The thing is Americans always say CARS ARE FREEDOM, but when you are forced to use your car for school, food, work, all movement because you don't have anything else, it's not freedom it's a prison
For real. I have epilepsy so I can't drive. Life here in Texas is hell if you're not able to drive. Pretty much have no freedom. I never go anywhere except my workplace which is a 40 minute walk bc I have to bum rides off people to get anywhere.
@@McFwoupson I use a car to go to work, it's a 10mile drive to a place where i would need to use atleast 3 different transports, but it could be done in maybe a bit less then 1 hour but it takes 15m by car. So the situation in Lisbon and Portugal overall is not excellent for public transport, but it's getting better, people need to atleast have the option of not using a car. If you live and work in Lisbon you can live without a car. Students and older citizens can go in any public transport FOR FREE or atleast very reduced fees. The month pass is around 35$ for all transports. Most EU cities will be like that altho more expensive. But our cities are not for the cars, they are for us.. Cities need to make better and cheaper public transport and make it harder for car owners. Americans need to fight to have their cities back, more highways destroying your neighborhoods and creating ghettos is not the answer PS: I'm sorry for your condition, best of luck my friend!
@@McFwoupson Fellow epileptic here - SAME! I can't drive anywhere. I live in a San Francisco Bay Area suburb, so it's not nearly as egregious as Houston or Florida, but it's still way too car-dependent.
I lived in the US for a couple of years as a student, and I couldn't pinpoint why I hated it so much until I watched Not Just Bikes' video on Houston, and I literally come from a fairly walkable European city with good public transport. It was a true lightbulb moment for me, as the closest I got before that was "why are there no bus lines anywhere", the rest I just assumed as some law of nature being there for a reason, didn't even register as dogshit urban planning. I feel like this is how 99% of people think about these things, and he kind of addresses that at the beginning of the video as well. Now back in Europe I appreciate the freedom of not needing a car, being able to just walk or hop on a bus/tram/metro anywhere, it's so fucking liberating compared to having this 2 tonne metal limb you need to go anywhere.
When I studied urban planning (in germany) american urban spaces were discussed several times. And not a single time in a positive way. Many american cities embody everything european planners are taught to avoid for almost 40 years now since we had a shift in planning paradigms.
When my family was homeless I had to walk to school. At a certain point away from the campus, the sidewalks would get increasingly worse and then just... stop. I was a teenager who was an arm's length away from a highway full of teenager drivers. I wish America wasn't so car-centric, those shots of cities in the Netherlands were beautiful.
you basically hate freedom, development , prosperity and democracy. the american way. holland is disgusting. i am joking. it’s all a big lie. usa is horrible. even to visit.
@@nutyyyy Soviet cities were not necessarily beautiful, but they provided housing, nearby stores and untilities, as well as public transportation. The basic needs of people were covered. The housing prices in the west would also drop, if cities would actually build buildings for people to live in.
I live in houston, and I can't believe how much I've been groomed to believe our urban planning is normal. So many times I've stepped on dirty grass paths full of litter next to large lanes just to walk somewhere a 1/4th a mile. Insane.
Its getting better though. They are improving from the inside out, starting in Central houston, Downtown, and the Med center. Hopefully they continue to improve. Something that complicates is all the little cities that make up the Houston Metro area.
ikr, I got into my urban planning phase about a few months ago found Adam Something, Not Just Bikes, and Alan Fisher all great channels with amazing content.
@@John-zl8qx yeah same here. I think found a couple of Not Just bike’s videos and found other channels like Alan Fisher, Adam Something, and others. It’s given me a better appreciation for the built landscape and how it can be more pleasant to live and work with more walkabilty like sidewalks, bike infrastructure, public transit, and green spaces. Huge pluses that it heavily reduces carbon emissions from car traffic and endless building sprawl and enables you to live without a car.
As a car owner it would be stupid to not make public transportation and urban infrastructure more accessable for pedestrians. It takes more cars off the road, saves money for the person who owns a car and one who doesn't, and it makes driving to and from places shorter. It helps everyone.
As a Native Houstonian, this city is extremely car dependent. Until i was 16 i pretty much felt like i was on house arrest, there was no where to travel even in my suburb, and i live 15 mins from downtown. It sucks man
*I’ve lived here my entire life and this city is truly hell. I just wish I had the fortune to have my life played out on camera from day one so that people can see just how fucking hellish it’s been and how evil people have been to me and how they’ve gotten away with it. It fucking HURTS. The pain is immense and it’s soul-ache. My soul is literally SUFFERING and what did I do to deserve this? Nothing.*
The best way to describe sidewalks in the US is that they're aesthetic. You're not meant to use them and they don't go anywhere. For a pertinent example, you can be ticketed for walking along a highway in Washington state if there isn't a sidewalk, or jaywalking when one is available for a higher fine. But when a new Cosco was built on the highway near me a few years back, the city added a roundabout to the turnoff for it. Which had sidewalks. On both the exterior and interior island. A half mile from any connecting sidewalk. And of course since the bike lane is literally 9 inches wide on that stretch of highway; if I want to use Cosco's sidewalk I have to stand in 55 mph traffic, risk a ticket, and jump traffic to use that fancy island sidewalk. (Also yeah, the 55 mph traffic goes right into a traffic circle and then hits a traffic light a few hundred yards down the line.) Also I didn't realize this until I started walking more, but a Zebra crossing doesn't mean traffic disruption for pedestrians in the US. Spokane literally has a handfull of marked pedestrian crossings across a 6 lane highway near me without any kind of signage or signals for drivers nowhere near a traffic light. The city decided that the cure for people getting ticketed for dodging traffic was to make areas where it's not ticketable.
I feel blessed to have grown up in a suburban city that had a continuous sidewalk network on all roads. Could walk 7 miles from my HS to home with sidewalks. I didn't realize that this reality about sidewalks until I visited Houston.
As someone who can't drive due to an eye disability, this stuff is very important. I have to either rely on walking, public transit, carpooling, or uber
people say cars give you freedom, which is fine if you have the nine thousand a year to spend on a car, but when urban planning forces you to have a car in order to work or get anywhere you need to go that is a removal of freedom. Planning cities for people as opposed to for cars isn't the same as prohibiting car ownership.
@@Ryleeman54number2 car payment, insurance, gas, maintenance, accidents, tickets. I've seen a few estimates of average annual cost that are lower, but not by much.
@@magnus_cockstrong yes but i dont see how a 2000 dollar car thatll run for years is costing me 9000 a year. I literally drive for a livint and hit nowhere near that lol
I just moved to Spain a few days ago and I can literally walk everywhere in this city. If I don’t feel like taking the whole walk to a place that’s far, I’ll simply take a bus for 1.5€. There’s bike lanes on literally almost every street. Parking that are appropriately located on the roads with massive underground parking under the city itself in which elevators are used to take people to the surface. The efficiency along with the elegant architecture of Pamplona, Spain, amazes me every time I leave to asses to my responsibilities or to simply read at a park.
There's something really cute about being asked to be sued. It's such a 90s phrase. "HEY, I LIKE CHOCOLATE! SO SUE ME, OK! " lol You can tell the chatter was raised by Gen X parents.
Also if he "needs" nightly hour long drives, he needs therapy or a change in lifestyle, not a car. Also all the stuff he mentions about access to cities should be part of the transit planning OBVIOUSLY. No one is saying "we need more public transport" and only means "more trams in cities" (whether it be for infrastructure or climate change reasons).
@@maeschder you can have nightly rides on a bicycle lol, it also provides you with exercise. If a city is designed with bicycle paths then you don't have to worry about being run over.
It depends We can't pretend it doesn't mean way less cars though Just own it. There simply isn't enough room in cities for parking for everyone to drive a 2 ton box everywhere. If you really want to do that, just get ready to sit in traffic on one or two lanes (vs 20) as busses and trams speed past you on dedicated lanes. There isn't really any other way.
I’m glad more millennials and Gen Z are getting into urban planning because it just easier to live in areas where everything is walkable for you. From grocery, work, school, and entertainment, there’s has been cities building neighborhood for that purpose to have all that together instead miles apart. And using light rail, heavy rail, speed bullet train, and busses using alternative energy is not only cheaper to use but the best way to fight climate change. If only Americans care more about convenience rather than “independent”. I find the rural areas so so so boring and very ugly. Like you spend a lot of money for a big house and put in a lot of unnecessary stuff you don’t need. There’s miles and miles of houses but some of these neighborhoods don’t have a park or a shopper area in the middle of them. To be honest that seems to be more communist than whatever Europeans are doing with their cities. Urban renewal has been key in 21 century and it’s works so much better for the average Joe. Small businesses will greatly appreciate this and you can use those extra land for other stuff like gatherings and festivals. I rather be somewhere that is close to everything I need and want to go to rather than drive miles and miles to get too. I have a car and I take very good care of it but a lot of people don’t care about maintaining their car to run good. They just get rid of it and pay more for the next one. Simply bad thinking since maintaining is just a lot cheaper. I live in area that is somewhat getting there as there’s a reliable bus system that takes me to work and a few grocery stores a mile away. But there’s a lot of work that need to be down in order to make the city where I’m at and others better.
Owning a car would be a lot nicer if I didn’t have to throw money at it so often cause of all the commuting I have to do. Sure, I could make more money or fix it myself but we need all day public transit. It’s senseless to make life so inconvenient for not having a vehicle.
like the guy said man people are so addicted and blinded by car dependency they can’t even COMPREHEND a city that is built more for humans. it’s literally unteachable to some americans it’s DESPICABLE 😂
Middle eastern gulf countries are like that but on steroids, and it's full of maniacs that don't even respect traffic laws. Fuck me I need to leave asap.
Houston could have put a lot of local rails in certain areas but they never did. They could've also put a train like back in the day going from Houston to Galveston. Houston just builds endless roads
Having walkable cities doesn't mean abolishing cars. I'm in support of all of this and I'm a fucking driving instructor. All it would do is make my job safer
I really wanna see a more explicitly leftist discussion of urban planning. Like looking at lefty planning from history. (Vienna, Mondragon, sewer socialism in the US, Soviet planning, Cuban planning, or any city planning/reconstruction in Rojava (i wonder if they have highly democratic urban planning too)) also look at urban planning in imperialist cities, how was Hongkong designed under the Brits? Or Delhi, or some of the French colonial capitals in N. Africa.
@@gabrielchristy7341 Yes, and. Lol Eco Gecko has a very good series about how the suburbs are horrible for a multitude and it is explicitly leftist. NJB is just implicitly leftist.
Went to the Netherlands once for my best friends wedding and now I’m trying to figure out how to move there. Seriously, it’s so beautiful and pedestrian friendly, which is why I loved it so much.
It can be kinda hard to find a house here since there is a huuuge housing shortage nationwide. Try to avoid the randstad area if you dont want to sell both of your kidneys in order to buy a house lol
@@TheOrangVegetal my friends bought outside Haarlem city center for half a million euros. But it’s a house they can grow into, took a long time to find one though. Honestly in the small I live in, the housing market is so competitive it took us months to be accepted for an offer. Seems housing is just hard to come by in a lot of places lately.
I'm so pissed about some of the ignorant american comments in his chat: Someone literally asked "Why don't they just get a car then, there are so many cheap ones?" And someone else asked "Why is that a problem?" Is education really that bad in the US or are people blind on both eyes like wtfff is wrong with some people in the chat
The best response I've heard to that is "Well I thought about getting an audiobook, but I guess driving a car never killed anyone. Guidedog fetch my cane, this commenter is gonna teach me how to drive."
i remember walking to the gas station nearest to my house for the first time this summer. I've lived in the same house for 6 years, and that gas station was always such a quick stop for anything while driving, so i thought it wouldn't be that bad to walk there. "its right up the road." except, as i was walking i realized that cars could drive 45 mph down this road, with absolutely zero sidewalk in many places, and at one point a random "crosswalk" that not a single car acknowledged was there. Not only that, but the fact that i realized in order for a carless household to get food, they would need to travel not only that road, but a highway without any sidewalks to get their produce, and not even good produce. It pisses me off so much that cities and towns have zero consideration for any individuals anymore, and instead focus on business (i'n my town's case, tourism).
Hasan's discussions with chats non-american audience, like with the person who asked if we have bike lanes, kinda makes me wish Hasan would go on a Google Street view tour of Los angeles and show/describe the area for people who have never been there. How unnecessarily spread out everything is and how little consideration there is for any form of moving around that ISNT by car
I dropped out of urban planning on my 4th year but some stuff about the way american cities were designed really stuck with me such as - Most cars are used for about 40min to 1h a day, so the other 23h of the day they are doing nothing but taking up space. - Cities like NY, while with a good public transportation network, have their own share of problems, such as the fact that in some streets the buildings are so tall it blocks light from entering the street for most of the day. That's one of the reasons why most european cities have height restrictions on their buildings. - When you do new urban developments it should be mandatory to have a mix of luxury, affordable and public housing and you want to equipt them with public squares, libraries, schools, theatres and so on to be used by all of its residents. That way rich people will directly invest in the community and this will improve chances of social mobility. From what I heard, american ghettos are the opposite of that
one example in north america where you also have a height limit is montreal, you cannot make a building that excedes the height of the mont royal (233m)
Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, Strong Towns are amazingly interesting, great channels that everyone should watch, it's taught me so much about the city where I live.
LA is transit is utter shit, but it isn’t like that everywhere. I live in Chicago, and transit is actually great. It’s consistently on time, and I’ve never been in train or bus that has broken down. I also have never had this kind of sidewalk problem. It’s a suburbia problem.
In Houston, pedestrians are seen as poor losers, which feed into the narrative that if your poor in the U.S. then it's your fault. Your low status is of your own doing and therefore they don't care about you. Public transportation is provided at minimum cost for those poor so they can eventually get to their minimum wage jobs provided for the EMPLOYERS convenience.
'God' bless the London Underground and TFL. I really underestimated how important it was until I realised that some other cities didnt even have buses.
i live in houston and i didn’t realize in other cities you could walk places at all until i traveled out of houston for the first time, and while young i thougjt that only the homeless walked, and that busses and trains didn’t exist in america. it’s sad, and it’s still super bad.
As someone who lives in a rural area in Germany I apreciate mixed zone housing a lot. Puplic transportation is bad and this helps a lot. You don't have to drive everywhere, you can walk to a lot of places or go on a short drive if you have a car. I have a car but I also can walk to where I need to be without puting myself in danger.
When Hasan said “If you’re thinking ‘Damn this looks like my suburb in Missouri”, I flipped. I live near St. Louis and walk 2 miles to work everyday. I have to jaywalk to efficiently get to work since so many sidewalks just end with no alternative besides two awkward crosswalks that are a quarter mile back. It’s frustrating knowing this is a problem in so many other cities. Don’t get me started on right on red lights >:(
23:10 I enjoy that Hasan tries to "um, actually" with "flood plains" in response to literal reclaimed land that's *below* sea level. He probably should've lead with "Look, the Netherlands actually have their shit together and hold back their flooding, unlike Houston, which is located on massive flood plains."
Memes aside, Houstonians immediately hated the I-10 expansion and are equally not happy with the city's plans for 59(69) apart from the repair of the road itself because they've been extremely slow fixing all the damage on it over the last 20 years.
The rich old city I stayed in (for a summer job with my friends) had decent sidewalks, but then had huge "hail Mary" crossings where you'd be lucky to make it across all the lanes safety.
Toronto is probably so high on that list because of the trams that aren't on the subway map. Without the trams, Chicago would kick Toronto's ass. Which is why I wish Chicago would also build a tram network that integrated well with the L. It could make the L so much better.
I’m from Scotland and when my family and I would walk to places in Florida and we apparently got weird looks for just walk and I remember times there was no pavement and our confusion about the lack the of pavements
@@Saturn_Rising hell lol, no seriously, at points you do run out of sidewalks, people look at you funny and taking a cool drink for the journey is a must if you don't wanna pass out from the heat.
Man, I saw a video recently on the roads in Denmark being more pedestrian-centric. It looked wonderful- would cut down on speeding and people running lights as well as keep walkers safer.
I deadass live in this area of Houston and it’s so funny watching this guy roasts tf outta my city planning just bc he had to work from one end of a shopping center to the other end lmaoo
I live in the San Fernando Valley and there's also arterial streets w/o sidwalks and I was once forced to walk out into the street with fast cars. The only city in California that isn't car centric and is very walkable is San Francisco, but it's too expensive to live in and I don't have a good reason to move there. I also don't really want to leave LA. But the city is improving, just at a snails pace.
Totally relatable dude. I also live in the valley, and a hilly area at that, but I don't have the money or license to maintain a car, so I've opted to bike. Things are getting better, especially after the passage of Measure M, but for now I have to manage dodging traffic across wide, hilly 50 mph stroads with crappy sidewalks and bike lanes that often have road rubble in them.
@@xenotiic8356 I live in the western part of the valley and it's very suburban here and also boring. I might move to Van Nuys or NoHo area since it's denser and have more things in walking distance and better transit. I also like San Fernando too.
@@JohnDoe-rg4tl the only red state that isn’t a drain on the federal govt, that actually pulls its weight, is TX and that’s because the BLUE cities generate all the money and are the hubs No one comes to Texas to live in Wichita Falls
They're also planning on widening i-35 by a large margin though which is an absolutely horrible idea bc adding more lanes doesn't work. It's also a 4 billion dollar project. Won't fix anything.
Those most liveable cities list always end up with a bunch of Australian cities because of soft factors like weather/days of sunshine plus the usual unemployment rate, higher education, and social safety nets (universal healthcare etc) except for Melbourne (which kept its tram network when the car manufacturers came to Australia) they are all car centric as hell though.
Stayed in Davis, CA for a bit while touring colleges & rented bikes with my family. It was mind blowing to see so many ppl using bikes in an American city. It’s the only place I’ve seen in the US where that’s the norm. Wish this were common everywhere like in the Netherlands.
I live in europe. I have a car. But its totaly by choice and because i want to be able to commute to work out of town and when i buy all the grocheries for the month. Rest of the time i walk or ride a bike. I have lots of friends who are in their 30s that have never had a drivers licence.
My city has a walk score of 28. Bike score of 34 and no transit score because we don’t have that. The sidewalks and “bike lanes” are dangerously tiny and intermittent, they are generally so close to the road they look like a gutter. American urban planning is such a nightmare.
i love how hasan doesnt understand the rankings of livable cities. its why a third of aussie citizens werent born in australia, we came here cause its good stuff mate.
I remember trying to bike to my towns mall as a teen and realizing the only possible way there required me to cross a busy freeway with no crosswalk. And since then I noticed people trying to get to their jobs at this mall dashing accross the same area
Wait so you guys literally have streets with no sidewalks? Haha that’s so weird to me. How does that even make sense to anyone? How do children get around?
I agree with the chatter in that I too enjoy night drives lol. I actually find it some what enjoyable to drive on the interstate long distance. This is contrasted by making it to a city and finding it extremely hard to navigate and immediately being filled with anxiety with trying to watch out for pedestrians and the other cars. Basically I like the drive to my destination but once there I wished I had just flown and relied on the public transit there.
