Is North American Urbanism Actually Hopeless?

Appreciate an urbanism channel that isn’t all doomerism, it’s nice to pull back and get a little more context.

Excellent video. I think ”North America” works OK as a generalization to start the conversation but any serious attempt at understanding what's going on needs to take into account the vast variation that exists here too. I’ve been running some numbers on traffic safety and Miami-Dade County has a full nine times more traffic fatalities per capita than Toronto. The U.S. in particular is an enormous country. When people talk about Canada being similar to the US, I almost have to respond: "the US isn’t even similar to the US!”.

My city, Salt Lake City, is announcing a lot of new housing and transit expansions and i caught myself saying "oh i wished i lived in the future". It's actually exciting to live in the present to bring in that future.

People also like to ignore the fact that on a per capita basis North America has more cargo tonnage transported by ship or rail then Europe while Europe is the one with more tonnage per capita with trucking and has more truckers per capita then North America but this isn't a daily part of our visible lives so it goes ignored.

I think a big source of a lot of "doomerism" about north american urbanism is that there is a lot of demand for less car-dependant living, but there isn't nearly enough supply. This results in absurdly high costs in desirable, car-lite neighbourhoods which make them inaccessible to the often younger and less well off individuals who want that style of living. A lot of people just don't have the resources, be it time, money, or age to live somewhere good in north america or wait for the place they live in to improve.

I really wish urbanists started to look more into the urbanization of Latin America as many of their cities were also developed in the age of car and have been able to create great projects with sometimes fractions of the cost we have in the States and Canada. I mean a city like Bogota, that is car centric, is trying its best to implement cycling everywhere and has been called the Amsterdam of Latin America. I feel we should look more into places with similar history rather than cities developed in the Middle Ages or Classical times.

Chiming in here to mention that if someone like RMTransit would attend council meetings with his community and turn it into a youtube video, many more people would know its possible and would do the same. IM THE ONLY ONE UNDER 80 YEARS OLD AT MY COUNCIL MEETINGS.

The problem that I have with people in North America (United States in particular). Is people's wilful blindness to the problems that plague our cities. Until recently i was one of those people you would see driving into a congested city in my overpriced, overrated 5,000 lbs pick up truck while complaining about the same traffic that i was contributing to. Since i started watching channels like this one, city beautiful, not just bikes, and city nerd. Im starting to change the way i look at urban planning. Now, I'm trying to change the way i get around in the city of Richmond, VA by doing things like taking public transit and using the current bike and pedestrian infrastructure so I can see what the problems are and maybe help find a solution to them. But at least now I have enough sense to know that the solutions start with me.

A lot of people in LA that say public transportation is terrible, frankly, never use it. I wanted to take my friend to DTLA to have a couple drinks without having to pay for Uber or having a designated driver. We took the bus, Metro, Angel flight, and ended up at the US Bank tower. Then we took the public transit back to West Hollywood to eat at Norms. It was honestly pretty good.

I think people tend to overrate how the age of cities outside of America reflect on their building. I say that because a big city 300 years ago would be a small to medium city these days. And while the historic center of most European and Asian cities can easily be millenia old, those historic centers are a small fraction of the area of the total city and most of the area of the city was built at the same time American cities were being built. I always get impressed when I look at maps of modern big cities like London or Paris 300 years ago, and see how the countryside was just arround the corner in all maps

I feel like north american urbanism is way too focused on a half-empty correcting the suburbs approach rather than a building on what's there half full approach, of course turning the burbs into Amsterdam is impossible, but making east coast cities into urban utopias really wouldn't take that much relatively.

Thank you for this. Those who reduce all of North America into one singular entity is actively harmful and misleading, as well as the fact that urbanism always seems to be US/CA vs. western Europe while the rest of the world is being left out of the equation (like Latin America as you said). While of course, North American transit systems are by no means perfect, they're still doing something and addressing the needs of its citizens and that's the point! East Side Access/Grand Central Madison in NYC for example, as long as it took and as overbudget as it was, the project helps so many people who live and work on the east side of Manhattan, and it's about time that this crucial connection exists. Things are getting better, and it's very obvious that there are many people focused on making NA's built environment get better too. It's not happening overnight, we have to remember the classic phrase that Rome wasn't built in a day! On top of the fact European cities aren't perfect either, Europeans tend to ignore Asian urbanism as you mentioned. Asian cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Shenzhen, Seoul, and even Pyongyang have phenomenal urbanism. Pyongyang has bike infrastructure to complement the Pyongyang Metro, trolleybuses, and trams. Bikes were banned in Pyongyang for decades until the ban was lifted in 1992. In 2017, a bike share program was introduced called Ryomyong/려명 or Dawn. If a city like Pyongyang can have a bikeshare program, a trolleybus system with over 35 miles in length, a tram system with 33 miles in length, AND two subway lines, then other cities have zero excuses not to take these steps for the greater good!

This was by far the most rational thing I've seen on any of these channels. Thank you for making it. Because some people have been saying some wild things on other videos I've seen

1:57 Calgary mentioned!! 🎊❤🎉

Never thought I’d hear an urbanist say “NA is too big and spread out” when urbanism focuses on travel within our cities. Nobody commutes from Toronto to Calgary

I'm glad there are still people like you, Alan Fisher, Strong Towns, Classy Whale, CityNerd, Alex Davis, Miles in Transit, and Oh The Urbanity who very much have hope and show and appreciate the things North America already has done for transit and how they can improve to be even better places! Engaged activism like attending public meetings is great, but it’s a mistake to treat that as the minimum for caring. A lot of creators' urbanist videos are made with the hope of getting people to vote and to talk to friends or family about said policy! Not everyone is gonna attend meetings, but you CAN get a majority to VOTE for people that listen and support urbanist causes! Voting matters A TON for getting things you want done! I've lived in Tarrytown, NY as well as Jersey City, NJ. I lived in Tarrytown when I was a kid, and when I lived there, everything was walkable (as Tarrytown's colonial!) and there's convenient MNR service, so we didn't need a car for our everyday needs. Even if we wanted to go to the massive Palisades Center mall across the Hudson, there's a bus (formerly called the Tappan Zee Express) that goes between Tarrytown and the mall! In Jersey City, both it and neighboring Hoboken have implemented Vision Zero, with Hoboken having a streak of no zero car-crash fatalities on city-owned streets since 2017, with Jersey City being the first city of its size to achieve this in 2022. Besides Vision Zero, that's not talking about how much development has popped up downtown because of the HBLR and how pedestrianized downtown JC is. And not just downtown, they've also been densifying around the Journal Square transit hub too and affordable housing TOD around the Bayfront HBLR development!

On point opening. I'm from the SF bay area and have lived in SD and LA. If you speak to my mom or any other 60+ year old, they will tell you that California was farmland when they were kids. It's remarkable how much California, the place I can speak to best, has changed in one lifetime. To have perspective, the west coast development is among fastest rise to prominence historcally. North America will absolutely improve, it's just a question of how soon. With that said.... Not fast enough for me! So keep it up RM Transit!

2:52 As a Canadian, love the Mercator Projection as it greatly exaggerates the size of Canada realitive to the lower 48 USA.

My hometown of LA will always be in my heart. From the great weather and phenomenal Mexican food (TexMex isn't real Mexican) I can't see myself living anywhere else

Watching a Chinese travel youtuber, the walkable urbanism in many Chinese cities seems nicer than I’d realised. More than just subways to study.