This interesting! I think that after WWII many leaders around the world the wanted to avoid any urban warfare so thats why the streets are ready for the tanks. The only problem is that these streets can welcome both defending and enemy tanks.
@@hobog This was the original idea behind the wide avenues of Paris. Revolutionists and protestors couldn't barricade themselves in anymore once the narrow medieval streets disappeared.
I started to write my final thesis titled "The Automobile as a Second Clothing," in the mid 1990's in Paris. Unfortunately my advisor failed to see how it pertained to architecture and urban planning. My premise was that the thoughtless use of the automobile was the single biggest influence in city planning which in my opinion is in direct contraindication to the very pedestrian nature of cities. Watching this video makes me wonder if I should finnish writing about it in an alternative form?
The topic matter has very certainly been receiving more vernacular attention as of late with more people seeming to dislike the automobile-focused nature of city planning and places like Poundbury popping up. Besides, creating cities that enable us to use less automobiles is likely going to be a vital part of transitioning into an environmentally sustainable economy.
My premise is that the thoughtless usage of the automobile directly negatively affects the quality of the urban experience for both automobilistes and pedestrians alike.
The former mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad, claimed space from automobiles to give to bicycle and public transport lanes. Most of the car-oriented citizens hated him for that, and he failed re-election. It’s not enough to have good ideas, a culture change is needed.
I don't bike. I live in Southern USA. Mostly cars for everything. I still love seeing waste being fixed. I hate all the unused space or incorrectly utilized.
Man I've been thinking the same for so long now ! Cars are taking so much space in our cities that walking in the street feels uncomfortable or dangerous, really adding to the stress of urban lives. The space allocated to parked cars is the most insane thing in my opinion, all that space used to store machines used on average not even once a day by just a single person, some of which could have used another mean of transport. Car advertisments tried really hard to put in our brains that car = freedom to the point that people consider driving as an essential right, but hey, it's actually not.
@@basstrammel1322 living in a "museum" city is very unpleasant. When where you live is mostly treated like the backdrop of someone else's vacation it isn't a nice feeling. Not all but many tourists from certain countries display little to no consideration for the inhabitants. A certain entitled population openly disrespect local culture. It happens in other places too. What many don't know is that many Parisiennes treat other Parisiennes with contempt just for coming from other arrondissements... Paris easily breeds cynicism...
@@frenchfrog70 I love Paris and Parisiennes. I embrace the real experience of it, and I try to discretly blend in. I don't want to step on anyones toes, but I sometimes forget parts of restaurant etiquette or stumble in the french language. I have nothing against any of the rude reactions to that, it just makes it more authentic. In fact, I wish it was more common to embarrace people in public around the world.
@@basstrammel1322 seems to me that you are the type of tourist secretly appreciated by most Parisians! I was once in the metro. Minding my own business when I overheard an American couple talking loudly. As if they didn't realize that some of us understand English. The wife asked her husband if they could go to McDonald's because "The food is sooo weird here..." I felt like saying something rude.... I didn't. But, as they we're leaving the wagon I saw a pickpoket do his thing while entering... I might could have jumped in to do something about it maybe not. To this day, I'm not sure if I feel bad about it or not?
I live in Cape Town and I know that intersection well. While it is quite accurate how immense it is, you have to remember that you kind of need that extra space to swerve out of the way for savage taxi drivers that DGAF about road laws
Mikael, please do a video next time you're in Sydney, NSW. Our state government has been ripping out cycle lanes that the city council put in! In the city centre the separated cycleways, and the traffic light sequencing that governs them, suck.
wow, i'm proud of my fellow countryman to design such useful app ♥ now that our capital has an architect mayor, Bratislava seems to positively progress. cheers to Slovakia.
Now ask yourself Where are those people going and why are they going there! Often it is to occupy a work space that is only used for the time they are there, but is heated 24-7 How many kilometers of a typical city are only used on a part time basis. WHY ?
agree.......especially with sausage mahoney there the way we run society is a mess....... humans should just occupy a capsule or embryo like sac 24/7, where all their physiological needs will be fulfilled,feeding tube,waste removal system up their ass or surgically connected to their colon ala human centipede style.......all work will be performed within a virtual environment,which can be accessed thru a jack in the neck......which is basically a simulation of the real world like offices where u would perform ur regular professional tasks like u would in real life.......except occasionally something will feel off.....like deja vu......glitches in the matrix thats what they call them.....of course sometimes humans or technicians in the real world might have to communicate or interact with someone whose in the matrix......they will do it thru a desktop or ipads thats connected to the person's pod or capsule or whatever u call it......for biological functions like sex......not gonna lie to u but its gonna be awkward......involving mechanical ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... why even have houses?after all we dont spend 24/7 in there,or even in one room,thats like a waste of space.......especially rich people with large living spaces why do they need large living spaces why cant they live in tiny apartments like the rest of us plebians?why do humans need space at all?.........why have gyms or supermarkets or go anywhere.......we should all live like shut ins or recluses or hikikomoris and never go anywhere........everything delivered to ur doorstep from food to toilet paper to
The ideas from this video improve traffic in that game, provided you have the right interaction management mods, decent public transit, mixed use developments instead of zoning huge blocks only for r c or i
Meanwhile here in the US we are struggling to add even token bike infrastructure let alone sidewalks in many urban neighborhoods. It's a monopsony of space in 'murican urbanisim.
@@bahamut149 because it's a massive country, so they can afford to make big things. this is apparent in truck designs between American engine-front trucks and European under-cab engine trucks.
@@bahamut149 One of the reasons for the larger vehicles is comfort on long rides. Most of the states are larger then entire countries in Europe. When you are putting 4-5 people into a car for hour plus road trips on a daily basis to get to work you want some space to stretch out. At least that is my experience with it.
I do not blame Americans not wanting to walk. I sympathize 100% with them on that. I sympathize 100% with them wanting their privacy in a car. If you suddenly have explosive diarrhea (and I have) better to do it inside one's own car than on a train or a bus with people around. However, that problem should be solved by a LOT more public bathrooms. And Americans need to accept that those comforts of cars everywhere come with a massive cost FORCED onto the young generation, in the form of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), and higher taxes to support all this nonfree "free" parking.
The U.S. is a car culture which is not bicycle or pedestrian oriented. While it would make sense that people would be more focused with narrower lanes, with people so occupied with their cell phones I doubt if they would concentrate more. I have noticed that in construction zones where the lanes are narrow people panic and drive very slow. A major road must handle "X" number of cars per hour and slowing the flow down will lead to gridlock. I saw this happen time and again in California. You must also allow room for the turn radius of larger vehicles. Just a few points I thought about while watching the video.
For an urban designer you seem to entirely forget transportation of goods. Semi Trucks are much wider than cars, and when following a curve the trailer is not lined up with the tractor, if my lane was the exact size of my truck, when the road curves to the left, my trailer would be in oncoming traffic. When the Eiffel tower needs to be repaired, and steel sections need to be brought in on 53' flat decks, if you reduce the intersection to just the amount needed for commuters, the trucks will not be able to make the turns without shutting down the streets and using powered jeeps to rear steer the trailer. Not to mention navigating cities is difficult in a tractor trailer, they need escape routes that are clear in the event they miss a turn so they can get back to the ring roads without becoming stuck at a narrow street or low bridge.
No. Semi deliveries shouldn't be in the core city. Ideally, a semi would stay out in the country and industrial area, transferring inner urban loads to smaller vehicles and street drones. It is a mistake in planning that makes semis have to enter the core city for deliveries. You have a good point for construction logistics
@@hobog but construction (or renovation) is temporary, they can shut down the road for cars during that time so big vehicles have all the space to maneuver.
Excellent video and fantastic tool! Ever since I was a kid, I've always wondered why so much of our road space is dedicated to cars. Whenever I walked to and from school, I HATED crossing roads & intersections because it made me feel so small. A simple Google Maps tour of Las Vegas was all I needed to identify why I felt that way and why I still feel that way as an adult. Now that I have this tool, I can visualize this better potentially as a new hobby during this pandemic!
@@piousminion7822 In case you missed the point entirely, the fact that automobiles do take up more space is the problem. They're incredibly space inefficient.
@@r923tf Not so much, specially considering that cars are not only there to transport people. But Las Vegas is a great example there: This is in a desert, people tend to not want to talk long ways in the hot sun but rather have a short trip with the car. And while cars take up a lot of space on a per-vehicle basis, the throughput is in a different league.
@@piousminion7822 If two cyclist bump into to one another, it's not really a problem. If two cars bump in to one another, it's a pretty big fucking problem.
@@ABaumstumpf I understand what you're saying, but I wanna keep the topic focused on transporting people. I know that automobiles are insanely useful, especially when carrying oversized cargo and for work. So yes, roads should have an appropriate amount of space for cars used for a job. But for the average person who uses a car for small errands? That's where I derive my point (and Mikael's point) from in that cars are space inefficient. It really makes no sense unless the person is disabled on a leisurely road trip from out of town. I think it's absurd that cities fuck up so badly to make cars the only comfortable option to do everyday things. You are right up to a certain point that, at the current state of Vegas, a [middle-class] person wouldn't want to walk for extended periods of time. That's why public transportation was developed over a hundred years ago. The only public transportation option with us locals in mind is the bus. Sure, they're air conditioned and have adequate capacity, but they are rarely on time and it's typical for a bus to come every 30 minutes to an hour. Most bus stops are not even sheltered or shaded with trees. When we want to go somewhere and anywhere reliably, the buses here aren't always the best option, as walking directly and especially biking directly can be faster than the bus. I know many people here, including myself, who are interested in walking/biking more as a practical means of getting around, even in hot weather. However, the facilities (rather lack thereof) make it not so comfortable. There is a solution to this that kind of already exists in the Valley. In more wealthy neighborhoods, especially those "master-planned communities" that are springing up all over the outskirts of Las Vegas Valley, that's sort-of accomplished where their streets are lined with drought-tolerant trees and man-made shade each way. It's peaceful walking/biking around those neighborhoods, because those same trees/shade also act as barriers between pedestrians, people on bikes, and cars. Because it's so peaceful, people who live in these areas have no problem running to the grocery stores on foot or on two wheels, as opposed to using a car. It almost never matters if it's sunny (surprise! it's Vegas) out unless that person is concerned about skin cancer. The problem is there usually isn't a logical connection between those neighborhoods to inside the city with the same comfort features. Bike lanes start merging back into motorized traffic, bus lines end, sidewalks all the sudden become non existent, etc. It's truly a mess here. Additionally, if we're gonna continue talking about transporting people in the hot sun (which, realistically, occurs 3 and a half months per year; every other time the weather is mild and pleasant), we should keep in mind the heat island effect. It's generally known that the wider an asphalt road is, the more heat it will absorb throughout the day then release later. My own experience reaffirms this in that wider roads without shade or trees will be hotter. With the typical Las Vegas road, residential streets are wider than even some European highways that I've driven on, it's ridiculous! Using my early example of the master-planned communities, walking & cycling is more pleasant because the shade and even limitations on space for cars reduces the amount of asphalt, resulting in cooler temperatures. Thus, I think that Mikael's arrogance of space point ties great with this phenomenon. When roads dedicate too much space for cars, it creates a hostile environment for users of other modes in more ways than we think. When roads take a step further and don't dedicate any space to other users besides a car, especially when it's not a designated highway/freeway, now that's truly outrageous. Temporary weather is not an excuse to neglect other transportation modes. It's something that pisses me off everyday about Las Vegas, which ironically prides itself in its "live and let live" philosophy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ edit: silly spacing mistakes
An average car is 5.75 feet x 15 feet = 86.25 square feet. But there needs to be space between cars so let's add a 1 foot buffer all the way around. Now we have 7.75 x 17 feet or a whopping 131.73 square feet. Most commuting in the Toronto region (and the first world) is done by car with only the driver in the vehicle. So the most popular mode of transport is also the most space-inefficient with one person hogging 132 square feet. So yeah, obviously bikes, pedestrians and public transit are the problem
On lane width: I'm sure Mike knows this, but he's fighting nearly a century of established standards that are all intertwined into our road grading system at the federal level. Wider lanes is an "easy" way to solve the problem of getting a Grade B road while not worrying about the other things like visibility range, slope and curve, or traffic density when you're running through the math. It's dumb as hell, but it's how we've been designing our roads in America since WWI.
Yes, I saw a talk from Jeff Speck, where he showed a modern and old style suburban area, and the new one is just hideously wide road, with no thought for pedestrians.
I am unfamiliar with the road grading system, can someone explain more what it is? When I google it, I only find things about highways. To me it seems like different rules should govern streets vs highways.
I understood that when designing major roads thru cities they take into consideration the movement of Military vehicles in case of War.. and also space requirements for mass evacuations, I wonder if you did a study on road layouts based in this theory would some of the designs prove me correct?
@@Hurricane2k8 It's completely irrelevant until it's not. We're not good at predicting geopolitics more than a few years in advance. Long term infrastructure design should reflect that uncertainty with robust strategies which sacrifice peak efficiency for versatility. Wide roads are not really a bad thing.
If a mass evacuation has to take place (in war, earthquake or fires) surely the last thing you want is for vehicles to clog up the safest space, namely the middle of the road?
I wonder if fluid dynamics can be applied to predict the decrease in traffic given change in lane width. Less lane width would make for more congestion, but would make cities more walkable as you said, making walking the more efficient mode of transportation. I would bet that this effect could be estimated with fluid dynamic formulas. It’s exciting to think about how such a simple change could potentially have a positive effect regarding emissions!
My city went through a revamp to make it "safer" for cyclists, 30km speed limit with poorly timed lights so you're always sitting at the light, in start stop when there's no traffic, there's now a bunch of islands wasting space, getting in your way, fucking up your ability to change lanes as a cyclist, they added dedicated bus-lanes that also make intersections extremely confusing for everyone, and there's never enough buses going down this lane to justify their existence.
Ugh. I hate when things are made "bike and pedestrian friendly" in a way that makes it 1). bloody confusing as a pedestrian and cyclist 2). horribly annoying as a driver. The US is far too car-centric, but some places in Europe, especially those that can have harsh winters (have fun biking 4 months out of the year), feel like one giant twisty bike lane... I love trams. Trams are awesome. Screw the US for having removed trams long ago.
@@Olivia-W I agree that certain bike/bus-promoting measures can be misguided sometimes, but as a Swede I can assure you that harsh winters never stopped us from biking. (I biked to work across a snow-covered city in -12 C weather just this morning.)
This is so depressing. I hate private automobilism. Even in cities with excellent public transport we still need to deal with arrogant egoism. I hate it.
12:25 I like the Dutch approach to designing intersections better, because of the protective traffic islands in the corners that also make left turns safer.
*Vehicular traffic flows more smoothly and efficiently when following sweeping curves* "Abomination, we need to change this immediately." *Pedestrians like to follow a curve when stepping off the crossing* "Yes this is what we NEED*
@@ligametis Yes, but the logic is that you don't want vehicular traffic in densely populated areas to flow as smoothly and efficiently as possible, because then you attract more traffic and you create jams. It's better to make vehicular traffic a tad tiresome, so people will only use a vehicle as a last resort. In my native Antwerp, it's pedestrians first, cyclists second and cars last. That way first responders and public transport are never held up by lazy drivers.
@@ixlnxs but there are people who depend on private transportation. Many don't live in the city centre, others need to visit a few different locations every day, deliver something. It is already often pretty slow and making it even slower would be frustrating.
You have to understand that he is a cyclist first and urban designer second. Just watch some more videos and you see his vision of a modern citie, which is basically "on bike". Don't get me wrong, thats not necessarily bad. He just not telling us "a solution", but "his solution". But in my opinion (which is not a neutral one either I'm was a truck driver for over 10 years and work in logistics) bikes will never be able to achieve what cars do know. Cars cant be the answer for the future, but bikes wont either. Everytime something happends that doesn't go as planned (people get sick, injured, die - something caught fire, someone break the law, a car breaks down) we need our roads to get a car to be where it is needed as fast as possible. You cant sent a doctor on a bike (okay you can, but you cant ride the patient to the hospital), you cant give a firemen a bike and a bucket of water and point to "where the smoke is". And let us not a forget that hardly any pedestrian and most of the cyclist aren't only pedestrians and cyclist. The trains in my city are crowded with people who think it is a good idea to take the huge bike with them to ride the train and then ride the bike for the last 500m or so. Nearly every pedestrian will use the public transportation at some point on their journy. So we can dedicate all the "waste of space" to the pedestrians and cyclists too. Also... cyclists will use roads too. They are not bound to their dedicated space. Pedestrians aren't forbit to cross the stress anywhere they want. But cars are. Cars cant leave the road if there is heavy traffic, like cyclist do. Cars cant just cross the vast places dedicated to pedestrians to shorten their way. I dont think his "its not rocket science" argument will hold... because it is way more complicated. At least if your argument is "its not fair". You're right. It isnt... but the cars aren't the bad guys here.
I really like this video. I would like to see your view on one of the slowest moving city, Edinburgh. And then Glasgow where they put motorway right through the middle of the city.
One eye-opening experience for me was trying to cross a city on bike during a long-distance trip a few years ago. I realized that the city was surrounded by one of these huge commercial areas with big supermarkets and other stores. There was literally no other way to get through this zone other than by car. No bike lanes, only high speed high traffic roads. I had to go buy a map just to be able to get out of the maze. Pretty much every city is surrounded by these suburban monstrosities.
Now imagine taking a 53' trailer into a city you've never been in before, with everyone not understanding you need to use their bike lanes and sidewalks to manuever because they made the truck routes too narrow.
@@maritimemisfits3360 but why would you take what is essentially a long-haul vehicle into a city centre? Planning for that wastes a lot of space, and large semis are not very effective for last mile delivery in any case. By the same token you don't put a railway goods terminal in the city centre - it's just not an effective use of space and infrastructure.
@@koma-k Because the world is fucked up. When you need to get construction equipment into a city do you think it drives itself there? How do you think those gigantic cranes get there? How about the supplies? You going to haul 40-60 ft structural beams with a pickup? Air lift it? How about even simpler things, sometimes we have extra space on the flat deck so you may throw on one large generator to be delivered. Then there is also getting lost / taking wrong turns, if its too tight to get out, police have to come shut down the street so we can get out. Dont forget about evacuations either.
So by your arguments, every street and intersection should be sized for the largest conceivable vehicle? I would certainly not like to live in such a city. Construction work is an exception, not the norm, and requires thorough planning. Getting lost is an exception, not the norm (and given today's navigation aids avoidable 90% of the time). And evacuations are usually not done with semis either - actually evacuating any sizeable crowd is a complex problem, varies for different parts of the world, how large an area and population are you evacuating, for what reasons etc. My point is that exceptions must be planned for - so you can make sure there are ways to reach construction sites with oversize equipment, but that may require some temporary exceptions and designated routes. Now on the other hand if a city has designated truck routes but they are not properly sized then that is a planning failure (sorry, I kinda missed your original point about undersized truck routes)
@@koma-k No not every street smart ass, but main streets (such as the ones near Eiffel tower) will need to be large enough to accomodate large trucks. GPS is not full proof and often can send you half ass retarded directions, if you had driven truck you would know this. Of course Semis aren't used for evacuations, but if you were using your head you would realize there would be a HUGE amount of traffic heading out of the city. Take a look at the I35 heading out of Houston, it doesnt need to be that many lanes, but that is a hurricane evacuation route. Construction is not an exception, it happens all summer long all over the city
Well, in general I agree with you. However there is a great BUT to it. Cars simply need a lot of space! It’s sad, I know, and there is no way to change this fact. We can still drive those shoe-sized Smart cars or what ever, but the delivery guys need to use the vans, or trucks even. Without them, the city infrastructure would eventually collapse!
In Europe, trucks are narrower and shorter, and delivery guys mostly use bicycles, not oversized monstertrucks. Traffic must adapt to the space it moves in, not the other way around.
Cars need a lot of space yes you are absolutely right, which is why infrastructure should be developed to DEMOTE the use of cars and PROMOTE the use of public transport, walking and cycling, because these are more space efficient. The delivery van argument is one that’s commonly used, but when you look at the US, delivery trucks and vans in cities are only 7% of vehicles, and 17% of congestion. It’s a poor excuse and one that falls flat on its face when you look at the facts. Source: www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-04-20/how-cities-are-coping-with-the-delivery-truck-boom
They don't need that space. They don't need highway speeds inside the city. Close roads to cars, but allow supply utility and emergency vehicles, and maybe transit
It is all because conservatives cannot do math. They are too stupid to do math. Rightards/rightists REFUSE to attack harms proportional to their quantifiable magnitude, because they personally benefit from the inequality/arrogance/self-entitlement. Selfish self-entitlement is the ONLY thing that matters to cuntservatards. Reductionism: the difference between right and wrong is how much. Everything differs in magnitude, not in kind. All conflict differs in magnitude, not in kind. This is why That Vegan Teacher and Vegan Gains Richard are true American patriots, heroes, revolutionaries. I PROUDLY vote for them for POTUS.
Well you croped the picture from Paris in such a way that the majority of space seems to be the street and the street widens up a bit there, yes. But when you zoom out just a little you see the reverse: massive spaces for pedestrians right next to this and along the river and another level above. ~ 20 m wide sidewalks. That said, your solution is better, but more for bicylists. Visit Berlin Alexanderplatz, those massive streets have equaly massive pedestrian ways and I think now even bike lanes. Yet crossing those streets or intersections is so terrible not because the streets are so wide but because you have to waiting too long for green and not be able to cross the street in one greenphase.
That is very true but does not take away the fact that at the point of conflict, aka the intersection itself, a lot can be done to make it a lot safer for everyone.
I understand what you are talking about, and i do agree that some cities still use outdated planning techniques but i don't really think this video is really fair. Arrogance is a bit harsh. I am not an expert in any way but: a) just choosing a random picture and analyzing it like that really doesn't tell you anything about the pedestrian/cars/bicycles ratio, maybe in the next minute or two a couple of buses filled with people passes by, what then ? b) as a continuation to point a), i think it's more accurate when traffic is the entire day analyzed, even more accurate would be a week or more (rush-hour, peak times, weekends etc), maybe in your example, roads take 66% of the available space because 66% of all traffic in that region is done by car c) and i think this is the main idea of my comment, with the invention of the car, more people chose to move to the suburbs, industries and ports for example moved to specially designated industrial areas, thus making the city centers a bit more airy than before. In the past almost everything was concentrated close to city centers. It was filthy, miserable and crowded way to live. How many old warehouses are now apartment buildings or offices? Take any old and industrially developed big city as an example (London, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Hamburg), it was crazy to imagine that warehouses, merchandise harbors and even train lines were once so close to city centers. d) the sad truth is that cars give up so much revenue (taxes, gas, insurance even speeding and parking tickets and many more), bicycles and pedestrians don't so they will always accommodate cars first and not the other way around. Of course compromises are made in certain areas, but that's just about it. This being said, i would like to see a video where you take into account some points i state above, or maybe you did, i don't know. I just found this channel and i haven't got the pleasure to watch more video yet.
The problem is the "City Designers" are doing their work based on how cool will it look on a wide Picture for you to buy in a gift shop. That and the fact that they are mostly driving cars.
@@whazzat8015 Indeed. The world's prime example of a failed city designed for cars not people is Brasília. Their designers, Costa and Niemeyer, never moved in and stayed in Rio for the rest of their lives.
I was pretty shocked by how terrible the area surrounding the Eiffel Tower is for pedestrians. Luckily there's a huge redesign coming. An even worse example of the arrogance of space in Paris is the Place de la Concorde. Check it out on Google Earth. It's ridiculous.
Paris has significantly changed in the last few years! They have obviously been listening. Anne Hidalgo has been doing an amazing job, and is continuing further.
Imma take this shit cerebral for a sec. I love your educational vids for what they are but I also love to fall asleep to your gruff monotone voice explaining shit to me. You are every underestimated engineering boyfriend ever. Congratulations.
If you want to see a real nightmare come to the city of Detroit. The roads are not friendly to pedestrians, bikes, or cars! There are 2 competing road systems layered over each other. Plus an elevated train system that covers very little of the city.
I get your point about 38 pedestrians vs 23 car users. But I feel like the point would be more legitimate if it was over a period of time vs a single point in time. Cars go faster right - in the time it takes 5 pedestrians to enter and leave this space 15? cars could've come and gone.
@Aaron K McBride Don't get me wrong, I'm all for less space for cars. I'm not saying the space given to something should be only based off the frequency of usage, that's just one lense for looking through it. All I'm saying is that single argument about humans in cars vs humans on foot feels a bit flawed by taking a single snapshot of time, not a period of time.
Thats why we drive in the streets with the cars where I live. After a few months I stopped noticing them and just drove along the edge letting them pass without even batting an eye
I reckon an argument can be made that by reducing the space dedicated to cars and freeing up the maneuverability and movement-flexibility of pedestrians we are facilitating social distancing for future pandemics. Given the in-vogue of pandemics at the moment, this argument might help convince some car-centric politicians. Of course, I might be overestimating both the power of my argument and the politician in question. Anyway, excellent video.
This is teaching me a lot about urban design. Thanks. I'm an American highway traveler, and space out on the roads is courtesy, room to be polite, and to stay out of others' way. But that's highways.
As a person who took several courses in urban design I can tell you this guy is not only an arrogant ideologue but also full of shit. The intersection changes he proposed will block firetrucks and I don't understand how he didn't notice that.
I hate riding bikes and love driving (our public transport is a joke) but still, your ideas about giving more space to pedestrians and bike are very interesting
Germany has planning rules (Bebauungsplan, able-to-build-plans) that set out exact requirements for new building areas eg the exact height of the ground floor and the top of the house - you are not allowed to go deeper to be less in the way of neighbours, or they in effect require homes to be disabled UN-friendly. However, in an older area where there are no rules, you can build anything as there are no rules - so you get a modern building in a historic area, but not in a new-build area.
Hej Mikael thanks for your videos, they are really interesting. Though there is more bikes and pedestrians than cars in Copenhagen I wondered why you seem to imply that cars should take way less space while they are not foldable and obviously need space to park. You can put one bike on another one, you can get closer to other pedestrians (well, hello Covid-19!) but you can't fold cars. As a pedestrian/biker/car driver in Copenhagen my impression is that everything is absolutely fluent and nice. I drove, walked and biked around Europe and in other countries: without writing a too long message, I think that cars may just need that amount of space, because without it they would become a pain in the ass just like what is happening in french cities once they start thinking "hey let's give less space to cars": in Copenhagen you can park, drive without worries. I'd be curious to know what you think about it especially about parking. It would be a pleasure to talk with you! Martin
Cars do indeed take up more space, but it's a question of priority. Do you prioritize infrastructure that enables pedestrians and bicyclists thus encouraging that behaviour, or do you prioritize cars? Do we even want cars in city centres is a question one could ask. As a fellow copenhagener and bicyclist I've felt very keenly some of the changes made to Nørrebro, with the closing of lanes over the lakes and the establishment of 3 metre wide bicycle lanes. It's the ONLY place in central Copenhagen where I truely feel the bicycle lanes are wide enough to accomodate the amount of bicyclists. Most places are pure hell on a bicycle if you're used to some of the more serene bicycle paths in outer Copenhagen (voldstien f.ex). Central Copenhagen (like other inner cities) is faced with a choice: prioritizing automobiles at the expense of everything else, or limiting vehicle access to the central city. In the current scheme there is no space for different cyclists. You cannot overtake securely, you cannot bike at speed, biking slowly is also an annoyance, biking with children isn't secure. All of the things you can easily do as soon as you get past Valby or a similar distance from the centre are unavailable to the cyclist in order to make space for the car.
Why should people in cars be given vast amounts of space just because they choose to move around suited in a highly space-inefficient metal exoskeleton? On average cars only carry around 1.5 people per trip. Cars themselves neither need nor deserve space, even though the car-centric thinking is now so deeply rooted in us that we consider them some sort of moral entities in their own right!
Yes, cars need space to park. But why should everybody else just give up their space for your car for free? I believe free public kerbside parking should be abolished and you should buy or rent a parking space in a commercial parking garage. That's how it works in Tokyon and countless other cities.
Hello, I just discovered your channel and I LOVE IT! I was anoyed by so many intersections in Warsaw. If you ever come here i would give you a tour of the city that is pretty much owned by cars. I personally use a Electric Unicycle as my mode of tranaportation. Keep up the work! I love it !!!
Should've compared the streets with rush hour times, no? I'm wondering how so much "wasted space" still leads to traffic jams, especially in major cities like Paris or Moscow
@@thestig2382 did you even watch the video? Cars can't go parallel on an oversized single lane, they only need so much space. This video is about the oversizing of roads and not enough space given to pedestrians and cyclists, it's not about changing road capacity generally speaking. Also you didn't understand the comment you replied to, he's saying that there are probably still tons of traffic jams even with all the wasted space.
FlourescentPotato yeah, I may have misread that. I wonder if adding additional lanes by reducing the width of other lanes where possible would help traffic jams,
Question: how are you going to let the police or an ambulance pass if you cant give way because the drive lanes were shortened, not everyday is black friday
The logic is that you don't want vehicular traffic in densely populated areas to flow as smoothly and efficiently as possible, because then you attract more traffic and you create jams. It's better to make vehicular traffic a tad tiresome, so people will only use a vehicle as a last resort. In my native Antwerp, it's pedestrians first, cyclists second and cars last. That way first responders and public transport are never held up by lazy drivers.
"Yes, let's make the lanes only as wide as the widest trucks, that's a GREAT idea!" *two trucks drive past each other and both end up on the sidewalk so they don't risk clipping.* *surprised pikachu*
Straw man fallacy! Nobody advocates making the lanes only as wide as the widest trucks. We advocate making them wide enough for trucks, but not for four trucks and zero cyclists, like at 4:28. Also, shouldn't vehicles be built to fit the roads instead of the other way around? Which do you think is easier to adapt?
I'm really questioning this ideology. Especially for NA. Wider lanes give better safety margins for higher speeds don't they? Like, you just don't understand how long it really takes to get somewhere here. Like how you can be driving for 8 hours and STILL be in California. What about cities that have massive transport influx for conventions etc which they hold constantly? What about the space in LA? Those highways are massively packed during rush? I'd like to see how you'd reorganize LA. That would be really cool.
5:14 Here where there are wide streets we use a solution to increase safety, we put car lane wide floppy posts, floppy because if you hit them they will just flop back up, 2 reflective strips posts on each side that a bus can go through yet it works as drivers become aware of their speed. Strangely, it even works with motorcyclists as you see them slow down too.
Take a look at Madison, Wisconsin. Cars are king here. There is a huge pretend bike space, yet going from one end of the city to the other via bike you better have good dead and dismemberment insurance, your family will need it.
A few things. first - that IS democracy. democracy in no way implies any sort of fairness but rather the opposite - the side with the most supporters gets to decide for everybody. That is why any country with democracy also has mechanisms in place to mitigate the downsides of democracy. Secondly at the time it was designed this was what people wanted, and if you would ask them even today i doubt you would get a much different answer. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding dinner. Then about the measurement it self: A still image tells only a part of the story - what is the actual throughput of that intersection? There might only ever be a few cars at a time in the intersection but if that is always the case and they have a nice steady flow than the number of passenger crossing it will be rather high. Just from that one picture it does look like there would easily be twice as many passengers crossing this by car compared to pedestrians. Pedestrians not taking sharp corners... but cars should? Cars that have to slowdown significantly around tight corners, sharply decreasing throughput while increasing noise and pollution? Then the carlane-width... uhm... you do realise that staying highly focused all the time not only is exhausting but also leads to stress and more errors, and with narrower lanes that means also more accidents? Narrowing lanes has been done in several cities all across europe and it basically always backfired. Sure, the accidents right at the short test-tracks the number of accidents go down, but the accidents in the surrounding areas go up. An average car is somewhere around 1.7m, an average bike is around 60 cm. Isn't 1.7m the mandatory width for bikes? That would put carlanes at nearly 5m !!! But normally high-volume carlanes (for most european countries) are around 3-3,5m , for bikes that would translate to 1.2m track width and you would also need to have them right next against the ongoing traffic too. Vehicles are allowed to be 2.5m wide in europe, heavier trucks or vehicles for construction regularly are that wide and you need some safety-margins for them to be able to move around. And most streets are narrower than the maximum, heck, in my city the lane-width often is the minimum allowed 2.6m. fine for most normal cars but oh god if a fire-truck needs to come through. The picture from russian - just look at how full the roads there still are. For the street in Kopenhagen - you mention the 25 000 bikes. How many people travel that street by motor-vehicle and how much cargo are they transporting? It is rather a problem of bad planning, not taking the interplay between pedestrians, cyclists and cars into consideration. But simply comparing the dedicated area while ignoring everything else is just as foolish. I would like a rather different planning too, but getting rid of the areas for cars is not the solution. If anything you want traffic of all types to be as fluent as possible. That would mean some wide and free-flowing roads that connect the points-of interest with a tight public-transport system and better pedestrian/bike-accommodations outside the main car-roads.
I am a car hater and I still hate this video more than I hate cars. I was an architecture student and studied a bit of urban design along the way. What was shocking to me was how much impact a seemingly minor change in street design can have. For example by removing the on-street parking and providing a tram line, one of the once-prosperous road in Toronto sees a rapid closing down of its local bussiness. Without local bussiness thriving, this road has become much undesired and quieter now. This "urbanism" is not something of a style choice. It is more of a reactive reshaping of the city scope during the population of automobiles. It's a given reality now, and should be respected as it resolves a certain issue in our modern life. It is, quite ironically, very arrogant of this guy in the video to think that his utopian vision is everything that matters. Do I love a city that promotes walking and cycling? Absolutely. Do I think this guy is full of shit? Of course I do. Because the hardest part is always implementation. Plus, This guy made some absolutely stunning technical mistakes. The turning curve at a crossroad is clearly designed for larger size vehicles (Eg: Firetrucks. ever heard of them Mikael?). I don't understand how an urban designer could have ignored this.
When I worked in Houten, Netherlands, We had a urban planner who said basically the same. he said that we plan our cities to much with the car in mind. Car first, then bikes, and if we have space left some room for the pedestrians. he said, we have to turn that around. That is very visible in Houten - I am interested in what you think about it!
An argument against narrower car lanes: Some of the largest vehicles on the road are things like vans and school busses that make wide turns and often transport lots of children. A ton of kids in the back seats can be distracting for drivers, preventing the laser focus that is necessary to stay within narrow lanes. I think it makes sense to give routes within cities enough space on the road to accommodate motorists who have to maneuver large, unwieldy vehicles that are often filled with noisy children. That’s particularly important in a place like the US, where we tend to have more children per household than European countries and where our school busses tend to be old, seatbeltless behemoths that aren’t super safe to begin with and would likely cause traffic and public safety problems if they had to stay within very narrow lanes.
Your premise is wrong. If a vehicle is too long and wide for a street, substitute the vehicle, not the street. Europe has more buses than America and they have no problem negotiating the winding streets from London to Lisbon and from Stockholm to Santorini.
ixlnxs If we had the resources to replace school busses, that’d be great. But most American school districts are working with a fleet of busses from the early 2000s and they just don’t have the money in the budget to change that. A “just make the roads narrower” proposal would drain a ton of money from the public works department to resize the roads. Then it would need the school district to replace their entire fleet with more maneuverable vehicles. Both are massive financial burdens that fall squarely on local governments, which get most of their revenue from a couple cents worth of sales tax and whatever they can bring in in traffic fines. Most American cities wouldn’t have the budget to change more than one or two intersections, let along resize all their roads.
In America lanes are wide for the safety of the drivers. The width is based on statistical variation of driver behavior relative to the center-line of the lane. The author of the video has valid criticisms, but I cannot jump onboard the idea that this is "transportation dictatorship". It's just good rigorous technical planning.
the safety side has been tested before. wider lanes = more reckless driving and more accidents occurring, vehicular and otherwise. this has been statistically proven. bigger is not always better.
@@tfriddo Yes I agree. My point is that wide roads were designed with the safety of the motor vehicle operator in mind. They do not consider the safety of other users of the roadway such as motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians. If we consider only automobile drivers, wider lanes are safer for them. However, considering ALL users of public spaces around roads, narrower lanes are statistically safer.
@@forgotaboutbre I'm saying that wider lanes are not necessarily safer for automobile drivers. They go faster, and are less aware of their surroundings. Yes they were designed that way for safety but they were wrong. It's better to have your car scratched on a small street than getting your car totaled because you were feeling confident driving down a wider street.
Its It's mostly unessecary in a lot of places, but in America our semis are honestly massive enuf to justify at the very least the intersections. Semis move something like 74% of our solid freight.
5:07 I know a lot of people here think this is a smart solution, but it is both stupid and dangerous... the intervals between cars are there for a reason and they're actually regulated in most countries, you need that room to maneuver your vehicle safely. If you reduce lane intervals like that in any area that sees heavy traffic, even temporarily at any time of the day, you'll see accidents there skyrocket, and those accidents will create jams, which in turn make the city even worse for everyone (coming from a guy who's living with a near-permanent traffic jam right under his windows because I live on a corner of a poorly designed intersection). A better solution would be to remove the dumbass perpendicular parking zone there and force it to be parallel. There's traffic rules that allow creation of perpendicular-only and parallel-only parking zones in many European countries, doing that would free up just enough space to allow for a bicycle lane without having to affect the road traffic in any way. The other safe alternative is to just actually remove a lane from the road instead of clustering everything closer together.
It is assumed drivers are actually able to drive their vehicle without crashing into each other. European lanes are much narrower than Russian ones and have a lot fewer accidents, to put it very mildly.
In Calgary we basically have what I consider winter 7months of the year (including deep freeze periods where temperature drops below -30C with the wind chill with snow and ice roads) and we also have very long distances compared to Europe so more bike lines won't equal more bike users. The city is approx. 65km in length north to south not to mention its also not flat. And more pedestrian areas in the city centre won't equal more pedestrians unless more shops for pedestrians are built and that's not happening in this economy. Even the very few pedestrian areas we do have are struggling with shops opening then going out of business all the time for years. It also goes back to temperature because when its cold people prefer to go to the mall then walk around in the cold. There is no hope for North America.
There is a remote connection. Gruen designed the first modern shopping centre - as an answer to a thoroughly developed critique of the destructive effect of cars on urban spaces. His ideas were corrupted by commercial interests pretty much out of the gate and he spent the last half of his professional life opposing the trends he inadvertent;y started. On the Frederksbergs of this world he is quoted as saying, “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments." He would have approved of the phrase “The arrogance of space.”
@@Ric-Phillips Yes, he wasn't the first to suffer from a lack of completion of his work, in fact most architects have this problem to a certain degree unless you are Norman Forster who helped with the abomination that is Astana!
you definitely need to check out melbourne and sydney in Australia. we're improving but not fast enough. the bad roads are symptoms of bad public transport and bad pedestrian access designs.
Isn't the most important part of this amount of space a mechanism of class domination? I mean, Georges-Euegéne Haussman was assigned to redesign Paris to prevent the people (later the workers ie. the Paris Commune in 1870) from seizing the spaces in which they live from the ruling class
great stuff, this has always blown my mind in almost every city i visit. i've got another one for you: The Arrogance of Retail Space. the nightmare continues.
As an econ student, I cringe so hard when negative externalities suboptimal urban planning is underway. Cars and trains are the long distance preference transport, but as many of these videos point out, most people live as close as possible to their places of work as they can afford. The Copenhagen example in this video of car space being the majority in an 80% bicycle use zone is utter ludacris. I am so glad that I came across this channel
Try to see the other side though. It's not like the people of the past were just stupid. There are reasons people like cars, not them being around cars, but being inside of them. Even with the extreme restrictions the Chinese or Singaporeans put on cars, the people over there still flock to them. I get it, you want to have a nice time just being in a city, but someone built a loud stinky 6 lane highway right through it. Sucks, I agree. But the reality of life is that people consistently prefer cars over public transit, even if the latter is just as fast and cheaper. Public transit especially in Europe and the US has failed to innovate in any way since the 1970s, even though the technology is there and in some cases already implemented. It is consistently losing money, even though it is often subsidised. If you already own the car, it is still cheaper to go by car, including the parking fee. This is economic reality, no matter how you skew it by gov't intervention. Look at the future. It is pretty safe to say that the slowmoving public transit companies will continue to do basically nothing. Now look at cars, that are on the verge of becoming electric and autonomous. These technologies combined will make cars even cheaper, not by a couple percent but more like by half. People that cannot afford cars can probably afford a robotaxi ride. Busses will probably just die. People will choose to live 60,80,100km out of town, get in their car and continue sleeping or having breakfast while they are driven to work. Nobody in their right mind will ever get in a commutertrain again. Car traffic will explode in our already gridlocked cities, with only homeoffice to save us. We need to do something about this. I personally believe that making peoples lives better is the goal. Yet the only "solution" offered is getting people out of their cars, against their will, by making cars suck. Note that. The idea often offered isn't to make alternatives so much better that people switch, but to make cars suck. So what do you think we should do? Me personally: I am pro large scale tunneling projects. Free up the top surface for predestrians, built multileveö superhighways underground. But what do you think? Surely you have more to say about this than just taking space away from cars, may the carpeople be damned.
Public transportation in the US is the way it is because it was not allowed to develop nor invested in it properly. It is better for the oil and car industries if every citizen has their own car, instead of all riding the same bus. Profits by big corporations are what guided the development of these cities.
Rodrigo Peralta might be true in some cases, yet here we are, even in Europe. Difference is just that most American public transit is unusable/doesn’t exist whereas the one in Europe just sucks. Why doesn’t even matter all that much. Even in places where public transport is heavily subsidized it failed to innovate.
I totally get the need to change the carcentric roads instead for pedestrians and bicyclists, however it should be only when the demand is needed. Living in Los Angeles, people claim less traffic and less accidents, but it’s the opposite in practice. Making the streets smaller for bike lanes when there is no one using it actually creates more traffic and more accidents, so much so that neighborhoods and businesses are going against there own cities.
If you happen to be in Russia, you may as well be just offended by our urbanism. Not only we have giant automobile lobby, and keep building new highways on top of each other, but those very few infrastructure pieces for pedestrians (very few partial pieces from soviet union heritage, things in urbanism was awful back then as well) usually removed in favor of automobiles. And I'm not even talking about 20-30 story building-blocks, such as Parnas and Kudrovo in Saint Petersburg.
I'm happy I found this channel, and love your content. However, as a dedicated automobile driver, I have to stick up for myself and my mode of transportation. 1. Is it still arrogant space when the street fills up with traffic at peak times? Your example showed very empty streets, but what does that same street look like during rush hour? Does it still seem like wasted space? 2. Those wide Calgary streets are a whole hell of a lot narrower when you have 5 ft tall mountains of snow drifts along every street in January. Pedestrians and residents don't like them put on the sidewalk, and you can't clear them off every time it snows, so onto the streets they go. 2b. Active transportation is a great idea, but again in Calgary (and the rest of the Canadian Prairies like where I am from) only crazy people are riding bikes during winter. The ice and snow are hard enough with feet or four wheels, never mind only using two. Just walking to the car is miserable enough at -40, but getting on a bike and heading to work isn't going to fly for most people. 3. You never commented on the inherent utility that cars provide. They are great private spaces that only take you to places you want to go to. You don't need to worry about what music is playing, stinky strangers, weather etc. Cars hold your stuff, and let you easily move other stuff around. They allow you to get around fairly quickly vs walking or biking. Cars are just too damn awesome and convenient, that's why they exploded in popularity and took over cities. You won't be able to get rid of them easily. 4. The lack of other options. I live in a car-centric city. Outside the core, it grew during the age of the automobile and obviously the car defines the look of the city. We do have a bus system, but it's far slower to get around with and underfunded. There have been some attempts to improve on this, but interest fluctuates with the election cycle. Frankly, I don't have any other real option to get around quickly and conveniently. Am I really a bad person for ask for better, faster roads that help me get about my day quicker? I know that if more people were on buses there would be less people in cars, and that public transportation is good for the whole city, but changing that is going to be a hugely expensive deal. It's a huge chicken/egg situation. No one funds public transit because no one takes public transit because public transit is under funded.
To be fair, it's a fucking pain to go through during the rush hour. Heck like every road next to the Seine are main road with a lot of traffic and this "arrogant" space is fucking needed at that time. I don't live in Paris but I often pass through the city to go to one of the train station in the southern part
@@Aloucette Exactly. As much as Paris is a world class city that swells with tourist walking around, it's also full of Parisians who just want to get the fuck home after work.
@@Aloucette - I'm pretty sure, there are more pedestrians too during rush hours. All in all there are more people trying to get to work/home. Of course every mode of transportation tries to fill out the space it's allocated.
I'm only commenting on the first example but what I have to say is that if the intersection is indeed kept in it's original condition it is only because back then they only had motorized or horse-drawn carriages both of them with horrendous steering abilities, as for horse-drawn carriages it's pretty darn hard to make the horses to go full stop and make them strafe sideways, not to mentions if there were four horses pulling and not two, and as for motorized carriages, they used to be rather crude and clunky back in those days, some of them still running steam, some of them running inefficient electric motors and even the petrol engine ones were far from what we know now, all of them having limited steering abilities and bringing the vehicle to a full stop was not simple as just pressing one pedal conveniently placed right underneath your foot (or two, you know, clutch and brake), on the other hand, those vehicles were going so slow and steady that it wasn't required for a carriage to go to a full stop as majority of the pedestrians were able to cross fast enough merely by walking.
As for the rest, I wouldn't disagree fully, BUT first and foremost there are ambulances that fare much better on an open road with wider turns, fire-trucks, same as before on a bigger scale, then there are lorries, which no matter how hard we try to keep them away from city centers, sometimes there's that one that's gotta pass through and nobody wants to wait on a truck until it cleans an intersection that was just too sharp. If we factor in statistics, how many square meters a pedestrian require? One meter? A VW Polo takes six times as much and if fully loaded it technically wastes only one square meter, side note, I myself hate the sight of a single person in a range rover, then there are safety precautions like clearance between lanes, everyone can park a car on folder mirrors both sides but it takes a lot of skill to pass between two cars in the same configuration, that comes to speed, we need to traffic to flow because the faster a car goes, efficiency rises (until a certain point of course) so if we were to cram cars closer to each other they'd be going slower when you factor in the drivers' skill. Road planning is not rocket science but it has more variables than that and when building an actual rocket, you get to adjust it to your calculations coming from some given constants, payload, used fuel, aerodynamic drag, maximum engine thrust, etc., when it comes to people using roads, you get thing like, is that a new driver or Mika Häkkinen, are they driving a Smart or an H3, is that a local or a person that's never seen this place before, is everything running smooth or do we have to divert traffic from the parallel street because there has been a ruptured water pipe underneath and we had to dig it up and so on. I'm saying this just to extend the objectivity of the topic, there are thousands of roads that surely dug into the surroundings more than necessary, but I wouldn't call it transportation dictatorship. Most of the times it's just corrupted officials.
I love cars, and yet, I agree 100% with this. Cars should be the exception: leisure time, country traveling, short time movements needed in unforeseen situations. It should never be the first option for daily commutes.
12:39 "Ohhh what a crazy idea" sums it up perfectly. We never do 90d turns while walking with pace, never. I've asked many friends about this while taking a stroll in the madrid and they think it's alright because people create the trails, so they just step over grass and create a trail automatically, because the designed path is a turd. I wonder what if we use this little common sense to build, and just follow the damned walking flow of humans, I mean it isn't that hard and ultimately saves space and resources. Why is it so hard to get this concept ingrained?
Genial video! Besøgte USA for et par år siden, og jeg blev nærmest ked af det, over at se folk gå rundt i kanten uden fortov, imens der var 8 spor til biler
But how would these changes affect traffic? If the reallocation makes it so that cars and busses can’t make it through traffic lights or causes rush hour traffic to be more than an hour how does that help? HCA blvd doesn’t really have much pedestrian traffic because there is nothing to do in that area but it is the only way to get through the city to Amager, and it’s combining traffic from Å blvd and nørre søgade, so to get rid of any of that would back up traffic all the way to østerbro and nørrebro. A better solution would be to increase the sidewalk width in the city so pedestrians aren’t forced to walk single file which is also impossible in the old city, but very realistic in new build areas, yet they keep building them with those tiny paving stones.
There are three main problems with your arguments here, 1- What do you mean by "Democratic"? When pedestrians and cyclists pay similar taxes in buying, running and yearly taxes per kilometre then they should get the same travelling space. They don't arrogantly take up the space, they pay considerable overheads for those roads which bring me to the other two points. 2- There are no considerations for traffic safety in your arguments, busses need extra room at junctions if making acute turns for example. They have to pull a good way away from the curb and pull out at least a car length into the junction as the back wheels "cut in" closer to the apex, not leaving enough space is a good way to get cyclists squished if the turn is too tight and some blue paint at the roadside isnt a magic force field that would protect them. Vehicles have stopping distances, much longer than a cyclist and they need more room to account for this. There are other reasons as well as these that mean "unused space at any given moment" is not "wasted space". 3- you made no real account of traffic flow over time, across a full day, one single picture in one single place at one specific time cannot account for it. You need to judge patterns as a whole at several points in time, things like those "wasted curved" corners can help with both traffic and the longer vehicle issues in my previous point but lets stick with traffic. Those vehicles using it don't have to slow down which isnt a "cars don't need to slow down because of arrogance" is actually a useful traffic alleviating method as it gets more cars through the junction, less cars sitting idle at junctions should be something you want as it cuts down on pollution.
1-Depends on what countries you're talking about, but in the USA most local streets are paid for out of local property taxes. Gas taxes are only used for highways. So in fact the pedestrians and cyclists pay the same for the streets but use them much less, so they subsidize drivers. The Highway Trust Fund that uses those gas taxes has been bankrupt for well over a decade, despite paying "only" for highways, even though the taxes are collected on gas used everywhere, highway or not. So how is the shortfall made up? State and Federal income taxes are allocated to cover it. So again, taxing everyone for the benefit of motorists, another subsidy. 2-These are solved problems. That squared off corner in Copenhagen with the bike parking has to be an intersection of one-way streets. In many cities there are one-way streets intersecting, but they still have the wide curves despite the curve being unusable for motor vehicles. Designers know how to use the correct turn radius at an intersection for the appropriate vehicles. Truck and bus routes are engineered differently. The one size fits all approach is the arrogant one. 3-Your examples are exactly how we got into this situation in the first place. Large radii for fast turning traffic is what should NOT be in a city. Those wide fast turns are super dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists because vehicle operators have less time to react to them. They make the crossing distance longer as well, leaving vulnerable users exposed for more time. Also, the "if we just maximize vehicle throughput then they'll all clear out faster" argument was disproven decades ago. If it was true, Los Angeles would be free of traffic. Instead, it just encourages more driving, more dangerous driving, and more pollution.
@@JeffreyJakucyk Im not sure where to start other than you're wrong, please leave a bitchy attempt of a reply so I can rebut when its not approaching 4am. The US is not the world though, so please remind me.
Nice channel! I wish there would be specialists like you in charge of urban planning here in Kyiv. We are among cities with worst traffic jams in Europe, and still there is no way to use bicycles safely, as we have almost no paths for them. Not to mention about freakin 6-lane highway just along the waterfront in the historic center of the city.
@h2s While it is true that PHX has more planning going for it. I lived there for a few years and you must drive to go anywhere. Public transit is practically nonexistent, and walking and biking are impossible due to the heat and mostly because everything is so spread out and car centric. The highways are also starting to/ have reached capacity and there doesn't seem to be much of a plan in place to deal with it besides build more highways/add more lanes, which as we all know leads to more traffic volume. It's literally a 40x40 mile Urban sprawl with single or double story houses. It needs to grow higher and become more dense as opposed to what is happening now.
I wish we had designated cycling lanes on some of the main roads in Wilhelmshaven, but no the Main traffic streets are only two narrow lanes wide and the moment a cyclist decides to drive on the road to not endanger pedestrians, a whole lane needs to switch in order to keep moving at 50 kp/h
Come to my city, we have the opposite problem. There is no space. Not for cars or pedestrians. The streets are all old, narrow and crowded. And there is on-street parking in most of the streets too, meaning in many places, vehicles traveling in opposite directions must yield to one another to get around parked cars. At least with COVID, the streets are pleasant.
I think the reason for the space distribution is pretty clear, honestly. Cars need space because they take more space to stop, to go, to turn, and do any of their functions. Car collisions deal plastic damage (in the scientific sense of plastic, i.e. non-elastic), while humans can turn on a dime, take up maybe 1.5 square feet, can stop and go without any concern for space, and their collisions are low impact and generally non-damaging. City biking takes up slightly more space, but they aren't exactly speeding when they're in an urban situation.
Every time I stand at a big wide / busy road / intersection waiting for the traffic lights to grace me with 20 seconds of crossing time every 5 minutes, I ask myself - why am I not able to even walk around my own city? I live here. These cars do not live here. They do not live at all. I walked from my house to this precise spot, and I will walk back. In doing so I will consume no fossil fuels, contribute to zero excess deaths through air pollution, and present no risk of smearing a cyclist into bolognese if I get distracted by my phone. Unlike the cars I am stood here waiting for. Why am I the one being punished by urban design in this scenario? Who are cities for? Has anybody ever wanted to move to a city or visit a city because of its car population? No. People visit Liverpool because the Beatles lived there, not because some cars drive around there. It's utterly insane and disgraceful and I'm pleased to have found somebody who can expound it better than I can. Keep preaching.
Pretty sure it was cannon fire priorities that screwed up Parisian streets to keep revolutions at bay, not automobiles. Google "Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann" ...talk about arrogance and dictatorship. Haussmann was the father or rather Fuhrer of modern urban planing, which has always been about dictatorship and social control. If you want to be taken seriously about your analysis of Parisian intersections, start with their history and the role the old city street configurations played in the overthrow of Louis XVI , and Haussman's subsequent reign of terror . From www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/second-empire/a/haussmann-the-demolisher-and-the-creation-of-modern-paris "During each of the previous political revolts (1789, 1830, 1848, and again in 1871), sections of Paris had succumbed to the revolutionaries. These successes were due in part to the political sympathies of the citizens of Paris, but the crooked narrow lanes of the medieval city also played a role. During times of conflict, urban mobs would blockade the maze that was the streets of Paris. Such barricades (makeshift barriers erected across streets to prevent the movement of opposing forces) proved very effective and made Paris all but uncontrollable at times. Think back to Eugène Delacroix's painting of the revolution of 1830, Liberty Leading the People- Marianne (Liberty) is shown rising over a barricade of just this sort." The automobile and it's needs have had very little impact on Paris compared to what Haussman did. If you really want to to rant about "The Arrogance of Space" and the tyranny of cars, go to Los Angeles, and make colored maps of the freeways that were buldozed through poor neighborhoods from the 1930s through the 1960s to make Goodyear Tire and General Motors corporations rich.
One of the issues that we can't forget is that it's not pedestrians delivering goods, mail, doing construction, putting out fires etc. You still need solid infrastructure for cars and trucks even if you'd like more cycle paths, pedestrian spaces and so on. It's especially an issue in the older cities of Europe that were never really planned but just sort of evolved. Just look at the central parts of Copenhagen for example, you have stores absolutely everywhere so you need trucks to be able to deliver goods everywhere as well or the stores will be empty. It's the downside of "lively" neighborhoods I suppose. If you only have stores in pre-planned shopping areas you only need the big trucks to be able to go to those few areas but that's just not how you create a livable city with life in the streets, it's how you end up with strip malls and so on. Sure, they're easier to plan for, to find enough parking at etc. but they suck the life out of your downtown areas. If you want goods in all of Copenhagen's stores you need trucks to be able to get to them, to unload things at them etc. and that obviously takes up space. Every truck delivering something can't just stop all traffic in central Copenhagen after all. Cyclists and pedestrians simply take up far less space in general, which is awesome, but that also means there's no particular reason to aim for a 33/33/33 division of space when they don't take up nearly the same amount of space. Obviously that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make things better, and the example from Paris is particularly silly considering how many people visit the Eiffel Tower, and how many of those people are pedestrians. We just need to keep in mind that heavy transport and big vehicles (trucks.. And buses I suppose) are *really* important if you actually want a city to function.
We can take steps to better accommodate pedestrians, cyclists and transit users while still enabling trucks and emergency vehicles to get where they need to go. The key is to also remember to take steps to reduce car use, especially in dense urban areas: 1. Reduce the amount of parking set aside for cars. 2. Make parking for cars more expensive. 3. Change some of the parking spots for cars into loading/unloading areas for trucks. 4. Make cars pay a toll to enter the sort of super-dense urban areas where you don’t want cars to go unless they absolutely need to. 5. Take steps to make public transit cheaper, faster, and more reliable to reduce car use. 6. Take steps to make cycling safer, faster, and more pleasant to reduce car use. 7. Build more apartments near urban offices, shops, and services to reduce the amount of people that need to travel long distances to them by car. etc. etc. etc.
What I hate the most in urban is how they handle Parking lot vs bus in Canada. I was against having a car, but damn every time they put the freaking door of the store really really far as away from the bus. They don't provide a good place to ride a bike that I almost stopped using a bike. The street is made to have bike, driver are dangerous and they are making the path too long.
Even on the level of world leaders humans copy the behavior of others. City planners and officials get their ideas of how to build a road and what to prioritize by looking at other cities, not careful analysis. There is careful analyses but not as much as most assume, often even our leaders mere do what feels right. In theory everyone in a democracy has one vote, in practice there are a variety of reasons why elected officials listen middle class and especially the rich but not the lower class; guess which one can't afford a car. There are real reasons a person in a car needs more space than a person on foot, though the differences decreases if you allow driving to be a slower and more difficult experience. For several minutes I objected to the video, but then you noted the actual percentages of pedestrians, bikers, and drivers. I don't own a car, but somehow I was still stuck defending car owners because of just how pervasive the assumption is that everyone drivers everywhere. It is closer to true here in LA, but my personal experience says otherwise. The widespread assumption overpowered my personal experience.
Moscow's streets are literally designed for tanks , not a joke , that's why they're so big
Same with mainland China. Tiananmen Square Massacre validated tank urbanism
This interesting! I think that after WWII many leaders around the world the wanted to avoid any urban warfare so thats why the streets are ready for the tanks. The only problem is that these streets can welcome both defending and enemy tanks.
@@hobog This was the original idea behind the wide avenues of Paris. Revolutionists and protestors couldn't barricade themselves in anymore once the narrow medieval streets disappeared.
I started to write my final thesis titled "The Automobile as a Second Clothing," in the mid 1990's in Paris. Unfortunately my advisor failed to see how it pertained to architecture and urban planning. My premise was that the thoughtless use of the automobile was the single biggest influence in city planning which in my opinion is in direct contraindication to the very pedestrian nature of cities. Watching this video makes me wonder if I should finnish writing about it in an alternative form?
yes you should, it sounds interesting
I'd read it for sure.
Yes I think so. I would read it.
The topic matter has very certainly been receiving more vernacular attention as of late with more people seeming to dislike the automobile-focused nature of city planning and places like Poundbury popping up. Besides, creating cities that enable us to use less automobiles is likely going to be a vital part of transitioning into an environmentally sustainable economy.
My premise is that the thoughtless usage of the automobile directly negatively affects the quality of the urban experience for both automobilistes and pedestrians alike.
The former mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad, claimed space from automobiles to give to bicycle and public transport lanes. Most of the car-oriented citizens hated him for that, and he failed re-election. It’s not enough to have good ideas, a culture change is needed.
thats because nobody cycles in sao paulo
@@dgam4211 yep. If don't get robbed, you WILL get him by a car.
@@dgam4211 I live @ Av. Paulista and I can tell you: the bicycle lane is heavily used here.
@@nihil1 liberdade here, and i used to travel a lot, peruibe, santos, ribeirão preto, very rarely see cyclists
Obviamente essa rapazeada que tá falando merda sobre ciclistas em São paulo, ou não moram em São Paulo, ou não saem de casa.
Ou são só burrinhos mesmo
I don't bike. I live in Southern USA. Mostly cars for everything. I still love seeing waste being fixed. I hate all the unused space or incorrectly utilized.
Space is great. Stop complaining for no reason.
Funny. My girlfriend and I actually do bike now! It's great.
Artistic
Man I've been thinking the same for so long now ! Cars are taking so much space in our cities that walking in the street feels uncomfortable or dangerous, really adding to the stress of urban lives. The space allocated to parked cars is the most insane thing in my opinion, all that space used to store machines used on average not even once a day by just a single person, some of which could have used another mean of transport. Car advertisments tried really hard to put in our brains that car = freedom to the point that people consider driving as an essential right, but hey, it's actually not.
Arrogance in Paris? Isn't that their trademark, so to speak?
Arrogance yes! But what is beneath the arrogance?
@@frenchfrog70 I'd say contempt for people not native to Paris.
@@basstrammel1322 living in a "museum" city is very unpleasant. When where you live is mostly treated like the backdrop of someone else's vacation it isn't a nice feeling. Not all but many tourists from certain countries display little to no consideration for the inhabitants. A certain entitled population openly disrespect local culture. It happens in other places too. What many don't know is that many Parisiennes treat other Parisiennes with contempt just for coming from other arrondissements... Paris easily breeds cynicism...
@@frenchfrog70 I love Paris and Parisiennes. I embrace the real experience of it, and I try to discretly blend in. I don't want to step on anyones toes, but I sometimes forget parts of restaurant etiquette or stumble in the french language. I have nothing against any of the rude reactions to that, it just makes it more authentic. In fact, I wish it was more common to embarrace people in public around the world.
@@basstrammel1322 seems to me that you are the type of tourist secretly appreciated by most Parisians! I was once in the metro. Minding my own business when I overheard an American couple talking loudly. As if they didn't realize that some of us understand English. The wife asked her husband if they could go to McDonald's because "The food is sooo weird here..." I felt like saying something rude.... I didn't. But, as they we're leaving the wagon I saw a pickpoket do his thing while entering... I might could have jumped in to do something about it maybe not. To this day, I'm not sure if I feel bad about it or not?
I live in Cape Town and I know that intersection well. While it is quite accurate how immense it is, you have to remember that you kind of need that extra space to swerve out of the way for savage taxi drivers that DGAF about road laws
Mikael, please do a video next time you're in Sydney, NSW. Our state government has been ripping out cycle lanes that the city council put in! In the city centre the separated cycleways, and the traffic light sequencing that governs them, suck.
wow, i'm proud of my fellow countryman to design such useful app ♥ now that our capital has an architect mayor, Bratislava seems to positively progress. cheers to Slovakia.
Now ask yourself Where are those people going and why are they going there!
Often it is to occupy a work space that is only used for the time they are there, but is heated 24-7
How many kilometers of a typical city are only used on a part time basis. WHY ?
agree.......especially with sausage mahoney there the way we run society is a mess.......
humans should just occupy a capsule or embryo like sac 24/7, where all their physiological needs will be fulfilled,feeding tube,waste removal system up their ass or surgically connected to their colon ala human centipede style.......all work will be performed within a virtual environment,which can be accessed thru a jack in the neck......which is basically a simulation of the real world like offices where u would perform ur regular professional tasks like u would in real life.......except occasionally something will feel off.....like deja vu......glitches in the matrix thats what they call them.....of course sometimes humans or technicians in the real world might have to communicate or interact with someone whose in the matrix......they will do it thru a desktop or ipads thats connected to the person's pod or capsule or whatever u call it......for biological functions like sex......not gonna lie to u but its gonna be awkward......involving mechanical ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................
why even have houses?after all we dont spend 24/7 in there,or even in one room,thats like a waste of space.......especially rich people with large living spaces why do they need large living spaces why cant they live in tiny apartments like the rest of us plebians?why do humans need space at all?.........why have gyms or supermarkets or go anywhere.......we should all live like shut ins or recluses or hikikomoris and never go anywhere........everything delivered to ur doorstep from food to toilet paper to
@@jont2576 Someone is a bit testy egh?
this guy never played city skylines
Making Pedestrian-focused cities is really fun.
The ideas from this video improve traffic in that game, provided you have the right interaction management mods, decent public transit, mixed use developments instead of zoning huge blocks only for r c or i
Amsterdam is quite interesting with lots of "cars are guests" roads.
Meanwhile here in the US we are struggling to add even token bike infrastructure let alone sidewalks in many urban neighborhoods. It's a monopsony of space in 'murican urbanisim.
As a foreigner i still don't understand American obsession with huge car. With car that big USA certainly need big road.
Its insane that in my city of 2 million people there is 1 bike path, and it goes for about 2 miles before leaving the city.
@@bahamut149 because it's a massive country, so they can afford to make big things. this is apparent in truck designs between American engine-front trucks and European under-cab engine trucks.
@@bahamut149 One of the reasons for the larger vehicles is comfort on long rides. Most of the states are larger then entire countries in Europe. When you are putting 4-5 people into a car for hour plus road trips on a daily basis to get to work you want some space to stretch out. At least that is my experience with it.
You can hardly compare the US with europe. The US is far larger, inter-city traffic is far higher with larger distances involved.
I do not blame Americans not wanting to walk. I sympathize 100% with them on that. I sympathize 100% with them wanting their privacy in a car. If you suddenly have explosive diarrhea (and I have) better to do it inside one's own car than on a train or a bus with people around. However, that problem should be solved by a LOT more public bathrooms. And Americans need to accept that those comforts of cars everywhere come with a massive cost FORCED onto the young generation, in the form of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), and higher taxes to support all this nonfree "free" parking.
The U.S. is a car culture which is not bicycle or pedestrian oriented. While it would make sense that people would be more focused with narrower lanes, with people so occupied with their cell phones I doubt if they would concentrate more. I have noticed that in construction zones where the lanes are narrow people panic and drive very slow. A major road must handle "X" number of cars per hour and slowing the flow down will lead to gridlock. I saw this happen time and again in California. You must also allow room for the turn radius of larger vehicles. Just a few points I thought about while watching the video.
For an urban designer you seem to entirely forget transportation of goods. Semi Trucks are much wider than cars, and when following a curve the trailer is not lined up with the tractor, if my lane was the exact size of my truck, when the road curves to the left, my trailer would be in oncoming traffic. When the Eiffel tower needs to be repaired, and steel sections need to be brought in on 53' flat decks, if you reduce the intersection to just the amount needed for commuters, the trucks will not be able to make the turns without shutting down the streets and using powered jeeps to rear steer the trailer. Not to mention navigating cities is difficult in a tractor trailer, they need escape routes that are clear in the event they miss a turn so they can get back to the ring roads without becoming stuck at a narrow street or low bridge.
This is clear a clear example of engineer bashing by wide eyed architects.
No. Semi deliveries shouldn't be in the core city. Ideally, a semi would stay out in the country and industrial area, transferring inner urban loads to smaller vehicles and street drones. It is a mistake in planning that makes semis have to enter the core city for deliveries.
You have a good point for construction logistics
@@hobog but construction (or renovation) is temporary, they can shut down the road for cars during that time so big vehicles have all the space to maneuver.
Excellent video and fantastic tool!
Ever since I was a kid, I've always wondered why so much of our road space is dedicated to cars. Whenever I walked to and from school, I HATED crossing roads & intersections because it made me feel so small. A simple Google Maps tour of Las Vegas was all I needed to identify why I felt that way and why I still feel that way as an adult. Now that I have this tool, I can visualize this better potentially as a new hobby during this pandemic!
They are larger and travel at higher speed. OF COURSE they need more space. This isn't rocket surgery.
@@piousminion7822 In case you missed the point entirely, the fact that automobiles do take up more space is the problem. They're incredibly space inefficient.
@@r923tf Not so much, specially considering that cars are not only there to transport people.
But Las Vegas is a great example there: This is in a desert, people tend to not want to talk long ways in the hot sun but rather have a short trip with the car. And while cars take up a lot of space on a per-vehicle basis, the throughput is in a different league.
@@piousminion7822 If two cyclist bump into to one another, it's not really a problem. If two cars bump in to one another, it's a pretty big fucking problem.
@@ABaumstumpf I understand what you're saying, but I wanna keep the topic focused on transporting people. I know that automobiles are insanely useful, especially when carrying oversized cargo and for work. So yes, roads should have an appropriate amount of space for cars used for a job. But for the average person who uses a car for small errands? That's where I derive my point (and Mikael's point) from in that cars are space inefficient. It really makes no sense unless the person is disabled on a leisurely road trip from out of town. I think it's absurd that cities fuck up so badly to make cars the only comfortable option to do everyday things. You are right up to a certain point that, at the current state of Vegas, a [middle-class] person wouldn't want to walk for extended periods of time. That's why public transportation was developed over a hundred years ago. The only public transportation option with us locals in mind is the bus. Sure, they're air conditioned and have adequate capacity, but they are rarely on time and it's typical for a bus to come every 30 minutes to an hour. Most bus stops are not even sheltered or shaded with trees. When we want to go somewhere and anywhere reliably, the buses here aren't always the best option, as walking directly and especially biking directly can be faster than the bus. I know many people here, including myself, who are interested in walking/biking more as a practical means of getting around, even in hot weather. However, the facilities (rather lack thereof) make it not so comfortable. There is a solution to this that kind of already exists in the Valley. In more wealthy neighborhoods, especially those "master-planned communities" that are springing up all over the outskirts of Las Vegas Valley, that's sort-of accomplished where their streets are lined with drought-tolerant trees and man-made shade each way. It's peaceful walking/biking around those neighborhoods, because those same trees/shade also act as barriers between pedestrians, people on bikes, and cars. Because it's so peaceful, people who live in these areas have no problem running to the grocery stores on foot or on two wheels, as opposed to using a car. It almost never matters if it's sunny (surprise! it's Vegas) out unless that person is concerned about skin cancer. The problem is there usually isn't a logical connection between those neighborhoods to inside the city with the same comfort features. Bike lanes start merging back into motorized traffic, bus lines end, sidewalks all the sudden become non existent, etc. It's truly a mess here.
Additionally, if we're gonna continue talking about transporting people in the hot sun (which, realistically, occurs 3 and a half months per year; every other time the weather is mild and pleasant), we should keep in mind the heat island effect. It's generally known that the wider an asphalt road is, the more heat it will absorb throughout the day then release later. My own experience reaffirms this in that wider roads without shade or trees will be hotter. With the typical Las Vegas road, residential streets are wider than even some European highways that I've driven on, it's ridiculous! Using my early example of the master-planned communities, walking & cycling is more pleasant because the shade and even limitations on space for cars reduces the amount of asphalt, resulting in cooler temperatures. Thus, I think that Mikael's arrogance of space point ties great with this phenomenon. When roads dedicate too much space for cars, it creates a hostile environment for users of other modes in more ways than we think. When roads take a step further and don't dedicate any space to other users besides a car, especially when it's not a designated highway/freeway, now that's truly outrageous. Temporary weather is not an excuse to neglect other transportation modes. It's something that pisses me off everyday about Las Vegas, which ironically prides itself in its "live and let live" philosophy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
edit: silly spacing mistakes
An average car is 5.75 feet x 15 feet = 86.25 square feet. But there needs to be space between cars so let's add a 1 foot buffer all the way around. Now we have 7.75 x 17 feet or a whopping 131.73 square feet. Most commuting in the Toronto region (and the first world) is done by car with only the driver in the vehicle. So the most popular mode of transport is also the most space-inefficient with one person hogging 132 square feet. So yeah, obviously bikes, pedestrians and public transit are the problem
Jeez, this guy certainly puts cars in their place. Funny cos he’s half American. Guess that’s why he still lives in ‘Hagen!
Um, he's Canadian-Danish.
@@buzzmop Yeah, well, I'm never sure if America includes Canada or not!
@buzzmop Canada is America
On lane width: I'm sure Mike knows this, but he's fighting nearly a century of established standards that are all intertwined into our road grading system at the federal level. Wider lanes is an "easy" way to solve the problem of getting a Grade B road while not worrying about the other things like visibility range, slope and curve, or traffic density when you're running through the math.
It's dumb as hell, but it's how we've been designing our roads in America since WWI.
Yes, I saw a talk from Jeff Speck, where he showed a modern and old style suburban area, and the new one is just hideously wide road, with no thought for pedestrians.
I am unfamiliar with the road grading system, can someone explain more what it is?
When I google it, I only find things about highways. To me it seems like different rules should govern streets vs highways.
I just found this channel and I'm instantly in love
yes great channel! some interesting topics!
Me too! I was looking into becoming a city planner when I was young, and had some ideas like this back then. In hinesight I should've done it.
Same here. I'm studying urban planning and this is very useful and interesting information. Shame it's so underrated
I understood that when designing major roads thru cities they take into consideration the movement of Military vehicles in case of War.. and also space requirements for mass evacuations, I wonder if you did a study on road layouts based in this theory would some of the designs prove me correct?
True dat!
Yes, because that's extremely relevant in 21st century Europe...
@@Hurricane2k8 disasters are always relevant, so is war. its better to be prepared and not need it than to be unprepared when you do.
@@Hurricane2k8 It's completely irrelevant until it's not. We're not good at predicting geopolitics more than a few years in advance. Long term infrastructure design should reflect that uncertainty with robust strategies which sacrifice peak efficiency for versatility. Wide roads are not really a bad thing.
If a mass evacuation has to take place (in war, earthquake or fires) surely the last thing you want is for vehicles to clog up the safest space, namely the middle of the road?
I wonder if fluid dynamics can be applied to predict the decrease in traffic given change in lane width. Less lane width would make for more congestion, but would make cities more walkable as you said, making walking the more efficient mode of transportation. I would bet that this effect could be estimated with fluid dynamic formulas. It’s exciting to think about how such a simple change could potentially have a positive effect regarding emissions!
Until you need to get a tractor trailer through it, whether it should be there or not it's going to happen.
My city went through a revamp to make it "safer" for cyclists, 30km speed limit with poorly timed lights so you're always sitting at the light, in start stop when there's no traffic, there's now a bunch of islands wasting space, getting in your way, fucking up your ability to change lanes as a cyclist, they added dedicated bus-lanes that also make intersections extremely confusing for everyone, and there's never enough buses going down this lane to justify their existence.
Ugh. I hate when things are made "bike and pedestrian friendly" in a way that makes it 1). bloody confusing as a pedestrian and cyclist 2). horribly annoying as a driver.
The US is far too car-centric, but some places in Europe, especially those that can have harsh winters (have fun biking 4 months out of the year), feel like one giant twisty bike lane...
I love trams. Trams are awesome. Screw the US for having removed trams long ago.
@@Olivia-W I agree that certain bike/bus-promoting measures can be misguided sometimes, but as a Swede I can assure you that harsh winters never stopped us from biking. (I biked to work across a snow-covered city in -12 C weather just this morning.)
This is so depressing. I hate private automobilism. Even in cities with excellent public transport we still need to deal with arrogant egoism. I hate it.
12:25 I like the Dutch approach to designing intersections better, because of the protective traffic islands in the corners that also make left turns safer.
*Vehicular traffic flows more smoothly and efficiently when following sweeping curves* "Abomination, we need to change this immediately."
*Pedestrians like to follow a curve when stepping off the crossing* "Yes this is what we NEED*
Nice to know I am not alone who has noticed this.
@@ligametis Yes, but the logic is that you don't want vehicular traffic in densely populated areas to flow as smoothly and efficiently as possible, because then you attract more traffic and you create jams.
It's better to make vehicular traffic a tad tiresome, so people will only use a vehicle as a last resort. In my native Antwerp, it's pedestrians first, cyclists second and cars last. That way first responders and public transport are never held up by lazy drivers.
@@ixlnxs but there are people who depend on private transportation. Many don't live in the city centre, others need to visit a few different locations every day, deliver something. It is already often pretty slow and making it even slower would be frustrating.
You have to understand that he is a cyclist first and urban designer second. Just watch some more videos and you see his vision of a modern citie, which is basically "on bike". Don't get me wrong, thats not necessarily bad. He just not telling us "a solution", but "his solution".
But in my opinion (which is not a neutral one either I'm was a truck driver for over 10 years and work in logistics) bikes will never be able to achieve what cars do know. Cars cant be the answer for the future, but bikes wont either. Everytime something happends that doesn't go as planned (people get sick, injured, die - something caught fire, someone break the law, a car breaks down) we need our roads to get a car to be where it is needed as fast as possible. You cant sent a doctor on a bike (okay you can, but you cant ride the patient to the hospital), you cant give a firemen a bike and a bucket of water and point to "where the smoke is".
And let us not a forget that hardly any pedestrian and most of the cyclist aren't only pedestrians and cyclist. The trains in my city are crowded with people who think it is a good idea to take the huge bike with them to ride the train and then ride the bike for the last 500m or so. Nearly every pedestrian will use the public transportation at some point on their journy. So we can dedicate all the "waste of space" to the pedestrians and cyclists too. Also... cyclists will use roads too. They are not bound to their dedicated space. Pedestrians aren't forbit to cross the stress anywhere they want. But cars are. Cars cant leave the road if there is heavy traffic, like cyclist do. Cars cant just cross the vast places dedicated to pedestrians to shorten their way.
I dont think his "its not rocket science" argument will hold... because it is way more complicated. At least if your argument is "its not fair". You're right. It isnt... but the cars aren't the bad guys here.
I really like this video. I would like to see your view on one of the slowest moving city, Edinburgh. And then Glasgow where they put motorway right through the middle of the city.
Yes, I love both but Jesus Christ the M8 is a monstrosity
All is fine, until you consider the military and construction side of things. They have other priorities and bikes are not one of them.
One eye-opening experience for me was trying to cross a city on bike during a long-distance trip a few years ago. I realized that the city was surrounded by one of these huge commercial areas with big supermarkets and other stores. There was literally no other way to get through this zone other than by car. No bike lanes, only high speed high traffic roads. I had to go buy a map just to be able to get out of the maze. Pretty much every city is surrounded by these suburban monstrosities.
Now imagine taking a 53' trailer into a city you've never been in before, with everyone not understanding you need to use their bike lanes and sidewalks to manuever because they made the truck routes too narrow.
@@maritimemisfits3360 but why would you take what is essentially a long-haul vehicle into a city centre? Planning for that wastes a lot of space, and large semis are not very effective for last mile delivery in any case. By the same token you don't put a railway goods terminal in the city centre - it's just not an effective use of space and infrastructure.
@@koma-k Because the world is fucked up. When you need to get construction equipment into a city do you think it drives itself there? How do you think those gigantic cranes get there? How about the supplies? You going to haul 40-60 ft structural beams with a pickup? Air lift it? How about even simpler things, sometimes we have extra space on the flat deck so you may throw on one large generator to be delivered. Then there is also getting lost / taking wrong turns, if its too tight to get out, police have to come shut down the street so we can get out. Dont forget about evacuations either.
So by your arguments, every street and intersection should be sized for the largest conceivable vehicle? I would certainly not like to live in such a city. Construction work is an exception, not the norm, and requires thorough planning. Getting lost is an exception, not the norm (and given today's navigation aids avoidable 90% of the time). And evacuations are usually not done with semis either - actually evacuating any sizeable crowd is a complex problem, varies for different parts of the world, how large an area and population are you evacuating, for what reasons etc.
My point is that exceptions must be planned for - so you can make sure there are ways to reach construction sites with oversize equipment, but that may require some temporary exceptions and designated routes. Now on the other hand if a city has designated truck routes but they are not properly sized then that is a planning failure (sorry, I kinda missed your original point about undersized truck routes)
@@koma-k No not every street smart ass, but main streets (such as the ones near Eiffel tower) will need to be large enough to accomodate large trucks. GPS is not full proof and often can send you half ass retarded directions, if you had driven truck you would know this. Of course Semis aren't used for evacuations, but if you were using your head you would realize there would be a HUGE amount of traffic heading out of the city. Take a look at the I35 heading out of Houston, it doesnt need to be that many lanes, but that is a hurricane evacuation route. Construction is not an exception, it happens all summer long all over the city
Well, in general I agree with you. However there is a great BUT to it. Cars simply need a lot of space! It’s sad, I know, and there is no way to change this fact. We can still drive those shoe-sized Smart cars or what ever, but the delivery guys need to use the vans, or trucks even. Without them, the city infrastructure would eventually collapse!
In Europe, trucks are narrower and shorter, and delivery guys mostly use bicycles, not oversized monstertrucks.
Traffic must adapt to the space it moves in, not the other way around.
Cars need a lot of space yes you are absolutely right, which is why infrastructure should be developed to DEMOTE the use of cars and PROMOTE the use of public transport, walking and cycling, because these are more space efficient.
The delivery van argument is one that’s commonly used, but when you look at the US, delivery trucks and vans in cities are only 7% of vehicles, and 17% of congestion. It’s a poor excuse and one that falls flat on its face when you look at the facts.
Source: www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-04-20/how-cities-are-coping-with-the-delivery-truck-boom
They don't need that space. They don't need highway speeds inside the city.
Close roads to cars, but allow supply utility and emergency vehicles, and maybe transit
This is the exact kind of voice we need in modern urban planning. Someone who points out the idiocracy without holding back.
It is all because conservatives cannot do math. They are too stupid to do math. Rightards/rightists REFUSE to attack harms proportional to their quantifiable magnitude, because they personally benefit from the inequality/arrogance/self-entitlement. Selfish self-entitlement is the ONLY thing that matters to cuntservatards.
Reductionism: the difference between right and wrong is how much. Everything differs in magnitude, not in kind.
All conflict differs in magnitude, not in kind.
This is why That Vegan Teacher and Vegan Gains Richard are true American patriots, heroes, revolutionaries.
I PROUDLY vote for them for POTUS.
Well you croped the picture from Paris in such a way that the majority of space seems to be the street and the street widens up a bit there, yes.
But when you zoom out just a little you see the reverse: massive spaces for pedestrians right next to this and along the river and another level above.
~ 20 m wide sidewalks. That said, your solution is better, but more for bicylists.
Visit Berlin Alexanderplatz, those massive streets have equaly massive pedestrian ways and I think now even bike lanes. Yet crossing those streets
or intersections is so terrible not because the streets are so wide but because you have to waiting too long for green and not be able to cross the street in one greenphase.
That is very true but does not take away the fact that at the point of conflict, aka the intersection itself, a lot can be done to make it a lot safer for everyone.
Dont let the truth ruin a nice story
I noticed this happening in Purdue. The sidewalks and bikeway widths doubled and the roads lost a lane or two.
I understand what you are talking about, and i do agree that some cities still use outdated planning techniques but i don't really think this video is really fair. Arrogance is a bit harsh.
I am not an expert in any way but:
a) just choosing a random picture and analyzing it like that really doesn't tell you anything about the pedestrian/cars/bicycles ratio, maybe in the next minute or two a couple of buses filled with people passes by, what then ?
b) as a continuation to point a), i think it's more accurate when traffic is the entire day analyzed, even more accurate would be a week or more (rush-hour, peak times, weekends etc), maybe in your example, roads take 66% of the available space because 66% of all traffic in that region is done by car
c) and i think this is the main idea of my comment, with the invention of the car, more people chose to move to the suburbs, industries and ports for example moved to specially designated industrial areas, thus making the city centers a bit more airy than before. In the past almost everything was concentrated close to city centers. It was filthy, miserable and crowded way to live. How many old warehouses are now apartment buildings or offices? Take any old and industrially developed big city as an example (London, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Hamburg), it was crazy to imagine that warehouses, merchandise harbors and even train lines were once so close to city centers.
d) the sad truth is that cars give up so much revenue (taxes, gas, insurance even speeding and parking tickets and many more), bicycles and pedestrians don't so they will always accommodate cars first and not the other way around. Of course compromises are made in certain areas, but that's just about it.
This being said, i would like to see a video where you take into account some points i state above, or maybe you did, i don't know. I just found this channel and i haven't got the pleasure to watch more video yet.
Man, this is a beautiful piece of work. Great watch. Thank you.
The problem is the "City Designers" are doing their work based on how cool will it look on a wide Picture for you to buy in a gift shop.
That and the fact that they are mostly driving cars.
and they live elsewhwere
@@whazzat8015 Indeed. The world's prime example of a failed city designed for cars not people is Brasília. Their designers, Costa and Niemeyer, never moved in and stayed in Rio for the rest of their lives.
I was pretty shocked by how terrible the area surrounding the Eiffel Tower is for pedestrians. Luckily there's a huge redesign coming. An even worse example of the arrogance of space in Paris is the Place de la Concorde. Check it out on Google Earth. It's ridiculous.
Cycling across Concorde is always a bizarre experience. /Mikael
If you don't like wide street level boulevards for cars then you are just going to LOVE American inner city highways
Mikael has worked in a number of US cities and yeah... like most urban designers... he's not a fan of those dinosaur highways
Paris has significantly changed in the last few years! They have obviously been listening. Anne Hidalgo has been doing an amazing job, and is continuing further.
Imma take this shit cerebral for a sec. I love your educational vids for what they are but I also love to fall asleep to your gruff monotone voice explaining shit to me. You are every underestimated engineering boyfriend ever. Congratulations.
If you want to see a real nightmare come to the city of Detroit. The roads are not friendly to pedestrians, bikes, or cars! There are 2 competing road systems layered over each other. Plus an elevated train system that covers very little of the city.
I get your point about 38 pedestrians vs 23 car users. But I feel like the point would be more legitimate if it was over a period of time vs a single point in time. Cars go faster right - in the time it takes 5 pedestrians to enter and leave this space 15? cars could've come and gone.
Absolutely. Take the same photographs at 8:30am or 5.30pm and you'll see why that space is needed. The arrogance of disingenuity.
@Aaron K McBride Don't get me wrong, I'm all for less space for cars. I'm not saying the space given to something should be only based off the frequency of usage, that's just one lense for looking through it. All I'm saying is that single argument about humans in cars vs humans on foot feels a bit flawed by taking a single snapshot of time, not a period of time.
Thats why we drive in the streets with the cars where I live. After a few months I stopped noticing them and just drove along the edge letting them pass without even batting an eye
I reckon an argument can be made that by reducing the space dedicated to cars and freeing up the maneuverability and movement-flexibility of pedestrians we are facilitating social distancing for future pandemics. Given the in-vogue of pandemics at the moment, this argument might help convince some car-centric politicians. Of course, I might be overestimating both the power of my argument and the politician in question. Anyway, excellent video.
This is teaching me a lot about urban design. Thanks. I'm an American highway traveler, and space out on the roads is courtesy, room to be polite, and to stay out of others' way. But that's highways.
As an aspiring urban planner this was really interesting. I will try out the tool right away!
As a person who took several courses in urban design I can tell you this guy is not only an arrogant ideologue but also full of shit. The intersection changes he proposed will block firetrucks and I don't understand how he didn't notice that.
I hate riding bikes and love driving (our public transport is a joke) but still, your ideas about giving more space to pedestrians and bike are very interesting
Germany has planning rules (Bebauungsplan, able-to-build-plans) that set out exact requirements for new building areas eg the exact height of the ground floor and the top of the house - you are not allowed to go deeper to be less in the way of neighbours, or they in effect require homes to be disabled UN-friendly. However, in an older area where there are no rules, you can build anything as there are no rules - so you get a modern building in a historic area, but not in a new-build area.
You have to see Warsaw, Poland to see the biggest arrogance of speace ever! I would be really happy to guide you around :)
I think Lodz is worse lol. It's a nightmare
Hej Mikael thanks for your videos, they are really interesting.
Though there is more bikes and pedestrians than cars in Copenhagen I wondered why you seem to imply that cars should take way less space while they are not foldable and obviously need space to park.
You can put one bike on another one, you can get closer to other pedestrians (well, hello Covid-19!) but you can't fold cars. As a pedestrian/biker/car driver in Copenhagen my impression is that everything is absolutely fluent and nice.
I drove, walked and biked around Europe and in other countries: without writing a too long message, I think that cars may just need that amount of space, because without it they would become a pain in the ass just like what is happening in french cities once they start thinking "hey let's give less space to cars": in Copenhagen you can park, drive without worries.
I'd be curious to know what you think about it especially about parking. It would be a pleasure to talk with you! Martin
Cars do indeed take up more space, but it's a question of priority. Do you prioritize infrastructure that enables pedestrians and bicyclists thus encouraging that behaviour, or do you prioritize cars? Do we even want cars in city centres is a question one could ask. As a fellow copenhagener and bicyclist I've felt very keenly some of the changes made to Nørrebro, with the closing of lanes over the lakes and the establishment of 3 metre wide bicycle lanes. It's the ONLY place in central Copenhagen where I truely feel the bicycle lanes are wide enough to accomodate the amount of bicyclists. Most places are pure hell on a bicycle if you're used to some of the more serene bicycle paths in outer Copenhagen (voldstien f.ex). Central Copenhagen (like other inner cities) is faced with a choice: prioritizing automobiles at the expense of everything else, or limiting vehicle access to the central city. In the current scheme there is no space for different cyclists. You cannot overtake securely, you cannot bike at speed, biking slowly is also an annoyance, biking with children isn't secure. All of the things you can easily do as soon as you get past Valby or a similar distance from the centre are unavailable to the cyclist in order to make space for the car.
Why should people in cars be given vast amounts of space just because they choose to move around suited in a highly space-inefficient metal exoskeleton? On average cars only carry around 1.5 people per trip. Cars themselves neither need nor deserve space, even though the car-centric thinking is now so deeply rooted in us that we consider them some sort of moral entities in their own right!
Yes, cars need space to park. But why should everybody else just give up their space for your car for free? I believe free public kerbside parking should be abolished and you should buy or rent a parking space in a commercial parking garage. That's how it works in Tokyon and countless other cities.
Hello, I just discovered your channel and I LOVE IT! I was anoyed by so many intersections in Warsaw. If you ever come here i would give you a tour of the city that is pretty much owned by cars. I personally use a Electric Unicycle as my mode of tranaportation. Keep up the work! I love it !!!
Amazing channel!
Should've compared the streets with rush hour times, no? I'm wondering how so much "wasted space" still leads to traffic jams, especially in major cities like Paris or Moscow
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I imagine less road space will lead to longer traffic jams, which has a negative effect on pedestrians and cyclists too.
@@thestig2382 did you even watch the video? Cars can't go parallel on an oversized single lane, they only need so much space. This video is about the oversizing of roads and not enough space given to pedestrians and cyclists, it's not about changing road capacity generally speaking. Also you didn't understand the comment you replied to, he's saying that there are probably still tons of traffic jams even with all the wasted space.
FlourescentPotato yeah, I may have misread that. I wonder if adding additional lanes by reducing the width of other lanes where possible would help traffic jams,
Question: how are you going to let the police or an ambulance pass if you cant give way because the drive lanes were shortened, not everyday is black friday
The logic is that you don't want vehicular traffic in densely populated areas to flow as smoothly and efficiently as possible, because then you attract more traffic and you create jams.
It's better to make vehicular traffic a tad tiresome, so people will only use a vehicle as a last resort. In my native Antwerp, it's pedestrians first, cyclists second and cars last. That way first responders and public transport are never held up by lazy drivers.
"Yes, let's make the lanes only as wide as the widest trucks, that's a GREAT idea!"
*two trucks drive past each other and both end up on the sidewalk so they don't risk clipping.*
*surprised pikachu*
exactly
Straw man fallacy! Nobody advocates making the lanes only as wide as the widest trucks. We advocate making them wide enough for trucks, but not for four trucks and zero cyclists, like at 4:28.
Also, shouldn't vehicles be built to fit the roads instead of the other way around? Which do you think is easier to adapt?
I'm really questioning this ideology. Especially for NA. Wider lanes give better safety margins for higher speeds don't they? Like, you just don't understand how long it really takes to get somewhere here. Like how you can be driving for 8 hours and STILL be in California. What about cities that have massive transport influx for conventions etc which they hold constantly? What about the space in LA? Those highways are massively packed during rush? I'd like to see how you'd reorganize LA. That would be really cool.
Arrogance of the Danes
5:14 Here where there are wide streets we use a solution to increase safety, we put car lane wide floppy posts, floppy because if you hit them they will just flop back up, 2 reflective strips posts on each side that a bus can go through yet it works as drivers become aware of their speed. Strangely, it even works with motorcyclists as you see them slow down too.
Take a look at Madison, Wisconsin. Cars are king here. There is a huge pretend bike space, yet going from one end of the city to the other via bike you better have good dead and dismemberment insurance, your family will need it.
A few things.
first - that IS democracy. democracy in no way implies any sort of fairness but rather the opposite - the side with the most supporters gets to decide for everybody. That is why any country with democracy also has mechanisms in place to mitigate the downsides of democracy.
Secondly at the time it was designed this was what people wanted, and if you would ask them even today i doubt you would get a much different answer.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding dinner.
Then about the measurement it self: A still image tells only a part of the story - what is the actual throughput of that intersection? There might only ever be a few cars at a time in the intersection but if that is always the case and they have a nice steady flow than the number of passenger crossing it will be rather high.
Just from that one picture it does look like there would easily be twice as many passengers crossing this by car compared to pedestrians.
Pedestrians not taking sharp corners... but cars should? Cars that have to slowdown significantly around tight corners, sharply decreasing throughput while increasing noise and pollution?
Then the carlane-width... uhm... you do realise that staying highly focused all the time not only is exhausting but also leads to stress and more errors, and with narrower lanes that means also more accidents?
Narrowing lanes has been done in several cities all across europe and it basically always backfired. Sure, the accidents right at the short test-tracks the number of accidents go down, but the accidents in the surrounding areas go up.
An average car is somewhere around 1.7m, an average bike is around 60 cm. Isn't 1.7m the mandatory width for bikes? That would put carlanes at nearly 5m !!!
But normally high-volume carlanes (for most european countries) are around 3-3,5m , for bikes that would translate to 1.2m track width and you would also need to have them right next against the ongoing traffic too.
Vehicles are allowed to be 2.5m wide in europe, heavier trucks or vehicles for construction regularly are that wide and you need some safety-margins for them to be able to move around. And most streets are narrower than the maximum, heck, in my city the lane-width often is the minimum allowed 2.6m. fine for most normal cars but oh god if a fire-truck needs to come through.
The picture from russian - just look at how full the roads there still are.
For the street in Kopenhagen - you mention the 25 000 bikes. How many people travel that street by motor-vehicle and how much cargo are they transporting?
It is rather a problem of bad planning, not taking the interplay between pedestrians, cyclists and cars into consideration.
But simply comparing the dedicated area while ignoring everything else is just as foolish. I would like a rather different planning too, but getting rid of the areas for cars is not the solution. If anything you want traffic of all types to be as fluent as possible. That would mean some wide and free-flowing roads that connect the points-of interest with a tight public-transport system and better pedestrian/bike-accommodations outside the main car-roads.
General is most often wrong.
Good calls all around. Thankfully these ideas are starting to be discussed.
I am a car hater and I still hate this video more than I hate cars. I was an architecture student and studied a bit of urban design along the way. What was shocking to me was how much impact a seemingly minor change in street design can have. For example by removing the on-street parking and providing a tram line, one of the once-prosperous road in Toronto sees a rapid closing down of its local bussiness. Without local bussiness thriving, this road has become much undesired and quieter now.
This "urbanism" is not something of a style choice. It is more of a reactive reshaping of the city scope during the population of automobiles. It's a given reality now, and should be respected as it resolves a certain issue in our modern life. It is, quite ironically, very arrogant of this guy in the video to think that his utopian vision is everything that matters. Do I love a city that promotes walking and cycling? Absolutely. Do I think this guy is full of shit? Of course I do. Because the hardest part is always implementation.
Plus, This guy made some absolutely stunning technical mistakes. The turning curve at a crossroad is clearly designed for larger size vehicles (Eg: Firetrucks. ever heard of them Mikael?). I don't understand how an urban designer could have ignored this.
Ah, an architect. The ones who know nothing about urbanism but think they know the most.
@@ixlnxs doesn't take a genius to know a firetruck can't go through that crossroad design. Call me a buffoon and I can still at least point that out.
Great work! Gives me hope for a better future for cities.
When I worked in Houten, Netherlands, We had a urban planner who said basically the same. he said that we plan our cities to much with the car in mind. Car first, then bikes, and if we have space left some room for the pedestrians. he said, we have to turn that around. That is very visible in Houten - I am interested in what you think about it!
An argument against narrower car lanes:
Some of the largest vehicles on the road are things like vans and school busses that make wide turns and often transport lots of children. A ton of kids in the back seats can be distracting for drivers, preventing the laser focus that is necessary to stay within narrow lanes. I think it makes sense to give routes within cities enough space on the road to accommodate motorists who have to maneuver large, unwieldy vehicles that are often filled with noisy children. That’s particularly important in a place like the US, where we tend to have more children per household than European countries and where our school busses tend to be old, seatbeltless behemoths that aren’t super safe to begin with and would likely cause traffic and public safety problems if they had to stay within very narrow lanes.
Your premise is wrong. If a vehicle is too long and wide for a street, substitute the vehicle, not the street. Europe has more buses than America and they have no problem negotiating the winding streets from London to Lisbon and from Stockholm to Santorini.
ixlnxs
If we had the resources to replace school busses, that’d be great. But most American school districts are working with a fleet of busses from the early 2000s and they just don’t have the money in the budget to change that. A “just make the roads narrower” proposal would drain a ton of money from the public works department to resize the roads. Then it would need the school district to replace their entire fleet with more maneuverable vehicles. Both are massive financial burdens that fall squarely on local governments, which get most of their revenue from a couple cents worth of sales tax and whatever they can bring in in traffic fines. Most American cities wouldn’t have the budget to change more than one or two intersections, let along resize all their roads.
In America lanes are wide for the safety of the drivers.
The width is based on statistical variation of driver behavior relative to the center-line of the lane.
The author of the video has valid criticisms, but I cannot jump onboard the idea that this is "transportation dictatorship". It's just good rigorous technical planning.
the safety side has been tested before. wider lanes = more reckless driving and more accidents occurring, vehicular and otherwise. this has been statistically proven. bigger is not always better.
@@tfriddo Yes I agree. My point is that wide roads were designed with the safety of the motor vehicle operator in mind.
They do not consider the safety of other users of the roadway such as motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians.
If we consider only automobile drivers, wider lanes are safer for them.
However, considering ALL users of public spaces around roads, narrower lanes are statistically safer.
@@forgotaboutbre I'm saying that wider lanes are not necessarily safer for automobile drivers. They go faster, and are less aware of their surroundings. Yes they were designed that way for safety but they were wrong. It's better to have your car scratched on a small street than getting your car totaled because you were feeling confident driving down a wider street.
Its It's mostly unessecary in a lot of places, but in America our semis are honestly massive enuf to justify at the very least the intersections. Semis move something like 74% of our solid freight.
5:07 I know a lot of people here think this is a smart solution, but it is both stupid and dangerous... the intervals between cars are there for a reason and they're actually regulated in most countries, you need that room to maneuver your vehicle safely. If you reduce lane intervals like that in any area that sees heavy traffic, even temporarily at any time of the day, you'll see accidents there skyrocket, and those accidents will create jams, which in turn make the city even worse for everyone (coming from a guy who's living with a near-permanent traffic jam right under his windows because I live on a corner of a poorly designed intersection).
A better solution would be to remove the dumbass perpendicular parking zone there and force it to be parallel. There's traffic rules that allow creation of perpendicular-only and parallel-only parking zones in many European countries, doing that would free up just enough space to allow for a bicycle lane without having to affect the road traffic in any way. The other safe alternative is to just actually remove a lane from the road instead of clustering everything closer together.
It is assumed drivers are actually able to drive their vehicle without crashing into each other. European lanes are much narrower than Russian ones and have a lot fewer accidents, to put it very mildly.
In Calgary we basically have what I consider winter 7months of the year (including deep freeze periods where temperature drops below -30C with the wind chill with snow and ice roads) and we also have very long distances compared to Europe so more bike lines won't equal more bike users. The city is approx. 65km in length north to south not to mention its also not flat. And more pedestrian areas in the city centre won't equal more pedestrians unless more shops for pedestrians are built and that's not happening in this economy. Even the very few pedestrian areas we do have are struggling with shops opening then going out of business all the time for years. It also goes back to temperature because when its cold people prefer to go to the mall then walk around in the cold. There is no hope for North America.
Nice to see the spirit of Victor Gruen lives on in today’s design community.
I hope you don't mean Frederksberg centre!
There is a remote connection. Gruen designed the first modern shopping centre - as an answer to a thoroughly developed critique of the destructive effect of cars on urban spaces. His ideas were corrupted by commercial interests pretty much out of the gate and he spent the last half of his professional life opposing the trends he inadvertent;y started. On the Frederksbergs of this world he is quoted as saying, “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments."
He would have approved of the phrase “The arrogance of space.”
@@Ric-Phillips Yes, he wasn't the first to suffer from a lack of completion of his work, in fact most architects have this problem to a certain degree unless you are Norman Forster who helped with the abomination that is Astana!
you definitely need to check out melbourne and sydney in Australia. we're improving but not fast enough. the bad roads are symptoms of bad public transport and bad pedestrian access designs.
Isn't the most important part of this amount of space a mechanism of class domination? I mean, Georges-Euegéne Haussman was assigned to redesign Paris to prevent the people (later the workers ie. the Paris Commune in 1870) from seizing the spaces in which they live from the ruling class
For some reason this channel has one of if not the most articulate comment section I've ever seen.
great stuff, this has always blown my mind in almost every city i visit. i've got another one for you: The Arrogance of Retail Space. the nightmare continues.
As an econ student, I cringe so hard when negative externalities suboptimal urban planning is underway. Cars and trains are the long distance preference transport, but as many of these videos point out, most people live as close as possible to their places of work as they can afford.
The Copenhagen example in this video of car space being the majority in an 80% bicycle use zone is utter ludacris.
I am so glad that I came across this channel
Try to see the other side though. It's not like the people of the past were just stupid. There are reasons people like cars, not them being around cars, but being inside of them. Even with the extreme restrictions the Chinese or Singaporeans put on cars, the people over there still flock to them. I get it, you want to have a nice time just being in a city, but someone built a loud stinky 6 lane highway right through it. Sucks, I agree. But the reality of life is that people consistently prefer cars over public transit, even if the latter is just as fast and cheaper.
Public transit especially in Europe and the US has failed to innovate in any way since the 1970s, even though the technology is there and in some cases already implemented. It is consistently losing money, even though it is often subsidised. If you already own the car, it is still cheaper to go by car, including the parking fee. This is economic reality, no matter how you skew it by gov't intervention.
Look at the future. It is pretty safe to say that the slowmoving public transit companies will continue to do basically nothing. Now look at cars, that are on the verge of becoming electric and autonomous. These technologies combined will make cars even cheaper, not by a couple percent but more like by half. People that cannot afford cars can probably afford a robotaxi ride. Busses will probably just die. People will choose to live 60,80,100km out of town, get in their car and continue sleeping or having breakfast while they are driven to work. Nobody in their right mind will ever get in a commutertrain again. Car traffic will explode in our already gridlocked cities, with only homeoffice to save us.
We need to do something about this. I personally believe that making peoples lives better is the goal. Yet the only "solution" offered is getting people out of their cars, against their will, by making cars suck. Note that. The idea often offered isn't to make alternatives so much better that people switch, but to make cars suck. So what do you think we should do? Me personally: I am pro large scale tunneling projects. Free up the top surface for predestrians, built multileveö superhighways underground. But what do you think? Surely you have more to say about this than just taking space away from cars, may the carpeople be damned.
Public transportation in the US is the way it is because it was not allowed to develop nor invested in it properly. It is better for the oil and car industries if every citizen has their own car, instead of all riding the same bus. Profits by big corporations are what guided the development of these cities.
Rodrigo Peralta might be true in some cases, yet here we are, even in Europe. Difference is just that most American public transit is unusable/doesn’t exist whereas the one in Europe just sucks. Why doesn’t even matter all that much. Even in places where public transport is heavily subsidized it failed to innovate.
I totally get the need to change the carcentric roads instead for pedestrians and bicyclists, however it should be only when the demand is needed. Living in Los Angeles, people claim less traffic and less accidents, but it’s the opposite in practice. Making the streets smaller for bike lanes when there is no one using it actually creates more traffic and more accidents, so much so that neighborhoods and businesses are going against there own cities.
If you happen to be in Russia, you may as well be just offended by our urbanism. Not only we have giant automobile lobby, and keep building new highways on top of each other, but those very few infrastructure pieces for pedestrians (very few partial pieces from soviet union heritage, things in urbanism was awful back then as well) usually removed in favor of automobiles. And I'm not even talking about 20-30 story building-blocks, such as Parnas and Kudrovo in Saint Petersburg.
oh, so you mentioned it
I'm happy I found this channel, and love your content. However, as a dedicated automobile driver, I have to stick up for myself and my mode of transportation.
1. Is it still arrogant space when the street fills up with traffic at peak times? Your example showed very empty streets, but what does that same street look like during rush hour? Does it still seem like wasted space?
2. Those wide Calgary streets are a whole hell of a lot narrower when you have 5 ft tall mountains of snow drifts along every street in January. Pedestrians and residents don't like them put on the sidewalk, and you can't clear them off every time it snows, so onto the streets they go.
2b. Active transportation is a great idea, but again in Calgary (and the rest of the Canadian Prairies like where I am from) only crazy people are riding bikes during winter. The ice and snow are hard enough with feet or four wheels, never mind only using two. Just walking to the car is miserable enough at -40, but getting on a bike and heading to work isn't going to fly for most people.
3. You never commented on the inherent utility that cars provide. They are great private spaces that only take you to places you want to go to. You don't need to worry about what music is playing, stinky strangers, weather etc. Cars hold your stuff, and let you easily move other stuff around. They allow you to get around fairly quickly vs walking or biking. Cars are just too damn awesome and convenient, that's why they exploded in popularity and took over cities. You won't be able to get rid of them easily.
4. The lack of other options. I live in a car-centric city. Outside the core, it grew during the age of the automobile and obviously the car defines the look of the city. We do have a bus system, but it's far slower to get around with and underfunded. There have been some attempts to improve on this, but interest fluctuates with the election cycle. Frankly, I don't have any other real option to get around quickly and conveniently. Am I really a bad person for ask for better, faster roads that help me get about my day quicker? I know that if more people were on buses there would be less people in cars, and that public transportation is good for the whole city, but changing that is going to be a hugely expensive deal. It's a huge chicken/egg situation. No one funds public transit because no one takes public transit because public transit is under funded.
To be fair, it's a fucking pain to go through during the rush hour. Heck like every road next to the Seine are main road with a lot of traffic and this "arrogant" space is fucking needed at that time.
I don't live in Paris but I often pass through the city to go to one of the train station in the southern part
@@Aloucette Exactly. As much as Paris is a world class city that swells with tourist walking around, it's also full of Parisians who just want to get the fuck home after work.
@@Aloucette - I'm pretty sure, there are more pedestrians too during rush hours. All in all there are more people trying to get to work/home. Of course every mode of transportation tries to fill out the space it's allocated.
I'm only commenting on the first example but what I have to say is that if the intersection is indeed kept in it's original condition it is only because back then they only had motorized or horse-drawn carriages both of them with horrendous steering abilities, as for horse-drawn carriages it's pretty darn hard to make the horses to go full stop and make them strafe sideways, not to mentions if there were four horses pulling and not two, and as for motorized carriages, they used to be rather crude and clunky back in those days, some of them still running steam, some of them running inefficient electric motors and even the petrol engine ones were far from what we know now, all of them having limited steering abilities and bringing the vehicle to a full stop was not simple as just pressing one pedal conveniently placed right underneath your foot (or two, you know, clutch and brake), on the other hand, those vehicles were going so slow and steady that it wasn't required for a carriage to go to a full stop as majority of the pedestrians were able to cross fast enough merely by walking.
As for the rest, I wouldn't disagree fully, BUT first and foremost there are ambulances that fare much better on an open road with wider turns, fire-trucks, same as before on a bigger scale, then there are lorries, which no matter how hard we try to keep them away from city centers, sometimes there's that one that's gotta pass through and nobody wants to wait on a truck until it cleans an intersection that was just too sharp. If we factor in statistics, how many square meters a pedestrian require? One meter? A VW Polo takes six times as much and if fully loaded it technically wastes only one square meter, side note, I myself hate the sight of a single person in a range rover, then there are safety precautions like clearance between lanes, everyone can park a car on folder mirrors both sides but it takes a lot of skill to pass between two cars in the same configuration, that comes to speed, we need to traffic to flow because the faster a car goes, efficiency rises (until a certain point of course) so if we were to cram cars closer to each other they'd be going slower when you factor in the drivers' skill. Road planning is not rocket science but it has more variables than that and when building an actual rocket, you get to adjust it to your calculations coming from some given constants, payload, used fuel, aerodynamic drag, maximum engine thrust, etc., when it comes to people using roads, you get thing like, is that a new driver or Mika Häkkinen, are they driving a Smart or an H3, is that a local or a person that's never seen this place before, is everything running smooth or do we have to divert traffic from the parallel street because there has been a ruptured water pipe underneath and we had to dig it up and so on.
I'm saying this just to extend the objectivity of the topic, there are thousands of roads that surely dug into the surroundings more than necessary, but I wouldn't call it transportation dictatorship. Most of the times it's just corrupted officials.
I love cars, and yet, I agree 100% with this.
Cars should be the exception: leisure time, country traveling, short time movements needed in unforeseen situations. It should never be the first option for daily commutes.
12:39 "Ohhh what a crazy idea" sums it up perfectly. We never do 90d turns while walking with pace, never. I've asked many friends about this while taking a stroll in the madrid and they think it's alright because people create the trails, so they just step over grass and create a trail automatically, because the designed path is a turd. I wonder what if we use this little common sense to build, and just follow the damned walking flow of humans, I mean it isn't that hard and ultimately saves space and resources. Why is it so hard to get this concept ingrained?
Genial video!
Besøgte USA for et par år siden, og jeg blev nærmest ked af det, over at se folk gå rundt i kanten uden fortov, imens der var 8 spor til biler
But how would these changes affect traffic? If the reallocation makes it so that cars and busses can’t make it through traffic lights or causes rush hour traffic to be more than an hour how does that help? HCA blvd doesn’t really have much pedestrian traffic because there is nothing to do in that area but it is the only way to get through the city to Amager, and it’s combining traffic from Å blvd and nørre søgade, so to get rid of any of that would back up traffic all the way to østerbro and nørrebro. A better solution would be to increase the sidewalk width in the city so pedestrians aren’t forced to walk single file which is also impossible in the old city, but very realistic in new build areas, yet they keep building them with those tiny paving stones.
www.wikiwand.com/en/Braess%27s_paradox
Just sayin, might not be 100p applicable but it's at least interresting
There are three main problems with your arguments here,
1- What do you mean by "Democratic"? When pedestrians and cyclists pay similar taxes in buying, running and yearly taxes per kilometre then they should get the same travelling space. They don't arrogantly take up the space, they pay considerable overheads for those roads which bring me to the other two points.
2- There are no considerations for traffic safety in your arguments, busses need extra room at junctions if making acute turns for example. They have to pull a good way away from the curb and pull out at least a car length into the junction as the back wheels "cut in" closer to the apex, not leaving enough space is a good way to get cyclists squished if the turn is too tight and some blue paint at the roadside isnt a magic force field that would protect them. Vehicles have stopping distances, much longer than a cyclist and they need more room to account for this. There are other reasons as well as these that mean "unused space at any given moment" is not "wasted space".
3- you made no real account of traffic flow over time, across a full day, one single picture in one single place at one specific time cannot account for it. You need to judge patterns as a whole at several points in time, things like those "wasted curved" corners can help with both traffic and the longer vehicle issues in my previous point but lets stick with traffic. Those vehicles using it don't have to slow down which isnt a "cars don't need to slow down because of arrogance" is actually a useful traffic alleviating method as it gets more cars through the junction, less cars sitting idle at junctions should be something you want as it cuts down on pollution.
1-Depends on what countries you're talking about, but in the USA most local streets are paid for out of local property taxes. Gas taxes are only used for highways. So in fact the pedestrians and cyclists pay the same for the streets but use them much less, so they subsidize drivers. The Highway Trust Fund that uses those gas taxes has been bankrupt for well over a decade, despite paying "only" for highways, even though the taxes are collected on gas used everywhere, highway or not. So how is the shortfall made up? State and Federal income taxes are allocated to cover it. So again, taxing everyone for the benefit of motorists, another subsidy.
2-These are solved problems. That squared off corner in Copenhagen with the bike parking has to be an intersection of one-way streets. In many cities there are one-way streets intersecting, but they still have the wide curves despite the curve being unusable for motor vehicles. Designers know how to use the correct turn radius at an intersection for the appropriate vehicles. Truck and bus routes are engineered differently. The one size fits all approach is the arrogant one.
3-Your examples are exactly how we got into this situation in the first place. Large radii for fast turning traffic is what should NOT be in a city. Those wide fast turns are super dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists because vehicle operators have less time to react to them. They make the crossing distance longer as well, leaving vulnerable users exposed for more time. Also, the "if we just maximize vehicle throughput then they'll all clear out faster" argument was disproven decades ago. If it was true, Los Angeles would be free of traffic. Instead, it just encourages more driving, more dangerous driving, and more pollution.
@@JeffreyJakucyk Im not sure where to start other than you're wrong, please leave a bitchy attempt of a reply so I can rebut when its not approaching 4am.
The US is not the world though, so please remind me.
check out "The High Cost of Free Parking"
Nice channel! I wish there would be specialists like you in charge of urban planning here in Kyiv. We are among cities with worst traffic jams in Europe, and still there is no way to use bicycles safely, as we have almost no paths for them. Not to mention about freakin 6-lane highway just along the waterfront in the historic center of the city.
u good?
Would love to hear your thoughts on US cities like Phonenix and LA which are the epitome of car centric and urban sprawl
@h2s While it is true that PHX has more planning going for it. I lived there for a few years and you must drive to go anywhere. Public transit is practically nonexistent, and walking and biking are impossible due to the heat and mostly because everything is so spread out and car centric. The highways are also starting to/ have reached capacity and there doesn't seem to be much of a plan in place to deal with it besides build more highways/add more lanes, which as we all know leads to more traffic volume. It's literally a 40x40 mile Urban sprawl with single or double story houses. It needs to grow higher and become more dense as opposed to what is happening now.
I wish we had designated cycling lanes on some of the main roads in Wilhelmshaven, but no the Main traffic streets are only two narrow lanes wide and the moment a cyclist decides to drive on the road to not endanger pedestrians, a whole lane needs to switch in order to keep moving at 50 kp/h
Interesting analysis, it’s given me new appreciation for my environment.
Come to my city, we have the opposite problem. There is no space. Not for cars or pedestrians. The streets are all old, narrow and crowded. And there is on-street parking in most of the streets too, meaning in many places, vehicles traveling in opposite directions must yield to one another to get around parked cars. At least with COVID, the streets are pleasant.
The Shibuya crossing is good but can you mention more examples of efficient urban planning in another video?
I think the reason for the space distribution is pretty clear, honestly. Cars need space because they take more space to stop, to go, to turn, and do any of their functions. Car collisions deal plastic damage (in the scientific sense of plastic, i.e. non-elastic), while humans can turn on a dime, take up maybe 1.5 square feet, can stop and go without any concern for space, and their collisions are low impact and generally non-damaging. City biking takes up slightly more space, but they aren't exactly speeding when they're in an urban situation.
Every time I stand at a big wide / busy road / intersection waiting for the traffic lights to grace me with 20 seconds of crossing time every 5 minutes, I ask myself - why am I not able to even walk around my own city? I live here. These cars do not live here. They do not live at all. I walked from my house to this precise spot, and I will walk back. In doing so I will consume no fossil fuels, contribute to zero excess deaths through air pollution, and present no risk of smearing a cyclist into bolognese if I get distracted by my phone. Unlike the cars I am stood here waiting for. Why am I the one being punished by urban design in this scenario? Who are cities for? Has anybody ever wanted to move to a city or visit a city because of its car population? No. People visit Liverpool because the Beatles lived there, not because some cars drive around there. It's utterly insane and disgraceful and I'm pleased to have found somebody who can expound it better than I can. Keep preaching.
Pretty sure it was cannon fire priorities that screwed up Parisian streets to keep revolutions at bay, not automobiles. Google "Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann"
...talk about arrogance and dictatorship. Haussmann was the father or rather Fuhrer of modern urban planing, which has always been about dictatorship and social control. If you want to be taken seriously about your analysis of Parisian intersections, start with their history and the role the old city street configurations played in the overthrow of Louis XVI , and Haussman's subsequent reign of terror .
From www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/second-empire/a/haussmann-the-demolisher-and-the-creation-of-modern-paris
"During each of the previous political revolts (1789, 1830, 1848, and again in 1871), sections of Paris had succumbed to the revolutionaries. These successes were due in part to the political sympathies of the citizens of Paris, but the crooked narrow lanes of the medieval city also played a role. During times of conflict, urban mobs would blockade the maze that was the streets of Paris. Such barricades (makeshift barriers erected across streets to prevent the movement of opposing forces) proved very effective and made Paris all but uncontrollable at times. Think back to Eugène Delacroix's painting of the revolution of 1830, Liberty Leading the People- Marianne (Liberty) is shown rising over a barricade of just this sort."
The automobile and it's needs have had very little impact on Paris compared to what Haussman did. If you really want to to rant about "The Arrogance of Space" and the tyranny of cars, go to Los Angeles, and make colored maps of the freeways that were buldozed through poor neighborhoods from the 1930s through the 1960s to make Goodyear Tire and General Motors corporations rich.
One of the issues that we can't forget is that it's not pedestrians delivering goods, mail, doing construction, putting out fires etc. You still need solid infrastructure for cars and trucks even if you'd like more cycle paths, pedestrian spaces and so on.
It's especially an issue in the older cities of Europe that were never really planned but just sort of evolved. Just look at the central parts of Copenhagen for example, you have stores absolutely everywhere so you need trucks to be able to deliver goods everywhere as well or the stores will be empty. It's the downside of "lively" neighborhoods I suppose. If you only have stores in pre-planned shopping areas you only need the big trucks to be able to go to those few areas but that's just not how you create a livable city with life in the streets, it's how you end up with strip malls and so on. Sure, they're easier to plan for, to find enough parking at etc. but they suck the life out of your downtown areas.
If you want goods in all of Copenhagen's stores you need trucks to be able to get to them, to unload things at them etc. and that obviously takes up space. Every truck delivering something can't just stop all traffic in central Copenhagen after all.
Cyclists and pedestrians simply take up far less space in general, which is awesome, but that also means there's no particular reason to aim for a 33/33/33 division of space when they don't take up nearly the same amount of space.
Obviously that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make things better, and the example from Paris is particularly silly considering how many people visit the Eiffel Tower, and how many of those people are pedestrians.
We just need to keep in mind that heavy transport and big vehicles (trucks.. And buses I suppose) are *really* important if you actually want a city to function.
Emergency access and cargo access can be easily accommodated. Actually, both would probably be easier in the absence of private cars.
We can take steps to better accommodate pedestrians, cyclists and transit users while still enabling trucks and emergency vehicles to get where they need to go. The key is to also remember to take steps to reduce car use, especially in dense urban areas:
1. Reduce the amount of parking set aside for cars.
2. Make parking for cars more expensive.
3. Change some of the parking spots for cars into loading/unloading areas for trucks.
4. Make cars pay a toll to enter the sort of super-dense urban areas where you don’t want cars to go unless they absolutely need to.
5. Take steps to make public transit cheaper, faster, and more reliable to reduce car use.
6. Take steps to make cycling safer, faster, and more pleasant to reduce car use.
7. Build more apartments near urban offices, shops, and services to reduce the amount of people that need to travel long distances to them by car.
etc. etc. etc.
What I hate the most in urban is how they handle Parking lot vs bus in Canada. I was against having a car, but damn every time they put the freaking door of the store really really far as away from the bus. They don't provide a good place to ride a bike that I almost stopped using a bike. The street is made to have bike, driver are dangerous and they are making the path too long.
He'd love Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Even on the level of world leaders humans copy the behavior of others. City planners and officials get their ideas of how to build a road and what to prioritize by looking at other cities, not careful analysis. There is careful analyses but not as much as most assume, often even our leaders mere do what feels right. In theory everyone in a democracy has one vote, in practice there are a variety of reasons why elected officials listen middle class and especially the rich but not the lower class; guess which one can't afford a car.
There are real reasons a person in a car needs more space than a person on foot, though the differences decreases if you allow driving to be a slower and more difficult experience. For several minutes I objected to the video, but then you noted the actual percentages of pedestrians, bikers, and drivers. I don't own a car, but somehow I was still stuck defending car owners because of just how pervasive the assumption is that everyone drivers everywhere. It is closer to true here in LA, but my personal experience says otherwise. The widespread assumption overpowered my personal experience.
I have this thought every day when I pass the junction on the north side of tower bridge (LDN) Just absurd
Here in NYC, the way they've been narrowing lanes is they make pedestrian greenways in the middle of the street.
Yes and NYC is a nightmare for truckers, most will refuse loads to NYC and only the new drivers get stuck with them.