Loved this! Instantly subbed and could not believe you had less that 300 subs. Can't wait to see more and would love to see a video on how to instigate change in my local area.
This was good. I really like the component in your videos so far where you interact with your community (like the interview with the transit guy in the previous video). I also really appreciate the optimistic approach. There's definitely value in talking about why successful places are successful or about why unsuccessful places are unsuccessful, but there's also value in talking about how an unsuccessful place can be a little bit better. I like that you're filling in this "missing middle" of urbanist content.
I disagree with your assertion that having lots of developers yields the best results for a neighbourhood. In London we have the "Great Estates" large areas of land that were developed by a single Lord and the sales were Leasehold for 100 years. They have been in the same family for centuries, each new generation becoming their custodians. They are probably the best run and most attractive developments in the UK.
As someone who lives in one of the many towns that are almost entirely “walkable losers” I really think discussions on how to make these places better are really important
True, although i'd say there's nothing to discuss. All planners need to do is not think about car use first, but in the end. Go to a place, sit there and imagine what you'd want around you. Stores, housing, green, maybe an office, walkways and leisure areas. Then think of the 3 times a week you'd need a car to travel further, and accomodate for it, without narrowing your inital plans. DONE. If your first idea is "how am i going to leave this place", no wonder you get ugly places. Oh and if zoning is the problem, get that changed. The worst thing in a city nowadays is traffic, not housing next to offices and stores. As long as you can't get the newspaper without a car, there's something wrong.
Here in Colorado Springs, CO the city approved an apartment complex to be built at the formers Sears store in the mall. I’m very interested to see how that’ll transform the neighborhood.
As someone from Tulsa, the lack of walkability and unease felt when crossing busy intersections is very common and I can agree it 100% contributes to the lack of residents biking and walking outside of just popular trails such as Mingo or Riverside. Tulsa is definitely a car-centric environment that makes it difficult for anyone to make walking, biking, or busing more primary in day-to-day travel. It can be a difficult place to live for low-income families who have no car or 1 for a large family and have to make use of the existing infrastructure. Which I agree with your thoughts of improving walkability and public transit versus building more roads.
As a Dutch person I have always be stunned how US cities are set up, but I am also stunned how you try to solve it. You actually gave the correct answer in your video: a stroad should be a street or a road. That stroad should clearly be a road, take out the sidewalk completely, no bike lane and take out all the driveways and remove the intersection except one to access a street network like you drew. Have an earth wall between the -stroad- road and the shopping area so it is a nice and quiet area, in the shopping area should be sidewalks and bike lanes, you don't want to walk or cycle along a busy road. This solution is better and safer for cars as well, one nice stretch of road with only one traffic light and no side exits.
Stroads in my country are very different, with 2-3 storey shophouses built close & along wide 4-5 lane roads back when human-pulled rickshaws used them instead of cars, with much lower speeds, so safety wasn't so much of an issue originally. This road often narrows due to cars & delivery vehicles parking along the side (for the shops in the shophouses) The YT channel Tehsiewdai talks more about it
And don't forget to plant lots of dense, native vegetation on that earth barrier between the road and the shopping district. Lots of trees and shrubs will help reduce the noise as well.
The audit process is such a great illustration of why American cities are broken for walkability. The people in charge themselves drive everywhere and all they can see is un-mowed lawns. I unfortunately have little hope for these "walkability losers" till our current generation of planners stay in office. I have great hope and expectations from the future generation of planners.
When they say 'landscaping' could they not also be referring to trees? Because that sidewalk didn't look like it had a lot of shade and that looked like quite a sunny day
@@angelaburress8586 if its a lead factory sure. But mixed use just means I don't have to drive 10 minutes to the supermarket and 45 minutes to my office. Why can't I live in an apartment above an office above a shop?
It's worth mentioning that all but 2? of the auditors were men and every person was white. I'm gonna guess that navigating streets like these isn't a daily reality for anyone there. Outside of a car, that is.
@@angelaburress8586 the amount of entitlement in this comment is fascinating. To start, every urban settlement in the history of mankind prior to the 1900s was mixed-use-seemed to work well for them. And more importantly (for the sake of replying to this specific comment, at least), the reason anything has to be "turned into" mixed-use development is because auto lobbyists went and turned almost _everything_ into _unwalkable_ developments in the first place. if you don't like walkable areas where houses intermingle with small businesses, so be it. But the reason it's even "special" in the US to begin with is because someone who agreed with you imposed their idea of America on everyone else, even despite the crippling financial obligations of maintaining expensive autocentric infrastructure, while you're complaining about urbanists supposedly doing the same thing _even though_ that "thing" they're doing is advocating for development patterns that _all_ people can use, young children, disabled people who can't drive, poor people who can't _afford_ to drive, and drunk individuals included. And that is to say nothing of people like me who simply don't want to drive, whether it's for environmental reasons, a desire to feel safe, or any of the dozens of inconveniences that come with owning a car. Also, if you're concerned about single-family homes or commercial areas that are free from housing, I hope you're equally passionate about opposing highway expansion projects that destroy the property values of these places, if not the entire properties themselves.
The clown, I mean engineer, who designed and wrote my city's bike plan in 2015, does not even ride a bike. So, we have expensive peripheral pieces of network that look exactly like this. It does not help that the word "safe" does not even appear until page 15 of a 25-page document.
Starting with safe neighborhoods and filtered permeability is a great idea. Make it so only destination traffic can go into these neighborhoods. Eliminating stroads and replacing them with streets or roads is a good start too. You can get a lot of walkable and cyclable infrastructure like that without it even being explicitly for bikes. A lot of Dutch bike infrastructure is actually just that, safe traffic calm streets. Bike lanes are important too, but making sure that people can truly go end to end on their bike is vital.
We have an absolutely terrifying feature on one of the bike laned roads in my city where, for whatever reason, there's a freeway style merge from this road onto another road, enabling cars (well, more like ENCOURAGING cars) to zoom across the bike lane without slowing down or using caution or anything. It's ridiculous as a cyclist who has right of way along the first road to have to literally stop and wait for all the merging idiots who don't have right of way who are offramping onto that other road. Freeway style merges should not exist anywhere but freeways. Especially not where there's bike lanes. When vehicles cross over the bike lane, it literally feels like an Indiana Jones cave trap, except for cars instead of swinging blades.
@@xiiaohao3871 It starts with NotJustBikes, maybe a little City Beautiful on the side, then you start watching Alan Fisher for the sick train memes, get hypnotized by CityNerd's upper West Coast accent and then bam! You're hooked on the urbanist juice.
@@chaos386 it gets even deeper when you have a 30 min conversation about walkable cities with a random guy at the rock climbing gym (it happened early 2022). like literally I'm like do you watch NotJustBikes and he's like yeah. I'm like that craazyy haha.
That sounds like a fun hobby: Draw on top of these stores with parking lots, converting them into mixed use zoning, parks, housing with corner stores, etc.
Kyler, Hirmunen has an excellent idea here. And please, do not apologize for making “extreme” suggestions, as I regretted you did here. Extremism in defense of space for people , not cars, is no vice. In fact, urbanism is the only remedy for the failing suburban experiment. Strong Towns teaches (reminds) us that towns have for millennia evolved and grown denser if they are successful towns. The car-centric post-war experiment has imposed this weird urbanism where everything is built out all at once based on Euclidean Zoning (separation of uses) and then never changes. Thousands of years of urbanism are now pushing up against that idea in our growing cities all over America, where the inability to make neighborhoods denser means housing shortages or sprawl or both.
Another benefit of transforming those parking lots around stroads into walkable areas with homes and shops is that all those destinations are easily served by transit because of being in a straight line thanks to the stroad. Linearity is one of the factors for transit to succeed.
Some great ideas here. There's too many urbanist videos lamenting or explaining all the problems and not enough suggesting actual solutions. Keep it up!
I hate blocks like these - narrow sidewalks that are exposed to scorching heat and freezing temperatures year-round, right up against fast-moving traffic, no greenery, and miles of box stores with "moats" of parking lots for as far s the eye can see. When these retail developers bough the land, they didn't need to consider the community around it - they put up a destination for locals and urbanites to drive to, paving the land because it used to be the cheapest option to providing landscaping, and it gave the impression that these were popular, desirable places to travel to. Now it's proving to be a waste of revenue, resources, and land, and these "stroads" are like scars across livable neighbourhoods, decaying as in-store shopping and retail purchasers are buying more online. I am all for the land being reapportioned to build more developments on unused parking lots, converting the land into "hubs" where more services and hospitality options are available. Instead of chain restaurants and retail outlets, how about locally-owned cafes, restaurants, breweries, and bakeries? How about adult learning centers, libraries, gyms, doctor's offices, and repair shops? Or even townhouses, condos, and small housing developments? Provide these lots with more greenery, plant trees for natural sunshade, and provide pedestrian friendly rest stops and travel paths to get to bicycle lanes and walking trails. The land we have already used is being wasted, and it's come at a high price, as cities continue to expand, and urban sprawl eats up viable land for agriculture, or wetlands, and forests. We can intensify the land we already occupy, making communities more livable, and more enjoyable.
Now you are getting a little dreamy and utopian with that 'locally owned' stuff. Everything will likely remain top-own franchised corporate control. Everything will be rented an leased, tracked and provided by subscription. There will be no personal charm. Just high tech rabbit warrens.
I think building codes should also require all the property use positioning to be flipped, Bring the stores up to the front of the lot and put the parking in back. This could also let the city cut down driveway counts by requiring rare but traffic lighted feeder driveways that run to access roads along the far back side of the actual parking lots. This can in part let the developers still build their unfortunate stripmalls but it does bring the stores up to the sidewalk and sticks the parking lot where it belongs, out of sight. From a retail POV it never made sense to me for the lot to be what is up front, you would think the stores would want to be what you see driving by.
redrawing that parking lot and adding in other buildings and making it more walkable is something i do literally everyday lol. i make maps of areas that exist and think of ways to redesign that area
That "removing graffiti" had any votes at all compared to everything else is hilarious to me. Maybe it's because I'm a metal spike and mohawk clad punk but uhhh... I think graffiti is so far down the list of things "wrong" with that intersection that it doesn't even make the list.
The silly thing is, the way they "remove" the graffiti in my city is literally spraying over it with an offwhite paint that doesn't even match the concrete at all. It might just look worse than the actual graffiti itself. Italy doesn't typically remove graffiti, which surprised me a lot, even in historical towns. But it saves their taxpayers a lot of money for meaningful budget expenditures instead. America could learn a lot from them. But we won't.
I think good bike paths is definitely a good starting remedy for stroad areas since everything is so spread out, it's rarely feasible to walk anywhere even when it does feel safe
As soon as you pointed out the Satellite view of that GIANT church surrounded by a parking lot bigger than for a rural Walmart I was baffled. That is so weird to see a church and a high school look like a big corporate store in a generic suburb or rural area. Where I'm from, we don't even have Walmart in the cities because the co-ops out-compete it and there's no space for a megamart with a giant stupid parking lot, that would waste a lot of space.
Great video! As an Oklahoman, it's wonderful to see someone tackle the topic of walkability within our cities. We need more people like you bringing this issue to light or else Tulsa and OKC will continue to be carbrained. I also appreciate the positivity of your videos and the fact that you give actual solutions to the problem instead of just listing all the reasons they suck (which are numerous, to be fair lol). Gained a subscriber! Excited to see more videos!
Waaah what a hellscape is that 🤯 It reminds me of the riverside of my city (Lyon, France) which was converted to parking lots in the 1970's... ruining the site. And the municipality decided to make it a promenade in the 2000's. Huge success. I must admit I dont think I've seen such land use, at this scale I mean, in France. And still we rely far too often on car-centric ideas to design our cities...
I was just walking through a parking lot in Fairfax, VA (because there's no sidewalk between where I was and where I was going) yesterday and passed through a series of parking spaces that are literally NEVER occupied. Looking at that stretch of lot, I realized it was enough room to put in 6 or 8 row houses, or mixed use buildings and disrupt absolutely nothing. Of course, it's also right by a massive intersection that divides a residential/commercial area from two schools, so kids have to walk across 6+ lanes, including two slip-lanes. And the city just allowed a private company to put up a fence blocking the only nearby, wheelchair accessible, official & maintained path between two neighborhoods... So...yeah, this town needs some work.
I'm in the Bailey's Crossroads section of Fairfax County, which is considered to be walkable. There are sidewalks or multi-use paths that allow pedestrians to get from point A to point B without having to go through a parking lot, but not a lot of people walk here because of the lack of buffer from traffic, driveway cutouts, and lack of visual interest. The county has a great plan for increasing walkability and micro mobility on the books, but I fear they will not be able to implement most of it as long as the State is in charge of the roads. Heck, it took 20 years of persistent lobbying and many traffic accidents to get VDOT to approve a traffic light that allows people to safely cross stroad to get to a local bodega a mere block from a 350 unit condo building. Good luck with getting your trail unblocked.
@@hilaryweiner893, yeah, that area is not fun to walk in at all. I almost got a job there a few years ago (right at the crossroads, actually) and my trip to the interview was bleak. I'd have had to cross 7 on my way to work every day, and that didn't strike me as a good thing. VDOT seems to be a very retrograde organization. They're actively fighting against any people-focused improvements, and only seem interested in building freeways and expanding roads. It's like they want Virginia to look like Texas. And nobody with power to do anything about it seems interested, so their fiefdom of car-centered construction is allowed to keep on chugging, in spite of everything.
@@matthewconstantine5015 I don't blame you for not wanting to cross Rt. 7! I'm on the Columbia Pike side, which is a little better. But you are absolutely right about VDOT, which doesn't consider the needs of pedestrians.
Ive known a few people in my life that would show up at a fence blocking a public path like that with a battery powered sawzall and cut a section out. And if they rebuilt it, they would cut it again and keep doing it till the company tired of replacing the section.
It’s really nice to see more ubanists focused on what appears to be the best solution for big box stores (a pet peeve of mine): MIXED USE DEVELOPMENT! I think what you explain towards the end of the video is key. So much space can be saved and most importantly, we would be building unique, WALKABLE, communities! I have to start vouching for mixed use development in my town here in Florida. And you’re probably aware of how bad it is here…
Got this as a random rec from the algorithm and am really impressed with the quality from a new channel. Great job! I’m from the US but haven’t been back in two years and this was a visceral reminder of just how unwalkable most of it is. (Tulsa looks eerily similar to my hometown even tho it’s in a different state). On another note, the lawn/landscaping comments really caught me off guard - that counts as overgrown?? And even if it were, that’s a bad thing?? As you may be aware, much like car dependency, “traditional” lawns and landscaping are very much something we need to ween ourselves off of going forward. They’re terrible for biodiversity, cause problems in terms of water and fertilizer use etc. Thankfully, I think people are starting to wake up to this as they are to the problems with car centric infrastructure, although clearly there’s a long way to go until minds are changed, especially in the US it would appear
I feel like even in places like this that are unlikely to ever feel “nice” to walk down without a huge amount of work, they should be technically “walkable” to the most basic possible level, allowing people to walk from one side of the road to another so it is at least possible to get from one corner to another.
I'm from Lawton, OK, and it's really great to see someone talking about these issues at a more local level. I don't think that these sorts of issues can be talked about on a general level. They have to be realized as issues in local communities, and action needs to be taken on a local level.
Literally could not agree with this more. It's a travesty that we are still building strip malls and big box stores with massive parking lots completely disjointing our cities. Like haven't we all traveled to LA and seen that as a warning of what not to do? 😂
thing is they are hazardous to the cars too, I don't think they benefit anyone given how many times I have seen them in dash camera videos and having accidents or lots of close calls. Dangerous to drivers, walkers, bikers(motor and pedal), and transit.
That landscaping was the leading concern is so laughably predictable - You have a group of able-bodied men, no one attempting it in a wheel chair, with children, or even necessarily under the assumption that they needed to be somewhere specific in a timely manner, and after huge swaths of time being taken up crossing dangerous sections of roads, they are worried about the landscaping. It would be funny if it wasn't tragic that these kind of people make most our decisions for us.
The Orange Pill network just keeps getting bigger. Love it! Being from Europe when I see a map with standard stuff like schools and art centres being lost in a sea of car parks, with their entrances far removed, I scream internally. I loved the redesigned big box store into residences and corner shops. You mentionned trees provide shades on long, straight stroads like this one, but buildings can do that as well, which goes perfectly with your dream plan. In so many places in the world, where the temperatures are high, and the sun is strong, people have tried to generate as much shade as possible, by building houses close to the next one, creating narrow(er) streets, channeling the wind, and lowering the temperature. But in the US you have to cook under the sun to wait for the bus. This blows my mind how dangerous it is. The lack of protection on the sidewalk from incoming cars is baffling. Great content, moving on to your next video!
so glad i found an oklahoma based audience after falling down this rabbit hole!!! sometimes it feels completely impossible to improve this state but you give me hope hahaha
Being from the NorthEast, particularly the NY-NJ region I would observe that the biggest problem is that while this may legally be a city it is clearly a suburban setting. the land uses and the streets are not cities. An dense cityscape solves many of these problems. It is one reason why I love NYC with real transit, low car ownership and except in parks little green grass. But that is what a city is about. You are completely correct about the unsignalized exit ramp, there should be a pedestrian signal there particularly with a cross walk. Any by the way it appears from the aerials on Googal that there is some dividion between the road and Krispey Kreme indicating they cannot or should not mow it, but it is obvious that that the grass is cut by someone.
10:00 big block stores, malls and concentration of business are a nightmare. we need to break them up, and incentivize people to walk arround. residents don't need an "all in one stop" for everything that is far away from everyone, residents need a neighbourhood with a multitude of stores and services spread out. Recife (where i live) is too, guilty of this, having lots of malls, but there is a robust network of local services, and you're never 10 minutes away (walking distance) from groceries or a drugstore for example. ideally what i would suggest is scrap completely the parking lots and transform them into multi-use apartments (first floor and second floor as services, and higher as apartments). make stores abundant everywhere. incentivize people walk arround the neighbourhood if they need something very specific (example: let's say you need a very specific electronic part for your PC, of course there would not be PC shops everywhere, but one per neighbourhood should suffice, and incentivize walking the place). if we break down malls and big department stores as smaller bits, with a multitude of services that are spread equally in a neighbourhood you can create by default, cities where the citizen will want to walk because he will never be 5 or 10 minutes walk distance from a store. and everyone wins. in my opnion you could do this: Ideally: ban cars arround Tulsa. turn parking lots into multi-floor buildings, and invest heavly in walking,biking and bus. and i mean, Heavly. a city of 500k, should at least have a network of 10000 buses and at least a 4 or 5 lane surface or underground metro (that same old rule of thumb of 1 bus for every 500 citizens). i know this will never happen because it is the U.S., bu you guys will not have a choice in the medium to long term because of climate change. More feasible in the U.S. reality: if you really, really need to keep cars, urrrgh.... at least put the parking garages underground and make the roads at maximum 3 lanes for major avenues,and 2 lanes for streets. i again call atention to my city, Recife... even the bigger avenues, have at best 4 lanes (we tend to do 3 lanes and divide with a big open refuge area if we need more lanes), and huge areas with elevated kerbs to protect the pedestrian from cars. it is not perfect, nonono, veeeery far from it, but to get things started you should take notes of the infrastructure here. there is sidewalks everywhere, and even if some are of extremely questionable quality (unleveled, painfully broken, and sometimes unwalkable) they are there. raise every crossing you can, and limit the vehicle speeds for at maximum 30 km/h inside an urban zone and streets, and (this is being ultra generous even) 50km/h on avenues. and for the love of god... no strodes... please. if you want examples of some of our streets and avenues, check these out: Rua da moeda (an example of pedestrian only street), Rua Padre Carapuceiro, Avenida Recife, Avenida Conde da Boa Vista, Avenida Agamenon Magalhães, Avenida Mal. Mascarenhas de Moraes, Avenida Presidente Castelo Branco (Jaboatão dos Guararapes), Avenida Sen. Robert Kennedy, Rua Ribeiro de Brito, Rua Ernesto de Paula Santos, Avenida Caxangá, Rua Estudante Sinval Meira Enrique, Rua do Jangadeiro (Jaboatão dos Guararapes), Avenida Boa viagem, Via Mangue... there is tons and tons of examples you can take from here for making your streets at Tulsa better.
>residents don't need an "all in one stop" for everything that is far away from everyone, residents need a neighbourhood with a multitude of stores and services spread out." Well then that's for people to decide with their wallets. Like how do you just decide this on your own?
@@marcossonicracer No one needs the state to "intervene" because you don't like their shopping habits or choices. If your product is better, feel free to build it, and the rest will take care of itself.
Remove parking minimums and revamp the zoning requirements to allow for mixed use development. Some areas will naturally densify (those with higher land values) which should be accommodated with slower traffic and more walking/biking infrastructure. Of course getting the first two done is the toughest part but I think it is a better (albeit much slower) solution than trying to force a very expensive change.
god "illegally jaywalk" reminded me that in the US there's this stupid rule and honestly it just makes me sad the automobile industry had so much power over your legislation regarding the end of the video, you say that "you're getting carried away" but removing car park is actually one of the most effective solutions to stop people from using their car. In most cities trying to reduce car usage, telling people "please dont take your car" has been proven ineffective to reduce traffic. Sadly, the most effective way to achieve that is making the cagies lives a living hell so that they just use something else.
While I've never been stopped for jaywalking, the idea that that rule does exist is BS. I always tell people: I believe it is far safer to cross whenever there is no traffic coming whether there is a cross walk or not. In fact, I think going to the crosswalks at a 4 way intersection is way more dangerous than just crossing the first chance you get and only having to worry about cars from 2 directions vs 4 directions with paint n lights for 'protection'
I loved your ideas, keep them coming. Maybe with enough TH-cam channels like this, people will actually start to internalize these notions, and someone in positions of power may actually start listening. By the way, I love your subtle dig at Amazon.
An interesting note is that walkability often hurts the big box stores bc the lower operating costs helps far more desirable small business actually compete (which is why they're so much less popular in Europe/Asia)
@@eryngo.urbanism given how much I see the ship to store option popping up for things on sites for biz like BestBuy I think one day the company will phase out its hangar sized stores, And will market onsite pickup at smaller places and sell it as a "fight porch pirates, ship to our location and pick up on your own time" Amazon is slowly conditioning people that they do not need everything immediately and a MiniBuy could still have some needs on site like cables and maybe minor computer bits like keyboards and mice.
When I walk around it’s sad the street trees and light poles get mowed down by cars and not replaced. I’ve even seen the holes where a tree used to go filled in with concrete.
In Spain a few years ago shopping centers became fashionable, far from inhabited areas, it was modernity, people had to go by car and fill a large shopping cart... fortunately people have discovered that the trade of Proximity, for the usual day-to-day purchases and the commercial streets, are much more comfortable and less time is lost. Many large commercial brands are opening neighborhood supermarkets and small shops in the neighborhoods. I hope that in a few years those large commercial areas in the suburbs will only be a memory of the past. Everything must be within a 15-minute walk, the health center, the bakery, the post office, the fruit shop... and of course the bar where you can drink a wine or a beer, that is quality of life.
Your idea at around 10:19 of turning a giant parking lot into a compact neighborhood is what looks like my city is doing. No idea if it will help. The problem with those is it fails when people can't get to where they want to go without a car. Causing major issues in a development like that.
I watch a bunch of videos of people talking about walkable cities so I am very happy to see a video where someone is doing something about this! Crazy how you all were basically the only ones walking that trail, just goes to show how many people drive in order to get around because of how dangerous and inconvenient it is to walk. I really love your idea of turning the strip plazas into walkable mixed zones and I have seen a lot of that done in Atlanta. I felt very safe walking and riding a scooter around that city and wish more places were like that here in the US
The outer perimeter of the parking lots are normally empty, so the first step would be to build commercial space fronting the street. Bonus points for apartments above the stores, but who would want to live next to that traffic? For the road itself, I think narrowing the lanes would be a good first step. With the extra space, I would set up some kind of barrier, then a protected bike lane parallel to the sidewalk.
Great quality. The new algorithm changes give smaller creators a chance I noticed videos with only a few views being recommended to me and yours is one of them!!
Backing up / slowing down highway traffic is a good thing. It begins the task of discouraging people from using their cars and results in a positive spiral.
What’s interesting is that with your infill design, the one major thing I would change is…just make sure there’s a parking garage. Having well designed vertical parking would support essentially the exact same number of customers from vehicle traffic while dramatically freeing up the needed space for apartments, offices and so on. It’s one concession that honestly leaves no real drawbacks to the idea. Because especially if the area is pleasant, no one would care if they had to walk a couple blocks form the garage, because it’s not a threatening environment. But really the obvious takeaway is that designing mixed use spaces and being very thoughtful of how to accommodate people first and foremost seems like such an obvious winning concept.
You've got to dig that intersection up and stick a tunnel under it. Big metal circular storm pipe. Then stick concrete around it, backfill some dirt and other layers and re-pave. If they do it right, it'd be a 1-week disruption to fix it entirely.
I love your video style! Great scripting! Good angle, and different feel from other urbanist channels than I like. I appreciate the book recommendation as well. Just downloaded it on audible.
This is the question I've been asking - can virtually unwalkable places become walkable and how do we get them to be walkable. But I also want know how we can start to create livable hubs in suburban sprawl areas. One thought I had was to have farmers markets and food trucks in parks as an early step. That might get people out into the neighborhood and begin to change the mindset. Changing big parking lots into multi use apartments, offices and stores is an idea whose time has come, even if people in car centric places can't envision it yet. We need to help people see it now, because cars are becoming unsustainable.
I look at this and think it should become a road. But everytime I suggest that there's always the issue of supporting the businesses along it. My usual goto is to "move it" to a street behind the existing building, but I honestly have never seen it implemented well.
A major issue I have with Jeff Speck's approach is it assumes one has a walkable area to start with. I bring this up because there genuinely seem to be parts of the United States where there is no walkable area to start, whether its in downtown or elsewhere. It's similar to my issue with Strong Towns where one has to have an urban core to start with in order to incrementally work one's way out from it, whether in terms of walkability, mass transit, ect.,
I think it's a good approach, but it should definitely be complemented with other approaches, especially in places like Tulsa that have lots of unwalkable areas.
Idk, my impression is that this kind of approach prioritizes places with the most potential; it doesn't require the places to be walkable to begin with. For a small urban town, the place with the most potential is of course the urban core. For a suburban town, it's the lifestyle center or the mall. In that case, we should prioritize improvements in these areas by building compact mixed-use nodes and connect it to transit, rather than e.g. bringing more commercial/office space and transit to the actual low-density single-family residential clusters. It's just easier and more economically feasible. In the far future, suburban towns might end up contracting in size, with most of them centered around former lifestyle centers/malls that have now become actual urban cores.
@@junirenjana Okay, that does help, and it would be able to capitalize off of say, cheap/free land use reform. Although I'm not quite sure what to do about oversized parking lots in the context of malls.
@@88Factor Some areas are just beyond repair to the point that it's probably in the best public interest to just let them rot away. However, in some cases, including the specific case cited in this video where the site sits on a major transportation node, infill development could prove beneficial.
@@junirenjana That's fair, especially as I'm relatively persuaded that, for the most part, there aren't entire communities beyond repair, which is too often what an incremental approach, for example, can curse communities to unintentionally that need more major changes to really get going on the path to revitalization.
This is something I thought before. All the parking spaces can be used to make into mixed use/usable land for development. I've seen it be done, it can be done. and I am happy to advocate for it in many places. Saves us from having to build more outward when we can use all that valuable land around. I think people walking distance to many amenities is a great plus.
So glad to see a channel that offers ideas for the US. It's easy to admire Europe and then think the US is beyond help. My approach to walking is to walk everywhere, no matter what.
This video is such a breath of fresh air. Tired of all these urban development videos that just point out the problem without providing an actual solution, besides "its better in this city."
The Peoria Avenue cycleway really needs to be fixed by requiring businesses to raise their driveways and provide a second stop sign to motorists leaving, one for the cycleway and one for the road. And that one for the cycleway definitely needs to have a "CYCLEWAY TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP" placard, and the cycleway itself needs to have a sidewalk.
Holy Hell, that arduous trek across that stroad that seemingly took FOREVER, God Damn I thought I hated stroads enough already but Jesus H. Christ, that stroad almost gave me an aneurysm.
Wish you would make a video please on what a normal person or a citizen can do to help persuade the people in charge to make more cities walkable and bikeable etc. and better places to live without always having to drive.
awesome video! I’m a Tulsa native and I absolutely loved this. We need to get a group going to start hashing out ideas for urban planning/public transport. I don’t think we’d see much of both in our lifetime in this city, but I know for a fact Tulsa would benefit from both. I lived abroad for three years and saw cities half the size of Tulsa with fantastic public transport and walking trails. If we truly wish to combat climate change, we need to build cities that are for humans & not strictly for vehicles
My only concern with an underpass is visibility. It would create a great place for pedestrians and cyclists to get mugged. But you're right, ideally it would be a good solution, because it would allow you to keep moving on the path and not have to worry about crossing the road.
I love this. The only issue I didn't see addressed is that all that parking on the ugly stroad is for people who live in whatever nearby sprawling, car-dependent residential suburb it connects to. Until such time as we get rid of those (if ever, in my wildest dreams), those people will need a place to park to do their shopping. What's the solution? Multi-story parking garage? Underground parking? Or is the argument that so much parking goes to waste anyway you can get rid of most of it and just keep some for the suburbanites?
if one cant be rid of those refuge islands they should probably have torso high steel reinforced concrete walls protecting them so even a speeding semi has a reaction like a bug on a bumper if it exits the travel lane. I would also say stick parking lots by code behind all stores and bring them up to the curb and have access road run along behind them, This way you shut traffic onto a very small handful of traffic lighted intersections for exiting onto the main road and any between store driving is now stuffed way away from the sidewalks. As I can see from Gmaps the smaller food places are almost up against the road but the bigs are not. on a side note I can really tell I am from New England, because I see one structure there and am like "holy crap why is a church almost as big as a shopping mall?". I think an enormous issue is how many cities and "suburban cities" today grew up after the car. Young cities like almost all of the Midwest, south, and much of the west coast save the old industrial ones on the great lakes in those states also grew up post-car dominance. Aside from land constraints one thing that kept NYC, Philly, DC, Chicago, Boston all dense is people had to get around those cities in a time before the car. This meant on foot, or trolley cars first horse pulled and then electric and eventually subways. Tulsa has not even half the population of Philadelphia but is actually bigger in land area, So they are really inefficiently using their space.
71st Street looks like it should be a Jersey Freeway to me. So I would put a bridge over the intersection for the trail while converting the intersection to a diverging diamond, eliminate all at-grade crossovers of 71st Street, provide grade-separated roundabouts at the mile roads and several overpasses in-between, and cut parallel continuous streets through all the big box and strip mall parking lots to create higher density neighborhoods like the one you demonstrated might be possible.
Ah yes, the Mingo Valley Cycleway. I honestly didn't think we could possibly get more carbrained than the Interstate 205 Cycleway in Portland but at least that cycleway is grade separated and has offramps to cross streets, a state requirement when the freeway itself doesn't allow bicycles on the shoulders.
This is EXACTLY what I think about all day. Great vid. A good secondary effect that I hope would happen if we did this kind of redevelopment is that the value of the land would increase and it would be more attractive to tear down the ugly big box stores and redevelop them into dense, multi-tenant buildings.
Good stuff! There are probably a million shopping centers next to suburban subdivisions. Building wide multi-use paths from the subdivision to the shopping center would be a productive first baby step toward better suburbs. There are some wide multi-use paths in Lakewood Ranch (Florida) that get fairly frequent use in an other car-first environment (if they were connected in a complete network they’d get much more use).
Something I’d say is separate the road and street sections a way to do this is have 4 road lanes (2 in each direction) with a buffer each side (with the occasional drive) then a street with pavement behind those sections
I'm not interested in totally filling in a car-grid with traditional building blocks. I'd focus on different things: How can you integrate biking trails into the slow fabric of your city? What does this system look like? What are the key details? How do we design those? In this case the highway is the main barrier. An underpass or bridge, crossing the highway at E 66th Street to E 67th Street, would be nice, because it avoids lethal interaction. But it might be a US political no go. So lets regard parking space as empty, and put a diagonal cyclepath + sidewalk (not a mixed one) from the Mingo trail bridge you showed, to David's Bridal corner. This way you cut the distance towards the important destinations of church and school with about 140 meters. Now you can design one or two buildings that put eyes on the slowstreet, and highlight + solve main points of conflict. If you design this first piece of slow fabric well, you'll get a benchmark for all future development. You don't need to fill in the whole lot. It's cheaper, easier, and less intrusive, if you mark the cornerstones, and let the future fill in the gaps.
Nice, a video focusing on Tulsa! Yes, the Mingo Creek Trail is pretty nice, but not really connected to anything commercial. Which is why I suspect it doesn't get a lot of use. I don't worry about 71st street and most of south Tulsa, because I live farther north in the Admiral and Harvard area, and I don't have a car, so i just don''t go far south very often. Sometimes I get as far as 51st street, but rarely do I go farther south. The 71st area between Memorial to the Mingo Valley Expressway has always been high car traffic. So I don't know why you focused on that area unless you just wanted to tackle the hard part first. Besides yourselves, how many pedestrians or bicyclists did you see on your trip? Maybe you can argue that if it were more bike and pedestrian friendly, the more bicyclists and pedestrians would use it. But remember, walkability is mostly for people who actually live in that area. How many people who live there would give up driving to walk to the stores? Tulsa tries, but still ends up doing silly things. They've built sidewalks along almost all major roads (with a few irritating exceptions) even though few people actually walk on them. So they're fine for bicycling--why add bike lanes, especially the ones that are just painted lines, where you have plenty of good sidewalk to bike on? The sidewalk's safer and physically separated from car traffic.
Tulsa through its history has done some things that other cities could learn from. Topics that would provide good examples: 1) When the Broken Arrow expressway was built, neighborhood street underpasses at Hudson/Irvington and Pittsburg were included. Good example of how to maintain neighborhood connection when limited-access highways are built. Really important for N/S transit on foot or bike. 2) The half-mile grid system of bike routes in south Tulsa works pretty well. I have some specific comments in the "really nice to have; a few details could have been better" vein but it is a model that can be emulated in other places. 3) The community got the OK Turnpike Authority to build parallel MUP when the Creek Turnpike was built. 4) Though the headline story is the success of flood control along Mingo, the inclusion of MUP in that corridor is also an important bike transportation feature. I point these items out, particularly 1, 2 and 3 because I am trying to show advocates in Houston how these features could be applied here.
wow! as an oklahoman i didnt know there were people actually trying to make our cities more walkable! im in the OKC area, do you have any groups/places that advocate for more walkability that I could join? i've been trying to add a sidewalk outside my neighborhood to this strip plaza literally right down the street but to no avail :(
Hmmm I'm not sure about OKC but they probably have something similar to the biking and pedestrian advisory committee here in Tulsa. And if they don't, maybe you can get something started.
really punching above your weight subscriber wise with the production quality here. Just found your channel with this video and im now subscribed. Keep it up!
I think you do have to get carried away when we’re talking about North American urban planning policies. Part of the issue is that our cities (speaking as a Canadian) don’t take the drastic action needed to really curb these issues. They’re not willing to go against the NIMBY’s, or to make meaningful changes to disincentivize driving, or to invest the money into public transit, or to actually make cycling safe, or prioritize pedestrians. My hometown of Guelph, Ontario (the name maybe recognized from @notjustbikes video on financial solvency) is a perfect example of this. It’s often considered one of the most forward thinking cities in Canada, during covid they established a car free dining district in downtown, completely closing off two streets to all private traffic. Everyone loved it, and it was the best thing Guelph has ever done. But each year they scale it back, last year it was only closed on weekends, this past year it was opened but the parking spots were kept as patios. Point is, we need drastic changes in our planning policies, and politicians willing to do it. Almost any project from a mixed use neighbourhoods, to road diets, pedestrianized streets or roundabouts have little support before being implemented, but ultimately win the people over in the end.
I agree with you, on every point. However, I have a bit of a problem with the Strong Towns conception of a stroad. Strong Towns go out of their way to make stroads sound like an illogical attempt to square the circle. They're not. The actual contradiction is that they are intended to be places that are exclusively for people in cars while still pretending to cater for people on foot. Imagine that (by some inexplicable natural selection) humans evolved into creatures that were all 6m long, 2.5m wide and typically walked at 80kph. Now imagine that you needed to design a shopping mall for these creatures. What you'd come up with would likely be a multilane, high speed "mall" lined with widely spaced drive throughs, each marked with a giant sign that could be easily read far in advance. This is what a stroad is. A shopping mall designed for a future where pedestrians as we currently understand them have ceased to exist. In the imagined future of the mid 20th century, humanity was supposed to retreat from the outdoors. Outdoor and public spaces were therefore designed on the understanding that the ONLY way that people would interact with them was inside a vehicle. Walking, and cycling and even just being outdoors was supposed to fade in significance and eventually die out entirely. And "forward looking" planners built places that were optimised for this future when it inevitably eventuated. But in the meantime, it's a free country and if you insist on going out without a car (practically naked in this imagined future), well nobody was going to stop you. You would be (cough cough) perfectly welcome in these places that had been designed to exclude you. The fact that people have continued to try to go outside means that we have to keep pretending that going outside is OK, when we've clearly designed around the idea that it's not. To this end, small changes are fine, but I think that far from being pie in the sky, your step 4 is actually the main act. If you want to improve places that were designed for an imaginary future where pedestrians don't exist, then you need to redesign these places to actually cater for people.
This is great! I had the pleasure to visit the Netherlands last November, and I had a lot of fun admiring all the excellent infrastructure there. I never looked back to North America the same way, even to my home city of Vancouver, even though it is transit friendly there are still a lot of cars there. I've already watched a lot of content from Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns (well before my visit to the Netherlands) and learned to reject the North American standard of car infrastructure. Even the little things matter: whereas getting food in restaurants or grocery stores is relatively affordable and accessible, it is much harder to do so back home, and from what I've seen food prices in Canada and the USA are much more expensive than in the Netherlands. Inside and near major train stations in the Netherlands, grocery stores are easily accessible, so after a day working in the city (or as a tourist, finishing a visit to the city), you could just pop into a store and buy food, before hopping onto a train to get home (in my case, a hotel in Hoofddorp, one station after Schiphol Airport). Whereas in an average American city, you need to drive everywhere, even a trip to the grocery store feels so tiresome; the situation in Vancouver isn't as bad as other North American cities, but I've once lived in extremely car-dependent places like Mississauga before and the nearest place to get food there is a 30 min drive (without traffic) on a stroad, or a 3 hour walk otherwise. I feel that North America is on the verge of societal collapse, largely thanks to car dependency and single family zoning.
Strong disagree here. 1. The average cost of food in the Netherlands is a fair bit more than the us. The average grocery visit per month in the us is about 440 USD while the netherlands its a bit over 500-600 and there is less of it. 2. Collapse of a society? Where? I think thats a poor conclusion to make from this. There are a fair amount of walkable cities in North America (with continuous projects for more). If people want that, they move to the city. Millions of people don't want that so they won't move there. Its not a good pr a bad thing its just a different lifestyle.
Until I retired and began thinking about how to minimize my use of a car, the condition of our US cities never occurred to me. Now that I'm cycling more than driving, the disastrous over-emphasis on cars is obvious.
Per one of the comments, one of the auditors should borrow a wheelchair and get around in that. Another one could wear a blindfold, though obviously they won't have the skills that blind people pick up. Or the auditing team could include actual blind and disabled people. Also someone on a bike -- here you probably _don't_ want a typical 'cyclist' today, because they're much more risk tolerant than the masses of people who might bike if they didn't fear dying. One note about infill: a big thing is groceries. US has 1 supermarket per 8500 people and 1 convenience store per 2000 people, so I'd guess that a store with fresh meat and produce needs at least 4000 people to be viable. And ideally you'd have 2 such stores in a 10 minute walk, for competition. That may not be feasible, especially in the beginning, but if so that will probably curb the driving reduction you can get. Should still do the infill, but scattered small-scale infills will have limited benefit until they can hook up into a bigger walkable area. Or unless you get much better at bike safe networks.
What did you think of this month's video? Do you think this area is worth our time and energy? Let us know!
Good job. I enjoyed the lesson.
I love it. I’ve wanted to see a video of how a suburban area can be walkable. Thinks slaps.
Loved this! Instantly subbed and could not believe you had less that 300 subs. Can't wait to see more and would love to see a video on how to instigate change in my local area.
This was good. I really like the component in your videos so far where you interact with your community (like the interview with the transit guy in the previous video). I also really appreciate the optimistic approach.
There's definitely value in talking about why successful places are successful or about why unsuccessful places are unsuccessful, but there's also value in talking about how an unsuccessful place can be a little bit better. I like that you're filling in this "missing middle" of urbanist content.
I disagree with your assertion that having lots of developers yields the best results for a neighbourhood. In London we have the "Great Estates" large areas of land that were developed by a single Lord and the sales were Leasehold for 100 years.
They have been in the same family for centuries, each new generation becoming their custodians. They are probably the best run and most attractive developments in the UK.
As someone who lives in one of the many towns that are almost entirely “walkable losers” I really think discussions on how to make these places better are really important
I agree! There's so much work to be done.
True, although i'd say there's nothing to discuss. All planners need to do is not think about car use first, but in the end. Go to a place, sit there and imagine what you'd want around you. Stores, housing, green, maybe an office, walkways and leisure areas. Then think of the 3 times a week you'd need a car to travel further, and accomodate for it, without narrowing your inital plans. DONE.
If your first idea is "how am i going to leave this place", no wonder you get ugly places.
Oh and if zoning is the problem, get that changed. The worst thing in a city nowadays is traffic, not housing next to offices and stores. As long as you can't get the newspaper without a car, there's something wrong.
California just legalized housing on retail plots a few days ago. Your biggest suggestion may be coming to my town!
Ooh, I'll be interested to see what comes of this.
Badly needed in Greater Serramonte
Wish that’d happen here in Washington state. But they keep building single family homes, causing lots of deforestation in the process.
Here in Colorado Springs, CO the city approved an apartment complex to be built at the formers Sears store in the mall. I’m very interested to see how that’ll transform the neighborhood.
As someone from Tulsa, the lack of walkability and unease felt when crossing busy intersections is very common and I can agree it 100% contributes to the lack of residents biking and walking outside of just popular trails such as Mingo or Riverside. Tulsa is definitely a car-centric environment that makes it difficult for anyone to make walking, biking, or busing more primary in day-to-day travel. It can be a difficult place to live for low-income families who have no car or 1 for a large family and have to make use of the existing infrastructure. Which I agree with your thoughts of improving walkability and public transit versus building more roads.
Nice to see that local people with similar ideas are finding each other here.
As a Dutch person I have always be stunned how US cities are set up, but I am also stunned how you try to solve it.
You actually gave the correct answer in your video: a stroad should be a street or a road.
That stroad should clearly be a road, take out the sidewalk completely, no bike lane and take out all the driveways and remove the intersection except one to access a street network like you drew.
Have an earth wall between the -stroad- road and the shopping area so it is a nice and quiet area, in the shopping area should be sidewalks and bike lanes, you don't want to walk or cycle along a busy road. This solution is better and safer for cars as well, one nice stretch of road with only one traffic light and no side exits.
Goed idee! (Ik woon in Middelburg!) Good idea!
That’s a traffic nightmare a bunch of one way streets 🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️
Stroads in my country are very different, with 2-3 storey shophouses built close & along wide 4-5 lane roads back when human-pulled rickshaws used them instead of cars, with much lower speeds, so safety wasn't so much of an issue originally. This road often narrows due to cars & delivery vehicles parking along the side (for the shops in the shophouses) The YT channel Tehsiewdai talks more about it
And don't forget to plant lots of dense, native vegetation on that earth barrier between the road and the shopping district. Lots of trees and shrubs will help reduce the noise as well.
@@angelaburress8586 What's the problem with one-way streets?
The audit process is such a great illustration of why American cities are broken for walkability. The people in charge themselves drive everywhere and all they can see is un-mowed lawns. I unfortunately have little hope for these "walkability losers" till our current generation of planners stay in office. I have great hope and expectations from the future generation of planners.
I hope not because they’re trying to turn everything into mixed use and that’s completely stupid🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️
When they say 'landscaping' could they not also be referring to trees? Because that sidewalk didn't look like it had a lot of shade and that looked like quite a sunny day
@@angelaburress8586 if its a lead factory sure.
But mixed use just means I don't have to drive 10 minutes to the supermarket and 45 minutes to my office.
Why can't I live in an apartment above an office above a shop?
It's worth mentioning that all but 2? of the auditors were men and every person was white. I'm gonna guess that navigating streets like these isn't a daily reality for anyone there. Outside of a car, that is.
@@angelaburress8586 the amount of entitlement in this comment is fascinating. To start, every urban settlement in the history of mankind prior to the 1900s was mixed-use-seemed to work well for them. And more importantly (for the sake of replying to this specific comment, at least), the reason anything has to be "turned into" mixed-use development is because auto lobbyists went and turned almost _everything_ into _unwalkable_ developments in the first place. if you don't like walkable areas where houses intermingle with small businesses, so be it. But the reason it's even "special" in the US to begin with is because someone who agreed with you imposed their idea of America on everyone else, even despite the crippling financial obligations of maintaining expensive autocentric infrastructure, while you're complaining about urbanists supposedly doing the same thing _even though_ that "thing" they're doing is advocating for development patterns that _all_ people can use, young children, disabled people who can't drive, poor people who can't _afford_ to drive, and drunk individuals included. And that is to say nothing of people like me who simply don't want to drive, whether it's for environmental reasons, a desire to feel safe, or any of the dozens of inconveniences that come with owning a car.
Also, if you're concerned about single-family homes or commercial areas that are free from housing, I hope you're equally passionate about opposing highway expansion projects that destroy the property values of these places, if not the entire properties themselves.
The clown, I mean engineer, who designed and wrote my city's bike plan in 2015, does not even ride a bike. So, we have expensive peripheral pieces of network that look exactly like this. It does not help that the word "safe" does not even appear until page 15 of a 25-page document.
Starting with safe neighborhoods and filtered permeability is a great idea. Make it so only destination traffic can go into these neighborhoods. Eliminating stroads and replacing them with streets or roads is a good start too. You can get a lot of walkable and cyclable infrastructure like that without it even being explicitly for bikes. A lot of Dutch bike infrastructure is actually just that, safe traffic calm streets. Bike lanes are important too, but making sure that people can truly go end to end on their bike is vital.
We have an absolutely terrifying feature on one of the bike laned roads in my city where, for whatever reason, there's a freeway style merge from this road onto another road, enabling cars (well, more like ENCOURAGING cars) to zoom across the bike lane without slowing down or using caution or anything. It's ridiculous as a cyclist who has right of way along the first road to have to literally stop and wait for all the merging idiots who don't have right of way who are offramping onto that other road. Freeway style merges should not exist anywhere but freeways. Especially not where there's bike lanes. When vehicles cross over the bike lane, it literally feels like an Indiana Jones cave trap, except for cars instead of swinging blades.
Damn, how deep down the urbanism rabbithole did I go to find someone with so few subscribers? Great vid. Keep it up
Quite deep. I started with NotJustBikes and Adam Something.. and here we go....
@@xiiaohao3871 It starts with NotJustBikes, maybe a little City Beautiful on the side, then you start watching Alan Fisher for the sick train memes, get hypnotized by CityNerd's upper West Coast accent and then bam! You're hooked on the urbanist juice.
@@chaos386 it gets even deeper when you have a 30 min conversation about walkable cities with a random guy at the rock climbing gym (it happened early 2022). like literally I'm like do you watch NotJustBikes and he's like yeah. I'm like that craazyy haha.
@@chaos386 The truly orangepilled watch Eco Gecko, which lies at the intersection of urban planning and politics.
I would love to see a series of you drawing horrible places into walkable neighbourhoods :D
That sounds like a fun hobby: Draw on top of these stores with parking lots, converting them into mixed use zoning, parks, housing with corner stores, etc.
Kyler, Hirmunen has an excellent idea here. And please, do not apologize for making “extreme” suggestions, as I regretted you did here. Extremism in defense of space for people , not cars, is no vice. In fact, urbanism is the only remedy for the failing suburban experiment. Strong Towns teaches (reminds) us that towns have for millennia evolved and grown denser if they are successful towns. The car-centric post-war experiment has imposed this weird urbanism where everything is built out all at once based on Euclidean Zoning (separation of uses) and then never changes. Thousands of years of urbanism are now pushing up against that idea in our growing cities all over America, where the inability to make neighborhoods denser means housing shortages or sprawl or both.
Another benefit of transforming those parking lots around stroads into walkable areas with homes and shops is that all those destinations are easily served by transit because of being in a straight line thanks to the stroad. Linearity is one of the factors for transit to succeed.
Some great ideas here. There's too many urbanist videos lamenting or explaining all the problems and not enough suggesting actual solutions. Keep it up!
The fact that everyone needed to wear safety vests should say it all!
I hate blocks like these - narrow sidewalks that are exposed to scorching heat and freezing temperatures year-round, right up against fast-moving traffic, no greenery, and miles of box stores with "moats" of parking lots for as far s the eye can see. When these retail developers bough the land, they didn't need to consider the community around it - they put up a destination for locals and urbanites to drive to, paving the land because it used to be the cheapest option to providing landscaping, and it gave the impression that these were popular, desirable places to travel to. Now it's proving to be a waste of revenue, resources, and land, and these "stroads" are like scars across livable neighbourhoods, decaying as in-store shopping and retail purchasers are buying more online.
I am all for the land being reapportioned to build more developments on unused parking lots, converting the land into "hubs" where more services and hospitality options are available. Instead of chain restaurants and retail outlets, how about locally-owned cafes, restaurants, breweries, and bakeries? How about adult learning centers, libraries, gyms, doctor's offices, and repair shops? Or even townhouses, condos, and small housing developments? Provide these lots with more greenery, plant trees for natural sunshade, and provide pedestrian friendly rest stops and travel paths to get to bicycle lanes and walking trails. The land we have already used is being wasted, and it's come at a high price, as cities continue to expand, and urban sprawl eats up viable land for agriculture, or wetlands, and forests. We can intensify the land we already occupy, making communities more livable, and more enjoyable.
Exactly!
Now you are getting a little dreamy and utopian with that 'locally owned' stuff. Everything will likely remain top-own franchised corporate control. Everything will be rented an leased, tracked and provided by subscription. There will be no personal charm. Just high tech rabbit warrens.
Definitely emphasize adding native plants not those ugly stupid trees that have no value in the environment it's put in.
I think building codes should also require all the property use positioning to be flipped, Bring the stores up to the front of the lot and put the parking in back. This could also let the city cut down driveway counts by requiring rare but traffic lighted feeder driveways that run to access roads along the far back side of the actual parking lots.
This can in part let the developers still build their unfortunate stripmalls but it does bring the stores up to the sidewalk and sticks the parking lot where it belongs, out of sight.
From a retail POV it never made sense to me for the lot to be what is up front, you would think the stores would want to be what you see driving by.
redrawing that parking lot and adding in other buildings and making it more walkable is something i do literally everyday lol. i make maps of areas that exist and think of ways to redesign that area
That "removing graffiti" had any votes at all compared to everything else is hilarious to me. Maybe it's because I'm a metal spike and mohawk clad punk but uhhh... I think graffiti is so far down the list of things "wrong" with that intersection that it doesn't even make the list.
The silly thing is, the way they "remove" the graffiti in my city is literally spraying over it with an offwhite paint that doesn't even match the concrete at all. It might just look worse than the actual graffiti itself. Italy doesn't typically remove graffiti, which surprised me a lot, even in historical towns. But it saves their taxpayers a lot of money for meaningful budget expenditures instead. America could learn a lot from them. But we won't.
@@michaelstratton5223almost like graffiti is part of Spain, i love it!
I think good bike paths is definitely a good starting remedy for stroad areas since everything is so spread out, it's rarely feasible to walk anywhere even when it does feel safe
Don’t forget the transit, it’d be nice to see a lane turned into a bus lane or LR.
Agreed! We have another video that goes into buses a bit, but transit is a topic we will be looking much more into in the future!
As soon as you pointed out the Satellite view of that GIANT church surrounded by a parking lot bigger than for a rural Walmart I was baffled. That is so weird to see a church and a high school look like a big corporate store in a generic suburb or rural area. Where I'm from, we don't even have Walmart in the cities because the co-ops out-compete it and there's no space for a megamart with a giant stupid parking lot, that would waste a lot of space.
Great video! As an Oklahoman, it's wonderful to see someone tackle the topic of walkability within our cities. We need more people like you bringing this issue to light or else Tulsa and OKC will continue to be carbrained. I also appreciate the positivity of your videos and the fact that you give actual solutions to the problem instead of just listing all the reasons they suck (which are numerous, to be fair lol). Gained a subscriber! Excited to see more videos!
Waaah what a hellscape is that 🤯
It reminds me of the riverside of my city (Lyon, France) which was converted to parking lots in the 1970's... ruining the site. And the municipality decided to make it a promenade in the 2000's. Huge success.
I must admit I dont think I've seen such land use, at this scale I mean, in France. And still we rely far too often on car-centric ideas to design our cities...
I was just walking through a parking lot in Fairfax, VA (because there's no sidewalk between where I was and where I was going) yesterday and passed through a series of parking spaces that are literally NEVER occupied. Looking at that stretch of lot, I realized it was enough room to put in 6 or 8 row houses, or mixed use buildings and disrupt absolutely nothing.
Of course, it's also right by a massive intersection that divides a residential/commercial area from two schools, so kids have to walk across 6+ lanes, including two slip-lanes. And the city just allowed a private company to put up a fence blocking the only nearby, wheelchair accessible, official & maintained path between two neighborhoods... So...yeah, this town needs some work.
I'm in the Bailey's Crossroads section of Fairfax County, which is considered to be walkable. There are sidewalks or multi-use paths that allow pedestrians to get from point A to point B without having to go through a parking lot, but not a lot of people walk here because of the lack of buffer from traffic, driveway cutouts, and lack of visual interest. The county has a great plan for increasing walkability and micro mobility on the books, but I fear they will not be able to implement most of it as long as the State is in charge of the roads. Heck, it took 20 years of persistent lobbying and many traffic accidents to get VDOT to approve a traffic light that allows people to safely cross stroad to get to a local bodega a mere block from a 350 unit condo building. Good luck with getting your trail unblocked.
@@hilaryweiner893, yeah, that area is not fun to walk in at all. I almost got a job there a few years ago (right at the crossroads, actually) and my trip to the interview was bleak. I'd have had to cross 7 on my way to work every day, and that didn't strike me as a good thing.
VDOT seems to be a very retrograde organization. They're actively fighting against any people-focused improvements, and only seem interested in building freeways and expanding roads. It's like they want Virginia to look like Texas. And nobody with power to do anything about it seems interested, so their fiefdom of car-centered construction is allowed to keep on chugging, in spite of everything.
@@matthewconstantine5015 I don't blame you for not wanting to cross Rt. 7! I'm on the Columbia Pike side, which is a little better. But you are absolutely right about VDOT, which doesn't consider the needs of pedestrians.
Ive known a few people in my life that would show up at a fence blocking a public path like that with a battery powered sawzall and cut a section out. And if they rebuilt it, they would cut it again and keep doing it till the company tired of replacing the section.
It’s really nice to see more ubanists focused on what appears to be the best solution for big box stores (a pet peeve of mine): MIXED USE DEVELOPMENT! I think what you explain towards the end of the video is key. So much space can be saved and most importantly, we would be building unique, WALKABLE, communities! I have to start vouching for mixed use development in my town here in Florida. And you’re probably aware of how bad it is here…
Got this as a random rec from the algorithm and am really impressed with the quality from a new channel. Great job!
I’m from the US but haven’t been back in two years and this was a visceral reminder of just how unwalkable most of it is. (Tulsa looks eerily similar to my hometown even tho it’s in a different state).
On another note, the lawn/landscaping comments really caught me off guard - that counts as overgrown?? And even if it were, that’s a bad thing?? As you may be aware, much like car dependency, “traditional” lawns and landscaping are very much something we need to ween ourselves off of going forward. They’re terrible for biodiversity, cause problems in terms of water and fertilizer use etc. Thankfully, I think people are starting to wake up to this as they are to the problems with car centric infrastructure, although clearly there’s a long way to go until minds are changed, especially in the US it would appear
I feel like even in places like this that are unlikely to ever feel “nice” to walk down without a huge amount of work, they should be technically “walkable” to the most basic possible level, allowing people to walk from one side of the road to another so it is at least possible to get from one corner to another.
8:24 dude clicked on the edit button of the city and made it better.
I salute you for maintaining any positivity while walking around such a horrible place.
I'm from Lawton, OK, and it's really great to see someone talking about these issues at a more local level. I don't think that these sorts of issues can be talked about on a general level. They have to be realized as issues in local communities, and action needs to be taken on a local level.
hello, fellow Lawtonite. would you like to join my strong towns chapter?
Altus just put-in a two-mile strech of sidewalk on a major road in town.
Literally could not agree with this more. It's a travesty that we are still building strip malls and big box stores with massive parking lots completely disjointing our cities. Like haven't we all traveled to LA and seen that as a warning of what not to do? 😂
Glad to keep finding more channels that are against stroads. Hope this momentum keeps up and becomes mainstream.
thing is they are hazardous to the cars too, I don't think they benefit anyone given how many times I have seen them in dash camera videos and having accidents or lots of close calls.
Dangerous to drivers, walkers, bikers(motor and pedal), and transit.
That landscaping was the leading concern is so laughably predictable - You have a group of able-bodied men, no one attempting it in a wheel chair, with children, or even necessarily under the assumption that they needed to be somewhere specific in a timely manner, and after huge swaths of time being taken up crossing dangerous sections of roads, they are worried about the landscaping.
It would be funny if it wasn't tragic that these kind of people make most our decisions for us.
The Orange Pill network just keeps getting bigger. Love it! Being from Europe when I see a map with standard stuff like schools and art centres being lost in a sea of car parks, with their entrances far removed, I scream internally. I loved the redesigned big box store into residences and corner shops.
You mentionned trees provide shades on long, straight stroads like this one, but buildings can do that as well, which goes perfectly with your dream plan. In so many places in the world, where the temperatures are high, and the sun is strong, people have tried to generate as much shade as possible, by building houses close to the next one, creating narrow(er) streets, channeling the wind, and lowering the temperature. But in the US you have to cook under the sun to wait for the bus. This blows my mind how dangerous it is. The lack of protection on the sidewalk from incoming cars is baffling. Great content, moving on to your next video!
so glad i found an oklahoma based audience after falling down this rabbit hole!!! sometimes it feels completely impossible to improve this state but you give me hope hahaha
I use to live in Tulsa, OK. I support this 100%.
In my opinion, the better a city is planned, the lower its environmental impact will be.
Being from the NorthEast, particularly the NY-NJ region I would observe that the biggest problem is that while this may legally be a city it is clearly a suburban setting. the land uses and the streets are not cities. An dense cityscape solves many of these problems. It is one reason why I love NYC with real transit, low car ownership and except in parks little green grass. But that is what a city is about. You are completely correct about the unsignalized exit ramp, there should be a pedestrian signal there particularly with a cross walk. Any by the way it appears from the aerials on Googal that there is some dividion between the road and Krispey Kreme indicating they cannot or should not mow it, but it is obvious that that the grass is cut by someone.
10:00 big block stores, malls and concentration of business are a nightmare. we need to break them up, and incentivize people to walk arround. residents don't need an "all in one stop" for everything that is far away from everyone, residents need a neighbourhood with a multitude of stores and services spread out. Recife (where i live) is too, guilty of this, having lots of malls, but there is a robust network of local services, and you're never 10 minutes away (walking distance) from groceries or a drugstore for example. ideally what i would suggest is scrap completely the parking lots and transform them into multi-use apartments (first floor and second floor as services, and higher as apartments). make stores abundant everywhere. incentivize people walk arround the neighbourhood if they need something very specific (example: let's say you need a very specific electronic part for your PC, of course there would not be PC shops everywhere, but one per neighbourhood should suffice, and incentivize walking the place). if we break down malls and big department stores as smaller bits, with a multitude of services that are spread equally in a neighbourhood you can create by default, cities where the citizen will want to walk because he will never be 5 or 10 minutes walk distance from a store. and everyone wins.
in my opnion you could do this:
Ideally: ban cars arround Tulsa. turn parking lots into multi-floor buildings, and invest heavly in walking,biking and bus. and i mean, Heavly. a city of 500k, should at least have a network of 10000 buses and at least a 4 or 5 lane surface or underground metro (that same old rule of thumb of 1 bus for every 500 citizens). i know this will never happen because it is the U.S., bu you guys will not have a choice in the medium to long term because of climate change.
More feasible in the U.S. reality: if you really, really need to keep cars, urrrgh.... at least put the parking garages underground and make the roads at maximum 3 lanes for major avenues,and 2 lanes for streets. i again call atention to my city, Recife... even the bigger avenues, have at best 4 lanes (we tend to do 3 lanes and divide with a big open refuge area if we need more lanes), and huge areas with elevated kerbs to protect the pedestrian from cars. it is not perfect, nonono, veeeery far from it, but to get things started you should take notes of the infrastructure here. there is sidewalks everywhere, and even if some are of extremely questionable quality (unleveled, painfully broken, and sometimes unwalkable) they are there. raise every crossing you can, and limit the vehicle speeds for at maximum 30 km/h inside an urban zone and streets, and (this is being ultra generous even) 50km/h on avenues. and for the love of god... no strodes... please.
if you want examples of some of our streets and avenues, check these out: Rua da moeda (an example of pedestrian only street), Rua Padre Carapuceiro, Avenida Recife, Avenida Conde da Boa Vista, Avenida Agamenon Magalhães, Avenida Mal. Mascarenhas de Moraes, Avenida Presidente Castelo Branco (Jaboatão dos Guararapes), Avenida Sen. Robert Kennedy, Rua Ribeiro de Brito, Rua Ernesto de Paula Santos, Avenida Caxangá, Rua Estudante Sinval Meira Enrique, Rua do Jangadeiro (Jaboatão dos Guararapes), Avenida Boa viagem, Via Mangue... there is tons and tons of examples you can take from here for making your streets at Tulsa better.
>residents don't need an "all in one stop" for everything that is far away from everyone, residents need a neighbourhood with a multitude of stores and services spread out."
Well then that's for people to decide with their wallets. Like how do you just decide this on your own?
@@xandercruz900 i disagree. voting with wallets does nothing in this instance in my view. sometimes there is no option than government intervention.
@@marcossonicracer No one needs the state to "intervene" because you don't like their shopping habits or choices.
If your product is better, feel free to build it, and the rest will take care of itself.
The Algorithm, in its wisdom, decided to show me your video, and I look forward to many more!
Glad you enjoyed! See you again next month.
Remove parking minimums and revamp the zoning requirements to allow for mixed use development. Some areas will naturally densify (those with higher land values) which should be accommodated with slower traffic and more walking/biking infrastructure. Of course getting the first two done is the toughest part but I think it is a better (albeit much slower) solution than trying to force a very expensive change.
Ooh, you might have just predicted what our next video will be about...
Another insightful video on a subject that is definitely one of your passions, Kyler. I'm proud of what you're doing here!
god "illegally jaywalk" reminded me that in the US there's this stupid rule and honestly it just makes me sad the automobile industry had so much power over your legislation
regarding the end of the video, you say that "you're getting carried away" but removing car park is actually one of the most effective solutions to stop people from using their car. In most cities trying to reduce car usage, telling people "please dont take your car" has been proven ineffective to reduce traffic. Sadly, the most effective way to achieve that is making the cagies lives a living hell so that they just use something else.
While I've never been stopped for jaywalking, the idea that that rule does exist is BS. I always tell people: I believe it is far safer to cross whenever there is no traffic coming whether there is a cross walk or not. In fact, I think going to the crosswalks at a 4 way intersection is way more dangerous than just crossing the first chance you get and only having to worry about cars from 2 directions vs 4 directions with paint n lights for 'protection'
I loved your ideas, keep them coming. Maybe with enough TH-cam channels like this, people will actually start to internalize these notions, and someone in positions of power may actually start listening. By the way, I love your subtle dig at Amazon.
Trigger warnings to every Karen, Nimby and McMansion boomer who dares watching the solutions section of the video.
An interesting note is that walkability often hurts the big box stores bc the lower operating costs helps far more desirable small business actually compete (which is why they're so much less popular in Europe/Asia)
Shhhh, don't tell the big box stores ;)
@@eryngo.urbanism given how much I see the ship to store option popping up for things on sites for biz like BestBuy I think one day the company will phase out its hangar sized stores, And will market onsite pickup at smaller places and sell it as a "fight porch pirates, ship to our location and pick up on your own time" Amazon is slowly conditioning people that they do not need everything immediately and a MiniBuy could still have some needs on site like cables and maybe minor computer bits like keyboards and mice.
lol OMG look at all that obnoxious parking @ 2:00 . What a dystopian nightmare most of America is.
I love the positivity. TH-cam has enough whiny urbanist channels, in my opinion--I want to hear more about how to get things done!
I just discovered you and the production quality is fantastic! It's always nice to find new urbanism and transit TH-cam channels.
Wow! Great content, tone, editing. You, sir, just earned a sub!
The fact that the auditors feel the need to wear high-visibility vests while *crossing the street* says it all...
omg I've been thinking about all of those issues for a while, and finding your videos just made my day. Love the ideas and the initiatives!
Found this video within an hour of getting home from the Best Buy at 71st and 169. Thank you for the video, this city needs it.
In Fort Worth a developer turned an old Montgomery Ward's into a mixed use development, so it has been done.
When I walk around it’s sad the street trees and light poles get mowed down by cars and not replaced. I’ve even seen the holes where a tree used to go filled in with concrete.
In Spain a few years ago shopping centers became fashionable, far from inhabited areas, it was modernity, people had to go by car and fill a large shopping cart... fortunately people have discovered that the trade of Proximity, for the usual day-to-day purchases and the commercial streets, are much more comfortable and less time is lost. Many large commercial brands are opening neighborhood supermarkets and small shops in the neighborhoods. I hope that in a few years those large commercial areas in the suburbs will only be a memory of the past. Everything must be within a 15-minute walk, the health center, the bakery, the post office, the fruit shop... and of course the bar where you can drink a wine or a beer, that is quality of life.
This is my first video that I've seen of yours, fantastic quality, you will go far. New subscriber gained!
Thank you for your support! You just barely managed to be one of the first thousand! Looking forward to making more videos for you all in the future.
Your idea at around 10:19 of turning a giant parking lot into a compact neighborhood is what looks like my city is doing. No idea if it will help. The problem with those is it fails when people can't get to where they want to go without a car. Causing major issues in a development like that.
I watch a bunch of videos of people talking about walkable cities so I am very happy to see a video where someone is doing something about this! Crazy how you all were basically the only ones walking that trail, just goes to show how many people drive in order to get around because of how dangerous and inconvenient it is to walk. I really love your idea of turning the strip plazas into walkable mixed zones and I have seen a lot of that done in Atlanta. I felt very safe walking and riding a scooter around that city and wish more places were like that here in the US
The outer perimeter of the parking lots are normally empty, so the first step would be to build commercial space fronting the street. Bonus points for apartments above the stores, but who would want to live next to that traffic?
For the road itself, I think narrowing the lanes would be a good first step. With the extra space, I would set up some kind of barrier, then a protected bike lane parallel to the sidewalk.
Great quality. The new algorithm changes give smaller creators a chance I noticed videos with only a few views being recommended to me and yours is one of them!!
Backing up / slowing down highway traffic is a good thing. It begins the task of discouraging people from using their cars and results in a positive spiral.
What’s interesting is that with your infill design, the one major thing I would change is…just make sure there’s a parking garage. Having well designed vertical parking would support essentially the exact same number of customers from vehicle traffic while dramatically freeing up the needed space for apartments, offices and so on. It’s one concession that honestly leaves no real drawbacks to the idea. Because especially if the area is pleasant, no one would care if they had to walk a couple blocks form the garage, because it’s not a threatening environment.
But really the obvious takeaway is that designing mixed use spaces and being very thoughtful of how to accommodate people first and foremost seems like such an obvious winning concept.
You've got to dig that intersection up and stick a tunnel under it. Big metal circular storm pipe. Then stick concrete around it, backfill some dirt and other layers and re-pave. If they do it right, it'd be a 1-week disruption to fix it entirely.
I love your video style! Great scripting! Good angle, and different feel from other urbanist channels than I like. I appreciate the book recommendation as well. Just downloaded it on audible.
Great video! Just stumbled across this from a Not Just Bikes vid, enjoyed the pragmatism of the proposed solutions
This is the question I've been asking - can virtually unwalkable places become walkable and how do we get them to be walkable. But I also want know how we can start to create livable hubs in suburban sprawl areas. One thought I had was to have farmers markets and food trucks in parks as an early step. That might get people out into the neighborhood and begin to change the mindset. Changing big parking lots into multi use apartments, offices and stores is an idea whose time has come, even if people in car centric places can't envision it yet. We need to help people see it now, because cars are becoming unsustainable.
I look at this and think it should become a road. But everytime I suggest that there's always the issue of supporting the businesses along it. My usual goto is to "move it" to a street behind the existing building, but I honestly have never seen it implemented well.
same with hwy 1 thru HMB
A major issue I have with Jeff Speck's approach is it assumes one has a walkable area to start with. I bring this up because there genuinely seem to be parts of the United States where there is no walkable area to start, whether its in downtown or elsewhere. It's similar to my issue with Strong Towns where one has to have an urban core to start with in order to incrementally work one's way out from it, whether in terms of walkability, mass transit, ect.,
I think it's a good approach, but it should definitely be complemented with other approaches, especially in places like Tulsa that have lots of unwalkable areas.
Idk, my impression is that this kind of approach prioritizes places with the most potential; it doesn't require the places to be walkable to begin with. For a small urban town, the place with the most potential is of course the urban core. For a suburban town, it's the lifestyle center or the mall. In that case, we should prioritize improvements in these areas by building compact mixed-use nodes and connect it to transit, rather than e.g. bringing more commercial/office space and transit to the actual low-density single-family residential clusters. It's just easier and more economically feasible. In the far future, suburban towns might end up contracting in size, with most of them centered around former lifestyle centers/malls that have now become actual urban cores.
@@junirenjana Okay, that does help, and it would be able to capitalize off of say, cheap/free land use reform. Although I'm not quite sure what to do about oversized parking lots in the context of malls.
@@88Factor Some areas are just beyond repair to the point that it's probably in the best public interest to just let them rot away. However, in some cases, including the specific case cited in this video where the site sits on a major transportation node, infill development could prove beneficial.
@@junirenjana That's fair, especially as I'm relatively persuaded that, for the most part, there aren't entire communities beyond repair, which is too often what an incremental approach, for example, can curse communities to unintentionally that need more major changes to really get going on the path to revitalization.
This is something I thought before. All the parking spaces can be used to make into mixed use/usable land for development. I've seen it be done, it can be done. and I am happy to advocate for it in many places. Saves us from having to build more outward when we can use all that valuable land around. I think people walking distance to many amenities is a great plus.
So glad to see a channel that offers ideas for the US. It's easy to admire Europe and then think the US is beyond help. My approach to walking is to walk everywhere, no matter what.
This video is such a breath of fresh air. Tired of all these urban development videos that just point out the problem without providing an actual solution, besides "its better in this city."
The Peoria Avenue cycleway really needs to be fixed by requiring businesses to raise their driveways and provide a second stop sign to motorists leaving, one for the cycleway and one for the road. And that one for the cycleway definitely needs to have a "CYCLEWAY TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP" placard, and the cycleway itself needs to have a sidewalk.
Holy Hell, that arduous trek across that stroad that seemingly took FOREVER, God Damn I thought I hated stroads enough already but Jesus H. Christ, that stroad almost gave me an aneurysm.
HOLY SHIT I THOUGHT THIS VIDEO HAD 100K+ VIEWS! Congratulations dude! Amazing work.
Wish you would make a video please on what a normal person or a citizen can do to help persuade the people in charge to make more cities walkable and bikeable etc. and better places to live without always having to drive.
awesome video! I’m a Tulsa native and I absolutely loved this. We need to get a group going to start hashing out ideas for urban planning/public transport. I don’t think we’d see much of both in our lifetime in this city, but I know for a fact Tulsa would benefit from both. I lived abroad for three years and saw cities half the size of Tulsa with fantastic public transport and walking trails. If we truly wish to combat climate change, we need to build cities that are for humans & not strictly for vehicles
It looks like it could be easier just to make an underpass under the road, no waiting needed, to pedestrians or bikes crossing the road.
My only concern with an underpass is visibility. It would create a great place for pedestrians and cyclists to get mugged. But you're right, ideally it would be a good solution, because it would allow you to keep moving on the path and not have to worry about crossing the road.
@@eryngo.urbanism mugged.... That's called a city problem.
Get ready for the algorithm boom friend!
adding a comment because i hear that helps get on the algorithms good side
I love this. The only issue I didn't see addressed is that all that parking on the ugly stroad is for people who live in whatever nearby sprawling, car-dependent residential suburb it connects to. Until such time as we get rid of those (if ever, in my wildest dreams), those people will need a place to park to do their shopping. What's the solution? Multi-story parking garage? Underground parking? Or is the argument that so much parking goes to waste anyway you can get rid of most of it and just keep some for the suburbanites?
if one cant be rid of those refuge islands they should probably have torso high steel reinforced concrete walls protecting them so even a speeding semi has a reaction like a bug on a bumper if it exits the travel lane.
I would also say stick parking lots by code behind all stores and bring them up to the curb and have access road run along behind them, This way you shut traffic onto a very small handful of traffic lighted intersections for exiting onto the main road and any between store driving is now stuffed way away from the sidewalks. As I can see from Gmaps the smaller food places are almost up against the road but the bigs are not.
on a side note I can really tell I am from New England, because I see one structure there and am like "holy crap why is a church almost as big as a shopping mall?".
I think an enormous issue is how many cities and "suburban cities" today grew up after the car. Young cities like almost all of the Midwest, south, and much of the west coast save the old industrial ones on the great lakes in those states also grew up post-car dominance. Aside from land constraints one thing that kept NYC, Philly, DC, Chicago, Boston all dense is people had to get around those cities in a time before the car. This meant on foot, or trolley cars first horse pulled and then electric and eventually subways.
Tulsa has not even half the population of Philadelphia but is actually bigger in land area, So they are really inefficiently using their space.
71st Street looks like it should be a Jersey Freeway to me. So I would put a bridge over the intersection for the trail while converting the intersection to a diverging diamond, eliminate all at-grade crossovers of 71st Street, provide grade-separated roundabouts at the mile roads and several overpasses in-between, and cut parallel continuous streets through all the big box and strip mall parking lots to create higher density neighborhoods like the one you demonstrated might be possible.
Ah yes, the Mingo Valley Cycleway. I honestly didn't think we could possibly get more carbrained than the Interstate 205 Cycleway in Portland but at least that cycleway is grade separated and has offramps to cross streets, a state requirement when the freeway itself doesn't allow bicycles on the shoulders.
This is EXACTLY what I think about all day. Great vid. A good secondary effect that I hope would happen if we did this kind of redevelopment is that the value of the land would increase and it would be more attractive to tear down the ugly big box stores and redevelop them into dense, multi-tenant buildings.
Good stuff! There are probably a million shopping centers next to suburban subdivisions. Building wide multi-use paths from the subdivision to the shopping center would be a productive first baby step toward better suburbs. There are some wide multi-use paths in Lakewood Ranch (Florida) that get fairly frequent use in an other car-first environment (if they were connected in a complete network they’d get much more use).
Something I’d say is separate the road and street sections a way to do this is have 4 road lanes (2 in each direction) with a buffer each side (with the occasional drive) then a street with pavement behind those sections
Like this? th-cam.com/video/a40nlBEQj0o/w-d-xo.html
as an avid viewer of everyone you mentioned, i must say this was equally interesting, great job my friend!!
I'm not interested in totally filling in a car-grid with traditional building blocks. I'd focus on different things: How can you integrate biking trails into the slow fabric of your city? What does this system look like? What are the key details? How do we design those?
In this case the highway is the main barrier. An underpass or bridge, crossing the highway at E 66th Street to E 67th Street, would be nice, because it avoids lethal interaction. But it might be a US political no go. So lets regard parking space as empty, and put a diagonal cyclepath + sidewalk (not a mixed one) from the Mingo trail bridge you showed, to David's Bridal corner. This way you cut the distance towards the important destinations of church and school with about 140 meters. Now you can design one or two buildings that put eyes on the slowstreet, and highlight + solve main points of conflict. If you design this first piece of slow fabric well, you'll get a benchmark for all future development.
You don't need to fill in the whole lot. It's cheaper, easier, and less intrusive, if you mark the cornerstones, and let the future fill in the gaps.
Nice, a video focusing on Tulsa! Yes, the Mingo Creek Trail is pretty nice, but not really connected to anything commercial. Which is why I suspect it doesn't get a lot of use. I don't worry about 71st street and most of south Tulsa, because I live farther north in the Admiral and Harvard area, and I don't have a car, so i just don''t go far south very often. Sometimes I get as far as 51st street, but rarely do I go farther south.
The 71st area between Memorial to the Mingo Valley Expressway has always been high car traffic. So I don't know why you focused on that area unless you just wanted to tackle the hard part first. Besides yourselves, how many pedestrians or bicyclists did you see on your trip? Maybe you can argue that if it were more bike and pedestrian friendly, the more bicyclists and pedestrians would use it. But remember, walkability is mostly for people who actually live in that area. How many people who live there would give up driving to walk to the stores?
Tulsa tries, but still ends up doing silly things. They've built sidewalks along almost all major roads (with a few irritating exceptions) even though few people actually walk on them. So they're fine for bicycling--why add bike lanes, especially the ones that are just painted lines, where you have plenty of good sidewalk to bike on? The sidewalk's safer and physically separated from car traffic.
I'm super fascinated with stroad conversions and reinaginations
I really wish more 'audits' like that were done in Florida. It really sucks here with car-centrism.
Tulsa through its history has done some things that other cities could learn from. Topics that would provide good examples: 1) When the Broken Arrow expressway was built, neighborhood street underpasses at Hudson/Irvington and Pittsburg were included. Good example of how to maintain neighborhood connection when limited-access highways are built. Really important for N/S transit on foot or bike. 2) The half-mile grid system of bike routes in south Tulsa works pretty well. I have some specific comments in the "really nice to have; a few details could have been better" vein but it is a model that can be emulated in other places. 3) The community got the OK Turnpike Authority to build parallel MUP when the Creek Turnpike was built. 4) Though the headline story is the success of flood control along Mingo, the inclusion of MUP in that corridor is also an important bike transportation feature. I point these items out, particularly 1, 2 and 3 because I am trying to show advocates in Houston how these features could be applied here.
wow! as an oklahoman i didnt know there were people actually trying to make our cities more walkable! im in the OKC area, do you have any groups/places that advocate for more walkability that I could join? i've been trying to add a sidewalk outside my neighborhood to this strip plaza literally right down the street but to no avail :(
Hmmm I'm not sure about OKC but they probably have something similar to the biking and pedestrian advisory committee here in Tulsa. And if they don't, maybe you can get something started.
really punching above your weight subscriber wise with the production quality here. Just found your channel with this video and im now subscribed. Keep it up!
I think you do have to get carried away when we’re talking about North American urban planning policies. Part of the issue is that our cities (speaking as a Canadian) don’t take the drastic action needed to really curb these issues. They’re not willing to go against the NIMBY’s, or to make meaningful changes to disincentivize driving, or to invest the money into public transit, or to actually make cycling safe, or prioritize pedestrians. My hometown of Guelph, Ontario (the name maybe recognized from @notjustbikes video on financial solvency) is a perfect example of this. It’s often considered one of the most forward thinking cities in Canada, during covid they established a car free dining district in downtown, completely closing off two streets to all private traffic. Everyone loved it, and it was the best thing Guelph has ever done. But each year they scale it back, last year it was only closed on weekends, this past year it was opened but the parking spots were kept as patios. Point is, we need drastic changes in our planning policies, and politicians willing to do it. Almost any project from a mixed use neighbourhoods, to road diets, pedestrianized streets or roundabouts have little support before being implemented, but ultimately win the people over in the end.
I agree with you, on every point.
However, I have a bit of a problem with the Strong Towns conception of a stroad. Strong Towns go out of their way to make stroads sound like an illogical attempt to square the circle. They're not. The actual contradiction is that they are intended to be places that are exclusively for people in cars while still pretending to cater for people on foot.
Imagine that (by some inexplicable natural selection) humans evolved into creatures that were all 6m long, 2.5m wide and typically walked at 80kph. Now imagine that you needed to design a shopping mall for these creatures. What you'd come up with would likely be a multilane, high speed "mall" lined with widely spaced drive throughs, each marked with a giant sign that could be easily read far in advance. This is what a stroad is. A shopping mall designed for a future where pedestrians as we currently understand them have ceased to exist.
In the imagined future of the mid 20th century, humanity was supposed to retreat from the outdoors. Outdoor and public spaces were therefore designed on the understanding that the ONLY way that people would interact with them was inside a vehicle. Walking, and cycling and even just being outdoors was supposed to fade in significance and eventually die out entirely. And "forward looking" planners built places that were optimised for this future when it inevitably eventuated. But in the meantime, it's a free country and if you insist on going out without a car (practically naked in this imagined future), well nobody was going to stop you. You would be (cough cough) perfectly welcome in these places that had been designed to exclude you. The fact that people have continued to try to go outside means that we have to keep pretending that going outside is OK, when we've clearly designed around the idea that it's not.
To this end, small changes are fine, but I think that far from being pie in the sky, your step 4 is actually the main act. If you want to improve places that were designed for an imaginary future where pedestrians don't exist, then you need to redesign these places to actually cater for people.
This is great! I had the pleasure to visit the Netherlands last November, and I had a lot of fun admiring all the excellent infrastructure there. I never looked back to North America the same way, even to my home city of Vancouver, even though it is transit friendly there are still a lot of cars there. I've already watched a lot of content from Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns (well before my visit to the Netherlands) and learned to reject the North American standard of car infrastructure. Even the little things matter: whereas getting food in restaurants or grocery stores is relatively affordable and accessible, it is much harder to do so back home, and from what I've seen food prices in Canada and the USA are much more expensive than in the Netherlands. Inside and near major train stations in the Netherlands, grocery stores are easily accessible, so after a day working in the city (or as a tourist, finishing a visit to the city), you could just pop into a store and buy food, before hopping onto a train to get home (in my case, a hotel in Hoofddorp, one station after Schiphol Airport). Whereas in an average American city, you need to drive everywhere, even a trip to the grocery store feels so tiresome; the situation in Vancouver isn't as bad as other North American cities, but I've once lived in extremely car-dependent places like Mississauga before and the nearest place to get food there is a 30 min drive (without traffic) on a stroad, or a 3 hour walk otherwise.
I feel that North America is on the verge of societal collapse, largely thanks to car dependency and single family zoning.
Strong disagree here.
1. The average cost of food in the Netherlands is a fair bit more than the us. The average grocery visit per month in the us is about 440 USD while the netherlands its a bit over 500-600 and there is less of it.
2. Collapse of a society? Where? I think thats a poor conclusion to make from this. There are a fair amount of walkable cities in North America (with continuous projects for more). If people want that, they move to the city. Millions of people don't want that so they won't move there. Its not a good pr a bad thing its just a different lifestyle.
Only 1k subs? Well heres one more! Great vid c:
Until I retired and began thinking about how to minimize my use of a car, the condition of our US cities never occurred to me. Now that I'm cycling more than driving, the disastrous over-emphasis on cars is obvious.
Great video! I'm surprised you don't have more subscribers yet!
Just found your channel, and I am glad I did. Great job.
Per one of the comments, one of the auditors should borrow a wheelchair and get around in that. Another one could wear a blindfold, though obviously they won't have the skills that blind people pick up. Or the auditing team could include actual blind and disabled people. Also someone on a bike -- here you probably _don't_ want a typical 'cyclist' today, because they're much more risk tolerant than the masses of people who might bike if they didn't fear dying.
One note about infill: a big thing is groceries. US has 1 supermarket per 8500 people and 1 convenience store per 2000 people, so I'd guess that a store with fresh meat and produce needs at least 4000 people to be viable. And ideally you'd have 2 such stores in a 10 minute walk, for competition. That may not be feasible, especially in the beginning, but if so that will probably curb the driving reduction you can get. Should still do the infill, but scattered small-scale infills will have limited benefit until they can hook up into a bigger walkable area. Or unless you get much better at bike safe networks.