Grid Cities are Fine, and OBF is a Copycat 

Hi Alan, first of all thank you for this video. I’ll do my best to explain everything in this comment to clear some of the stuff up that you mention. The first thing is that you disagree with the video, obviously you’re quite knowledgeable about this topic and I think you presented all the points well. I’ll definitely take the criticisms to heart. I haven’t really thought much about including the sources but it makes a lot of sense to do. I’ll go back and add those. Hopefully they will bring some clarity to my points in the video. I will say though that it was an opinion piece but I could probably have done a better job making that more clear. The second thing is plagiarism. The section of my video you show where I used Vox’s words instead of my own is 100% plagiarism and I’ve cut that part out of the video. It should have never been in the video in the first place, I don't know what I was thinking and I’m truly ashamed of myself for this. I’ve always looked to Vox for inspiration because to me they are the gold standard on RU-vid. I’ve developed a lot of my skills by imitating what they’ve made both in editing, animations, and scriptwriting in order to eventually figure out my own style, and I went too far. In regards to the rest of the video, it wasn't copied or plagiarised from anywhere. And I truly mean that. I should point out that the footage I used from Not Just Bikes was done so correctly and falls under fair use. I still wanted to compensate him though because I felt bad after he expressed concern over it on his Twitter even though it was fair use. The third thing is you say that I’ve copied/plagiarised 60% of my videos. This is not true. You apparently had your Discord community find the videos they believed to be copied/plagiarised from other creators. But I’m honest when I say, I haven’t even seen most of the videos you show. Nor have I copied any of them. Sometimes I do make a video on a topic that other creators have covered before, that's inevitable, but why would that make it a copy? If making a video on the same topic as another creator is considered “copying/plagiarising” we wouldn’t have many videos left on this platform that weren’t exactly that. I truly don’t wish to copy or plagiarise anyone, and since the instance with Vox I’ve made a point not to watch any other creator's video on a topic I’m going to cover until the video is finished and uploaded. (Sometimes it is unavoidable though as I might have watched a video on the topic in the past). It’s disheartening to see that you didn’t care to dig a little deeper and actually compare these videos yourself before making such a bold and hurtful claim. Lastly, the reason I deleted my community post. I must admit I was frustrated the day I deleted that post. I had just found out that some of the creators mentioned in it had instead of expressing their concerns to me, done shady things to hurt my channel. It had to do with sponsors and it had to do with their agency, you can figure the rest out for yourself. I can’t elaborate further on that. I should have just kept it up regardless but I hope actions speak louder than words. Thank you, Oliver

This is amazing, there’s actually drama in the city planning RU-vid community

99% of arguments against grid designs are actually arguments against stupid zoning laws

I like how he conveniently leaves Vancouver out of "most liveable" and "grid". Vancouver's been ranked among the most liveable cities in the world for years.

As someone that lives in Chicago, I have never once thought to myself "this city is unlivable." The city has probably the second best public transportation (after NYC) and has zoning that is mixed, meaning you can go get groceries, something to eat, and walk your kids to school without having to drive 20 mins.

Thanks for making this Alan. I wasn't even aware OBF plagiarized one of my videos too. It's a really frustrating problem, and he's not the only channel guilty of it. My scripts take anywhere from 1-4 weeks of research, and rely a lot on my education as an engineer. I see channels copy my explanations frequently, and they often just completely butcher them in their attempts to mask their plagiarism. OBF is just one in a long list of content farms that just copy and riff other channels. Uploading at the frequency he does is impossible without plagiarism. Research and writing is the longest part of the process for any self respecting EDU channel. He's not even the worst of the lot though. Bright Side has 44 million subs and constantly plagiarizes other creators. It's not a new problem. I have been pushing RU-vid internally to have some sort of appeal system to flag channels that do it frequently, but that's obviously a very tricky problem to solve. I don't own the information I share.

Damn, he really copied that shit word for word. And he literally gave the best argument for why his statements were bullshit right at the beginning.

I would keep my eye on this dude, he seems like the kind of person that gets away with shit by being nice and non-confrontational as a defense when people call him out, but goes right back to the usual schedule after the heat dies down.

There's drama in the city planning RU-vid community

OBF: “The Perpendicular streets of the grid disrupt airflow” Chicago Winters: “I’m about to end this man’s whole career”

Hey, freshly graduated city planner here. Grid cities were somewhat vilified in the studies, but most arguments against them aren't so much arguments against grid cities as they are arguments against the way that we fill our cities. Keep up the work!

As someone from Chicago, thank you. The way the city is planned as a grid system is fucking amazing, it made it easy to get around and navigate the city, only problem was crappy public transport and dispersion of stores and residential buildings, but even then Chicago was way better than so many other places in the USA.

Just wanted to point out that Melbourne was most liveable city for a while, and I think there’s probably a total of 5 diagonal roads in that town, probably the most gridded city to ever exist

Ironically he has a "Why London is Terribly Designed" video and that city is not a grid. He gets seriously panned in the comments section for just being wrong in his reasoning. Actually had the gall to say London's public transport system is bad, when it's one of the best in the western world.

Videos like this are really necessary. In the world of music or film or television there are critics who serve a historically important role to call out the bullshit. On RU-vid you can't even see a dislike bar anymore let alone the fact that the average person wouldn't know to click it on a bad OBF video. There generally is no moderation or critiques of RU-vid content. It just floats around as if it were fact.

LMAO " the smug guy with the minute ad in it" damnnn didnt have to do adam something like that haha

Really like that you called Adam Something a “smug guy”, because majority of his video are at best, just him complaining without any thoughts and factchecking the sources he use

honestly OBF to me always feels like a waste of potential as his content just feels like 15 year old me who knows some random facts about urban planning and geography by watching other channels, then rearrange them to fit the clickbait title. His editing skills makes his content more accessible and he should do better on researching in-depth topics edit: just realized that Alan also talked about this in the video and I completely missed it, guess I am the OBF now :/

I understand the gripes, andas a European, videos like "Why Europe is Extremely Well Designed" miss out on one very important fact: most European cities weren't "designed", they are the result of an almost organic growth, often over centuries.

THANK YOU! Melbourne is a very good gridded city. And it's very livable because it's gridded. It has an excellent tram network which utilises Melbourne's linear roads. And it's easy to transverse because it's gridded. I agree that gridded cities can be bad, but ungridded cities can also be bad. It's much more complicated than that.

I live in Chicago without any car, and the grid system is great for me personally. I’m autistic so having very straightforward instructions of just “up ___, over ____” makes walking around a lot easier and less stressful than the cities I’ve been to with much wigglier design :)

His London video gave me a bloody aneurism. Kept banging on about how bad it is for cars... Mate, jog on, cars can naff off. TfL is one of the world's best public transport providers and all he drones on about is 'muh car traffic bad'.

Plagiarism is one of the ongoing issues on RU-vid which seem to be worsened by the algorithm. I allegedly blame the algorithm because I feel that the algorithm right now is probably trying to read my mind and guess what other channels I might like based on what I have already subscribed to. For example, there are a few channels about disasters or accidents that I have subscribed to because they have done quite decent jobs. However, I am then recommended several disaster/true crime/supernatural/true event channels which, well, I don't think I would check them out because they would just cover the same stories. The same goes for other genres as well. (No, I don't want any more videos on Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos, thanks.) I think it is also a problem even before RU-vid exists. When someone has successfully sell something (contents), there are newcomers and some copycats joining in until eventually the market saturates. Deep inside, I believe that if a site has too many users (billions, let's say), the site will be eventually too big to manage. Problems will inevitably erupt, and there is no way to practically control anymore.

the topography argument is literally only a problem in cities skylines lmao

I love how you've made this video. Usually, when a creator makes a callout video, it's mostly villifying because there's a lot of emotion and they've begun to see this person as just completely rotten. Meanwhile, your video is mostly just a callout of their actions, and not themselves. Hell, you've gone into depth trying to figure out why they do it, and how much talent they have. It's like a wake-up call by a calm but increasingly disappointed father.

4:30 Not only is the DOT a culprit here, but these grids were legitimately laid out wrong when cities were platted. They should have made every fifth street an artery and the other four narrower. This is not a fault of grids, this is a fault of poorly designed grids, just like how Salt Lake City's blocks are too large but Portland's are nice and small.

The most important things for me personally are that streets should connect and be human-scaled. You can have winding roads or gridded streets. Just spare me the stroads, culs-de-sac, and private drive nonsense.

You can design a city like a grid, like a circle, hell go all trapeze, but where you place residential and commercial areas and how you connect them will always be the determining factor of a cities ease of travel.

I have a friend who is an actuary for a 'major American insurance company'. I brought this topic up with him and he noted that when planning accident probabilities, they calculate the distance between 'intersections or traffic adjustors.' Or grids. Cities with longer distance grids have higher traffic issues (jams), accident rates (all kinds both parked and moving vehicles), people being hit by vehicles. That contributes to higher insurance rates.

Holy shit. I didn’t expect him to copy a video word for word

I love how the "grid bad" argument only makes sense if you can't imagine your city being anything but car dependent.

me: * watching from my home in San Francisco * "let's move on to something really easy to debunk" "grid cities need to be flat" me: "hey they're about to mention us!!"

Melbourne's known for its Hoddle Grid, and a view on the maps or from above doesn't do it justice. It's built over 4 hills and former swamps, so it actually has peaks and troughs. When there's a huge downpour, some streets become some sort of rivers, you can see the water flow down the hill through the tram tracks and end up with water pooling in some intersections.

Enjoyed this video a lot. I’ve been a peripheral observer to the whole OBF thing for a while (actually didn’t know about a couple of the ones you highlighted) and I totally echo your sentiment at the end, the chap is clearly talented and it just seems like he’s not learning, or doesn’t care, judging by his responses on twitter or on his community tab. He alleges shady goings on, but I think it’s more simple than that - creators chat to each other about other creators.

"Perpendicular streets disrupt airflow" seems just outright false based on elementary physics. It literally creates multiple avenues for wind to blow into regardless of direction, and allows it to flow without being disrupted. Cul-de-sacs, for example, obstruct airflow due to the fact that there are no channels FOR air to flow. The Urban Heat Island isn't about grid streets, it's about pavement stovetops and glass building magnifying glasses heating them up.

Salt Lake City resident here and you using it as a bad example hit close to home LMAO. I remember telling a tourist a restaurant he was looking for was 4 blocks away and when he started walking towards it I felt bad 😭. However the streets you showed as examples (State Street and 900 South) are arterial roads meant to get people in and out of the city, they show up about every 3-4 blocks. The majority of the streets are a lot thinner and more walkable, but still suffer from the big city block issue.

The absolute worst city shape I’ve personally had to deal with was Canberra, it’s a bloody circle, in multiple areas you have to cross crazy amounts of oncoming cars, roads are poorly marked for the direction of traffic in some places, gps will lie about how to get places. Grids are fine, just burn all circular cities to the ground.

Video editors and graphic designers can be hired; writing a good script is a whole different game, it comes from lifelong learning. If writing didn't matter then every editor/designer would have been a celebrated RU-vidr like NotJustBikes or RealLifeLore. OBF is copying the part that takes the most time & effort. Furthermore, plagiarising an already successful video means that you've got a greater chance of going viral on RU-vid. It's good content, if it went viral once, it can go again under your channel's name. Making videos on new novel topics is risky and come with many uncertainties. OBF will apologize, delete those parts and vouch for never doing this again but his channel stands on the back of those practices. He has still got those subs and views. This is wrong precedence being set. We'll increasingly more people doing this to get successful on RU-vid.

The point about large blocks isn't that straight forward. I lived in Beijing, where the blocks are really big. The plus was that inside each block there were big space for green area, playgrounds and space for people to interact. Outside in the streets, the sidewalks were wide, there were wide cycle paths, often seperated from the street. It was still walkable. Not far to go for groceries.

Saying that more intersections are the reason drivers are slower is like saying that smoking is the reason less people die on trafic Corelation, not causation.

The concept of grid cities was born in Mesopotamia long before cars, and Alexander the Great brought the idea to Europe. During the Renaissance, this urban planning concept that was once favored by ancient people was reintroduced and it is still in use in different variations and the latest of which has been to bend and stretch the grid city into different shapes instead of straight streets. And since the concept has been working for thousands of years, I believe it will last for thousands more years.

I have my issues with that liveable cities list, but it's really funny that OBF didn't include Melbourne, Australia, a grid city that always features on that list.

These urban planning/logistics/geopolitical wannabe know-it-all channels really annoy me but I can't quit watching them lol. Thanks for making these videos

7:20 Finally some recognition for how good Bilbao`s urbanism is!

I used to live in a major city in Florida. Most of the streets followed a grid pattern. It was fairly easy to get around. Now whenever I come back to visit, they've added a ton of roads that don't follow the grid pattern, and it has gotten very difficult to get around. Often, I don't know where I am and have to stop to figure it out or turn on my GPS.

Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, Alan Fisher, City Nerd, Oh the Urbanity… these are the urban planning channels I trust.

First RealLifeLore and now OBF? No one is safe!

12:46 The smug guy actually has extremely good insight into politics and economics. His videos on city plannings are also great.

It seems a lot of urban design youtubers talk less about street design and more about road layout design, with the exceptions being the better urban design youtubers like Not Just Bikes. Street design (width of drivable surface, barriers, medians, trees, etc.) make a much bigger difference than virtually any road layout does.

The fact that the OBF video is word for word for the VOX video is absolutely crazy and disappointing. I fail to see why someone would do that?

As someone from Barcelona I was constantly thinking about my city when watching this video. Literally everything that you urbanism youtubers say about Barcelona is how awesome the grid is (and it is). Then this guy goes and starts trashing grids because US cities are grids and they suck. Glad you mentioned my city at the end :P

I’m in the process of writing my first videos for a RU-vid channel that I’m starting and I had no idea that like 4 creators I’ve watched were actually just copying others. One more thing I’ll need to watch out for especially if I’m smaller in the community since my voice won’t really carry as well as urs. Thanks for the info sir!

I have to admit that I have come to this channel bounced from the obf channel. Precisely the one that made the grids left me stunned, even more so when most of the large European cities have all or part of their grid network (perhaps not so perfect like the ones they do in America but grid after all). Thanks, now I know which channel I have to subscribe to (plus you have an exquisite sense of humor)

The copying thing is hilariously bad, but for me his videos always felt like “nothing” topics that just say the same point over and over without actually forming a sensible argument and bringing in random (somewhat misleading) statistics. It’s like he had an argument in mind and then brings in statistics to support it rather than looking at the statistics and using them to form an argument, and it’s so poorly done that it doesn’t end up really saying anything meaningful at all

9:57 Wow they didn’t even bother to change any words. Bruh 🤣

Whenever I copied stuff from anywhere, even when citing passages, I made an effort to rephrase the content at least somewhat. It always bewilders me how actual plagiarists never seem to make the bare minimum effort to hide the fact that they're plagiarising other people's content.

Grids are also more efficient for utility infrastructure because they facilitate good connectivity, redundancy and density. More efficient utility infrastructure is easier to modernize and maintain (Quality over quantity). Some things I can think of based on my experience working as a utility engineer: - You can serve more people with less infrastructure on a grid. - Planning routes for water/sewage, gas, electric, and communication is very straight forward as you don't have to take overly circuitous routes or arrange for easements to avoid/navigate private land. - If you need to maintain a particular utility line, the road you close isn't going to have as much of an impact on transit routes because there are plenty of alternatives nearby. Additionally, utilities don't have to coordinate as much with private entities to get access to infrastructure for maintenance or emergency response. They can generally just coordinate with DOT to set up a traffic plan and get to work. - It's safer to have utility mains located in easements that are clearly demarcated as public (along roads, or in alleys) rather than have them located in easements that cross private property because a private property owner could, for example, decide to dig on their property without consulting an underground locating service first and hit a main. It's easier and cheaper to have mains located almost entirely in public spaces on grids because of their good connectivity. - Dense utility infrastructure makes it easier to have redundancy via multiple independent routes that are close enough to back each other up in the case of outages/issues.

Another note about "Grids require you to flatten the entire terrain" is you can just gesture broadly at every city in Massachusetts and say: "Are you sure about that"

If anyone knows how to design the perfect city, it's my grandpa and father. Building a new city from ruins wasn't easy, but with some Soviet help, never giving up, and keep pushing their goals, they made it happen. And now, I carry on their legacy to make Pyongyang even more modern. The people are happy and that's what matters

I love how this niche of, I'd describe it as city design/ infrastructure channels present genuine criticisms towards each other, allowing each channel to grow in their skills and video production quality, thus giving us, the viewers the best videos possible. No pointless drama, just genuinely good criticisms mixed in with witty jabs for ADHD retention.

Omg Thank you! I remember when I first noticed this with OBF’s Dubai Islands video. It was such an obvious copy of Neo’s video. Not only was the content super similar, the original thumbnail was the same and the logo was incredibly similar too. Essentially if you were a Neo subscriber or looking for one of his videos, it would have been really easy to accidentally click on OBF’s. I feel like this had to have been more than just a coincidence and more like a channel building strategy.

>Grid cities are bad because heat > Let look at an example > *florida*

10:15 I audibly gasped.

Ha! First thing I thought was" but Barcelona is a wonderful grid city. It can work", glad to see you mentioned it! You could have mentioned Montreal too the grid is bad for cars but great for pedestrians and bikes.

Babe wake up, new Armchair Urbanist

I stopped watching his videos after I felt strongly insulted by his video about coal in Germany. I'm from the region where they mine the coal, and there are certainly problems, but he portrayed us like we are mentally retarded or something. The way he presents his videos really feels like a 15 year old having a presentation in school and his language reflects that.

That little neighborhood at the outro was gorgeous!

In uni I was talking to an urban designer, who was a judge for a design exercise we were doing, and we were talking about how my city used to be very “griddy” before cars. Working class neighbourhoods were focused on lot numbers and not car access so they were walkable and relatively dense. Now those old suburbs are valuable and have narrow streets, street trees, and lots of intersections, so they’re quite pleasant and walkable.

The urban planning community these days seem to just watch and take in the big urban planning channels without generating their own ideas and conclusions. It's kind of a sadly a big circlejerk for big urban planning youtubers. Please use critical thinking skills people and do research instead of just watching educational youtube videos because not every youtube creator knows what their talking about.

This is so good

Why is the city planning channel drama the best thing I’ve seen today lmao, to this OBF guy I hope you watched the end of this video, Alan makes several good points that you’d probably benefit from hearing but either way good luck, I hope your RU-vid journey goes well and I hope you use those editing skills for good

i opening this video expecting it to be about city planning and this is so much more than what i expected

I have more respect for real life lore because they did do the re-upload.

I live in a fairly small european town, mostly built on a grid, and I find it much more liveable than the neighbouring city which has streets from the 1500s. If the city planners do their job, it doesn't matter the layout.

Its interesting you point this out because I basically follow most of the people he has copied and because he gets recommended to me alot I often feel like I've watched his videos before and just forgot without it ever occuring to me that he straight up plagarized. I'm glad you pointed this out though so I can spend less time on him and continue giving support to the people that actually did the work.

I gotta love the fact that I saw OBF's original video next to this one at the same time in my recommended.

This guy is why the phrase “correlation doesn’t equal causation” exists

10:00 it's not even plagiarism, it's worse

Glad your video came up in my feed.

It reminds me of when I was trying to practice art as a kid and so would trace pictures and say I made them and try to copy the style until I developed my own, not realizing that I was just hampering myself

Oh no

WOW, that was pretty damning with the Vox video comparison

Presenting possible objections and then dealing with them is actually a great way of making a convincing argument.

"Sometimes the book just sucks ass" that point is so true for so many different books. It should be on a shirt

Oh yeah, OBF makes WAY too many mistakes (I especially noticed this in his ghost town vid about Myanmar). Like in a vid where he talks about Japanese geography and why it's terrible, he included a clip of Hong Kong double decker trams as if they're in Tokyo, he brought up lack of resources but didn't acknowledge that's what led Japan to expand and invade its neighbors historically, failed to mention typhoons which you know stopped the Mongols from invading, and used an outdated map of the Shinkansen network without the Hokkaido Shinkansen, Hokuriku Shinkansen, and the Kyushu extension of the San'yō Shinkansen to Kagoshima. OBF is just a Dollar Store Vox. That being said, I love grid cities, I find it so much easier to work my way through a grid city than one that isn't. Maybe because I've been to NYC so many times, but I've never had a problem figuring out where I was. And if I didn't, I'd go to the nearest subway station and then find the way to my correct destination

Melbourne is quite literally a grid city and it's one of the best cities to live in. You can have great grid cities, and Melbourne is peak design (mixing wider streets with narrower ones, running trams through the bigger streets, having very wide pedestrian areas even on major roads)

In Cities Skylines I use grids all the time, but how I zone everything keeps traffic down. Keep housing near offices/commercial, commercial near industry/highways, and industry near ports/highways and with lots of public transit for workers which most of the time pays for itself. People just walk and bike everywhere usually. I wish C:Sk had mixed zoning.

OBF's video came so close to the realisation that it's actually car dependency that's the problem

I'm kinda wary of that trend when people make videos with impressive editing and very know-it-all tone while not taking care of fact and logic checking what they're saying. They are going to rise in views because they are pretty and well made visually and narratively but they are going to spread half-truths and misconceptions.

Alan fisher is going on his joker vigilante arc

Good video with a lot of great perspective. As an American transportation engineer, I can say there's currently a lot of push to learn from past mistakes. For example, "road diets" are a common approach to improving urban streets. By widening sidewalks, planting more trees and gardens, striping off dedicated bus/transit lanes and bike lanes, narrowing auto travel lanes, and moving parking off the street, a lot can be done to make existing streets safer for drivers, bikers, and pedestrians, make streets more pleasant and walkable, and actually (believe it or not) reduce auto congestion. Also great point about why streets were built wide in the past. I'm so sick of hearing "because white, cisgender racists" as the reasoning for big fat streets in cities. They did this because they thought making roads super wide would improve safety because there's more room for cars to drive (read about the clear zone concept to learn more about this). While this is absolutely true for high-speed, high-volume facilities such as freeways, the exact opposite is true for city streets as they encourage higher speeds and more aggressive driving.

I just added his grid video to my watch later and then I saw this. I’m glad I watched this one first

I waited the whole video for you to mention Barcelona. I was just there and that, my friends, is how you build a grid.

Thank you! As a Chicagoan I hate when people misrepresent the grid system. Chicago strikes a balance between artery and residential streets. It’s such a great city and easy to navigate but people hate on it because it isn’t a city in Europe.

i am close to choked up just looking at that neighborhood at the end... i keep expecting the street/road to pop out at the next partial turn... it's amazing. wonderful. closer to the heart...

I was watching his "Why Tokyo is so well designed" video and I was wondering why it felt so familiar like I had watched it before. Turns out I had watched the b1m video about that topic earlier in the year and it was much more well done.

That Adam Something call out at the end is savage. I love his videos but yeah its very smug sometimes

I'm loving your videos calling out the shitty (but well edited) channels that are overrepresented on RU-vid at the moment.

Thank you so much Alan. I watched an OBF video once and thought it was extremely grating and unoriginal. The basic thesis of that video was just "American cities bad, Euro cities good", but it was riddled with mistakes that really showed off how little research he had done before trying to make that case. There's plenty of fair game to criticize about American cities, but criticizing American cities without know what you're talking about is just the most obnoxious form of condescending Euro-elitism. Its superficially intellectual, but really just punch-able. You're completely right, his editing and presenting style completely covered up for the lack of substance considering how many likes and views and agreeable comments he was getting. So thanks again Alan. You really reminded everyone what an actually researched video essay looks like. Air tight case, with evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt. Real community service.

I look at the narrow, crowded streets and dense population areas and feel the same way that you feel when you see wide streets and lack of population density.