This Is the Best Designed Suburb in America 

Carmel doesn't even have a bus system. Everyone drives. It has a few okay streets in its faux downtown but the rest of it is just regular American sprawl.

​@@neil.heffernanI mean it's clear they are deconstructing after decades of car centric design and suburban stratification. It will not be made right over night and this is a wonderful step in the right direction. Let's try to be positive about progress that is visibly being made.

I looked at the city on Google streetview and it literally just looks like a normal American suburb. Not sure what this video is pointing out that makes it the "best designed". This is literally everywhere

@@scenicdepictionsofchicagolife Calling it anywhere close to being "A solid European city" is an extreme exaggeration. This looks absolutely nothing like a town in any European country. This looks like an American suburb where the strip malls are designed a little differently

@@neil.heffernan you are right it's not a European style city. It never will be, it doesn't need to be. Carmel is a toddler of a walkable, bikeable city. It's battling against 70+ years of exclusive car oriented development. Did you miss how the mayor comment on what a struggle it has been to convince developers and bankers to back their ideas? They have achieved an incredible amount in the last 20 years and if you project out similar or faster progress over the next 20 it could really be a stunning place. Yea they need more transit, but building an attractive vibrant place that people want to be is a magnet for creating more transit links. Its a step by step process.

And the world

Agree.

As a person that travels through it that isn’t surprising at all

Indianapolis as a whole has improved greatly since the 1980s. Sure the leaving of western electric did downgrade it for a while but since the 2000’s the city has been exploding in economic growth.

Indy has a few really nice suburbs that are regularly seen on best places to live in the US. The north side in particular is very nice.

Indiana is really nice and has some very beautiful/nice towns and cities. Many have been mentioned on the best places to live on Forbes.

seems like Mayor Brainard needs to go visit as many other mayors as possible in the US and teach them some helpful ideas!

He was also responsible for turning most intersections into traffic circles. It has spread to neighboring suburbs and I really like the setup.

Just because you dont like suburbs doesnt mean they suck. Some people prefer to live away from the city in their own home, nothing wrong with that

@@lalakersproThey have serious issues that make them inefficient. In just about every metric, it’s better for suburbs to be designed a bit more like cities. Rural areas are really the only places that can get away with things like this. Also, these types of suburbs have far more character than the generic North American ones were stuck with. With so much culture on this continent, our shared spaces should reflect it!

@@landrypierce9942 Yeah no thanks. lol

@@Jon_Nadeau_ If you live in a typical North American suburb and like that lifestyle, is there any reason you couldn’t just live in a rural area for mostly the same thing. Suburbs are meant to take some of the benefits from both urban and rural life, but at the moment, they don’t have much of either.

@landrypierce9942 I agree, and suburbs do have the benefits of both rural and urban areas. I like the suburbs the way they are now so there's not much reason to move. Rural areas are nice too but sometimes they don't have many amenities or are too far away from anything. The suburbs are a good balance.

Thank you! I hope more cities can implement this!

desirability will do that to prices lol

Not really expensive, the houses are just big. You can find decent 2 bed apartments in Carmel for under 1000-1100 a month..

@@WisdomRangerNot really desirability, it’s because houses in Carmel are huge. The average home in carmel is like 3500 sq ft lmao.

You get what you pay for. Wanna live in a good area? Pay up

There are a couple of suburbs near Carmel that are also nice and cheaper.

The guy above me is right.

At least it’s doing something in some of its area few other places are

Let assume that whole city looks like this beautiful 😢.

Thanks!

Hoboken is leagues better than here

They don’t want black people or “the poors” coming to their city. Carmel is very elitist and classist.

You missed the entire point of the video. The city has a population of 100k. Over 80% of the population has a degree and the medium income is 100k plus Most of all the amenities are walkable so a bus isn’t needed

You can take transit even if you have a degree and make a lot of money. Nor do you need a certain number of people to have transit. And didn't they talk about how they buried all the parking (couldn't hear too clearly due to music) - they wouldn't need so much parking if they had more transit. Another commenter said that this is just the downtown area, they still have regular suburbs like any other place - there could be transit to take people from their single family houses into this downtown area.

Everyone has cars here, so funding public transportation from the single family home areas is very unlikely. Even if there were a bus system, we are all so busy that waiting on scheduled transportation would be too time consuming. Very few people would use it outside of weekends and holiday break times. Most people rarely travel to downtown Indy.

It’s the best because all other US suburbs that were designed recently are just very incredibly bad. The good suburbs are usually built before WW2, zoning, and car centric policies. It’s like being the champion of US Major League Soccer. Best of a mediocre league.

Indiana is fine. Maybe you suck

You have to start somewhere. If little enclaves prove to be popular and successful, then their influence will spread. We're in the early stages of this change with the housing crisis pushing faster solutions to the problems caused by car centric living. Hopefully examples like down town Carmel will show towns that it's both profitable for the town and residents to have these places, then they stop becoming enclaves and become the norm.

I live and work in Carmel. I fully agree. Its an extremely small potion of the city. Only the City Center has had this kind of activity done. Just sprawl everywhere else. Ill give them credit for starting,a nd thats making nearby Fishers do the same, but it isnt going to change much.

What you don’t realize is that Carmel is actually spread out and the city gets credit for its amenities and quality of life. Midtown, The Art district, The Monon trail is all one area Then you have West Clay and all these areas are walkable. Plus you have to remember that the place is no longer a town but a city of 100k All those people gotta live somewhere

I think you're missing the point. The goal here isn't too get rid of all the sprawl in a suburb since many people living living in those areas. After all people move to the suburbs for a reason. The point is to improve the suburbs by building a small walkable and economic engine downtown that the residents can drive/walk too. We don't want to get rid of the suburban sprawl completely because then it's not even really a suburb anymore you might as well just call it a urban city.

as Timothy says, this is a start. You can't change 75 years of car oriented development all at once. The core downtown has proven to be attractive, successful, and desirable. The mayor talked of new projects on the horizon. The video showed a dozen building under construction. These are the first steps only. A long way to go, but a start.

Just one man is not responsible for all of this, however..

yeah i was gonna say i swear ive seen this

Yes.

The only transit option is the IndyGo Bus, but it's pretty slow, so people avoid it. Indy, however has set plans into expanding the red line into Westfield or Carmel, which could be beneficial. Right now, only about 2% of us in Carmel walk or take public transit. Additionally, only 2% of carmel residents walk or take public transit, 72% of Carmel residents drive alone to work, 5% carpool, and 21% get to work from home.

@@aimxdy8680There is a demand based bus service that does serve Carmel called Hamilton County Express. I honestly am starting to dislike the demand based bus service. Tried it once, they said my trip request was denied, yet they sent a bus over to the place I wanted to be picked up, and yet they blame me for it. Such ridiculous management.

It’s really not, but it’s just that some republicans seem to value freedom a lot. But there are car centric liberals too

Except Paris has a dense public transportation network...

That looks nothing like Paris. it does however, look like Disney Springs....

Car are not as needed there

Most people who are pushing for this type of urban design are also pushing for public transit via trains or whatnot so you can just catch a train and land within 5-10 minutes walking distance of whatever destination It's possible, it has been done in other countries

an urbanist mde fan wow ive seen it all

And I am republican so don’t make it about my party

Nobody here in the USA pays attention to signage. We learn to ignore that when we're young.

good, remove all bikes

What would you call citizens of the United States of America? United States of Americans? United Statians? No... We just call them Americans. You can call the United States of America simply, "America". You just can't call the United States "*The* Americas". You can use "begs the question" or "raises the question". Aristotle named the fallacy that but it doesn't mean you can't use the phrase to mean other things. "Begs" has taken on new meaning after him and works in this context to mean "raises". Also, the phrase itself isn't a logical fallacy but rather the translation of the Aristotelian phrase rendered as "beg the question" but meaning "assume the conclusion." You probably already knew this but then you should've specified "which is the name of a logical fallacy" instead of "which is a logical fallacy" :P But at least you haven't committed a fallacy fallacy. Although you are being pedantic.

@@derp3044 I'm always curious why every time I bring this up, people mistakenly bring up demonyms. I wasn't talking about what the people are called, but what the country is called, and it's called the United States of America (in full) or the United States (in short). "America" refers to the entire landmass (which was a continent for everyone until the 1950s, after which point it got split into 2 continents in some cultures), which is what the name "United States of America" is referring to (as in, not "of Africa", "of Asia", etc.). Reducing "United States of America" to "America" would be like reducing "San Francisco of California" to "California"; it's a semantic error. It might seem like country names can be derived from demonyms and vice-versa, but they actually have a tenuous relationship at best. In the same way that one cannot say "do you call the people Dutch people or Netherlandic people? Therefore, the name of the country is Dutchia", the logic doesn't work for the US because it doesn't have a unique name for the country. So the demonym came to be one of last resort, where the residents of every other country in America came to have unique names of their own, so the label "American" came to be used to refer to the people from the US (though it still refers to everyone from America). However, United Statians, Usonians, or US-Americans are all valid demonyms that people can use. United States of Americans is grammatically incorrect because of the semantic error (see above). As for the idiom, no, "begs the question" is incorrect when it isn't referring to the name of the logical fallacy. It's just a common misconception that people think "sounds right", just like how they mix up "revolves around" and "centred on". And of course the phrase itself isn't a logical fallacy. But your point there, while somewhat valid in that there's a bit of ambiguity in how I phrased it, is silly because it would be like saying "it's incorrect to say 'I'm John' when what you mean is 'My name is John'." The former can refer to the name as well, which is the sense that I was using it in.

@@tstcikhthys it seems to be in how the Western Hemisphere is taught differently perhaps. In the US and Canada we are just taught you may call the US "America", and that the landmass containing both North America and South America are "The Americas", not "America", which seems to be reserved for USA. I beg to defer 😋 colloquially, it is acceptable. Again, languages are living and constantly changing, even changing based on errors sometimes. I think the ambiguity argument still stands, as it's not a commonly known that "begs the question" is the name of a logical fallacy, and one could confuse your statement with the statement itself being a fallacy. "I'm John" vs "My name is John" won't ever be confused.

The use of “mindset” as he did in the video is also barbarous

A suburb is an area where most work in a larger city adjacent to it, whereas a small city is a low population city where most work inside of the city. Hope this helps.

@@QurgingB284are these people all commuting somewhere?

As the mayor said, it's probably the local banks thinking it's too risky to do this and not financing these projects for developers.

Specific parts of Montreal aren't bad either :,)

The architecture is way better than the new European modernist developments though

Definitely not the best suburb in US, maybe the best in indiana. NJ has far better suburbs, so does Utah

They have none.

It's a suburb of the city with under 1,000,000 people and pretty bad public transportation. However, downtown Carmel, which is all shown in the video, is very easy to walk around (everything is less than a 15-minute walk), and rental cars should not be hard to find. But no, Carmel does not have public transportation.

@@oneshotfanThey do, however it only runs every December. It’s called the Carmel Holiday Trolley. It’s a bus route that runs every 15 minutes.

if you love disgusting public transit so much just stay in chicago or nyc.

I LOVE many of Chicago's suburbs!

I went on Google Street View and it looks like 98% of American suburbs

and that's why they made it super walkable

I'm pretty sure being walkable doubles as being accessible but ok go off. Many places designed for cars are not accessible at all save for a few parking spots. Good luck finding ramps throughout the street, or pedestrian-friendly intersections. It's scary trying to cross stroads built for cars. How do you get around with mobility issues? Drive your car? Have you tried going in an electric wheel chair or walker? Maybe walking more instead of driving everywhere would help change your mobility issues?

Also, I don't get how it would be super easy to get out of your car each and every time you want to access a building. Wouldn't it be harder to leave the car than already be up and about? Wouldn't you need someone with you anyway helping you get out of your car? Someone that would be able to help you walk around Carmel?

@@derp3044: What they mean by "walkable" in Carmel is that it has sidewalks and looks pretty. But if you have mobility issues, you have to park in parking garage and likely walk for multiple blocks. You heard them oh its "only a 15 minute walk" but that's more than some can do, especially in icy or snowy conditions. As opposed to being able to pull up in front of the restaurant or store and park in a handicap space or even a regular space within a more walkable distance. You are correct that many areas that are not planned like Carmel also have accessibility issues. Shoot, my neighborhood does not even have sidewalks but that's not the topic of THIS video. I am also going to assume you meant well by the comment about walking more improving mobility, because that is true in some cases but in my case and many others, it won't work. That's not to say we can't exercise, I love to swim, but walking more is not the cure for all of us. I'm not sure if you are in Central Indiana or not, but if you are local you will know that Carmel is carefully designed to keep certain types of people out. You don't see people with disabilities or many minorities or people with different socioeconomic backgrounds in Carmel. Their design is carefully curated to be inaccessible to those groups on purpose. So while I am usually the last to throw out "woke" tropes, Carmel truly is designed for exclusion and that IS repugnant to me because it thinly veils their actual goals which is to keep people out that don't match their aesthetic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmel,_Indiana

@@derp3044 That would depend on your disability. For some the walk is worse, for others it would be getting in and out of a car (back issues make that part harder). And, no, not everyone needs a helper to function just because they have limitations. I think your definition and understanding of mobility issues and disabilities is a little narrower than the reality.

@@semperapparatus987 i see your point now, sorry for framing it like this. You are definitely in the minority here and it sucks to see. However, I do believe that these are steps in the right direction. With higher density and better walkability, they will eventually put in a transit system, making the commute a whole lot easier after parking your car. I'd argue it would even save more time than being stuck in city traffic. Also, does Carmel not plow the sidewalks properly? Or does it become too cold/challenging to commute with your disability? Sorry for coming off as hostile at first btw. I also believe ideally getting rid of most street parking and only having a few accessible spots would be more beneficial too.

Please don’t act slow.

🤓