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​ @strongtowns  has a new book coming out!

Chuck and Daniel Herriges' are about to release their book, "Escaping The Housing Trap". It's a great delve into the housing crisis in North America, and what's causing it, including the part that's almost never mentioned in the media: car dependency.

You can pre-order a copy now via the links on their website:

 https://www.housingtrap.org/ 

I'm going to Japan soon, so I wanted to talk to one of the experts,  @LifeWhereImFrom , about what I should look for when I'm there, and we ended up having a great conversation about why Japan has stayed (relatively) affordable while other developed nations have not!

Hear our conversation in the latest episode of  @theurbanistagenda  podcast (currently early-access for Nebula supporters, public release next week).

 https://nebula.tv/agenda/how-japan-has-remained-relatively-affordable-with-life-where-im-from 

The latest video by  @SimonClark ​ is great (as usual) and it's worth a watch.

It's interesting to see how often "bike infrastructure" comes up on top, regardless of how you slice the data. 

I talked about this in my collab with Climate Town way back when: walkable cities are better in almost every way, and I found my quality of life to be significantly higher the more walkable my city is. But these cities are also significantly better for climate change too (as well as financial sustainability, as  @strongtowns ​ has shown). 

There's really no good reason not to make cities more bikeable and walkable. 

 https://youtu.be/ReXaS4QausQ 

Alright, which one of you works for the Washington Post?

Thanks for listing me next to Mr. Beast 😂

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/09/most-important-app-youtube/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzEyNjM1MjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzE0MDE3NTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MTI2MzUyMDAsImp0aSI6IjE2NjcwYWQ5LTIwODEtNDRkMS04YzU2LTFmNGNmZWQ3MDY1NSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5LzIwMjQvMDQvMDkvbW9zdC1pbXBvcnRhbnQtYXBwLXlvdXR1YmUvIn0.hHx0Fc4PnGvPN_JJ0hakZ6EE7xwisaHAM2ncHyQAq3o 

My friend who runs the YouTube channel  @ThePostApocalypticInventor  ran into car troubles recently.

He is exceptionally good at fixing things (and that's an understatement), but even *he* spent about a thousand euros and months of time to fix an electrical issue in his late-model Subaru Forester.

Whenever I talk about how expensive cars are, I always get some replyguy telling me that people can just buy used cars and it's cheap. Yeah, it's cheap until you run into almost any maintenance issue, then the costs add up very quickly.

The whole video is interesting, but if you just want to see the issues with the car it starts at  14:19 . 

Just when I thought I was getting used to Dutch infrastructure, they make something that amazes even me.

 @BicycleDutch ​​ has made a video about a "stacked tunnel" in Hilversum (of all places!) where people cycling have a short tunnel under the railway, while cars take a longer, deeper tunnel underneath.

It was built this way as it was cheaper and didn't require bulldozing any adjacent buildings.

This is absolutely brilliant. Dutch engineers never cease to amaze me. 

I've just released a list of all of the "unlisted" content on my YouTube channel to my Patreon.

These were all available on Patreon already, but Patreon is bad at content discovery, so most of my new Patreon supporters haven't seen these.

Check it out if you support me on Patreon (I'm posting here because some people tell me that they don't always get the Patreon notifications for new content):

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/great-list-of-101262010 

And no, these won't be posted to Nebula. Every video on this list is unlisted for one reason or another, and I want to keep them to a limited audience. Nebula is becoming a mainstream platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users, so that would be the opposite of a limited release! 

My latest video is now up early for Nebula supporters.

Amsterdam needed to close a 90-year old historic bridge for for almost 4 months for necessary renovations. But they closed it to cars ... and built a whole new temporary bridge, just for bikes.

Here is the interesting story about the closing of Berlagebrug, in Amsterdam!

 https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-amsterdam-closed-this-bridge-to-cars-but-not-bikes 

There was a study published recently entitled, "Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment". It summarises - in detail - all of the ways that cars and their infrastructure cause harm. 

It's exceptional and you should read it (it's actually very accessible for a scientific paper), link in the pinned comment.

But if you'd like a summary,  @CityNerd  has recently released a video going over some of the "highlights" of this paper. It really is an exceptional summary as to the damage caused by automobiles and car dependency. 

A few months ago Laura Kampf (a German maker YouTuber) took a 5 hour walk in LA to get a map. 

It was pretty awful, as you might expect. 

Laura is pretty good spirited about this, and she and her friends laugh about it, which I think you have to, for your own sanity.

But I think that people are also way too apologetic about this stuff. The residents of LA should be disgraced by this. This is disgusting. Places like this should never exist.

Laura's experience is definitely funny, and I enjoyed the video, but it's not so funny when you think that there are people in LA who cannot afford a motor vehicle and this is their everyday experience.

Car dependency is disgraceful.

Edit: I cannot deal with the literal morons who are responding with "duh, she could've taken the bus". Yes. We all know there's a bus. What we're talking about here is the quality of the walk, not the length of the walk. People still need to get to and from the bus, and there are places the bus doesn't go. None if this is acceptable, so stop making excuses just because there's a shitty bus that gets stuck in traffic and still takes hours to get there. 🤦‍♂️ 

 https://youtu.be/mGDuT3hDn1c