Home" section of YouTube. There are a few gurning-in-the-thumbnail types that I've stopped seeing altogether after doing this.
If your issue is that you play a video then just keep watching whatever YT shows you next and it's sometimes this person, then I'm not sure if this solves that problem since I don't do this personally
I've come to understand that there are things that have three or so factors, and you will never get rid of them.
1. Views. Usually boosted by getting bandwagoned on a place like Reddit. High viewed videos pop up everywhere, irrelevant or not.
2. Feel good factor, which sprouts from feeling like you learnt something new or can change the world now.
3. Emotional mob mentality. People refuse to believe things are the way they are for anything other than "bad design" or "someone did it wrong". Capitalising on this, is factor three.
Some videos fill these 3 boxes and they just show up time and time again, EVERYWHERE. It's the algorithm of the internet, and YouTube loves to lead it.
I wish there were a way to "block" youtube channels. I feel similarly about this specific content source, but there are a bunch of others who are far worse on other topics.
>It's an information channel that mostly shows you how things work in the Netherlands and makes the case that it's a better way than the idiotic car-centric north American way.
Yes. Comparing apples to oranges. What an outrage! My apples have less vitamin C! How dare they.
>If you're outraged after watching his videos
I'm not. But the majority who do watch the video are. It's his fault. The same way people are outraged at many things unjustly after watching a video filled with bias.
Are people outraged by what he says, or by the reality he exposes? Should that reality then remain hidden to keep people complacent?
I think it's reality that's outrageous, and it's people like NJB and Strong Towns that are pointing out it could be better, they are pointing out how to make it better. People are outraged because they realise how bad their infrastructure is, and how much better it could be. That's a positive, constructive type of outrage. It's not just fomenting anger for its own sake (as indeed happens way too often in other media).
If someone told you that it can't be better, and it was the truth, you'd get pretty outraged at them when another person claimed that it was all just bad design and that they didn't want you to have the better thing.
It's pretty obvious when you have no emotion to channel.
Comparing apples to oranges is an easy way to get anyone upset. After all, who wouldn't want both?
So you're saying it's an outrage channel based on what evidence? You say that the car centric cities of North America are like they are by thoughtful design and that NJB creates outrage by depicting this design as verfiably inferior while in reality it is just "what works for the country". So can you elaborate what is better (and works better) about the design of a car centric "stroad" City compared to a walkable city?
If it's an outrage channel how come I'm not outraged after watching all of his content?
What i am is pleased to have learned a lot about dutch urban design. If anything outrages me, it's how you keep insisting this channel "compares" anything when all it does is showcases dutch cities, and once in a while complains about specific issues in his hometown of London ON.
