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I am not a cyclist
- Thread starter justride
- Start date
Really enjoy this channel.
It's cool that he is from London as well, so lots of talk about Canada specific issues.
Made me rethink the housing problem in a way that I now realize the issue is so much larger than any one individual factor (though zoning is something that is always on my mind now, and few people seemingly talk about).
His whole thing on car dependent suburbs really opened my eyes... The idea that inner city dwellers are directly funding the sustenance of poorly planned and wholly inefficient suburbs.
On the subject of bicycles - he has a great recent video on the Toronto Islands, where basically everyone has a cargo bike to get groceries and things of the sort. No cars really does make the place feel quite magical.
If I didn't enjoy the motorcycle so much, I'd just stick to bicycles. Still don't own a car, and don't plan to. Whenever I need to carry something large, It's a U-Haul or Uber XL. Way cheaper for the few times a year I need to carry large things somewhere.
It's cool that he is from London as well, so lots of talk about Canada specific issues.
Made me rethink the housing problem in a way that I now realize the issue is so much larger than any one individual factor (though zoning is something that is always on my mind now, and few people seemingly talk about).
His whole thing on car dependent suburbs really opened my eyes... The idea that inner city dwellers are directly funding the sustenance of poorly planned and wholly inefficient suburbs.
On the subject of bicycles - he has a great recent video on the Toronto Islands, where basically everyone has a cargo bike to get groceries and things of the sort. No cars really does make the place feel quite magical.
If I didn't enjoy the motorcycle so much, I'd just stick to bicycles. Still don't own a car, and don't plan to. Whenever I need to carry something large, It's a U-Haul or Uber XL. Way cheaper for the few times a year I need to carry large things somewhere.
Sounds a whole lot like 'motorcyclists'. We get lumped in with those 'hooligans'.
NA cities didn't need to be made tight and small because we have all this open space. Hence the reliance on the car. Same goes for transit...people like to compare how crap Toronto is in comparison to NY, London, Paris, or the Asian cities with phenomenal systems. We do not have the population to sustain a system like that. Toronto is large geographically...impossible to pepper the entire thing with subways. Toronto is currently building (or designing) 4 major infrastructure projects to better this...but it takes time, investment and no future political change of direction for them to all be completed in a timely manner.
European and Asian cities have much milder winters also...that helps things a lot.
Toronto Island residents...another group of entitled mofos that think they own the island. Toronto should kick them all out, cancel all future leases, and make it a massive park for use by all the residents of the area. Not some old crusty idiots who cry foul for something they have no ownership claim on. Having said that...sign me up, I want to live on an island subsidized by the City.
NA cities didn't need to be made tight and small because we have all this open space. Hence the reliance on the car. Same goes for transit...people like to compare how crap Toronto is in comparison to NY, London, Paris, or the Asian cities with phenomenal systems. We do not have the population to sustain a system like that. Toronto is large geographically...impossible to pepper the entire thing with subways. Toronto is currently building (or designing) 4 major infrastructure projects to better this...but it takes time, investment and no future political change of direction for them to all be completed in a timely manner.
European and Asian cities have much milder winters also...that helps things a lot.
Toronto Island residents...another group of entitled mofos that think they own the island. Toronto should kick them all out, cancel all future leases, and make it a massive park for use by all the residents of the area. Not some old crusty idiots who cry foul for something they have no ownership claim on. Having said that...sign me up, I want to live on an island subsidized by the City.
Scandinavian countries have similar if not harsher winters than Toronto. Montreal definitely has way more intense winters (don't they still have snow right now?) and they were able to implement a big cycling network. And a lot of them are miles ahead of us in terms of alternate transportation methods.
The Netherlands were like us in the 60s...and in the 70s following a constant uptick in car drivers killing children they had violent protests to put measures in place that put forward "people" as road users and not just "cars"
Something that i learned while going down that rabbit hole, is that our streets/infra are not engineered with safety first in mind (and by this i mean also safety between cars). It's built with speed and volume first as a priority which makes safety an afterthought in the design of our infrastructure and that, to me, is quite concerning.
You prioritize the means of transportation that you want people to use and then you build around it. Here it was cars, over there it was public transit and bikes. And even then, their car network works great because the other methods are so efficient that people actually want to use them. They can make it work over there but it's just not popular enough, he actually talks about Mississauga in this video and the difference between the two types of infrastructure is almost depressing. A big problem we'll have for any type of change here is how people perceive transit as being "for the poor" and not convenient...which, in its current form definitely sucks in several use cases.
But even if you get popular support it's not as easily said then done.
This video is a bit longer, but tl:dr, road was due for regular maintenance and they were going to improve the infrastructure on it. Even with 95% support of the local residents the best option for it was turned down due to a loud minority.
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