I'm so tired of people arguing that people are dumb therefore roads are dangerous. People are dumb everywhere. Does that mean people who make a small mistake deserve to die, or that people who recklessly drive should destroy families? No. It shouldn't. The road system in the US is failing us.
@@DolphinWithIgloo-fg3ow Are you joking or are you really being this dense? You can’t expect 100% of the population to follow the rules of the road. Human behavior sadly does not work that way. Hence we should design roads to intuitively slow people down or pay more attention. Think of speed platforms, narrower roads, set-back crossings and intersections minimizing crash impacts.
Even for drivers paying full attention, fewer lanes would help. It’s very difficult to make sure 6 to 10 lanes of high-speed cross traffic are clear before crossing. Even for narrow, 2-lane roads, daylighting intersections rather than permitting parking right up to them help a lot. There are many proven ways to improve upon our dangerous road and street designs. We should implement them.
Remember that language always matters: Roads are not "for cars" they are for transportation. This is a great examination of ways to include other methods of transportation besides driving into road design. Thank you for continuing to promote awareness of the need for more intelligently designed transportation infrastructure.
So far, there are also the problems of: 1. Strict zoning laws of single family homes. 2. The bulldozing of lower income neighborhoods for highways 3. The accessibility of cheap cars to anyone 4. Lack of relatable clean safe public transit
@@bluefungiactually parents of boomers started this mess and I think most of the boomer behaviors were as a result of toxic parenthood that many of the boomer generations were subjected to. I'm not in any way justifying them but we have to question how they ended up like this.
Number 3 is disappearing fast. My wife’s first car was secondhand from her best friend, and honestly should’ve been completely rebuilt or outright scrapped. I could only afford my first car debt-free because my parents paid for it. We’re still paying for my wife’s replacement car.
I think another reason for such high accident rates in the US is the fact that there are no alternatives to driving. Not everyone is a "professional" driver but in the US everyone ir forced to drive. Pluss their driving schools and tests are nothing compared to for example the Netherlands(since everyone in the US has to have a drivers licence to participate in society while in the EU you have a choice). I think a lot of americans who are not that comfortable at the wheel of a car would prefer other means of transportation which in turn would remove unconfident drivers from roads, but they just don't have a choice🤷♂️
Oh yeah I'm not really sure I'd be a competent driver so I just don't. I ride bikes and take the train for longer distances. (Belgium) It's not all perfect, you know sometimes it rains or the trains have delays sometimes but at least I feel pretty safe, stress-free and don't have the massive financial burden of a car.
@@hananas2 Exactly! And that doesn’t just go for those of us that are less confident behind a steering wheel. I’m a confident driver. Only two years in yet about 35k kilometers all across Europe. I like driving. I like taking the car on a road trip, or to a regular outing to the park or the beach. What I don’t like is using my car for my daily trips. I rather walk to the neighborhood supermarket than take the car to the other side of town, pay attention to traffic and being slowed down while I’m just running errands. I don’t like driving to college, having to deal with traffic, impatient drivers and traffic jams when I’m trying to run on schedule. I much rather just walk to my bus stop in peace and read a book in the train. Not a worry in the world and nothing to constantly have to pay attention to when I’m just trying to start my day. It’s much more relaxed to be able to look out the window or get some work done while traveling than to constantly pay attention to drivers while you’re already stressed out from your school work.
I feel like in some ways, we try to make driving as _easy_ as possible in the US (in terms of the amount of judgment and skill it takes to drive). Think traffic lights instead of roundabouts, stop signs instead of yield signs, wider lanes, etc. IMO you don't really have to be a professional driver in the US to drive pretty safely; you just have to have the correct attitude and priorities. I'm sure nobody reading this comment would make the kinds of extremely-negligent driving mistakes shown at the beginning of this video, even if your driving skill is below average. IMO we could get our accident fatality rate way down if we just worked on our cultural attitudes about driving (people having a sense of entitlement and acting like they own the road, leading to road rage incidents, etc.). One thing that this video doesn't mention that I'm sure contributes to the difference in speeding and accident rates between the US and Europe is how we enforce speed limits: In Europe, speed limits are often enforced by automatic cameras rather than human police officers, while in the USA some drivers feel like they can drive as fast as they want as long as they don't see any police around. (I actually live in a very rural area--my town has a population around 600-700, and we have to drive 30 minutes to get to the nearest other town--and for a long time it was pretty much common knowledge that the county police didn't pay any attention to the road out to my town, so people would drive as fast as they wanted.) Granted, I also know that European speeding fines are often less expensive than traffic tickets in the US unless you're going _really_ fast.
@@philipmcniel4908 Yeah we design our roads to be easy. I was amazed when I went to the UK, and you had very narrow country roads, and you often needed to negotiate with oncoming traffic to pass at narrow points/ towns. Roads in the Uk are very narrow by US standards, even on the motorway. It makes you pay attention to the road much more, and thus is harder. But it is significantly safer.
@@bixbysnyder-00 Again, I think the safety has to come down to cultural attitudes. If you put a roundabout in some places in the US, people would eventually start flying around it at 30 mph, especially at night in rural areas where cars only come by every 10-20 minutes (or less) so it's easy--and *almost* always correct--to just assume there's no one else coming. Same with some of those tight roads.
06:53 Response of Americans : "Quick, call the cops, some parents need to be punished", instead of holding their government responsible for creating a world where children can't live independently. And I see 'creating a dangerous world' in the same light as 'allowing a situation to develop into'.
We're absolutely culpable as a society. It's crazy to me that people feel like the enormous car lines at schools are acceptable. Some parents still choose the car line over walking or allowing their kids to ride the bus without a reason other than that being their preference. Sure the infrastructure design has influenced that preference over time, but schools and the streets around them are not designed for those massive car lines and you would think that parents with other options would gladly take them.
@@DizzyDiddy Do an experiment where the area around a school is declared a car free zone, block the road of concrete barriers, in the Netherlands we do such with concrete flower boxes. It creates a safe space, it forces people to seek other means of getting there and it makes the surroundings green with potentially creating a fun place to be.
@@Jila_Tana I like that idea, but I suspect we would just end up with car lines just outside of the car free zone. Still, it makes sense for school zones to be car-free or car-light.
our government doesn’t seem to care about us not to mention all the bureaucratic red tape we have to go thru to get shit done just doesn’t seem worth it to a lot of people. I hate stroads which most American cities are based around but we have streets in old American downtowns that are a lot better for pedestrians. My hometown for example is very safe and everyone sticks to the speed limit thru town and there’s almost no accidents. If there is an accident it’s cos someone wasn’t paying attention.
I recently had jury duty and the case was about a car crash. Pretty much everyone in the jury pool was trying to get dismissed because they had been in a car accident or someone they knew had been in a car accident. The judge at one point said, "everyone has either been in a car accident for someone in their family has been in a car accident...I had a rear-end collision last week" like it was common fact.
i think this is one of the ways to connect and reach people about our dangerous road design and car dependency though. Ask them if they, they family or friends have been in accidents. When they inevitably say yes they know some one hurt maybe even that died we can address that this shouldn't be a common thing that we experience and its largely due not to the drivers fault, but the design and layout of our road network, lack of alternative transportation options, and sprawling city design.
@@seantroy3172 People in 'Murica simply love driving too much. A lot of people consider it their 'real castle' so to speak, especially a guy if he's got a ball and chain. And women, of course, love to "feel safe" while driving so that's why they need the massive new SUV that is seemingly designed to kill bicyclists and pedestrians. Men also love to show off about how many horsepower their truck's HEMI has and how much it can tow yada yada yada. Meanwhile, if you want a smaller truck like what used to be available here in America in the 90's you have to get one imported! And don't even get me started on how small the truckbeds are nowadays...
Streets in the US are built as roads and they're too safe for cars so they make traffic unsafe for everyone else. Cars have become ridiculously huge and you can't even see out of them anymore with their tiny windows and massive pillars. Also, there are just a lot more people driving so there are more fatalities.
European cars have safety features built also regular safety checks. Air bags, crumple zones ,etc protect drivers and passengers also reduce damage to other vehicles.
Canadian roads too. I started driving again a few months ago after not having done so for close to 10 years. I caught myself doing almost 80km/h on a road with a speed limit of 60. And it felt very comfortable because the road is wide and straight
I saw a lot of streest from Groningen, I walk there to and from work every day (3.5 km/2.2 miles). It's a real nice walk, takes me just over half an hour. Now, in my case, the fastest route does take me over 4 major intersections, all with traffic islands and such but still, a busier route with more car traffic. However, on my way back home I usually take the route through the city center, which skips al major intersections, and takes me through a mostly pedestrian/bike area with barely any car traffic, and that route takes me only 5 to 10 minutes longer. Moi eem!
Moi mien jong! Also the pedestrian streets in Groningen didn't come without protests from car drivers (in the 70s/80s iirc). But in the end it was worth it to remove them from the streets
Sometimes I get the impression that Americans think Dutch streets are all narrow and that cars have to worm their way through for miles. But that is not true! Only within a neighborhood, half a mile max, streets are narrow and designed to drive slow, with mixed traffic. So after two minutes you arrive on a larger road that connects neighborhoods, here modes of transport are separated, bicycles, cars, pedestrians all have their own space, so traffic is faster. After another three minutes you will be on a major road through the city, such roads have full separation, over and underpasses for bicycles and pedestrians, usually separated bus/tram lanes, and designed for throughput by a lot of traffic, fast and comfortable for everyone. These roads are connected to highways. No bicycles, no pedestrians, no slow transport, no level crossings, no traffic lights, high speed all over Europe, from the Algarve to Finland, and from Calais to Istanbul. Most destinations, work, amusement, shopping centers, large offices, are along a throughput road. Only the first five to seven minutes of any journey are speed reduced areas, from home to highway.
I’m Swedish and I took a drivers license test in Florida some years ago and it was a joke. I believe that education is important for road safety. Also Americans drink/drug and drive…
US roads prioritize car throughput over people throughput. These are two very different metrics and it partially explains why US streets are giant asphalt drag strips that are designed for cars only. I’m willing to bet that, pound for pound, those Dutch intersections move just as many or more people than US intersections in a similar demographic area. Great video, the visualizations are stunning!
sidewalks in the us are actually wide enough for people to pass each other. In Europe, that's often not the case. City planners in Europe are notoriously bad in allowing enough space for all traffic, introducing more danger.
@@svr5423 You are thinking completely the other way around!!Traffic is not only the cars!!Traffic is also people walking,people biking!And as you see in the streets off the Netherlands,every one who goes out the door off their house is a participant in the traffic in the streets,not just cars.So all has to get safe ways to move through the streets,especially walking people.
@@jooproos6559 Cars (and airplanes) by far make up the most of personkilometers. Walking is safer than riding a bicycle. But if you need to step on the road because the sidewalk is too small, then it becomes more dangerous. US allows for more space for everyone compared to Europe.
How does the US prioritise car throughput? If that was true, they would focus on intersection design and systems. The topic of intersections is a major part of this video.
There was a recent critical incident nearby to me (2300 E. Canyon Road, Spanish Fork, UT) that involved two girls being struck on a road posted at 45 MPH. A vehicle had stopped for them to cross. The vehicle that hit them went around the stopped car and did not see the girls. Police indicated the girls "darted out". The intersection has ZERO marked crosswalks and is an arterial in a recently-built residential subdivision. Despite ALL of this, there were still boneheaded comments posted to KSL like: "If there were traffic signals at each and every intersection there would still be tragic accidents occurring there as we see when people choose to ignore the signals along with pedestrians and cyclists who re present." and "Sounds like it has way less to do with the speed of drivers at that intersecting and way more to do with people darting out directly in the front of traffic. The government cant fix everyones problems and make everyone 100% safe nor should it be their job. We as humans just need to be a bit smarter about the decisions we make." There needs to be a "Stop the Kindermoord" movement here, but sadly that will never happen. Americans will just shrug and victim-blame when the inevitable result of poor engineering comes to pass.
It will lead to more external control on cars, first by limiting max. speed in geofenced areas via GPS, then by automagically fining drivers who have been speeding in said areas without having a "voluntary" speed regulator in their vehicle. Sounds dystopian so it'll happen.
"Americans will just shrug and victim-blame..." . Many Americans have grown up learning to take responsibility for their own actions which leads to them evaluating situations from a somewhat objective standard. That is starting to change now that the country is being taken over by the entitled who tend to believe that nothing is their personal fault and that the government should provide them with safety, money, etc., etc..
@@pcs5852 "Many Americans have grown up learning to take responsibility for their own actions which leads to them evaluating situations from a somewhat objective standard." And how's that working out? Pedestrian deaths are at the highest they've been in decades.
@@KuopassaTv The Dutch seem to have been able to accomplish this without all that kind of tech. Their streets are also considered nicer to drive on too. And it probably helps that you can't just get your driver's license from a Cracker Jack box there.
@@aidanmccarthy9249 "And how's that working out? Pedestrian deaths are at the highest they've been in decades." It's working out the way an objective person would expect. With more vehicles and people on the planet, with a failing education system and with diminishing opportunities to develop common sense as a child, "Pedestrian deaths are at the highest they've been in decades." What were you expecting?
I was shocked coming from the uk to see highways with individual turn offs for business and four way stops are just crazy and are asking for an accident
Spot on, although I do think there are other factors at play too. EU/UK and most other countries have adopted vehicle safety standards that balance pedestrian safety with the safety of the vehicle occupants, in the US it's the safety of the occupants that is the driving factor, and often very little thought is given to pedestrian safety in vehicle design. That leads to monstrosities like the Cyber Truck. Americans have also been conditioned to see driving as an inalienable right and any attempt to promote alternatives is often seen as "leftie" or even more bizarrely as some form of communism.
That's right lightweight, it's called 'right to travel', it's in our constitution. And yes, alternative 'modes' of transportation are usually public, and are considered communism, because it is. It goes against the grain of American individualism.
@@watcher-someone-awake Ignoring the fact that the 'right to travel' in your constitution has fuck all to do with the topic at hand, if it was how you are stating, then surely the government would have to provide infrastructure for other modes of transport, since there are many people who are unable to drive, and would have that right. Also I fail to see how public transport is communism (actually socialism, but we've already established your intelligence level), but providing trillions of dollars for cars is not.
i live in aachen germany so very close to the netherlands. i really enjoy driving there but i hate the speedbumps. I love the street design and the traffic lights. late in the evening you often see your traffic light turning red and after 3 seconds while you are heading towards the traffic light it switches on green again. you spend so much less time waiting at traffic lights inspecially if its low traffic. but after my visit to the netherlands i enjoy the most driving over the german border and going home with 140mph :D
3:20 this example has been changed in 2022 it was alright. It had its 90's design redone. This is 'Kinkerstraat' modes of transport shared on the road: Trams, motor vehicles, bikes on the side. Wide sidewalks. If you're watching this video already give it a quick glance on streetview!
I've lived in Germany for 3 years and drove in many European countries to include the Netherlands...the driving mentality between Northern Europeans and Americans are just so different. I miss driving in Europe. Unless you're on a no speed limit section (Netherlands has sections on their highways at night) everyone is driving the speed limit. Not in America. Roundabouts are dangerous in America compared to Europe. And crosswalks...I remember driving with some European friends on Ramstein...a poor Airman was just waiting to cross a "zebra stripe" (crosswalk) for about 10 minutes...no one was letting him go even though he had the right of way. We finally got to that intersection, stopped and waived him through. He was so hesitant to cross but he had the right of way. Americans just don't take driving seriously. My neighbor had to pay thousands of Euros for his son to take driving lessons and I think he couldn't start until 18? Don't remember the age but older than typical American kids driving at 15. This isn't going to be solved until Americans take driving seriously.
"My neighbor had to pay thousands of Euros for his son to take driving lessons and I think he couldn't start until 18?" Contrast this with Driver's ed in the USA basically being an extra high school class and the license itself being probably around $50. License renewal doesn't include extra testing or anything, just another $50. If a rule changes, there's little education either - you might hear about it in local news, and that's about it. We complain about everyone breaking the rules - but it's a miracle anyone actually remembers the rules. Add to that really poor road design that doesn't reflect the rules (especially speed limits).
He American DUI, is not strict enough, in America the limit is 0.08 but in Australia it’s 0.05 and in China it’s 0.02 and some countries 0.00. And in some countries the fine for speeding or using your phone is very expensive so more people won’t do it.
As a Chinese currently in Australia I agree with what you said, and I also want to add that in China you will face criminal charges if your BAC is higher than 0.08. In my country, the biggest problem is that the driving test is too theoretical to teach drivers how to drive responsibly at all 😂
So design roads with the knowledge that drivers are fucking idiots. This whole personal responsibility thing doesn't seem to be doing anything to make the roads safer.
5:59 The term "access road" means something completely different here in San Antonio 😭 Also known as service roads or frontage roads in other parts of the state, they're basically 3-lane, one-way, high speed roads that parallel all of our freeways. So in other words, extremely long stroads. Hilarious that they actually put a sidewalk on those and expect people to use them
All true. Road design is an important aspect for making roads safer and usable for different means of transport. But to make it work, you need a compact city centre and diversified residential areas. And that’s a whole other story.
To make cycling a viable alternative, a compact city is essential. However, until that is achieved, people should still be able to cycle safely, even if it often means travelling longer distances.
A compact city center is certainly not a requirement. As long as some trips can be done in a reasonable time frame via active transport it's possible to create people oriented infrastructure that works. Even if people need to drive to work or school they might be able to walk or bike to the store, library, gym, etc. Even homes in car-dependent American suburbia usually have destinations that can easily be reached on foot or by bike, even if they don't have a compact city center. I don't have a compact city center nearby, yet I can readily bike to most of my destinations thanks to decent infrastructure for American standards. In some cases my trips are shorter and more convenient by bike than car, and that could be massively improved with small infrastructure design changes such as pedestrian-and-bike only shortcuts through neighborhoods. E-bikes can also help make those longer distances feel shorter. Compact city centers are great, but they are not a requirement for safer and better street design.
@@streetscaping "compact city" Dunno what you are talking about, 50% of trips in the USA are under 3 miles, time taken is about 15 min one way. Its just that you end up with a avarage speed of 10 mph on stroads due to stop signs and traffic lights. Guess what the avarage cycling speed in eg Amsterdam is, 8 mph. If you look a bit further, eg density of cities and municipalities, you will be surprised, Amsterdam (4800/km2) and Utrecht (3900/km2) would barely make the top 150 incorporated places by population density in the USA and barely fall into the USA definition of urban (10k per square mile)
most important aspect of road design is to have people travel on motorways for the most amount of time and kilometers. They are by far the safest roads.
There are health benefits as well, by walking and cycling. Unfortunately North America is built around the car culture. It is no coincidence, that many cities the design is for car use, especially in suburbs of major cities (where crime, homelessness is out of control) that obesity and BMI are very high as a result.
How about the US makes driver training, actual training instead of just holding a mirror in front of someone's face to see if it fogs up. Driver's training in the US is more about not having you stand in front of DPS staff any longer than is absolutely necessary. It can take a year, multiple tests and cost thousands of Euros to get a license in the Netherlands. Change the road and the average US driver can be safe while on that particular road. Correctly train them to drive and they can drive safely anywhere. Or, you could moved to the Netherlands.
In the UK our road system is about halfway between that of the US and Netherlands. I'd love to see more Netherlands style changes but there'd be a lot of political opposition from conservatives who look on cars the same way that Americans do - as the epitome of freedom.
Yet our road deaths is about the same (per capita) as the Netherlands. Sure our cycling infrastructure is way behind (but catching up) but our roads are also narrow. This includes rural roads which can just about fit one or two cars (slowing down may be required).
The problem in the UK is that the car mindset is more similar to the USA, but the streets are two or three times as narrow. Walking, cycling or even driving through British residential areas is a constant exercise of avoiding parked and moving cars, even on the pavements. The balance between road usage and availability is broken over there. A lot of cars need to be removed from the streets to make them safer for all user types, but I don't see how that can be achieved
@@osasunaitor In the Netherlands cars has to visit a car dealer or car specialist to perform a security check on the car every year..If something is wrong it has to be repaired before you can drive your car again.And almost every year you have to let the car repaired by the repair shop.But i can not get rid off the feeling that those car shops do anything just to get your money from it.A car that is one year old should not get as bad as they see it. Hee Boss,we are bad financial.Oh,dont worry,there will be one year old cars soon...And we are back healthy again..
@@jooproos6559 You need to find a better garage then. My car is 11 years old now. Only repairs it needed so far besides the regular maintenance is new tires, windshield wipers and brakes.
Road design is one aspect. More attention has to be paid to which rules are enforced. In North America far too much attention is given to cell phone use and speeding. Lane discipline on freeways and main highways should take precedence over speeding. Intersections have a high accident rate yet seldom is there any attention to them. Some location may have red light cameras but maybe just making sure drivers know the rules of the road would improve.
The US Federal Transit Administration requires grading of roads and highways using "Level of Service" which measures speed, traffic flow of cars, and non-stop vs stop-and-go. Until the FTA decides to use other criteria for awarding money and rating streets and highways, we're stuck.
I reckon a lot of crashes are due to the extremely confusing traffic light setups, with lights strung on cables across multi-lane roads, on the far side of the junction to which they apply, and all these rules that sometimes apply and sometimes apply like "right turn on red", "left turn yield on green" and permanently flashing yellow lights, whatever that might mean
A big problem with why this will never work in the USA is the fact that each state is responsible for road construction and design (even if they get federal dollars to use). Therefore, you have fifty states with fifty different sets of regulations and guidelines for traffic engineering. Going further down the rabbit hole, in each state you also have roads that are designed and maintained by a county government or similar (ie. parishes in Louisiana) as well as cities/towns/villages being responsible for their own roads as well. Furthermore, most of the governmental units have laws requiring them to accept the bid from the lowest qualified bidder for a given project, and you can see why this is damn near impossible. However, some of the cities here have really latched on to modern traffic engineering utilizing many concepts expressed in the video and are really very livable places for non-car based transport, but those are more the exception than the rule. Some governments are reluctant to even patch potholes or keep their bridges in good working order, so unless management of roads is completely redone from the top-down here, this vision will remain a pipe dream for now.
Your probably right. But you also forgot éducation. Europe driving license are a harder to get, you need to actually study, and their expensive. Also you have in most country's you have a point system. Américain driving license are a joke.
As someone that bikes around in Austin, one huge difference that feels way less safe as a pedestrian/bike is cars getting a right turn on reds. I don't know if this is universal with all EU countries, but after hearing a friend in Germany say people there can't do that, I noticed how easy it is to just hit someone crossing that's on your right when as a driver you're looking left for oncoming traffic.
Nope. No right turn on red for motor vehicles, anywhere. The right turn has its own arrow, which is synchronized with the cycle lane and pedestrian crossing. Also, cars swerving across the bicycle gutter to get into the right turn lane 4:48 , is a HELL NO! in Europe. That turn lane would be eliminate in favor of extra sidewalk and a shorter pedestrian crossing.
It's only dangerous in Europe because they have alot of foot traffic. Thats why its banned in NYC but in the South and West nobody is walking in 100+ degree weather so making people wait just puts more pressure on the traffic to build up for no reason
@@azulaquaza4916 If I've learned anything from urbanist YT videos, it's that cars should be completely banned from making right turns: Right turn on red = bad because you might hit pedestrians/cyclists coming from your right across the street you're on. Right turn on green = bad because you might "right hook" someone crossing the street you're turning to. Right turn on green arrow = bad because it's adding an extra turn lane, more space/resources expended for cars, bad land use, more distance for non-drivers to cross, etc.
Even if we never have other major modes of transportation, there has got to be a physical separation between streets and roads, so that pedestrians can safely and free enjoy streets and cars can safely and freely drive through roads.
I dont get why every us city is build in squares. its so boring, bad for traffic and dangerous. every city here in germany is unique with a layout completly different to every other city
No one cares, Americans can move to Europe because y'all can and have money, I couldn't move to the US even if I wanted. So it makes me mad when I see Americans moving to Europe, the US you liking it or not is a good country, if even wealthy ppl like you can move to Europe and so does refugees and immigrants from poor countries, so basically ruining life for locals. I would recommend to try solving you own internal problems, not just move.
Here in Australia, our road death rate is about half that of the US, but still considerably more than what is typical in the EU. Our roads tend to have a lot of safety features and, for me anyway, European roads feel a lot more dangerous. I suspect the difference is that, being a large and sparsely populated country, we tend to go on more long road trips and so fatigue becomes a greater factor. Even though street design in the US may be a problem, my guess that longer roads trips and thus more fatigue may also be an influence.
@@aidanmccarthy9249 It was also the drivers. Sure, there are reckless drivers here too, but there seemed to be a lot more in Europe. The freeways in Italy were deadly (and they weren't narrow).
Another Aussie. I don't think it's got anything to do with the distances. Yes the exist, but unless you live in the sticks (~20%), the VAST majority of driving is within your town or city. I haven't spent much time in America, but my feeling is that their suburbs are far more disconnected (in terms of street connections to neighbouring suburbs) than ours, and while we have some light commercial areas in our residential areas, this is becoming worse in newer developments, leading to more traffic. We have plenty of stroads, but unlike American ones. Where they have huge parking lots with businesses behind them, ours tend to have residences attached directly to them. Locally at least I can see my council is trying, but it's frustrating seeing simple things they could have done to make it better. For example, they put in speed bumps along one of the main street servicing the suburb, as it goes past a park. This is great, it's not a high traffic street, but it is wide and straight there, easy to speed. But they put the money into raising a whole intersection there, but didn't bother to put in a zebra crossing so that children and families could actually cross to the park. (Also, I wouldn't take Italy as the benchmark of Europe)
@@tomwijgers Are you suggesting the US does better than Australia? The statistics say otherwise. I have done some driving in the US and am not at all surprised that they have a higher death rate than we do. It was the EU doing better than us that puzzled me. Fatigue was the only explanation I could think of, but if you have evidence to the contrary, I happy to listen. It wouldn't matter that most trips here are metropolitan and thus short, I would have thought. You just need enough long trips for fatigue to become a factor and significantly affect the death rate. When I last looked at the statistics, we seemed to be doing a lot worse than the EU, but, looking at them now, we don't seem to be doing that bad. Road deaths per billion vehicle-km is the most meaningful stat (to my mind anyway). Of those countries in Europe that publish these stats, the handful of countries that do better than us, average 3.7 (compared to our 4.9). Since they don't all publish this stat, I can't really give a European (or EU) average. They may well be doing worse than us on average. The US, with this measure, is on 6.9 (their per population stat is far worse).
@@BobHutton No I wasn't trying to suggest that! Just pointing out some differences between us and them. I don't think there'd be a huge difference between us and the EU, but that's because most of the EU is not as great as, say NL, not because we can't do a lot better. I haven't looked at statistics, but I do remember all the ads from years back saying how most accidents are within 3 (or was it 5?)km of home, which makes a lot of sense, since that's where most driving is done.
TREES. Why aren't most streets either tree lined or building lined? Having pretty much highways in cities, is why we have a bunch of issues with accidents, mores than other countries.
Because standards actually have them removed, to make a clear zone, so that cars whizzing off the road at high speed don't hit as much, on their way to hitting a house at 100 miles an hour, as was the case for a relative's house a couple years ago. The speed was *measured* at just over 100 miles an hour. Missed someone sleeping by a couple feet. A highway department refused to allow planters to protect pedestrians on a sidewalk in my downtown, because cars might hit them and bounce back into the road. It's by design, fought for tooth and nail by planners.
Nice vid, really enjoy how many are quickly realizing just how stupidly we've built our environment over here in North America.. Gotta love oil and auto industries
Perhaps the redesign of streets in different cities around the world, not just in the United States and Europe, as explained in this video, will lead to the fact that the global road death rate will greatly decrease.
Let’s keep in mind 70 foot long trucks need to use these roads too. Half the “big” roads we have aren’t really big enough for truckers. Other countries tend to use shorter wheelbase trucks and shorter trailers.
Simple... Straight roads are dangerous! You can neither judge distance nor speed of other vehicles well. Moreover it's mind numbing to drive on them so you have less concentration. Also people tend to drive faster by choice, but also by the lack of concentration and visible cues of speed (wide roads are worse than narrower roads)
I think you should also consider how a driver's licence is obtained. A TH-camr in the US said she never exited a parking lot on her test. In Europe, _but at least in the Netherlands_ , you must attend a proper driving school. taking part in real traffic. And on your test, you also drive in everyday traffic. If said TH-camr is true, in the US lots of drivers learned mum or dad's bad habits and think they are the best chauffeurs in the world while everybody else is bad. The above is hearsay and guess. Can you look into the differences between countries driving education? What are the cost, rules and regulations to obtain a driving licence?
One anecdote doesn't equal experience of 330+ million and they probably said it or exaggerated it to have content. US crash numbers are only intense because the frequency of driving in the US is much higher than other countries
I taught my kids to drive as soon as their feet could reach the pedals. I taught them the 3 rules of driving: (1) never hit anything, (2) never let anything hit you, and (3) try to follow the regulations.
I can't say for any other country, or now that I think about it even other states. In Victoria, Australia, you can get your learners permit (L) when you turn 16, with a theory test. You can then drive with any other fully licensed driver, with minimal restrictions. To get your license, you have to log 120 hours worth of driving. I'm unsure how this is enforced (I expect it isn't), as when I was a learner this was just a recommendation. Once you're 18, you can then sit a driving test, which includes a theory test and a driving test, which is pretty simple. You basically just have to drive around a bit, prove you can do one of three parking maneuvers, not crash into another car or the hit the curb or break a driving regulation. That will put you on your probationary license (P1), which does have a few restrictions. Once you've had that for a year, you automatically move up to another probationary level (P2) with a few less restrictions and once you've had that for 3 years you're fully licensed. Depending on what age you do all this, you can skip parts, so that it is possible to get your Ls, 3 months later do you test which will take you straight to P2.
Would be interesting to know how "miles travelled" in these statistics is defined? In a comparison of road structures I assume it to be "miles travelled in road traffic"?
Here in Las Vegas the metro area is built on the "Western Grid Pattern". Essentially about every mile east and west there is a wide straight arterial road that is wide, typically three lanes each direction with a center turn lane. These roads go mostly from one end of town to the other uninterrupted. They are wide, straight and by their design promote speeding. Many of these roads back up to residential neighborhoods divided only by a three foot sidewalk and a concrete block wall. Cars frequently run off the roadways and through the walls. Add to that, Las Vegas has liberal drinking laws, a "party town" and what appears to be lax DUI laws.
Driving tests need to be far more difficult. Enforcement needs to drastically increase. Bad drivers should be getting 4 points not 12. People over 60 need to recertify every 5 years. Wrong way driving, driving into a work zone, DUI and being at fault for any accident should be an instant life ban on driving. People driving without a license should spend a year in jail. You will see much better driving habbits when the stakes for screwing up are a lot higher.
Drivers in Romania might be just as insane as in USA. I drove for a few months in countries like Belgium, Germany, Poland, Hungary, all nice and calm. As soon as I reentered the romanian roads I realised why it's on top of the list, everybody's going over the speed limit and overtaking whenever they have the chance.
How do the Europeans deal with emergency vehicles? I regularly see pushback for road diets because of the risk of emergency vehicles not being able to get through a single lane if there is any congestion.
4:30 this is a common Dutch solution. Notice that the lanes are relatively wide so that in case of a fully backed up road cars can move to the side and if neccesery drive over the curb. And since there is a median people can't overtake so having wide lanes in this case is fine from a road safety perspective.
@@streetscaping I don't get it. Doesn't making the lanes wide defeat the purpose of the design, to slow cars down? When you have a pedestrian island like at 5:16, emergency vehicles can't get by. And of course this all assumes you have the width available to fully separate the bike lanes from the vehicular ones, not always a given.
6:33 These kind of double center lines are a recent trend (10 years or so..) for 30 mph 'distribution roads' and outdated 45-62 mph 'through roads'. Emergency vehicles can lane split and if necessary may even force oncoming traffic into the grass or onto the curb.
@@jyutzler That road is built under the concept of "drive slow go faster" I talked about this in my other video. Despite having wide lanes speeds will still be lower because overtaking isn't possible. With regards to 5:16, traffic volumes on such roads are relatively low.
@@streetscaping Sorry, I'm baffled here. What is stopping cars from going faster? In the US, cars will go 50 MPH on a road like that unless there is congestion and if there is congestion, then there is no way for emergency vehicles to get by. In my hometown we're going through this right now. NIMBYs are using a single incident where an ambulance crashed while trying to squeeze through stopped traffic as an excuse to shut down any and all safety-related changes to the road network. Local T&ES has zero response to the complaints, which means that the NIMBYs are sucking all of the air of the room with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Top 3 things the US needs to be a fully developed nation. We're about 60 years behind everyone else currently. 1. High speed rail 2. Free healthcare 3. Affordable housing For a free nation, we sure do it let cooperations and the top 1% buy our lives. The future will be amazing when the Boomers loose power. And because they're aging out all we gotta do is wait and let nature help us. 😉
the Netherlands, the Netherlands the Netherlands Tired with these eternal references to this miniature country in Europe that has VERY different conditions than many other countries. The US needs to do a lot to improve road safety but copying their ideas is no solution.
The biggest difference is of course sprawling cities. In low-density cities destinations are far apart making cycling not the most convenient means of transport. However, as I mentioned, suburbs should still have safe bike lanes to allow people the option to cycle safely.
its because in America they'd rather pull you over for doing 5 over and not for hogging the left passing lane or doing dumb shit. Also the quality of common sense when it comes to driving is horrendous, they would rather fail you first 2 tries to milk you for money then pass you out of obligation on your third rather than pass you first time because you are a good driver and fail others 50 times because they suck. The culture is the main problem, the roads are a small factor in all these greater problems, the culture is so much different, the difference I see in culture in Poland and Canada is huge, most people are more courteous in Poland and not willing to do dumb selfish shit but in Canada/America people are so much more selfish, I've been driving on a 4 lane main road in the 3rd lane preparing to switch to 4th to make a left turn, and then a driver from the right side turns right onto my road, except she turns EXACTLY into the lane i'm driving in straight in front of me, THEN she goes into the fourth lane after driving 10 kmh in my lane and forcing me to brake, like why? Either turn into the second or fourth right fucking away, or at least fucking accelerate if you really need the third lane so bad. This isn't solved with road infrastructure this is solved with proper culture, which goes far beyond just roads or drivers ed. It's something rooted in you when you grow up. If you just make the roads smaller without changing the culture people are just gonna be ripping 20 above speed limit in those narrow roads and causing more crashes than before. People don't speed because they feel it's safe, people speed because they don't care if its safe. Sure it's safe to speed on the highway, sure its safe to do 5 over in the city most of the time, but you need to actually CARE about safety of others and actually judge for yourself when its safe to speed or not. People who cause crashes by speeding alone do not CARE and go 30 over in the city. Crashes aren't simply caused by speeding unless you go very high over, crashes are caused by lack of attention/knowledge pretty much everyone speeds to some degree, including that in your statistics is just false causation. If you remove 5-10 over crashes from the "speeding is a deciding factor" statistics, I can bet your crash statistics will drop down to maybe 2% being due to speeding with generosity. The main problem is other aspects of driving, speeding itself is not the problem 95% of the time. Take my previous situation where a guy pulled into the third lane I was driving in, what if I was a shit driver that was on the phone or just zoning out? I wouldn't avoid that collision. Its almost always a possibility to avoid a collision when you drive with a brain I've dodged many collisions in my lifetime by idiots merging into my lane, stopping on the entrance ramp or running reds, simply because I pay attention. It surely attributes quite a lot that I love driving and am always fully immersed in the driving experience rather than just using it as a transportation measure, but even then just paying attention is not that hard.
I don't know a car enthusiast who enjoys a commute. To enjoy a drive, you are either racing (go to a track, please!), or out on a winding road with great views. Having proper streets and roads doesn't harm these at all, and adding infrastructure for alternative options even makes the commute better, by reducing car traffic volumes.
@@42luke93When you say vertical parking, it sounds like you're talking about a parking structure. Like a typical parking garage, or those mechanical parking conveyors all over Japan.
In Florida or South Florida regardless of the road, folks don’t obey traffic laws. Licenses are passed out like candy. All you need to do is show up and they will give you a license. Folks also don’t yield to pedestrians or cyclists. They also go 65+ mph on a slow 30mph residential road. On i95 or any other highway they drive highly aggressive and reckless.
first you have to see there is a problem, and i guess at this point are neither american lawmakers, nor road engineers or planers... therefore you need to open their eyes before getting any reaction...
There exist lawmakers and planners who favor change, but lots don't. And those who favor change generally get unpopular half measures, too little to improve much, and so the pushback eventually wins. You need a long-term push over decades, like in Carmel Indiana for roundabouts.
@@bearcubdaycare The United States was founded upon rugged individualism, NOT some pansy E-U propaganda. Why don't you do us Americans a favor and see yourself out, of our country.
It has been proven time and time and time and time and time again that reworking roads like this does little to nothing, i'm a Caltrans worker of 16 years and those major road works such as roundabouts and diverging diamonds would just creep back up again as soon as the cameras stopped rolling. Some 40 projects here where roads were built as this video describes actually would turn more dangerous than before within 90 days of install. This is nothing but people lying to themselves hoping people see this as "they're doing something" when in reality only 1 thing is ever going to fix this, Discipline and respect!!! people don't care, but when they see cops writing them tickets and getting one in the mail, then they start going slower and respecting the rules. Rural eastern Cali has proven that time and time again, but no one listens, then they come up with this crap and fudge the numbers to feel good. Job security for me and the towing industry at least. Edit, i should ad that this probably only applies to the US, i'm just in California and see what is happening here and watching it unfold in other parts of the US too.
Born and raised in California here. That said, you must be from somewhere other than 'Cali' as no real Californian calls it that. But yeah, I agree that all this propaganda and lies are about making the U.S. more like the communist infected E-U.
It's not really. Your people (the British in particular) gave it to us 400+ years ago to differentiate the 13 colonies from Canada simply. It dosent make sense in English because there isn't a single America, it's called the AMERICAS, 2 continents. Only Latin countries really call America one continent and call Americans "Estados Unidenses" which is basically "United Statians" which sounds stupid in English.
@@leDespicable Ways to improve leDespicable: tax him out of existence, berate him for whatever thing you never bothered to try to understand, call him stupid for not being you... sound familiar?
The US has several times the motor vehicles than several European countries put together. As a result, most U.S. streets are designed around motor vehicles to begin with. Some areas create unprotected bike lanes in places they shouldn't, because the street wasn't wide enough to begin with, actually causing a vehicle/bicycle accident hazard, while traffic circles/roundabouts are a current fad in the U.S. (nothing like seeing tire tracks over the landscaping in the middle of a circle). There is neither interest nor money to redo all the urban roads in the United States, especially since taking up street parking with European-style measure in old neighborhoods, or slowing traffic with fancy restriction devices will simply get politicians voted out of office at the next election. One nearby town is redoing a 4-lane road with commercial and industrial traffic through a business district trying for the speed reduction and livability factors. That works SO well when they have an expressway on and off-ramps just south of the redone area, and traffic going through the redone area leading to industrial areas north of the area. I wonder how long it will be before it is returned to a regular US-style road, since they went from 4 lanes down to 2 lanes to plant trees, and widen sidewalks so businesses can set up outdoor spaces (not many restaurants/cafes along that route either). It ain't fancy; it's gritty, blue-collar people there, not fancy, trendy white-collar cafes serving wine and cheese. Enjoy the diesel fumes with your Chateau Whatever, right?? Don't forget to take in your ourdoor furniture every night so nobody steals it (it's a town fighting a high crime rate also).
This is such a myth, 2015 data for amount of registered vehicles per 1000 people: USA - 867 Greece - 883, Finland - 950, Italy - 875, Austria - 849, Poland- 711
I think you might have your cause and effect mixed up. US streets are designed around motor vehicles to begin (and end) with. As a result, the US has several times the motor vehicles...
@@tomwijgers Some of the roads existed before motor vehicles existed, and were later upgraded for motor vehicles. Some were little better than dirt or gravel horse cart tracks, and in the U.S. bicyclists pushed for better roads before the motor vehicle existed en mass. Roads go where people want to go, not because of the method of locomotion itself.
@@philipmcniel4908 It is easier to see a picture sign rather having to read the text. In the United Kingdom there are about 250 different road signs but you would only see a few of those regularly. Recently looked at book with all the signs and understood the message even for signs I'd not seen previously.
@@Brian3989 I think it kind of depends. If it's a sign you see all the time, you're going to recognize it pretty easily either way, and if it's a miscellaneous sign you don't see all the time (and you live in a largely monolingual area), it can help to have words to spell out more detailed things like "headlight corridor next 5 miles" or "sunken grade" or "grooved pavement."
Roundabouts are usually only common in newly built neighborhoods, but US is phasing them in slowly before changing entire intersections to educate the public by starting small and letting them experience it.
Personal story. I used to live in Tucson, Arizona, but my workplace was a Bayer greenhouse in Marana, half an hour away. On the traditional route, there was a 4-way stop that was super busy because of work transit and the nearby school. Then it was closed for several months and replaced with a roundabout. I loved it. Instant increase in safety. No more worries of T-boning or being T-boned by a school bus.
How about curves, or something magical called, a speed bump! Not only for like school zones, but areas with high density of people, i've been to some cities in America, and i've seen massive roads in the middle of cities that go in a straight line without a single speed bump, i also despise the idea of the cycling lanes being squeezed right next to where the cars are, i live in a 3rd world country, and not gonna lie, our highways are similar, but our urban roads are like 10 times better planned than the US.
Cars are getting bigger and wider in the US. Euro roads don't work in the US and never will. Crashes and dumb people are just a part of the accepted risk you take when driving or living close to a busy street.
Yes and this is the mindset that we want to get rid of. The reason cars are getting bigger in the US is because our roads are so dangerous it makes us feel the safest to be in a big vehicle if we changed how we designed our streets so we wouldn’t need a big truck to feel safe, im sure at least half of the SUV/Truck owners would give them up because they are just not practical. You spend an arm and leg in gas just to get half a tank and then you can’t even see the kid you’re about to run over? Your logic only makes sense to CAR BRAIN mentalities. I’m going to say it louder for everyone to hear it! You don’t need a truck to feel safe if we stopped designing roads for car throughput and designed them more for people throughput. Like when does this end? When you have a highway off ramp and ramp leading from your driveway? Then you’ll complain that your kids can’t play outside because of traffic. Ignorance at it finest! You might be from Texas?
It’s not always good to segregate cyclists from car traffic though, this os mostly done at 50 km/h roads and faster, while roads with a speed limit of 30 tend to have cyclists on the streets to slow down traffic even more, this is still being implemented and not that common yet.
@@svr5423 no that’s not the best thing to do, it encourages speeding and unsafe behavior, if the road is narrow enough then people slow down and start to be careful.
@@miles5600 Narrow roads lead to more accidents due to the lack of safety margins. Everybody has to drive more precise which is also exhausting and causes fatigue. Not sure why you think something would encourage speeding. It's normally the absence of speeding cameras or cheap speeding tickets.
@@svr5423 wide roads encourage speeding and it's been proven. also no, narrow roads don't cause more *crashes* because people are more cautious, The Netherlands has proven it by the design of their streets and their design manual encourages narrowing roads. all the data is available on google if you're interested.
The initial graph is flawed. There is on average , more people driving per million inhabitants in America then other countries. So you need to redo the graph to show deaths per a mile driven or deaths per car on the road. For example, Sweden has approx. 545 vehicles per a 1000 people with a total population of around 10 million . The USA has 908 vehicles per 1000 people which is almost 1 vehicle per a person and a total population of over 330 million... lol... Also note, most cars are as dangerous as the driver, I have witnessed a person driving while drinking a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone all at the same time. If the Coffee was in one hand and the phone and cigarette was in the other... how F*** were they steering????
US is a car reliant city it would take years for ppl to turn into less of a car dependent country also for kids biking we dont if its safe for them to do it themselves it depends on which area if its in a city like detroit den nah its not safe
Both countries have relatively similar road safety statistics even though the Netherlands has a population density about 20 times that of Sweden and has the highest density of cars per km2 in Europe (excluding microstates).
@@azulaquaza4916 Thanks. Throughout the UK, you may know, that pot holes are an epidemic. Budgets for patching have been curtailed so much that defects develop over years and patches on patches are normal. Citizens have resorted to filling them in themselves and been taken to court by the authorities for causing 'damage'. Authorities spend still more money contesting lawsuits brought by motorists for damage to their cars. Some potholes have been listed on social media as tourist attractions. Still, civic leaders award themselves bigger pay rises and bonuses.
The real truth is: most people are simply too stupid to be allowed to drive at all. We need to design our cities to support walking, biking, and public transit so most people are not forced to drive to everything. If we give unskilled people options, they will use them.
Positive changes are already occurring! And hopefully, the east and west coast where there is high potential for a transit corridor will see high-speed trains.
Positive changes are already occurring! And hopefully, the east and west coast where there is high potential for a transit corridor will see high-speed trains.
I didn't even notice it. Background music is pretty common during narration. Maybe something about this music in particular was distracting to you or it was too loud compared to the narration. Either way, it was fine for me and I normally notice when this sort of thing is done poorly.
@@DizzyDiddy For me, any background music that is played while the host (or any other people in the video) is speaking, is distracting. When I am watching a video about why a plane crashed or how to install a bathroom's exhaust fan or how to cook this or that food, I just want to hear the instructions. The music causes my brain to try and follow along as well as pay attention to whatever the host is saying. When I have made this request in other video channels, some folks suggest enabling the c/c. That's not a good suggestion, since I will have to mute the dialogue and read the screen. And the auto-gen'd c/c are not always accurate (e.g., aviation host said 'fore' but the c/c wrote 'four.' Yes, I know the difference but still). Plus the c/c on-screen text itself blocks the image (just like tv channels do during newscasts). I like to remind hosts that not using any music will give them back time. Since they are not trying to figure out what music to play and then dubbing it to the dialogue track.
This is an incredible video. I really wish that all bike lanes in the united states were raised to sidewalk level. I really wish that conservative americans realized that car-centric society does not line up the value of freedom for everybody. It makes people be forced to buy a car to live in most areas. 🤦.
You guys should just lay off complaining about American Roads... it's never going to change because it's against the law to change them. This is because it would be to expensive and the government only cares about money... quit complaining. It will never change
![Would You Fall for It? [ST08]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n94-_yE4IeU/mqdefault.jpg)
![Would You Fall for It? [ST08]](/img/tr.png)
I'm so tired of people arguing that people are dumb therefore roads are dangerous. People are dumb everywhere. Does that mean people who make a small mistake deserve to die, or that people who recklessly drive should destroy families? No. It shouldn't. The road system in the US is failing us.
Bad drivers are failing us. Slow down and pay attention.
@@DolphinWithIgloo-fg3ow Are you joking or are you really being this dense?
You can’t expect 100% of the population to follow the rules of the road. Human behavior sadly does not work that way. Hence we should design roads to intuitively slow people down or pay more attention. Think of speed platforms, narrower roads, set-back crossings and intersections minimizing crash impacts.
Even for drivers paying full attention, fewer lanes would help. It’s very difficult to make sure 6 to 10 lanes of high-speed cross traffic are clear before crossing.
Even for narrow, 2-lane roads, daylighting intersections rather than permitting parking right up to them help a lot.
There are many proven ways to improve upon our dangerous road and street designs. We should implement them.
If everybody pays attention to the road + always drive by the law: you would never even need traffic lights
keyword: if, @@KhoiNguyen-ny7fz
Remember that language always matters: Roads are not "for cars" they are for transportation. This is a great examination of ways to include other methods of transportation besides driving into road design. Thank you for continuing to promote awareness of the need for more intelligently designed transportation infrastructure.
So far, there are also the problems of:
1. Strict zoning laws of single family homes.
2. The bulldozing of lower income neighborhoods for highways
3. The accessibility of cheap cars to anyone
4. Lack of relatable clean safe public transit
Thank your local Boomers. They had a chance to develop this nation but, instead chose greed and cars over people.
@@bluefungiactually parents of boomers started this mess and I think most of the boomer behaviors were as a result of toxic parenthood that many of the boomer generations were subjected to. I'm not in any way justifying them but we have to question how they ended up like this.
Number 3 is disappearing fast. My wife’s first car was secondhand from her best friend, and honestly should’ve been completely rebuilt or outright scrapped. I could only afford my first car debt-free because my parents paid for it. We’re still paying for my wife’s replacement car.
I think another reason for such high accident rates in the US is the fact that there are no alternatives to driving. Not everyone is a "professional" driver but in the US everyone ir forced to drive. Pluss their driving schools and tests are nothing compared to for example the Netherlands(since everyone in the US has to have a drivers licence to participate in society while in the EU you have a choice). I think a lot of americans who are not that comfortable at the wheel of a car would prefer other means of transportation which in turn would remove unconfident drivers from roads, but they just don't have a choice🤷♂️
Oh yeah I'm not really sure I'd be a competent driver so I just don't. I ride bikes and take the train for longer distances. (Belgium)
It's not all perfect, you know sometimes it rains or the trains have delays sometimes but at least I feel pretty safe, stress-free and don't have the massive financial burden of a car.
@@hananas2 Exactly! And that doesn’t just go for those of us that are less confident behind a steering wheel. I’m a confident driver.
Only two years in yet about 35k kilometers all across Europe.
I like driving. I like taking the car on a road trip, or to a regular outing to the park or the beach.
What I don’t like is using my car for my daily trips. I rather walk to the neighborhood supermarket than take the car to the other side of town, pay attention to traffic and being slowed down while I’m just running errands.
I don’t like driving to college, having to deal with traffic, impatient drivers and traffic jams when I’m trying to run on schedule.
I much rather just walk to my bus stop in peace and read a book in the train. Not a worry in the world and nothing to constantly have to pay attention to when I’m just trying to start my day. It’s much more relaxed to be able to look out the window or get some work done while traveling than to constantly pay attention to drivers while you’re already stressed out from your school work.
I feel like in some ways, we try to make driving as _easy_ as possible in the US (in terms of the amount of judgment and skill it takes to drive). Think traffic lights instead of roundabouts, stop signs instead of yield signs, wider lanes, etc. IMO you don't really have to be a professional driver in the US to drive pretty safely; you just have to have the correct attitude and priorities. I'm sure nobody reading this comment would make the kinds of extremely-negligent driving mistakes shown at the beginning of this video, even if your driving skill is below average. IMO we could get our accident fatality rate way down if we just worked on our cultural attitudes about driving (people having a sense of entitlement and acting like they own the road, leading to road rage incidents, etc.).
One thing that this video doesn't mention that I'm sure contributes to the difference in speeding and accident rates between the US and Europe is how we enforce speed limits: In Europe, speed limits are often enforced by automatic cameras rather than human police officers, while in the USA some drivers feel like they can drive as fast as they want as long as they don't see any police around. (I actually live in a very rural area--my town has a population around 600-700, and we have to drive 30 minutes to get to the nearest other town--and for a long time it was pretty much common knowledge that the county police didn't pay any attention to the road out to my town, so people would drive as fast as they wanted.) Granted, I also know that European speeding fines are often less expensive than traffic tickets in the US unless you're going _really_ fast.
@@philipmcniel4908 Yeah we design our roads to be easy. I was amazed when I went to the UK, and you had very narrow country roads, and you often needed to negotiate with oncoming traffic to pass at narrow points/ towns. Roads in the Uk are very narrow by US standards, even on the motorway. It makes you pay attention to the road much more, and thus is harder. But it is significantly safer.
@@bixbysnyder-00 Again, I think the safety has to come down to cultural attitudes. If you put a roundabout in some places in the US, people would eventually start flying around it at 30 mph, especially at night in rural areas where cars only come by every 10-20 minutes (or less) so it's easy--and *almost* always correct--to just assume there's no one else coming. Same with some of those tight roads.
9/11 attack:
2,977 victims
US: Let's declare war on terror, implement tons of safety regulations, checkups, laws, create whole new security departments, make sure this never ever ever happens again.
2013-2022 road fatalities:
374,331 victims
US: Meh.
COVID: 1 mil dead
DC: mehhhhhh tough break that's just life f off here's $1200 don't spend it all at once
@@Krill_all_health_insuranceCEOs thats quite different
@@AvCasey19 or maybe the same
9 years vs 1 day
@@uzijn100-120 daily
06:53 Response of Americans : "Quick, call the cops, some parents need to be punished", instead of holding their government responsible for creating a world where children can't live independently.
And I see 'creating a dangerous world' in the same light as 'allowing a situation to develop into'.
We're absolutely culpable as a society. It's crazy to me that people feel like the enormous car lines at schools are acceptable. Some parents still choose the car line over walking or allowing their kids to ride the bus without a reason other than that being their preference. Sure the infrastructure design has influenced that preference over time, but schools and the streets around them are not designed for those massive car lines and you would think that parents with other options would gladly take them.
@@DizzyDiddy Do an experiment where the area around a school is declared a car free zone, block the road of concrete barriers, in the Netherlands we do such with concrete flower boxes. It creates a safe space, it forces people to seek other means of getting there and it makes the surroundings green with potentially creating a fun place to be.
@@Jila_Tana I like that idea, but I suspect we would just end up with car lines just outside of the car free zone. Still, it makes sense for school zones to be car-free or car-light.
our government doesn’t seem to care about us not to mention all the bureaucratic red tape we have to go thru to get shit done just doesn’t seem worth it to a lot of people. I hate stroads which most American cities are based around but we have streets in old American downtowns that are a lot better for pedestrians. My hometown for example is very safe and everyone sticks to the speed limit thru town and there’s almost no accidents. If there is an accident it’s cos someone wasn’t paying attention.
@@DizzyDiddy
Or worse, you’d have all the car-obsessed locals throwing a hissyfit and doing a mass protest against the walkable safe areas
I recently had jury duty and the case was about a car crash. Pretty much everyone in the jury pool was trying to get dismissed because they had been in a car accident or someone they knew had been in a car accident. The judge at one point said, "everyone has either been in a car accident for someone in their family has been in a car accident...I had a rear-end collision last week" like it was common fact.
i think this is one of the ways to connect and reach people about our dangerous road design and car dependency though. Ask them if they, they family or friends have been in accidents. When they inevitably say yes they know some one hurt maybe even that died we can address that this shouldn't be a common thing that we experience and its largely due not to the drivers fault, but the design and layout of our road network, lack of alternative transportation options, and sprawling city design.
If we had 30k people dying and 3 million people being injured in industrial accidents each year, I feel like would do something to change that.
They let drivers do whatever. Even murder. Car brain society is real man.
@@seantroy3172 People in 'Murica simply love driving too much. A lot of people consider it their 'real castle' so to speak, especially a guy if he's got a ball and chain. And women, of course, love to "feel safe" while driving so that's why they need the massive new SUV that is seemingly designed to kill bicyclists and pedestrians. Men also love to show off about how many horsepower their truck's HEMI has and how much it can tow yada yada yada.
Meanwhile, if you want a smaller truck like what used to be available here in America in the 90's you have to get one imported! And don't even get me started on how small the truckbeds are nowadays...
Streets in the US are built as roads and they're too safe for cars so they make traffic unsafe for everyone else. Cars have become ridiculously huge and you can't even see out of them anymore with their tiny windows and massive pillars.
Also, there are just a lot more people driving so there are more fatalities.
arms race: "buying a bigger tank to survive the next crash".
European cars have safety features built also regular safety checks. Air bags, crumple zones ,etc protect drivers and passengers also reduce damage to other vehicles.
I don't understand the tiny windows trend in new vehicles.
It is one of the dumbest car trends of all time.
America roads make people comfortable with speeding. Having trees and turns making me want to slow down.
Canadian roads too. I started driving again a few months ago after not having done so for close to 10 years. I caught myself doing almost 80km/h on a road with a speed limit of 60. And it felt very comfortable because the road is wide and straight
I saw a lot of streest from Groningen, I walk there to and from work every day (3.5 km/2.2 miles). It's a real nice walk, takes me just over half an hour. Now, in my case, the fastest route does take me over 4 major intersections, all with traffic islands and such but still, a busier route with more car traffic. However, on my way back home I usually take the route through the city center, which skips al major intersections, and takes me through a mostly pedestrian/bike area with barely any car traffic, and that route takes me only 5 to 10 minutes longer.
Moi eem!
Moi mien jong! Also the pedestrian streets in Groningen didn't come without protests from car drivers (in the 70s/80s iirc). But in the end it was worth it to remove them from the streets
Yeah so much shots from Groningen, and also Harlingen. The creator must come from here in the north of NL hah.
Sometimes I get the impression that Americans think Dutch streets are all narrow and that cars have to worm their way through for miles. But that is not true!
Only within a neighborhood, half a mile max, streets are narrow and designed to drive slow, with mixed traffic.
So after two minutes you arrive on a larger road that connects neighborhoods, here modes of transport are separated, bicycles, cars, pedestrians all have their own space, so traffic is faster.
After another three minutes you will be on a major road through the city, such roads have full separation, over and underpasses for bicycles and pedestrians, usually separated bus/tram lanes, and designed for throughput by a lot of traffic, fast and comfortable for everyone.
These roads are connected to highways. No bicycles, no pedestrians, no slow transport, no level crossings, no traffic lights, high speed all over Europe, from the Algarve to Finland, and from Calais to Istanbul.
Most destinations, work, amusement, shopping centers, large offices, are along a throughput road.
Only the first five to seven minutes of any journey are speed reduced areas, from home to highway.
In the US it's all decentralized. Everything near an urban or semi-urban area built out. There is no "five to seven minutes" followed by freedom.
Our cars are MASSIVE so you could understand why people are concerned about it
I’m Swedish and I took a drivers license test in Florida some years ago and it was a joke.
I believe that education is important for road safety.
Also Americans drink/drug and drive…
yep. Sweden is one of the most road safe countries
US roads prioritize car throughput over people throughput. These are two very different metrics and it partially explains why US streets are giant asphalt drag strips that are designed for cars only. I’m willing to bet that, pound for pound, those Dutch intersections move just as many or more people than US intersections in a similar demographic area. Great video, the visualizations are stunning!
sidewalks in the us are actually wide enough for people to pass each other.
In Europe, that's often not the case.
City planners in Europe are notoriously bad in allowing enough space for all traffic, introducing more danger.
@@svr5423 You are thinking completely the other way around!!Traffic is not only the cars!!Traffic is also people walking,people biking!And as you see in the streets off the Netherlands,every one who goes out the door off their house is a participant in the traffic in the streets,not just cars.So all has to get safe ways to move through the streets,especially walking people.
@@jooproos6559 Cars (and airplanes) by far make up the most of personkilometers.
Walking is safer than riding a bicycle. But if you need to step on the road because the sidewalk is too small, then it becomes more dangerous. US allows for more space for everyone compared to Europe.
@@svr5423 Although in many places in the US there are no footpaths at all!
How does the US prioritise car throughput? If that was true, they would focus on intersection design and systems. The topic of intersections is a major part of this video.
There was a recent critical incident nearby to me (2300 E. Canyon Road, Spanish Fork, UT) that involved two girls being struck on a road posted at 45 MPH. A vehicle had stopped for them to cross. The vehicle that hit them went around the stopped car and did not see the girls. Police indicated the girls "darted out". The intersection has ZERO marked crosswalks and is an arterial in a recently-built residential subdivision.
Despite ALL of this, there were still boneheaded comments posted to KSL like: "If there were traffic signals at each and every intersection there would still be tragic accidents occurring there as we see when people choose to ignore the signals along with pedestrians and cyclists who re present." and "Sounds like it has way less to do with the speed of drivers at that intersecting and way more to do with people darting out directly in the front of traffic. The government cant fix everyones problems and make everyone 100% safe nor should it be their job. We as humans just need to be a bit smarter about the decisions we make."
There needs to be a "Stop the Kindermoord" movement here, but sadly that will never happen. Americans will just shrug and victim-blame when the inevitable result of poor engineering comes to pass.
It will lead to more external control on cars, first by limiting max. speed in geofenced areas via GPS, then by automagically fining drivers who have been speeding in said areas without having a "voluntary" speed regulator in their vehicle. Sounds dystopian so it'll happen.
"Americans will just shrug and victim-blame..."
.
Many Americans have grown up learning to take responsibility for their own actions which leads to them evaluating situations from a somewhat objective standard. That is starting to change now that the country is being taken over by the entitled who tend to believe that nothing is their personal fault and that the government should provide them with safety, money, etc., etc..
@@pcs5852 "Many Americans have grown up learning to take responsibility for their own actions which leads to them evaluating situations from a somewhat objective standard."
And how's that working out? Pedestrian deaths are at the highest they've been in decades.
@@KuopassaTv The Dutch seem to have been able to accomplish this without all that kind of tech. Their streets are also considered nicer to drive on too. And it probably helps that you can't just get your driver's license from a Cracker Jack box there.
@@aidanmccarthy9249 "And how's that working out? Pedestrian deaths are at the highest they've been in decades."
It's working out the way an objective person would expect. With more vehicles and people on the planet, with a failing education system and with diminishing opportunities to develop common sense as a child, "Pedestrian deaths are at the highest they've been in decades."
What were you expecting?
I was shocked coming from the uk to see highways with individual turn offs for business and four way stops are just crazy and are asking for an accident
Cars have gotten a lot more powerful, what hasn't changed is how the roads are designed
Spot on, although I do think there are other factors at play too. EU/UK and most other countries have adopted vehicle safety standards that balance pedestrian safety with the safety of the vehicle occupants, in the US it's the safety of the occupants that is the driving factor, and often very little thought is given to pedestrian safety in vehicle design. That leads to monstrosities like the Cyber Truck. Americans have also been conditioned to see driving as an inalienable right and any attempt to promote alternatives is often seen as "leftie" or even more bizarrely as some form of communism.
That's right lightweight, it's called 'right to travel', it's in our constitution. And yes, alternative 'modes' of transportation are usually public, and are considered communism, because it is. It goes against the grain of American individualism.
@@watcher-someone-awake Ignoring the fact that the 'right to travel' in your constitution has fuck all to do with the topic at hand, if it was how you are stating, then surely the government would have to provide infrastructure for other modes of transport, since there are many people who are unable to drive, and would have that right. Also I fail to see how public transport is communism (actually socialism, but we've already established your intelligence level), but providing trillions of dollars for cars is not.
i live in aachen germany so very close to the netherlands. i really enjoy driving there but i hate the speedbumps. I love the street design and the traffic lights. late in the evening you often see your traffic light turning red and after 3 seconds while you are heading towards the traffic light it switches on green again. you spend so much less time waiting at traffic lights inspecially if its low traffic. but after my visit to the netherlands i enjoy the most driving over the german border and going home with 140mph :D
Dedection strips at traffic lights are really nice, saves a lot of time and makes traffic flow efficiently.
3:20 this example has been changed in 2022 it was alright. It had its 90's design redone.
This is 'Kinkerstraat' modes of transport shared on the road:
Trams, motor vehicles, bikes on the side. Wide sidewalks. If you're watching this video already give it a quick glance on streetview!
I've lived in Germany for 3 years and drove in many European countries to include the Netherlands...the driving mentality between Northern Europeans and Americans are just so different. I miss driving in Europe. Unless you're on a no speed limit section (Netherlands has sections on their highways at night) everyone is driving the speed limit. Not in America. Roundabouts are dangerous in America compared to Europe. And crosswalks...I remember driving with some European friends on Ramstein...a poor Airman was just waiting to cross a "zebra stripe" (crosswalk) for about 10 minutes...no one was letting him go even though he had the right of way. We finally got to that intersection, stopped and waived him through. He was so hesitant to cross but he had the right of way.
Americans just don't take driving seriously. My neighbor had to pay thousands of Euros for his son to take driving lessons and I think he couldn't start until 18? Don't remember the age but older than typical American kids driving at 15. This isn't going to be solved until Americans take driving seriously.
"My neighbor had to pay thousands of Euros for his son to take driving lessons and I think he couldn't start until 18?"
Contrast this with Driver's ed in the USA basically being an extra high school class and the license itself being probably around $50. License renewal doesn't include extra testing or anything, just another $50. If a rule changes, there's little education either - you might hear about it in local news, and that's about it. We complain about everyone breaking the rules - but it's a miracle anyone actually remembers the rules. Add to that really poor road design that doesn't reflect the rules (especially speed limits).
He American DUI, is not strict enough, in America the limit is 0.08 but in Australia it’s 0.05 and in China it’s 0.02 and some countries 0.00. And in some countries the fine for speeding or using your phone is very expensive so more people won’t do it.
As a Chinese currently in Australia I agree with what you said, and I also want to add that in China you will face criminal charges if your BAC is higher than 0.08. In my country, the biggest problem is that the driving test is too theoretical to teach drivers how to drive responsibly at all 😂
One of the reason is how easy a person not qualified to drive can get a license in USA. Roads are only as dangerous as their drivers.
And drivers are only as dangerous as the road design allows them to be. It all comes back to road design.
So design roads with the knowledge that drivers are fucking idiots. This whole personal responsibility thing doesn't seem to be doing anything to make the roads safer.
I was not expecting such a good video with this amount of views
5:59 The term "access road" means something completely different here in San Antonio 😭
Also known as service roads or frontage roads in other parts of the state, they're basically 3-lane, one-way, high speed roads that parallel all of our freeways. So in other words, extremely long stroads. Hilarious that they actually put a sidewalk on those and expect people to use them
All true. Road design is an important aspect for making roads safer and usable for different means of transport.
But to make it work, you need a compact city centre and diversified residential areas. And that’s a whole other story.
To make cycling a viable alternative, a compact city is essential. However, until that is achieved, people should still be able to cycle safely, even if it often means travelling longer distances.
Not necessarily, j.vandersson. These same principles can make a US suburb feel surprisingly compact. Check out places like Carmel, Indiana.
A compact city center is certainly not a requirement. As long as some trips can be done in a reasonable time frame via active transport it's possible to create people oriented infrastructure that works. Even if people need to drive to work or school they might be able to walk or bike to the store, library, gym, etc. Even homes in car-dependent American suburbia usually have destinations that can easily be reached on foot or by bike, even if they don't have a compact city center. I don't have a compact city center nearby, yet I can readily bike to most of my destinations thanks to decent infrastructure for American standards. In some cases my trips are shorter and more convenient by bike than car, and that could be massively improved with small infrastructure design changes such as pedestrian-and-bike only shortcuts through neighborhoods. E-bikes can also help make those longer distances feel shorter.
Compact city centers are great, but they are not a requirement for safer and better street design.
@@streetscaping "compact city"
Dunno what you are talking about, 50% of trips in the USA are under 3 miles, time taken is about 15 min one way.
Its just that you end up with a avarage speed of 10 mph on stroads due to stop signs and traffic lights. Guess what the avarage cycling speed in eg Amsterdam is, 8 mph. If you look a bit further, eg density of cities and municipalities, you will be surprised, Amsterdam (4800/km2) and Utrecht (3900/km2) would barely make the top 150 incorporated places by population density in the USA and barely fall into the USA definition of urban (10k per square mile)
most important aspect of road design is to have people travel on motorways for the most amount of time and kilometers.
They are by far the safest roads.
There are health benefits as well, by walking and cycling. Unfortunately North America is built around the car culture. It is no coincidence, that many cities the design is for car use, especially in suburbs of major cities (where crime, homelessness is out of control) that obesity and BMI are very high as a result.
How about the US makes driver training, actual training instead of just holding a mirror in front of someone's face to see if it fogs up. Driver's training in the US is more about not having you stand in front of DPS staff any longer than is absolutely necessary. It can take a year, multiple tests and cost thousands of Euros to get a license in the Netherlands. Change the road and the average US driver can be safe while on that particular road. Correctly train them to drive and they can drive safely anywhere. Or, you could moved to the Netherlands.
In the UK our road system is about halfway between that of the US and Netherlands. I'd love to see more Netherlands style changes but there'd be a lot of political opposition from conservatives who look on cars the same way that Americans do - as the epitome of freedom.
Yet our road deaths is about the same (per capita) as the Netherlands. Sure our cycling infrastructure is way behind (but catching up) but our roads are also narrow. This includes rural roads which can just about fit one or two cars (slowing down may be required).
The problem in the UK is that the car mindset is more similar to the USA, but the streets are two or three times as narrow.
Walking, cycling or even driving through British residential areas is a constant exercise of avoiding parked and moving cars, even on the pavements.
The balance between road usage and availability is broken over there. A lot of cars need to be removed from the streets to make them safer for all user types, but I don't see how that can be achieved
however the UK does a remarkable job in preventing traffic fatalities
@@osasunaitor In the Netherlands cars has to visit a car dealer or car specialist to perform a security check on the car every year..If something is wrong it has to be repaired before you can drive your car again.And almost every year you have to let the car repaired by the repair shop.But i can not get rid off the feeling that those car shops do anything just to get your money from it.A car that is one year old should not get as bad as they see it.
Hee Boss,we are bad financial.Oh,dont worry,there will be one year old cars soon...And we are back healthy again..
@@jooproos6559 You need to find a better garage then. My car is 11 years old now. Only repairs it needed so far besides the regular maintenance is new tires, windshield wipers and brakes.
Road design is one aspect. More attention has to be paid to which rules are enforced. In North America far too much attention is given to cell phone use and speeding. Lane discipline on freeways and main highways should take precedence over speeding. Intersections have a high accident rate yet seldom is there any attention to them. Some location may have red light cameras but maybe just making sure drivers know the rules of the road would improve.
The US Federal Transit Administration requires grading of roads and highways using "Level of Service" which measures speed, traffic flow of cars, and non-stop vs stop-and-go. Until the FTA decides to use other criteria for awarding money and rating streets and highways, we're stuck.
I reckon a lot of crashes are due to the extremely confusing traffic light setups, with lights strung on cables across multi-lane roads, on the far side of the junction to which they apply, and all these rules that sometimes apply and sometimes apply like "right turn on red", "left turn yield on green" and permanently flashing yellow lights, whatever that might mean
Calm down and stop pretending to be a taxi driver.
A big problem with why this will never work in the USA is the fact that each state is responsible for road construction and design (even if they get federal dollars to use). Therefore, you have fifty states with fifty different sets of regulations and guidelines for traffic engineering. Going further down the rabbit hole, in each state you also have roads that are designed and maintained by a county government or similar (ie. parishes in Louisiana) as well as cities/towns/villages being responsible for their own roads as well. Furthermore, most of the governmental units have laws requiring them to accept the bid from the lowest qualified bidder for a given project, and you can see why this is damn near impossible. However, some of the cities here have really latched on to modern traffic engineering utilizing many concepts expressed in the video and are really very livable places for non-car based transport, but those are more the exception than the rule.
Some governments are reluctant to even patch potholes or keep their bridges in good working order, so unless management of roads is completely redone from the top-down here, this vision will remain a pipe dream for now.
Your probably right. But you also forgot éducation. Europe driving license are a harder to get, you need to actually study, and their expensive. Also you have in most country's you have a point system. Américain driving license are a joke.
No roundabouts, suburban roads with high speeds and many turn-offs, and wide roads which promote speeding.
As someone that bikes around in Austin, one huge difference that feels way less safe as a pedestrian/bike is cars getting a right turn on reds. I don't know if this is universal with all EU countries, but after hearing a friend in Germany say people there can't do that, I noticed how easy it is to just hit someone crossing that's on your right when as a driver you're looking left for oncoming traffic.
Nope. No right turn on red for motor vehicles, anywhere.
The right turn has its own arrow, which is synchronized with the cycle lane and pedestrian crossing.
Also, cars swerving across the bicycle gutter to get into the right turn lane 4:48 , is a HELL NO! in Europe. That turn lane would be eliminate in favor of extra sidewalk and a shorter pedestrian crossing.
It's only dangerous in Europe because they have alot of foot traffic. Thats why its banned in NYC but in the South and West nobody is walking in 100+ degree weather so making people wait just puts more pressure on the traffic to build up for no reason
@@azulaquaza4916 That law was made during the gas crisis and just wasn't ever removed because "muh freedom".
@@azulaquaza4916 If I've learned anything from urbanist YT videos, it's that cars should be completely banned from making right turns:
Right turn on red = bad because you might hit pedestrians/cyclists coming from your right across the street you're on.
Right turn on green = bad because you might "right hook" someone crossing the street you're turning to.
Right turn on green arrow = bad because it's adding an extra turn lane, more space/resources expended for cars, bad land use, more distance for non-drivers to cross, etc.
We need to build more self sufficient, charming, walkable towns in the US
Beta male Serf
That restaurant crash. 3 seconds into the video. Did any of the restaurant patrons die?
Nobody was seriously injured
The worst part is, you aren't even losing any lanes. We just don't want to do it the better way because $MONEY$.
Even if we never have other major modes of transportation, there has got to be a physical separation between streets and roads, so that pedestrians can safely and free enjoy streets and cars can safely and freely drive through roads.
I dont get why every us city is build in squares. its so boring, bad for traffic and dangerous. every city here in germany is unique with a layout completly different to every other city
That's a good video, liked and subscribed!
Left the US for the EU. I'm never going back
No one cares, Americans can move to Europe because y'all can and have money, I couldn't move to the US even if I wanted. So it makes me mad when I see Americans moving to Europe, the US you liking it or not is a good country, if even wealthy ppl like you can move to Europe and so does refugees and immigrants from poor countries, so basically ruining life for locals. I would recommend to try solving you own internal problems, not just move.
Here in Australia, our road death rate is about half that of the US, but still considerably more than what is typical in the EU. Our roads tend to have a lot of safety features and, for me anyway, European roads feel a lot more dangerous. I suspect the difference is that, being a large and sparsely populated country, we tend to go on more long road trips and so fatigue becomes a greater factor.
Even though street design in the US may be a problem, my guess that longer roads trips and thus more fatigue may also be an influence.
It's the narrowness that makes European roads feel a lot more dangerous right? That's how they want you to feel while driving so you'll slow down.
@@aidanmccarthy9249 It was also the drivers. Sure, there are reckless drivers here too, but there seemed to be a lot more in Europe.
The freeways in Italy were deadly (and they weren't narrow).
Another Aussie. I don't think it's got anything to do with the distances. Yes the exist, but unless you live in the sticks (~20%), the VAST majority of driving is within your town or city. I haven't spent much time in America, but my feeling is that their suburbs are far more disconnected (in terms of street connections to neighbouring suburbs) than ours, and while we have some light commercial areas in our residential areas, this is becoming worse in newer developments, leading to more traffic. We have plenty of stroads, but unlike American ones. Where they have huge parking lots with businesses behind them, ours tend to have residences attached directly to them. Locally at least I can see my council is trying, but it's frustrating seeing simple things they could have done to make it better. For example, they put in speed bumps along one of the main street servicing the suburb, as it goes past a park. This is great, it's not a high traffic street, but it is wide and straight there, easy to speed. But they put the money into raising a whole intersection there, but didn't bother to put in a zebra crossing so that children and families could actually cross to the park. (Also, I wouldn't take Italy as the benchmark of Europe)
@@tomwijgers Are you suggesting the US does better than Australia? The statistics say otherwise. I have done some driving in the US and am not at all surprised that they have a higher death rate than we do.
It was the EU doing better than us that puzzled me. Fatigue was the only explanation I could think of, but if you have evidence to the contrary, I happy to listen. It wouldn't matter that most trips here are metropolitan and thus short, I would have thought. You just need enough long trips for fatigue to become a factor and significantly affect the death rate.
When I last looked at the statistics, we seemed to be doing a lot worse than the EU, but, looking at them now, we don't seem to be doing that bad. Road deaths per billion vehicle-km is the most meaningful stat (to my mind anyway). Of those countries in Europe that publish these stats, the handful of countries that do better than us, average 3.7 (compared to our 4.9). Since they don't all publish this stat, I can't really give a European (or EU) average. They may well be doing worse than us on average.
The US, with this measure, is on 6.9 (their per population stat is far worse).
@@BobHutton No I wasn't trying to suggest that! Just pointing out some differences between us and them.
I don't think there'd be a huge difference between us and the EU, but that's because most of the EU is not as great as, say NL, not because we can't do a lot better.
I haven't looked at statistics, but I do remember all the ads from years back saying how most accidents are within 3 (or was it 5?)km of home, which makes a lot of sense, since that's where most driving is done.
TREES. Why aren't most streets either tree lined or building lined? Having pretty much highways in cities, is why we have a bunch of issues with accidents, mores than other countries.
Because standards actually have them removed, to make a clear zone, so that cars whizzing off the road at high speed don't hit as much, on their way to hitting a house at 100 miles an hour, as was the case for a relative's house a couple years ago. The speed was *measured* at just over 100 miles an hour. Missed someone sleeping by a couple feet.
A highway department refused to allow planters to protect pedestrians on a sidewalk in my downtown, because cars might hit them and bounce back into the road.
It's by design, fought for tooth and nail by planners.
It would make walking nicer too. I hate the lack of shade on sidewalks here in Canada.
@@aidanmccarthy9249 You wouldn't last long in Las Vegas.
@@floycewhite6991 good thing I don't plan on ever going there. I'll stick with Amsterdam.
Nice vid, really enjoy how many are quickly realizing just how stupidly we've built our environment over here in North America.. Gotta love oil and auto industries
Perhaps the redesign of streets in different cities around the world, not just in the United States and Europe, as explained in this video, will lead to the fact that the global road death rate will greatly decrease.
Let’s keep in mind 70 foot long trucks need to use these roads too. Half the “big” roads we have aren’t really big enough for truckers. Other countries tend to use shorter wheelbase trucks and shorter trailers.
Simple... Straight roads are dangerous! You can neither judge distance nor speed of other vehicles well. Moreover it's mind numbing to drive on them so you have less concentration. Also people tend to drive faster by choice, but also by the lack of concentration and visible cues of speed (wide roads are worse than narrower roads)
I think you should also consider how a driver's licence is obtained. A TH-camr in the US said she never exited a parking lot on her test. In Europe, _but at least in the Netherlands_ , you must attend a proper driving school. taking part in real traffic. And on your test, you also drive in everyday traffic.
If said TH-camr is true, in the US lots of drivers learned mum or dad's bad habits and think they are the best chauffeurs in the world while everybody else is bad.
The above is hearsay and guess. Can you look into the differences between countries driving education? What are the cost, rules and regulations to obtain a driving licence?
I promise you that TH-camr was lying, at the bare minimum you have to do at least 1 circle around the building
One anecdote doesn't equal experience of 330+ million and they probably said it or exaggerated it to have content. US crash numbers are only intense because the frequency of driving in the US is much higher than other countries
I taught my kids to drive as soon as their feet could reach the pedals. I taught them the 3 rules of driving: (1) never hit anything, (2) never let anything hit you, and (3) try to follow the regulations.
@@azulaquaza4916 If that was true US crash numbers would even out with other countries when divided my distance driven. Spoiler. It doesn't.
I can't say for any other country, or now that I think about it even other states. In Victoria, Australia, you can get your learners permit (L) when you turn 16, with a theory test. You can then drive with any other fully licensed driver, with minimal restrictions. To get your license, you have to log 120 hours worth of driving. I'm unsure how this is enforced (I expect it isn't), as when I was a learner this was just a recommendation. Once you're 18, you can then sit a driving test, which includes a theory test and a driving test, which is pretty simple. You basically just have to drive around a bit, prove you can do one of three parking maneuvers, not crash into another car or the hit the curb or break a driving regulation. That will put you on your probationary license (P1), which does have a few restrictions. Once you've had that for a year, you automatically move up to another probationary level (P2) with a few less restrictions and once you've had that for 3 years you're fully licensed. Depending on what age you do all this, you can skip parts, so that it is possible to get your Ls, 3 months later do you test which will take you straight to P2.
Build elevated rail and use the pillars to reduce car space
Would be interesting to know how "miles travelled" in these statistics is defined? In a comparison of road structures I assume it to be "miles travelled in road traffic"?
Here in Las Vegas the metro area is built on the "Western Grid Pattern". Essentially about every mile east and west there is a wide straight arterial road that is wide, typically three lanes each direction with a center turn lane. These roads go mostly from one end of town to the other uninterrupted. They are wide, straight and by their design promote speeding. Many of these roads back up to residential neighborhoods divided only by a three foot sidewalk and a concrete block wall. Cars frequently run off the roadways and through the walls. Add to that, Las Vegas has liberal drinking laws, a "party town" and what appears to be lax DUI laws.
Vegas boulevards and especially the new rural highways are so easy to drive on compared to old ones elsewhere. You're griping about the good parts.
Driving tests need to be far more difficult. Enforcement needs to drastically increase. Bad drivers should be getting 4 points not 12. People over 60 need to recertify every 5 years. Wrong way driving, driving into a work zone, DUI and being at fault for any accident should be an instant life ban on driving. People driving without a license should spend a year in jail. You will see much better driving habbits when the stakes for screwing up are a lot higher.
0:18 , Romania somehow makes the USA's problem look small... ,
Drivers in Romania might be just as insane as in USA. I drove for a few months in countries like Belgium, Germany, Poland, Hungary, all nice and calm. As soon as I reentered the romanian roads I realised why it's on top of the list, everybody's going over the speed limit and overtaking whenever they have the chance.
How do the Europeans deal with emergency vehicles? I regularly see pushback for road diets because of the risk of emergency vehicles not being able to get through a single lane if there is any congestion.
4:30 this is a common Dutch solution. Notice that the lanes are relatively wide so that in case of a fully backed up road cars can move to the side and if neccesery drive over the curb. And since there is a median people can't overtake so having wide lanes in this case is fine from a road safety perspective.
@@streetscaping I don't get it. Doesn't making the lanes wide defeat the purpose of the design, to slow cars down? When you have a pedestrian island like at 5:16, emergency vehicles can't get by. And of course this all assumes you have the width available to fully separate the bike lanes from the vehicular ones, not always a given.
6:33 These kind of double center lines are a recent trend (10 years or so..) for 30 mph 'distribution roads' and outdated 45-62 mph 'through roads'. Emergency vehicles can lane split and if necessary may even force oncoming traffic into the grass or onto the curb.
@@jyutzler That road is built under the concept of "drive slow go faster" I talked about this in my other video. Despite having wide lanes speeds will still be lower because overtaking isn't possible. With regards to 5:16, traffic volumes on such roads are relatively low.
@@streetscaping Sorry, I'm baffled here. What is stopping cars from going faster? In the US, cars will go 50 MPH on a road like that unless there is congestion and if there is congestion, then there is no way for emergency vehicles to get by.
In my hometown we're going through this right now. NIMBYs are using a single incident where an ambulance crashed while trying to squeeze through stopped traffic as an excuse to shut down any and all safety-related changes to the road network.
Local T&ES has zero response to the complaints, which means that the NIMBYs are sucking all of the air of the room with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Cars are getting ridiculous bigger with more powerful engines. SUV’s and big Pick-Up trucks are more dangerous than ever.
In the suburb I live in all major roads look like the improved road in the beginning of the video
in Utrecht or Rotterdam i dont remember they let the people who walk first by a traffic light and then they let the cars treu
Top 3 things the US needs to be a fully developed nation. We're about 60 years behind everyone else currently.
1. High speed rail
2. Free healthcare
3. Affordable housing
For a free nation, we sure do it let cooperations and the top 1% buy our lives. The future will be amazing when the Boomers loose power. And because they're aging out all we gotta do is wait and let nature help us. 😉
How do you only have fewer than 2k subscribers?
Yes I totally agree, that approach makes much more sense
Maybe if the made it possible for people to walk in the USA
Half of US lives in a climate not suitable or comfortable for walking by 1st world standards.
the Netherlands,
the Netherlands
the Netherlands
Tired with these eternal references to this miniature country in Europe that has VERY different conditions than many other countries.
The US needs to do a lot to improve road safety but copying their ideas is no solution.
The biggest difference is of course sprawling cities. In low-density cities destinations are far apart making cycling not the most convenient means of transport. However, as I mentioned, suburbs should still have safe bike lanes to allow people the option to cycle safely.
its because in America they'd rather pull you over for doing 5 over and not for hogging the left passing lane or doing dumb shit. Also the quality of common sense when it comes to driving is horrendous, they would rather fail you first 2 tries to milk you for money then pass you out of obligation on your third rather than pass you first time because you are a good driver and fail others 50 times because they suck.
The culture is the main problem, the roads are a small factor in all these greater problems, the culture is so much different, the difference I see in culture in Poland and Canada is huge, most people are more courteous in Poland and not willing to do dumb selfish shit but in Canada/America people are so much more selfish, I've been driving on a 4 lane main road in the 3rd lane preparing to switch to 4th to make a left turn, and then a driver from the right side turns right onto my road, except she turns EXACTLY into the lane i'm driving in straight in front of me, THEN she goes into the fourth lane after driving 10 kmh in my lane and forcing me to brake, like why? Either turn into the second or fourth right fucking away, or at least fucking accelerate if you really need the third lane so bad.
This isn't solved with road infrastructure this is solved with proper culture, which goes far beyond just roads or drivers ed. It's something rooted in you when you grow up. If you just make the roads smaller without changing the culture people are just gonna be ripping 20 above speed limit in those narrow roads and causing more crashes than before. People don't speed because they feel it's safe, people speed because they don't care if its safe. Sure it's safe to speed on the highway, sure its safe to do 5 over in the city most of the time, but you need to actually CARE about safety of others and actually judge for yourself when its safe to speed or not.
People who cause crashes by speeding alone do not CARE and go 30 over in the city. Crashes aren't simply caused by speeding unless you go very high over, crashes are caused by lack of attention/knowledge pretty much everyone speeds to some degree, including that in your statistics is just false causation. If you remove 5-10 over crashes from the "speeding is a deciding factor" statistics, I can bet your crash statistics will drop down to maybe 2% being due to speeding with generosity. The main problem is other aspects of driving, speeding itself is not the problem 95% of the time.
Take my previous situation where a guy pulled into the third lane I was driving in, what if I was a shit driver that was on the phone or just zoning out? I wouldn't avoid that collision. Its almost always a possibility to avoid a collision when you drive with a brain I've dodged many collisions in my lifetime by idiots merging into my lane, stopping on the entrance ramp or running reds, simply because I pay attention. It surely attributes quite a lot that I love driving and am always fully immersed in the driving experience rather than just using it as a transportation measure, but even then just paying attention is not that hard.
The world should be livable while also being livable for car enthusiasts
I don't know a car enthusiast who enjoys a commute. To enjoy a drive, you are either racing (go to a track, please!), or out on a winding road with great views. Having proper streets and roads doesn't harm these at all, and adding infrastructure for alternative options even makes the commute better, by reducing car traffic volumes.
Why not just make it vertical parking so you can fit more cars instead of wasting space.
cost?
@@jyutzler cost of the paint that is it
@@42luke93 oh we have a different term for that, either angular parking or perpendicular parking as opposed to parallel parking
@@42luke93When you say vertical parking, it sounds like you're talking about a parking structure. Like a typical parking garage, or those mechanical parking conveyors all over Japan.
@@米空軍パイロット parallel parking sounds like horizontal. So Perpendiculsr then.
Great video, thank you !
In Florida or South Florida regardless of the road, folks don’t obey traffic laws. Licenses are passed out like candy. All you need to do is show up and they will give you a license. Folks also don’t yield to pedestrians or cyclists. They also go 65+ mph on a slow 30mph residential road. On i95 or any other highway they drive highly aggressive and reckless.
5:52 is kruithuisweg in delft
first you have to see there is a problem, and i guess at this point are neither american lawmakers, nor road engineers or planers... therefore you need to open their eyes before getting any reaction...
There exist lawmakers and planners who favor change, but lots don't. And those who favor change generally get unpopular half measures, too little to improve much, and so the pushback eventually wins.
You need a long-term push over decades, like in Carmel Indiana for roundabouts.
@@bearcubdaycare The United States was founded upon rugged individualism, NOT some pansy E-U propaganda. Why don't you do us Americans a favor and see yourself out, of our country.
great points
It has been proven time and time and time and time and time again that reworking roads like this does little to nothing, i'm a Caltrans worker of 16 years and those major road works such as roundabouts and diverging diamonds would just creep back up again as soon as the cameras stopped rolling. Some 40 projects here where roads were built as this video describes actually would turn more dangerous than before within 90 days of install. This is nothing but people lying to themselves hoping people see this as "they're doing something" when in reality only 1 thing is ever going to fix this, Discipline and respect!!! people don't care, but when they see cops writing them tickets and getting one in the mail, then they start going slower and respecting the rules. Rural eastern Cali has proven that time and time again, but no one listens, then they come up with this crap and fudge the numbers to feel good. Job security for me and the towing industry at least.
Edit, i should ad that this probably only applies to the US, i'm just in California and see what is happening here and watching it unfold in other parts of the US too.
Born and raised in California here. That said, you must be from somewhere other than 'Cali' as no real Californian calls it that. But yeah, I agree that all this propaganda and lies are about making the U.S. more like the communist infected E-U.
As a european it is so weird that in the USA you call your country America?
It's not really. Your people (the British in particular) gave it to us 400+ years ago to differentiate the 13 colonies from Canada simply. It dosent make sense in English because there isn't a single America, it's called the AMERICAS, 2 continents. Only Latin countries really call America one continent and call Americans "Estados Unidenses" which is basically "United Statians" which sounds stupid in English.
Elon Musk is an African-American while Kamala Harris is a Jamaican-Indian.
@@azulaquaza4916 Agreed. Mexicans never call themselves Mexican United Statians although that's the name of their country.
1:10 is so funny to me, simple sure, but 1 leaves room for emergency services and uh, turning, while your "improved" version, does not.
emergency services work just fine in the netherlands lol
I have an easy solution for you: u-turn zones.
@@BrowncoatGofAZ I like it
@@JazyyWazyy I wasn’t trying to imply that they don’t, just pointing out a flaw with the visual really.
Common Sense Soapbox just posted a video claiming that cyclists are responsible for more deaths than drivers...
it's true, usually because they're responsible for their own deaths caused by three factors: stupidity, poor judgement, and, improper operations.
Only 800 views?!😮
People read the title, another US bashing video, and moved on.
@@1972Ray Listing ways to improve a place isn't bashing
It's a pretty new video. Come back in a month.
@@leDespicable Ways to improve leDespicable: tax him out of existence, berate him for whatever thing you never bothered to try to understand, call him stupid for not being you... sound familiar?
@@floycewhite6991 What are you implying? I merely said that stating ways to improve roads isn't US-bashing, so what exactly are you trying to say?
The US has several times the motor vehicles than several European countries put together. As a result, most U.S. streets are designed around motor vehicles to begin with. Some areas create unprotected bike lanes in places they shouldn't, because the street wasn't wide enough to begin with, actually causing a vehicle/bicycle accident hazard, while traffic circles/roundabouts are a current fad in the U.S. (nothing like seeing tire tracks over the landscaping in the middle of a circle). There is neither interest nor money to redo all the urban roads in the United States, especially since taking up street parking with European-style measure in old neighborhoods, or slowing traffic with fancy restriction devices will simply get politicians voted out of office at the next election.
One nearby town is redoing a 4-lane road with commercial and industrial traffic through a business district trying for the speed reduction and livability factors. That works SO well when they have an expressway on and off-ramps just south of the redone area, and traffic going through the redone area leading to industrial areas north of the area. I wonder how long it will be before it is returned to a regular US-style road, since they went from 4 lanes down to 2 lanes to plant trees, and widen sidewalks so businesses can set up outdoor spaces (not many restaurants/cafes along that route either). It ain't fancy; it's gritty, blue-collar people there, not fancy, trendy white-collar cafes serving wine and cheese. Enjoy the diesel fumes with your Chateau Whatever, right?? Don't forget to take in your ourdoor furniture every night so nobody steals it (it's a town fighting a high crime rate also).
This is such a myth, 2015 data for amount of registered vehicles per 1000 people: USA - 867 Greece - 883, Finland - 950, Italy - 875, Austria - 849, Poland- 711
I think you might have your cause and effect mixed up. US streets are designed around motor vehicles to begin (and end) with. As a result, the US has several times the motor vehicles...
@@tomwijgers Some of the roads existed before motor vehicles existed, and were later upgraded for motor vehicles. Some were little better than dirt or gravel horse cart tracks, and in the U.S. bicyclists pushed for better roads before the motor vehicle existed en mass.
Roads go where people want to go, not because of the method of locomotion itself.
you call 65 to 75 mph fast driving???
we call that, parking while moving!
The US needs to adopt the universal standard for road signs rather than having them worded in English
But then people would have to memorize what they mean instead of just reading:P
Tough task. The US is allergic to anything that resembles an international standard, they must do everything their own particular way.
@@philipmcniel4908 It is easier to see a picture sign rather having to read the text. In the United Kingdom there are about 250 different road signs but you would only see a few of those regularly. Recently looked at book with all the signs and understood the message even for signs I'd not seen previously.
@@Brian3989 I think it kind of depends. If it's a sign you see all the time, you're going to recognize it pretty easily either way, and if it's a miscellaneous sign you don't see all the time (and you live in a largely monolingual area), it can help to have words to spell out more detailed things like "headlight corridor next 5 miles" or "sunken grade" or "grooved pavement."
@philipmcniel4908 Do you need a sign for grooved pavement though? Or is a sign with an uneven road surface enough?
Intersections are where many are killed including motorcyclists so why not use Roundabouts?
Roundabouts are usually only common in newly built neighborhoods, but US is phasing them in slowly before changing entire intersections to educate the public by starting small and letting them experience it.
Roundabouts are great, Carmel IN has many great examples.
Personal story. I used to live in Tucson, Arizona, but my workplace was a Bayer greenhouse in Marana, half an hour away. On the traditional route, there was a 4-way stop that was super busy because of work transit and the nearby school. Then it was closed for several months and replaced with a roundabout. I loved it. Instant increase in safety. No more worries of T-boning or being T-boned by a school bus.
How about curves, or something magical called, a speed bump! Not only for like school zones, but areas with high density of people, i've been to some cities in America, and i've seen massive roads in the middle of cities that go in a straight line without a single speed bump, i also despise the idea of the cycling lanes being squeezed right next to where the cars are, i live in a 3rd world country, and not gonna lie, our highways are similar, but our urban roads are like 10 times better planned than the US.
Cars are getting bigger and wider in the US. Euro roads don't work in the US and never will. Crashes and dumb people are just a part of the accepted risk you take when driving or living close to a busy street.
Yes and this is the mindset that we want to get rid of. The reason cars are getting bigger in the US is because our roads are so dangerous it makes us feel the safest to be in a big vehicle if we changed how we designed our streets so we wouldn’t need a big truck to feel safe, im sure at least half of the SUV/Truck owners would give them up because they are just not practical. You spend an arm and leg in gas just to get half a tank and then you can’t even see the kid you’re about to run over? Your logic only makes sense to CAR BRAIN mentalities. I’m going to say it louder for everyone to hear it! You don’t need a truck to feel safe if we stopped designing roads for car throughput and designed them more for people throughput. Like when does this end? When you have a highway off ramp and ramp leading from your driveway? Then you’ll complain that your kids can’t play outside because of traffic. Ignorance at it finest! You might be from Texas?
It’s not always good to segregate cyclists from car traffic though, this os mostly done at 50 km/h roads and faster, while roads with a speed limit of 30 tend to have cyclists on the streets to slow down traffic even more, this is still being implemented and not that common yet.
Indeed, I mentioned this at 6:00
best is to make the lanes wide enough so cars and bicycles can comfortably get around each other.
@@svr5423 no that’s not the best thing to do, it encourages speeding and unsafe behavior, if the road is narrow enough then people slow down and start to be careful.
@@miles5600 Narrow roads lead to more accidents due to the lack of safety margins. Everybody has to drive more precise which is also exhausting and causes fatigue.
Not sure why you think something would encourage speeding. It's normally the absence of speeding cameras or cheap speeding tickets.
@@svr5423 wide roads encourage speeding and it's been proven. also no, narrow roads don't cause more *crashes* because people are more cautious, The Netherlands has proven it by the design of their streets and their design manual encourages narrowing roads. all the data is available on google if you're interested.
Tax SUVs and Trucks out of existence
SUV and truck drivers are voters too.
Simply increase the gas tax. Let fuel economy drive the larger vehicles out of existence.
Liberals hate the working class.
Driver training is also a factor
Texas truly epitomizes it.
The initial graph is flawed. There is on average , more people driving per million inhabitants in America then other countries. So you need to redo the graph to show deaths per a mile driven or deaths per car on the road. For example, Sweden has approx. 545 vehicles per a 1000 people with a total population of around 10 million . The USA has 908 vehicles per 1000 people which is almost 1 vehicle per a person and a total population of over 330 million... lol... Also note, most cars are as dangerous as the driver, I have witnessed a person driving while drinking a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone all at the same time. If the Coffee was in one hand and the phone and cigarette was in the other... how F*** were they steering????
US is a car reliant city it would take years for ppl to turn into less of a car dependent country also for kids biking we dont if its safe for them to do it themselves it depends on which area if its in a city like detroit den nah its not safe
It took the Netherlands decades too. They started in the 70s. But it's possible to start now, and if you don't, then it will only take longer.
@@tomwijgers dey gotta control crime in some cities first before dey do wut da netherlands did
Why do we always talk about netherlands all the time? Why not Sweden
Both countries have relatively similar road safety statistics even though the Netherlands has a population density about 20 times that of Sweden and has the highest density of cars per km2 in Europe (excluding microstates).
Do American streets have lots of potholes?
Places where it snows or lower income area yes but if you report it to the city they usually have a crew out there to patch it.
@@azulaquaza4916 Thanks. Throughout the UK, you may know, that pot holes are an epidemic. Budgets for patching have been curtailed so much that defects develop over years and patches on patches are normal. Citizens have resorted to filling them in themselves and been taken to court by the authorities for causing 'damage'. Authorities spend still more money contesting lawsuits brought by motorists for damage to their cars. Some potholes have been listed on social media as tourist attractions. Still, civic leaders award themselves bigger pay rises and bonuses.
The real truth is: most people are simply too stupid to be allowed to drive at all. We need to design our cities to support walking, biking, and public transit so most people are not forced to drive to everything. If we give unskilled people options, they will use them.
Never happen in America just like we will never have substantial number of high-speed trains
Positive changes are already occurring! And hopefully, the east and west coast where there is high potential for a transit corridor will see high-speed trains.
Positive changes are already occurring! And hopefully, the east and west coast where there is high potential for a transit corridor will see high-speed trains.
The roads aren't. The people are. God, driving is quite chore when the rules, or following there of, is closer to India than any European country.
Sheesh, at least give us a warning some of those clips are graphic. Literally saw a young girl have her life end getting crushed in that second clip.
Nobody was seriously hurt
A suggestion for your future videos: do not use any music while you are narrating. "background music" is distracting to the narration. Thanks.
I didn't even notice it. Background music is pretty common during narration. Maybe something about this music in particular was distracting to you or it was too loud compared to the narration. Either way, it was fine for me and I normally notice when this sort of thing is done poorly.
@@DizzyDiddy For me, any background music that is played while the host (or any other people in the video) is speaking, is distracting. When I am watching a video about why a plane crashed or how to install a bathroom's exhaust fan or how to cook this or that food, I just want to hear the instructions. The music causes my brain to try and follow along as well as pay attention to whatever the host is saying.
When I have made this request in other video channels, some folks suggest enabling the c/c. That's not a good suggestion, since I will have to mute the dialogue and read the screen. And the auto-gen'd c/c are not always accurate (e.g., aviation host said 'fore' but the c/c wrote 'four.' Yes, I know the difference but still). Plus the c/c on-screen text itself blocks the image (just like tv channels do during newscasts).
I like to remind hosts that not using any music will give them back time. Since they are not trying to figure out what music to play and then dubbing it to the dialogue track.
This is an incredible video. I really wish that all bike lanes in the united states were raised to sidewalk level. I really wish that conservative americans realized that car-centric society does not line up the value of freedom for everybody. It makes people be forced to buy a car to live in most areas. 🤦.
agree
You guys should just lay off complaining about American Roads... it's never going to change because it's against the law to change them. This is because it would be to expensive and the government only cares about money... quit complaining. It will never change
Positive changes are already occurring! And creating a safe road network would save society billions of dollars
You have an interesting way of speaking👀
Wait till you go to the UK 🇬🇧