This summer, I received the incredible opportunity to visit the Netherlands. This urbanist pilgrimage taught me so much about urban planning, and how wrongly my country is doing it. Here are three counterintuitive things I learned about how to take back a country from the cars.
45 Comments
Wow this looked so professional and smooth. Very entertaining!
Alex. Please tell me you got to meet up with Jason when you were there. 🙏
Alex. Your videos are already top-tier urbanist quality. You need a Patreon!
Agreed. Car culture has to go away to reduce pedestrian deaths.
Nice T-T
People put up with a shitty bus when there’s no alternative. Yeah, some parts of the world lived through that. It’s called communism. It ultimately failed. I am tired of Dutch bs, if the country’s so great, just move there already and be done with it. People that appreciate freedom don’t want the crap from the Netherlands exported globally. The Soviet Union would have humbly leaned from you, the propaganda here is insane.
Yup, writing was on the wall, America is doomed as well. It was great while it lasted. Why would you export the kind of crap you run away from hundreds of years ago…?
I was just reading about a town in Spain called Ponteverde where cars are banned from the medieval town center and it got me wondering how many residents of the town center are still noticeably salty, years on, that if they have a car, they have to walk further to get from their parking place to their home. That got me thinking of the fantastic super-narrow streets in Philly, where cars can barely or not at all fit, as wondering how people living on those streets feel about the tradeoff of not being able to park in front of their home versus having a street that is friendlier to people. Anyway, that could be a cool video to see!
3:00 not a terrier but a wirehaired dachshund 😃
When you finish your studies, come to Southern California and fix this mess.
You've got a great channel! Very inspiring.
YASSSSSS
You can do a NotJustBikes and move away from the USA.
It's a lot easier to flee than to fix your country.
And don't forget to change those stupid euclidian zoning laws – everyone would be more willing to change their view if you didn't NEED a car to reach shops, services or schools from your house deep in the single-family-homed suburbs.
I love your style!
Out of focus final shot was great, you were going back to a country that is out of focus.
What a great video, clear commentary and excellent footage. Changing people's inner values is the best and most effective lever for change (see the iceberg model). This only happens when we work together with communities, rather than imposing interventions on them.
My 2 dutch cents: the dutch mixed use, low speed streets that you showed are probably still a step to far for north America. Dutch drivers are used to bicycle traffic, and are mostly also cyclists themselves. So before you advocate this approach in north-america, it is better to first build up critical mass and familiarity by using physically separated bicycle infrastructure.
I am also happy to get as much out of their cars and on those bikes and public transportation so I can drive my car without traffic jams. Keep up the good! /whoehahaha
that building looks like shit !
I think there is hope for us in Britain, the USA and Canada… but I'm afraid it's not in the near future. The younger generations appear to be receptive to the idea of change, but the older generations are still stuck in the car-dependent mind-set. Unfortunately, I doubt I'll see enough change LOL as I'm one of the latter. I've preferred cycling to driving from an early age. I did my [compulsory in California] drivers' ed class in 1966, but didn't get my licence until I was 20. I cycled over 5 miles daily to college where I was one of a half-dozen to not arrive by car (out of 5000). Now aged 71 I still cycle roughly 15 miles a day for exercise and enjoyment, despite the almost complete lack of any cycling infrastructure where I live!
You know the state of your country is bad when our soulless business parks are better then your soulless suburbs 🤣😜
A lot of those cultural changes were legal changes. Those cars that gave you right of way? It's because the driver of the car is legally responsible if there's an accident. (And we don't do high-priced lawyers or settlements out of court to make the driver evade consequences.)
Of course you're not wrong, that kind of behavior has seeped into the culture over the decades, and drivers, being almost always cyclists themselves, will be more friendly when there's bad weather or a steep incline or something like that.
I'm debating whether I want to go back to school for the kind of degree you're doing. I didn't realize until I was almost done with college that this was the kind of thing that really fascinates me
Netherlands is an urban planners wet dream
It's so interesting to me to see how you are so excited about locations I pass on my commute (by train) every day without giving them much thought.
0:01 at this point I totally expected Martin Garrix's Animals to start playing
Well done, Alex. Albeit a Dutchman, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the '60s and '70s. I left the US in 1986 for the UK. I retired in 2018, and I then realised my dream of 50 years to return to the fatherland. I now live in paradise… Middelburg, Zeeland. I no longer have a car. I walk, cycle or take the train/tram/bus everywhere. I feel liberated after living in car-centric places. In fact, I feel euphoric!
The biggest difference I think is , the fact that we Dutch start of cycling from like 6 years old and we use them for about a decade to get around ( school,friends etc.).
So the idea of cycling/cyclists is embedded in our thinking pattern , we don't magically forget about cyclist when we get in a car.
5:55 In america it sounds like traffic laws only is for cars. But here in the netherlands if a car meets a bike the same law counts if
the person it doesnt matter what the person is in or on u get the right off way.
Someone has undoubtedly already commented this but cows or sheep are there to trample the land. This reinforces the dykes making them safer in case a flood ever we're to happen.
On your point of cultural expectation, at least to bike lanes in the Netherlands, one of the cool things about bike lane design in the Netherlands is that are still very much traces visible to how it developed over the past 5 decades. Some bike lanes aren't great to current Dutch bike standards, but they were great in the 90's, and those lanes are just not due to an upgrade yet.
You give me hope for the future 😊
I though I had tinnitus but it turned out it was the near constant traffic noise of the "street" that I live on
A worthwhile addition to the other videos out there on this topic 👍
a good bike lane save a lot of humanlife
lesson four vote out car supremacist from city council and start a movement to support bike infra nothing happens if you don;t push for it
Long distance? Where Netherlands? My state alone 20x the size of the whole Netherlands….
I can vouch for using public transit for field trips. A lot of my schools' field trips were done on public busses and that played a large part in my happiness to use them myself now.
Sorry you had to go back. But it's great that you, as an urban planning student, visited. I hope that more of your fellow students will visit the Netherlands. 😊 That would save me, as a Dutch person, a lot of frustration when traveling abroad with all the shitty infrastructure in the rest of the world. 😂
We're not going to do remotely enough of this in time to make a difference. Because before that happens, the bill for replacing low density car-centric infrastructure is going to be due and we'll be completely unable to pay.
Cars stop for every bicycle bc you are basically always at fault if you hit a more vulnerable road user unless they pass a red light or something
Absolutely correct in ALL points! I’ve been there, it’s pretty incredible..
The US can do the same. Take it step by step, first one city with a complete pedestrian and bikefriendly infra-structure with shops and other ameneties in the neighbourhood like the citycenter. If one city will be so bold to close down for cars and let people walk&talk gettin used to NOT takin the car, because they don"t have to. Everthing will change , shops, restaurants, schools..but most of all people start to change because they don't have to strugle gettin in the car for groceries. They can walk!!!
the last minute — keep that style. very Tom Scott. better yet if you can keep the red shirt. Tom Scott for livable cities lol