Funny how perceptions can change. I was born in 1955, and grew up in Den Haag. When the Nieuwmarktrellen was a thing, I just tended to think these guys and girls were standing in the way of progress. Some 50 years later, I am glad they did. Our cities are so much more livable, thanks to them.
Here in Utrecht, we started filling in the old city moats in favor of highways. We stopped after a few years with the shortest highway to nowhere in the world. Right now we’re more than halfway to breaking them all up and digging brand new ditches in the same old places....
Utrecht also narrowly avoided a similar fate, where the waterway ringing old city center was to be filled in and a two-lane ring placed to enable easier motor access. Thankfully there was plenty of resistance and the Minister of Culture designated the walls and strongholds along the waterway as monuments, which stalled the highway construction, resulting in the shortest highway in the country at not even two kilometers. What an accomplishment, right? Restoration of the Catharijnesingel waterway should be finished during 2020, so we'll have undone that part of the highway mania soon. If you're a motorist, Utrecht is far from ideal, but as an elective non-driver I'm more than satisfied.
@@jlammetje That is true, but in the 1960's the Dutch policy (along with policies in other countries) was to make room for the car, also in the city centers...
I'm from Zwolle (a beautiful old city about an hour away from amsterdam) in the 60s there was a plan to demolish half of the medieval city centre to make place for the A28 highway to run through the middle of the city and have an on off ramp there. Luckily after similar protests to the ones in Amsterdam the A28 was placed about 1km outside the city centre. By the way, if anyone wants a tour of Zwolle sometime just let me know, I'm happy to show anyone around.
@@NotJustBikes yes that's certainly fun! Near the train station is also Dino Land, I've not been there my self but it's really popular with kids as well.
Whenever people get upset about traffic jams they always shout "we need more roads". No mothafluffer, you need less cars. Redesign your cities so people dont need cars all the time.
So you build a subway... Amsterdam did that, destroying a whole historic neighbourhood. Much to the discontent of most of the citizens of the city. But eventually we figured we can make use of the old dutch habit of riding bikes. Amsterdam is perfect for that.
nope, traffic jams (at least in the Netherlands) are BETWEEN cities more than anything, or on the entry points to a city. A major reason people still use cars to get to cities is because public transport is both highly inefficient and massively overcrowded. Trains are packed over capacity during rush hour, both the train cars and the track segments, so simply adding more trains doesn't work. In fact Dutch railways have some years ago announced that if there were only a 10% reduction in car traffic in favour of trains they'd be unable to cope, and since the amount of rail traffic has increased by roughly that amount (due to the increase in population, not a decrease in car use). But take an example from my reality, living outside of Utrecht but having to commute into the city outskirts for work: By car it takes me about 40 minutes to get to work in the morning, and the same to get home in the afternoon. Same trip by public transport would take me 3 hours in the morning and another 3 hours to get home. And that in overflowing trains and busses. And that's the situation for most people who use a car to get to work.
This is what’s happening in the Philippines. Filipinos perceived themselves as faux Americans and being car centric is a way for progress. Our oligarchs brains us so that they can build toll elevated highways and gain more money. They are convincing us that the only way to solve traffic is to build more roads than to build and encourage mass transportation.
Filipinos perceive that because they have no other choice. Public transportation is basically poor in the country so they have to buy a car which then clogs roads as more people buy. Meanwhile, urban planners are still stuck in the American way of planning and want to replicate what’s in the US (see those subdivisions).
@@achuuuooooosuu weird, since some of those subdivisions built in the 90s have now become great walkable neighborhoods in their own right. Apparently the developers weren't as strict as they should be and let the owners develop their houses as they saw fit. Thus main shopping streets developed within these old subdivisions, and they're great.
@@ianhomerpura8937 one advantage of lax enforcement. during the early years, it's probably strict, but after a few years (especially once the developer have sold every property), things began to relax
@@achuuuooooosuu i doubt if there's even urban planners though. they just let developers create these hectares of subdivisions, but the infrastructures leading to some of these places are in bad shape (pot holes, barely 2-lanes, no proper drainage, etc)
Same thing goes to London. They were planning to build more residential areas with houses that look exactly the same in the 60s, but another crisis stopped it.
@@Ritaaw1 Huh, interesting. I know that they made a green belt at some point to stop expansion. They've done something like that here as well afaik. Maybe the current crisis will have loads of positive consequences as well. Not having trains/busses that are stuffed with people would be nice to have after this as well.
For clarity: Jokinnens plan was not commissioned by the city of Amsterdam, but by the car industry and car drivers organisation. And Amsterdam did build highways.... not through but around the central part of the city. This helped to reduce cars within the city.
They started building them through neighbourhoods as well. You can see that in parts of Oost, where the poorest people lived in the 60’s and 70’s (after the original inhabitants had been murdered in the holocaust). Almost nothing remains today of the Weesper/Waterloopleinbuurt as a result of the car-centric modernizations that happened then.
It is similar in Trondheim, Norway. They planned replacing “Bakklandet” a central district a long the river with highway, removing many old buildings. Luckily they didn’t, and now it is almost the most popular part of the city with cafes and almost no traffic.
Yep. I lived in Brussels for two years. I always think it's what Amsterdam would be if people hadn't protested in the 70s. It's amazing how car-centric Brussels still is today.
@@NotJustBikes Somehow, overall, I still prefer living in Brussels over Amsterdam because of the food, people, culture, authentic nightlife, but the traffic is terrible.
@@luxembourger Most people prefer Amsterdam over Brussels. And especially because of the unfriendly nature of Brussels. But if you like the people more that is your right.
@@davidderuiter726 I understand what you wean. I love the (alternative creative) nightlife in Belgium, something what is mostly missing in Amsterdam. Amsterdam has become, how strange it may sound, too conservative and commercial mainstream for me.
They tried to pull this shit in the city of hamburg as well. In the late 1960s, the city was planning to build a network of inner city highways that would have plowed through historic living quarters. Many of the inner city rivers would have been filled with concrete. Thank God these plans where never realised.
The plan for these motorways in built-up places always cites "fast and easy access" as the main reason for building them. But when you think of it, all these plans achieve is A) ensure anybody who can drive there, will drive there, and B) Introduce a bottleneck for road traffic. It's a recipe for gridlock. You want to build those ugly interchanges outside of town. This also helps to avoid local traffic getting on the motorway. Because they are very expensive to build and maintain, you'll want through traffic only on the motorways.
Welgeldiguniekalias and by doing that it will free up potentially overcrowded public transit, or allow more people to even have an option into the city in places without either public transit or highways. It’s ultimately going to free up some “traffic”
@@me-it9jn Are you joking? www.safe-tiny.io/4lvcKNcb3 It's much easier and cheaper to buy some more buses than to build more lanes. In Amsterdam proper, there are no places without public transit. There's trains, trams, the metro, and buses all over the place, and an estimated 38% of all trips in Amsterdam are by bicycle. More cars would only get in the way and disrupt the flow of traffic.
"Fast and easy access" to what, if everything is being demolished in favor of highways. I can't comprehend how people ever deemed plans like this a good idea.
I was about 9 is when scientists started of warning of global warming. I pretty much decided around then that I was never going to own a car and add to the problem. I'm 45 now and the only times I've ever driven was because it's better to have someone that may be a little overly cautious behind the wheel instead of someone that's been drinking, but, I have kept my word and never owned a car. Anyway, I went to Amsterdam for the first time in November of 2019...and I cried. A 43 year old man crying because he realized he's lived his entire life in a country that seems to go out of it's way to accommodate something that sits in a parking spot 99% of the day and not the population. I went into more businesses in two days in Europe than I did in two months in the US. And that's not because I was a tourist. Henk's Comics was just a short walk from where I was staying. I stopped in a coffeeshop, in a bakery, got a few supplies from Albert Heijn, and went into a few stores that looked interesting. I went into all those places because I actually had the option to. If I wanted to do those things in Texas, well, closest dispensary is 2 states over. There's a tortilla factory nearby which doesn't sell to the public, but the closest thing to a "bakery" is at the supermarket, which is over an hour walk. I know of a few interesting businesses here I'd like to check out, but they're on opposite sides of town, at least 3 hours just to get there by foot. I dunno... It just kind of hit me at once how Americans don't even get the option to have that kind of community aside from a few pockets here and there. "Oh, you own the building and you want to live upstairs of your business on the bottom floor? Don't be ridiculous. You're not ZONED for that!" Dufuqyo?! Sorry for the rant. Thanks for taking the time to doing these. Informative and masterfully put together. Makes me want to become a city planner and use your videos as reference guides.
Bulldozing "several" poor districts to make room for giant highway(s). And a giant stadium for a professional sports team that pays it's players absorbent salaries to not perform; all funded by tax dollars. Now that is more American!
people in the 60's really were on one. some of the worst examples of urban planning and architecture, combining to produce one big Hellcity™. I'm glad the damage was mitigated in this case at least.
nothing of this plan passed the aproval, yes their may have been buildings that got broken down but it was for normal projects that where needed to keep the city alive same as every other city in the world
Sadly, my home city of Stockholm had its central districts completely demolished in favour of wide streets and highways, and the beautiful old houses were demolished in favour of ugly 1960s houses despite massive protests. It’s called “Norrmalmsregleringen” in Swedish. Hopefully we can completely restore how it was once upon a time :/
There's a prime example of car planning destroying pedestrian spaces not by taking up that space but by making them unpleasant close to where I live at the train station, there is a walkable cyclable shopping area close to some apartment buildings and student housing, it's surrounded by 6 lane roads (3 lanes each way) and getting there requires crossing or walking along one of those roads for a while, even with wide pedestrian and cycling paths it's unpleasant, the only shop that manages to thrive in this area is maybe somewhat ironically a bicicle store that has expanded and now takes up over 50% of the shopping area and currently makes up over 80% of the store fronts that are still being used.
There were similar plans for Vienna, some of them partly implemented. What brought them to a halt, was not really protest (people were in favour in the 1960s) but lack of funds - thankfully.
@@Foxesandbelts To live maybe but they are not vibrant as a whole, Living around a zoo is nice i guess but there is not a lot to do in that neighbourhood. De Pijp used to be a poor place now a lot of Young Urbanned People live there.
They planned to do the same thing in Greater London, but protests eventually stopped any big highways from ever being built in London. Many big highways stop at the M25, and the four that penetrate through stop before reaching London proper.
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With the ongoing coronavirus crisis, many cities are encouraging bikes as a stopgap measure, especially for those who used to use the public transportation network. The popularity of PT is plummeting for obvious reasons (kinda hard to keep 1.5 meters in a Petri-dish-on-wheels) and if those people would all start driving, the number of cars would pretty much double overnight which would basically suffocate the cities in exhaust gasses and keep the roads in a constant state of gridlock. Budapest, for example, finally got the bike lane on the Grand Boulevard and the Üllői street (after literal decades of cyclists demanding them). And while they are supposedly temporary... well, as the Russian proverb goes: Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution. This and a more widespread acceptance of telecommuting might be the silver lining in this pandemic.
It will be interesting to see how cities change after the pandemic, but cities have had pandemics before, and Taiwan (for example) maintained a very good control of the coronavirus while never reducing public transit usage (as I talked about in my coronavirus vide), so I'm not sure too much is going to change in the long-run. Still, now is the time to install better walking and cycling infrastructure for sure, because your Russian proverb is completely correct.
@@NotJustBikes In the United States, I can see big money groups that oppose transit ballot measures, like auto industry funded Americans for Prosperity, weaponizing Covid. Your Taiwanese example will become very important, too bad the minor inconvenience of a face covering is seen as a deal breaker and freedom issue for countless selfish Americans.
To me the most interesting thing about this is how the inhabitants of Amsterdam fought back and didn’t allow this to happen. This car-centric faux-futurism seems to have affected “younger” cities the most, as opposed to centuries-old cities in Europe and Asia, almost like people in these newer cities were less attached to them somehow. Also, while this might be a tough subject to tackle, segregation also played a role in the suburbia landscape of the US, as they were seen as “white havens”. I’m curious as to why this didn’t seem to play the a similar role in the Netherlands, as the Dutch also have a history of colonization and enslavement.
You touched upon grass root resistance but it has been the driving factor that made Amsterdam into the city it now is. I suggest you look into the history of the squater movement in the Nieuwmarktbuurt, that is where Amsterdam (and the Netherlands in general) found its tipping point concerning urban development.
@@NotJustBikes yes, and the anti city circus against the stopera (we lost that one) and het witte fietsenplan van Luud Schimmelpennik. It is remarkable however that all these ideas from the seventies really started to bloom in the last decade and if i am not mistaken will lead to really big and revolutionary changes in the next years to come. 50 years after the epic Nieuwmarkt struggle, who would have guessed?
@@ArmageddonAfterparty Please explain, i don't quite understand your point. What i wanted to say is that the squaters movement changed the way people and politics thought about urban development, away from suburbanisation towards the compact city with room for residential, educational, recreational and commercial and retail functions, all mixed together in a small scale people friendly public space. You can see this now in allmost all neighbourhoods of Amsterdam. It is contrary to the modernistic ideas of separation of Urban functions as propagated by Corbusier and realised on a grand scale in the USA. An example in the Netherlands can be found in the Bijlmer neighbourhood but even there you can see a rethinking of the original context.
The answer is: Paris! Car-free city starting 2022! I'm going there this Christmas to check it out (again). I'm there every three to five years and it's bee great to see the changes!
@@Nyx_2142 While it would be good, Paris singing the praises of doing next to nothing aside from a few central routes feels predictive: "yes we did it, we don't need more".
Now you can have a look at Moscow. It is a car-centric city where tube and road network grow rapidly , but a lot of people live inside the city. It could be a bike-city , but a car is a symbol of wealth here, and one half of the year bikes are extremely uncomfortable and dangerous to ride due to extreme weather conditions ..
New York had Robert Moses,who destroyed transit,and neighborhoods,with a meat ax,and never took responsibility for his displacement of people,and businesses,and the almost dissolution of New York City,and parts of Long Island! That's one major reason why,now,New York is so hard to get around in,and the dearth of public transport! Thank you for your attention ☺!
There is a similar video about London. There it partly happened. And in San Francisco the Embarcadero was actually built; fortunately they had an earthquake and then they decided not to rebuild it.
Toronto, too, with the Gardiner Expressway. They bulldozed the neighbourhood of South Parkdale, for instance. Most cities have a story like this. And most cities weren't able to stop it.
@Andrew Smith 1. If they had made ringways you'd still have congestion. 2. You have a public transportation system many times better than most American cities. I sometimes travel to Houston. The "Katy Freeway" has if you count everything 24 or so lanes. And they all stand still. Really, more roads are *not* the solution.
In Tilburg in the 60's a lot was actually demolished by the mayor Cees Becht, nicknamed locally as Cees den sloper. Or Cees the demolisher. The city was actually pretty before, as can been seen in the Tilburg archives. After not so much. In an American tourguide it was compared to east Berlin even. Nowadays they are renovating and rebuilding a lot, esp in the old railway area. Keeping as much of the original buildings as possible. Wich is really nice. Hope they keep it up.
Lots of cities in Noord Brabant and Limburg were demolished in the sixties to accommodate cars because of the industries closing down. Just look at Roermond, Eindhoven, Helmond. God awful what they did there. Helmond is absolutely the worst off. There’s an overpass next to the castle close to the city center. If you see older pictures of Helmond you will cry. I think the sixties demolished more beautiful cities than WW2.
Fortunately the old center was not sacrificed, suburbanisation still happened though. After the 60s Amsterdam lost almost 200.000 inhabitants to suburbs like Almere only to be regained by newcomers in 2020. Even the ring road was still built, just much further outside the old center. This is the A10, a mostly 6 to 8-lanes highway and connects the suburbs within city limits such as Nieuw West and also directs traffic out and into the city.
Yes, there was still a push in those times for people to live outside of the city and drive in. Instead of bulldozing the centre they focused on Park and Ride. Unfortunately today all the people who live in those suburbs now expect easy access to the city by car and are constantly demanding more expensive highway expansion.
In Germany we call this "autogerechte Stadt" ("city adapted to cars") and many big cities in Germany (West more than East) were more or less rebuild that way after the World War II.
I like the inner city of Leipzig much for this. The city center is an all pedestrian and bicycle area and the neighboring areas are easily accessibly by foot, bike, or public transportation. The TRAM system they have there is almost perfect. But at the same time, traversing the city by car is also not too huge a struggle. The city highways are far from as crammed as those of Berlin or Hamburg and the layout is really straightforward and easily navigable.
Stockholm was completely destroyed by similar modernisations in the 50s and onwards. It makes me wonder what currently modern ideas will be seen as crazy in 50 years.
I'm guessing it'll be something healthcare related, that'll make this look like the dark ages. I have studied the stock market and economics for a while - pharmaceuticals seem to be the only industry where the highest cost producer of a treatment continually wins. Small drug companies must partner with bigger ones and charge more to become successful. It makes me think there's a bit of backroom dealing going on, plus lots of politics/oligarchies behind the scenes - and politicians/government won't tackle it because if they reigned in spending and called out companies for obscenely inefficient ways of doing things, people would die. I fully expect to look back in 20 years and be like... "Yeah, we could've spent $100b on that COVID thing and saved more people, rather than tens of trillions worldwide." It'll be stupidly obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
Indonesia as The Dutch former colony, right now many cities in Indonesia trying to copy Amsterdam as they were like in 60s. Many cities and towns more become car & motorbike-centric, the government are more likely to build wide road & tolls across the island instead doing reactivation of The Dutch Railway Network.
This was pretty bad, good that most of it didn't happen! In the 1960's, anything seemed possible, and there seemed to be no limits. Rotterdam, a city that likes to brag about having the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, etc., had a plan for its port that even dwarfs this one. Look for 'Rotterdam 2000+' (select images) , the most megalomaniacal and devastating plan ever designed for anything in the Netherlands. The plan was, to more than double the port's industrial area, sacrificing all of the island of Voorne-Putten and part of Hoekse Waard; on top of that, a whole new city for half a million inhabitants was projected on the isle of Goeree-Overflakkee, basically ruining that island as well. Needless to say, this plan also met a little resistance after its presentation ;)
@@willjfang playing the race card are we? Just be happy we tolerate you here so you don’t have to live under oppressive communist rule. We’ve had about enough in Richmond
After The Joker plan Amsterdam realized a ring highway system around the boundaries of the city called Ring Amsterdam. It forms so to speak a wheel around the city and there a many roads like spokes of a rim, that leads to the main city center. The mono rail mentioned in the video became a metro system which rises above and underground. In the video the so called 'boulevard' is indeed a part of a highway that never got realized. It suppose to connect Amsterdam North thru the IJ tunnel via Jonas Daniel Meyer Square to the south/east part of the city. It is indeed a strange site to see old neighborhoods cut in half by a modern lay out of roads and new modern tall buildings. Actually it is a awful site to see. To good part is that traffic inside the city does no longer go thru the small and narrow streets of good old Amsterdam. It's functions as a ring inside a ring.
2:22 This is literally where I walked past for a few years to go to college. Behind the camera is the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, the main College in the city,
Rotterdam was rebuild with a modern plan (the Basic Plan) which like all plan end up failling and open up toward less car oriented approach. However, it also create a very comfortable and integrated car and bicycle network. This basic infrastructure, for me, are today the carriers of real densification in the city centre, fighting the urban growth and the growing lack of housing. I feel sometime that is what Amsterdam lack. Those infrastructures also decide how a city can adapt to problematic of big cities. Amsterdam today suffer from a dramatic lack of housing and the city is totally unaffordable. Densification is quite difficult, so they develop new neighborhood quite far from the city centre. Amsterdam Noord has a real potential, but its lack of adapted infrastructure has let it unable to suffice the need of housing development. Without going to the extrem of north america's road infrastructure, I do believe that Amsterdam need to start changing scale in their answers.
As a long time resident this is shocking and fascinating to see. I wasn't born here but my city is certainly one of the most liveable. Fortunately, Amsterdam did get a chance.
These plans do sound absolute ridiculous in today’s standards. However they had a valid point back in de 60’s. De Pijp for example was a place nobody wanted to live. Small, badly build houses, often without even a shower where whole families lived in. As welfare grew in the 50’s and 60’s those houses in the Pijp and other working class neighbourhoods needed major renovations due to the increased welfare. People who could afford moved to more spacious environments like Almere, Zaandam or Hilversum. That one area that was demolished after all, was demolished to build the old Metrotunnel which eventually gave space to buid the 4 lane Wibautstraat.
Something similar happened in Prague (Czech Republic). And because the communist regime was in power, they succeeded. Now we have giant, oversized, multi-lane roads in Prague, which often cannot even be passed from one side to the other. And people here literally have to lay down their lives in order to make a difference for the better. One example for all. The death of cyclist Jan Bouchal in 2006, an ecologist and promoter of bicycle transport. The intersection was not rebuilt until 2012. A link to a Czech website describing how Prague got rid of the crossroads of death. Please use Google Translate. ekolist.cz/cz/zpravodajstvi/zpravy/praha-se-zbavila-krizovatky-smrti-cykliste-ji-uz-projedou-bezpecne Jan Bouchal en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Bouchal North-South highway in Prague wikipage cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severoji%C5%BEn%C3%AD_magistr%C3%A1la
Impeccably executed! Your videos are brilliant. I, however, must express utter sadness that the Americans did inspire the Dutch to build motorways, and they are ubiquitous. In addition, there is no dearth of traffic queues, urban sprawl, strip development, and ugly development. All of these aforementioned elements did not appear until the late '70s and '80s. I was fortunate enough to see The Netherlands in the early '70s when it was a veritable open air museum.
Makes me think of Quebec City. There are beautiful places around the Chateau Frontenac but many of the working class neighbourhood who looked great too have been partly destroyed. Most of the city is a pain to look at and to live in without a car.
Here in Brazil we have some cities where the main way of commuting is the bicycle. One of them is a city named "Campo Bom" (Good Camp) in Rio Grande do Sul. But despite the fact that bicycles are better for the environment, the citizens use them because most people are too poor to afford cars. In the state's capital people commute with things like Uber because public transportation is too expensive, depending on the trip's length. Not only that, but Uber and its similar services destroyed the ecosystem of public transportation. We had buses, microbuses, cabs and even electric trains. They weren't perfect but at least we didn't have a lot of congestion as we have now. Before March 2020 I used mostly public transportation, my car was (and still is) only used for trips outside the metro area. Now I'm walking as much as possible, because the city is too hostile towards bicycles and scooters.
We had very similar plans here in Helsinki, Finland in the 1960's called Smith-Polvinen. Not sure if there's much material of it in english, but as they say ''picture is worth a thousand words'' . If you'd like can link you a great 3D visualization of it.
I suspect any video about "highways" and "cars" will get car ads. Pretty funny. I wish I could choose which ads to show (or not show), but I am at the will of Google! 😁
Jason, A Great explanation of what happened in the '70s in Amsterdam. This needs to be shown around the planet to all city councillors who have grandiose ideas about themselves and super-highways. Auckland NZ is one such example of the disaster that ensues when wrong thinking is followed. Of course it helps to not have self regulation and hard line selective neoliberal economics running the show.
all that wibautstraat footage takes me back to my days studying there, and all the walking we did just reach the AH! looking back it’s such a different experience compared to studying in the city centre. i still do plenty of walking while there, but by choice, since it’s much more fun than the treks through the dreary, cold wintunnel that is the wibautstraat
Wow, I'd never realized why it works so well here and so badly in the US. If you build stuff around cars, you have huge N-lane roads and giant parking lots, moving all buildings far apart, so people will want to take a car to get anywhere because it's too darn far to walk. No way to fix it, because people expect the distances to remain the same when cars are removed, and you can't fix the distances before the cars are gone.
That is exactly right. Unfortunately once you've bulldozed your walkable neighbourhoods, and given all of the space between buildings to cars, it's extremely difficult to go back.
@@NotJustBikes Not just that; if you were to propose a walkable neighbourhood in the US now you wouldn't get any traction - where would you park your car so people won't want to move there, nobody will come to the shops so no shops will go there, nobody thinks it'll be a success so nobody will want to fund it.
Funny that the left most plan at 00:51 is pretty much exactly how the highway system turned out. A highway aroud the city rather than through it, fortunately.
Omg, imagine this all has happen. I would cry if I saw old photos of old Amsterdam, so lifeable, and now inefficient city structure... I think these old structures from the car-free time are the best in the world
Ah, Dubai. The 'city' that failed to be. The single most artificial and soulless 'settlement' to ever exist and only made to be a playground for people with more money than sense.
God, could you imagine how far back we would have been set back in terms of infrastructure if we didn't have a model infrastructure country like the Netherlands?
It's a bakfiets, usually just called "cargo bikes" in English, but that's confusing. They are available in many US cities. Just search for a bike shop near you that sells cargo bikes. They can be expensive though, as most are imported from Denmark or the Netherlands.
Hey Jason, loving the videos -- just heard about you on The War on Cars and I think I just binged your whole channel over the weekend. Are you slowly working up to some recommendations for American and Canadian cities? The Armchair Urbanist roasted you pretty good with a summary of your channel (paraphrasing): "Frustrated by American infrastructure? Just give up and move to Amsterdam." I hope you took his joke lightly, he seems like a good fella, but he brings up a decent point. How do we help change this? Is it cultural? Is it political? I watched your episode on zoning and still don't know what I can do about it. Is zoning something I vote on? Is it something elected officials vote on? How does it even work? I'm not a homeowner (I'm an American millennial after all) so I don't really **need** to understand zoning and can't really afford a car because of student loans (I'm an American millennial after all) and the existential climate crisis can't really afford me to have a car, either.....so how do we fix this? Looking forward to more videos! Thanks!
I found a few of your Videos over some time, in the last couple of days I saw a few more, and as a Wanna be Channel My self, Subscribed ( I know how important it is 👍) I have a Himiway E-Bike and just got into the Bike Culture and like your Content and as I saw some very recent Videos, have gone back to your beginning, I was in film classes in college and like the style of video you produce. Much Love from Vancouver,,,,,,,,,,,WA.
I know what it's like, I've lived 4 years in the city with the second highest ratio of km of highway per habitant in Canada. Scooters and cars with spare tires were completely blocked by highways. Scooters used bike bypasses all the time. Now imagine being a pedestrian? It's so sad.
damn insane... good example how renovation and renewal needs to be tested against the needs of the people, and not against a futuristic view that hasn't been proven, only in the mind of the project manager.
Hey, nice video, I'm glad I watched it. I am just curious now if there are have been any other well-documented stories like this Plan Jokinen in Amsterdam and Hague? Anywhere else across future European Union that the sprawled car-dependent suburbia was gonna rise?
Tons of European cities had plans like this that were carried out more or less but many were thankfully stopped by fierce protests and resistance and since roughly the 1990s the history of European cities has really just been undoing the damage of the 20th century. It was back when people in Europe still thought that America was an ideal to follow and the vision of the future because of the Marshall aid, interacting with American troops, media and a hefty dose of propaganda. Europe slowly became disillusioned with America though and at this point most Europeans either feel uneasy with the US or see it as an example of what not to do and have some amount of contempt for the country.
Rotterdam was already flattened by the Germans in 1940. The first architect that had the job to reconstruct Rotterdam was Witteveen. He designed Rotterdam with respect to the historical architecture of Rotterdam, but the Nazis weren't satisfied with it and in 1942 it was completely halted. This meant Rotterdam wasn't rebuilt at all until the war had ended and that it had urban farming like medieval Rome, and today Detroit. In the meantime, Witteveen got a burn-out in 1944 and was succeeded by van Traa that came up with the _Basisplan_ , that had Nazi infrastructure, but the plans for architecture crystallised a year after the liberation in 1946. That's why after the war Rotterdam was rebuilt as the modern, car-friendly city as we know it. It could have been worse in the 1970s, but people woke up and stopped the megalomaniac plans. wederopbouwrotterdam.nl/artikelen/wederopbouwplan-witteveen wederopbouwrotterdam.nl/artikelen/basisplan-van-traa/ versbeton.nl/2018/05/historische-besluiten-nee-tegen-het-rottetrace/
I met Herman Feddema yesterday at Huis de Pinto. He participated in the social movement against the highway. I think it would be great for you to meet him.
Expressways are great, and they get a lot of criticism. The main problem with American cities isn't that expressways exist, its that they go through the urban center instead of staying at the periphery. Trains and bikes are obviously superior for the urban core.
This is actually really similar to how San Francisco stopped the freeway plan around the same time period, which is interesting as Market St is currently transitioning to a car-free street and part of it is already only accessible by bikes and public transit. Let's hope we can see a similar future of SF then, providing that people are willing to get e-bikes. Let's face it, those hills can kill even the most badass cyclist 😂
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![Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous (and they're everywhere) [ST05]](/img/tr.png)
Funny how perceptions can change. I was born in 1955, and grew up in Den Haag. When the Nieuwmarktrellen was a thing, I just tended to think these guys and girls were standing in the way of progress. Some 50 years later, I am glad they did. Our cities are so much more livable, thanks to them.
In their time, revolutionaries are often seen as radicals.
@@Quintinohthree So true. Rebels sometimes turn into freedomfighters, when they win. It takes time for them to be appreciated, though.
You assumed those youngsters knew nothing! But it's actually you who knew nothing.
@@33lex55 Not always, though. Some rebels don't lead to movements that improve life. There's always good and bad.
@@aryanbhuta3382 Without specifics, there is little I can say to that. Can you name a specific group or event?
Damn, those huge parking lots are seriously depressing.
Daniel you are just using the wrong vehicle then
@@d947 Just use a bike?
Yes, they are depressing
In the US, we call that "Individual freedom" (me: cries in American)
@@d947 That’s the whole fucking point
Holy crap we dodged a bullet there in the 60s!
(Amazing how much quality content you squeezed into
TH-cam videos can be quick and to-the-point when you're not trying to stretch them out to fit more ads. 😉
Here in Utrecht, we started filling in the old city moats in favor of highways. We stopped after a few years with the shortest highway to nowhere in the world. Right now we’re more than halfway to breaking them all up and digging brand new ditches in the same old places....
@@NotJustBikes Sadly, it failed entirely to address the problems with yuppification as well as gentrification. Liveable cities my ass.
@@NotJustBikes my guy with the burn on most youtubers😂
@@ArmageddonAfterparty this is so true, house prices are skyrocketing. Most original locals cannot afford these. sad but true
Utrecht also narrowly avoided a similar fate, where the waterway ringing old city center was to be filled in and a two-lane ring placed to enable easier motor access. Thankfully there was plenty of resistance and the Minister of Culture designated the walls and strongholds along the waterway as monuments, which stalled the highway construction, resulting in the shortest highway in the country at not even two kilometers. What an accomplishment, right? Restoration of the Catharijnesingel waterway should be finished during 2020, so we'll have undone that part of the highway mania soon. If you're a motorist, Utrecht is far from ideal, but as an elective non-driver I'm more than satisfied.
Gerritt Lighthart and everyone in the Netherlands knows that you don’t take the car to a city center, you take a bus or train.
@@jlammetje That is true, but in the 1960's the Dutch policy (along with policies in other countries) was to make room for the car, also in the city centers...
@@marcvanderwee Yes, do you remember the city bus going under the Dom tower?
vind utrecht toch wel erg vaag als stad (grote open wegen) buiten het prachtige centrum dan!
The last time I was in Utrecht (2017) the area around the central station was one big construction site, though. Bit depressing to be honest.
I'm from Zwolle (a beautiful old city about an hour away from amsterdam) in the 60s there was a plan to demolish half of the medieval city centre to make place for the A28 highway to run through the middle of the city and have an on off ramp there. Luckily after similar protests to the ones in Amsterdam the A28 was placed about 1km outside the city centre.
By the way, if anyone wants a tour of Zwolle sometime just let me know, I'm happy to show anyone around.
I know Zwolle! My kids love the Bonami SpelComputer Museum there. 😉
@@NotJustBikes yes that's certainly fun! Near the train station is also Dino Land, I've not been there my self but it's really popular with kids as well.
Zwolle de home town! ;)
Ik kom ook uit Zwolle 🙂
ik heet ook bart
Whenever people get upset about traffic jams they always shout "we need more roads". No mothafluffer, you need less cars. Redesign your cities so people dont need cars all the time.
Sure, we can build roads that spiral up 100 floors and go nowhere if they so want.
Btw, I own a car.
So you build a subway... Amsterdam did that, destroying a whole historic neighbourhood. Much to the discontent of most of the citizens of the city. But eventually we figured we can make use of the old dutch habit of riding bikes. Amsterdam is perfect for that.
*Fewer
nope, traffic jams (at least in the Netherlands) are BETWEEN cities more than anything, or on the entry points to a city.
A major reason people still use cars to get to cities is because public transport is both highly inefficient and massively overcrowded.
Trains are packed over capacity during rush hour, both the train cars and the track segments, so simply adding more trains doesn't work.
In fact Dutch railways have some years ago announced that if there were only a 10% reduction in car traffic in favour of trains they'd be unable to cope, and since the amount of rail traffic has increased by roughly that amount (due to the increase in population, not a decrease in car use).
But take an example from my reality, living outside of Utrecht but having to commute into the city outskirts for work: By car it takes me about 40 minutes to get to work in the morning, and the same to get home in the afternoon.
Same trip by public transport would take me 3 hours in the morning and another 3 hours to get home. And that in overflowing trains and busses.
And that's the situation for most people who use a car to get to work.
@@jwenting So the real problem is overpopulation. Let's face it.
This is what’s happening in the Philippines. Filipinos perceived themselves as faux Americans and being car centric is a way for progress. Our oligarchs brains us so that they can build toll elevated highways and gain more money. They are convincing us that the only way to solve traffic is to build more roads than to build and encourage mass transportation.
Filipinos perceive that because they have no other choice. Public transportation is basically poor in the country so they have to buy a car which then clogs roads as more people buy. Meanwhile, urban planners are still stuck in the American way of planning and want to replicate what’s in the US (see those subdivisions).
@@achuuuooooosuu weird, since some of those subdivisions built in the 90s have now become great walkable neighborhoods in their own right. Apparently the developers weren't as strict as they should be and let the owners develop their houses as they saw fit. Thus main shopping streets developed within these old subdivisions, and they're great.
@@ianhomerpura8937 one advantage of lax enforcement. during the early years, it's probably strict, but after a few years (especially once the developer have sold every property), things began to relax
@@achuuuooooosuu i doubt if there's even urban planners though. they just let developers create these hectares of subdivisions, but the infrastructures leading to some of these places are in bad shape (pot holes, barely 2-lanes, no proper drainage, etc)
A least they are now rebuilding the PNR railway. Shame it was neglected.
Yeah, sometimes a financial crisis+oil crisis can be a good thing.
Luckily it was at the height of the protests of 'Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child murder) and other groups..
Same thing goes to London. They were planning to build more residential areas with houses that look exactly the same in the 60s, but another crisis stopped it.
@@Ritaaw1 Huh, interesting. I know that they made a green belt at some point to stop expansion. They've done something like that here as well afaik.
Maybe the current crisis will have loads of positive consequences as well. Not having trains/busses that are stuffed with people would be nice to have after this as well.
Wouter vanR Jay Foreman made videos about the houses in London, it’s somewhere in his channel
@@Ritaaw1 If it is I've already watched it, haha. No that I think of it, I'll go and watch some mapmen again.
For clarity: Jokinnens plan was not commissioned by the city of Amsterdam, but by the car industry and car drivers organisation.
And Amsterdam did build highways.... not through but around the central part of the city. This helped to reduce cars within the city.
They started building them through neighbourhoods as well. You can see that in parts of Oost, where the poorest people lived in the 60’s and 70’s (after the original inhabitants had been murdered in the holocaust). Almost nothing remains today of the Weesper/Waterloopleinbuurt as a result of the car-centric modernizations that happened then.
It is similar in Trondheim, Norway. They planned replacing “Bakklandet” a central district a long the river with highway, removing many old buildings. Luckily they didn’t, and now it is almost the most popular part of the city with cafes and almost no traffic.
Very contrasting with what happened to Brussels, where they actually built those ‘city highways’ haha. Now Brussels is trying to get rid of it...
Yep. I lived in Brussels for two years. I always think it's what Amsterdam would be if people hadn't protested in the 70s. It's amazing how car-centric Brussels still is today.
@@NotJustBikes Somehow, overall, I still prefer living in Brussels over Amsterdam because of the food, people, culture, authentic nightlife, but the traffic is terrible.
@@luxembourger Most people prefer Amsterdam over Brussels. And especially because of the unfriendly nature of Brussels. But if you like the people more that is your right.
@@davidderuiter726 I understand what you wean. I love the (alternative creative) nightlife in Belgium, something what is mostly missing in Amsterdam. Amsterdam has become, how strange it may sound, too conservative and commercial mainstream for me.
@@luxembourger I've lived in Brussels, and I honestly would prefer to live in Amsterdam. I've lived in other places in the Netherlands before as well.
"So the dutch looked to the Americans for inspiration"
*oh no*
they were "doomed, dooomed I say"
Sidste sted at kigge med mindre du vil ha en lorteløsning
They tried to pull this shit in the city of hamburg as well. In the late 1960s, the city was planning to build a network of inner city highways that would have plowed through historic living quarters. Many of the inner city rivers would have been filled with concrete. Thank God these plans where never realised.
The plan for these motorways in built-up places always cites "fast and easy access" as the main reason for building them. But when you think of it, all these plans achieve is A) ensure anybody who can drive there, will drive there, and B) Introduce a bottleneck for road traffic. It's a recipe for gridlock.
You want to build those ugly interchanges outside of town. This also helps to avoid local traffic getting on the motorway. Because they are very expensive to build and maintain, you'll want through traffic only on the motorways.
Welgeldiguniekalias and by doing that it will free up potentially overcrowded public transit, or allow more people to even have an option into the city in places without either public transit or highways. It’s ultimately going to free up some “traffic”
@@me-it9jn Are you joking? www.safe-tiny.io/4lvcKNcb3
It's much easier and cheaper to buy some more buses than to build more lanes. In Amsterdam proper, there are no places without public transit. There's trains, trams, the metro, and buses all over the place, and an estimated 38% of all trips in Amsterdam are by bicycle. More cars would only get in the way and disrupt the flow of traffic.
"Fast and easy access" to what, if everything is being demolished in favor of highways.
I can't comprehend how people ever deemed plans like this a good idea.
@@lonestarr1490 Fast and easy access to the parking lot of course ;\
fast and easy access was more like slow , hard and depressing access by now
I was about 9 is when scientists started of warning of global warming. I pretty much decided around then that I was never going to own a car and add to the problem. I'm 45 now and the only times I've ever driven was because it's better to have someone that may be a little overly cautious behind the wheel instead of someone that's been drinking, but, I have kept my word and never owned a car. Anyway, I went to Amsterdam for the first time in November of 2019...and I cried. A 43 year old man crying because he realized he's lived his entire life in a country that seems to go out of it's way to accommodate something that sits in a parking spot 99% of the day and not the population. I went into more businesses in two days in Europe than I did in two months in the US. And that's not because I was a tourist. Henk's Comics was just a short walk from where I was staying. I stopped in a coffeeshop, in a bakery, got a few supplies from Albert Heijn, and went into a few stores that looked interesting. I went into all those places because I actually had the option to. If I wanted to do those things in Texas, well, closest dispensary is 2 states over. There's a tortilla factory nearby which doesn't sell to the public, but the closest thing to a "bakery" is at the supermarket, which is over an hour walk. I know of a few interesting businesses here I'd like to check out, but they're on opposite sides of town, at least 3 hours just to get there by foot. I dunno... It just kind of hit me at once how Americans don't even get the option to have that kind of community aside from a few pockets here and there. "Oh, you own the building and you want to live upstairs of your business on the bottom floor? Don't be ridiculous. You're not ZONED for that!" Dufuqyo?!
Sorry for the rant. Thanks for taking the time to doing these. Informative and masterfully put together. Makes me want to become a city planner and use your videos as reference guides.
Name something more American than bulldozing a poor district to make room for a giant highway.
Or historical sites.
using every big occasion as an excuse to fire lethal weapons into the sky
Yanks
Bulldozing "several" poor districts to make room for giant highway(s). And a giant stadium for a professional sports team that pays it's players absorbent salaries to not perform; all funded by tax dollars. Now that is more American!
@@Urlocallordandsavior ok name two times that happen since you said sites
people in the 60's really were on one. some of the worst examples of urban planning and architecture, combining to produce one big Hellcity™. I'm glad the damage was mitigated in this case at least.
Some of the houses/flats that were built in the 60s are so damn terrible.
I think a lot of ideas of the 60ies/70ies were total failures, it was the time of academic madness.
nothing of this plan passed the aproval, yes their may have been buildings that got broken down but it was for normal projects that where needed to keep the city alive same as every other city in the world
Modernism is a cancer that still endures in todays cities
@@Kiluei Modernism yeah yugh
Sadly, my home city of Stockholm had its central districts completely demolished in favour of wide streets and highways, and the beautiful old houses were demolished in favour of ugly 1960s houses despite massive protests. It’s called “Norrmalmsregleringen” in Swedish. Hopefully we can completely restore how it was once upon a time :/
They should have destroyed all the sick 60:s suburbs full with criminals and parallel society.
There's a prime example of car planning destroying pedestrian spaces not by taking up that space but by making them unpleasant close to where I live at the train station, there is a walkable cyclable shopping area close to some apartment buildings and student housing, it's surrounded by 6 lane roads (3 lanes each way) and getting there requires crossing or walking along one of those roads for a while, even with wide pedestrian and cycling paths it's unpleasant, the only shop that manages to thrive in this area is maybe somewhat ironically a bicicle store that has expanded and now takes up over 50% of the shopping area and currently makes up over 80% of the store fronts that are still being used.
There were similar plans for Vienna, some of them partly implemented. What brought them to a halt, was not really protest (people were in favour in the 1960s) but lack of funds - thankfully.
I literally gasped for air when you said 'demolishing de pijp'. \OoO/
No kidding! De Pijp is the best neighbourhood in Amsterdam now!
@@NotJustBikes There are nicer neigbourhoods in Amsterdam, like Plantagebuurt/Kadijken. Thanks for the vids :)
@@Foxesandbelts To live maybe but they are not vibrant as a whole, Living around a zoo is nice i guess but there is not a lot to do in that neighbourhood. De Pijp used to be a poor place now a lot of Young Urbanned People live there.
@@davidderuiter726 YUP = young urban professional ;)
@@1995pianofreak Ah, so gentrification happened, I see.
Love your videos so far, they’re short, to the point and very informative! Keep up 👍
They planned to do the same thing in Greater London, but protests eventually stopped any big highways from ever being built in London. Many big highways stop at the M25, and the four that penetrate through stop before reaching London proper.
With the ongoing coronavirus crisis, many cities are encouraging bikes as a stopgap measure, especially for those who used to use the public transportation network. The popularity of PT is plummeting for obvious reasons (kinda hard to keep 1.5 meters in a Petri-dish-on-wheels) and if those people would all start driving, the number of cars would pretty much double overnight which would basically suffocate the cities in exhaust gasses and keep the roads in a constant state of gridlock.
Budapest, for example, finally got the bike lane on the Grand Boulevard and the Üllői street (after literal decades of cyclists demanding them). And while they are supposedly temporary... well, as the Russian proverb goes: Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution. This and a more widespread acceptance of telecommuting might be the silver lining in this pandemic.
It will be interesting to see how cities change after the pandemic, but cities have had pandemics before, and Taiwan (for example) maintained a very good control of the coronavirus while never reducing public transit usage (as I talked about in my coronavirus vide), so I'm not sure too much is going to change in the long-run. Still, now is the time to install better walking and cycling infrastructure for sure, because your Russian proverb is completely correct.
@@NotJustBikes In the United States, I can see big money groups that oppose transit ballot measures, like auto industry funded Americans for Prosperity, weaponizing Covid. Your Taiwanese example will become very important, too bad the minor inconvenience of a face covering is seen as a deal breaker and freedom issue for countless selfish Americans.
To me the most interesting thing about this is how the inhabitants of Amsterdam fought back and didn’t allow this to happen. This car-centric faux-futurism seems to have affected “younger” cities the most, as opposed to centuries-old cities in Europe and Asia, almost like people in these newer cities were less attached to them somehow.
Also, while this might be a tough subject to tackle, segregation also played a role in the suburbia landscape of the US, as they were seen as “white havens”. I’m curious as to why this didn’t seem to play the a similar role in the Netherlands, as the Dutch also have a history of colonization and enslavement.
You touched upon grass root resistance but it has been the driving factor that made Amsterdam into the city it now is. I suggest you look into the history of the squater movement in the Nieuwmarktbuurt, that is where Amsterdam (and the Netherlands in general) found its tipping point concerning urban development.
Yup, that's totally true. It's a topic that's worth its own video some day. Along with the metro protests in the 70s.
@@NotJustBikes yes, and the anti city circus against the stopera (we lost that one) and het witte fietsenplan van Luud Schimmelpennik. It is remarkable however that all these ideas from the seventies really started to bloom in the last decade and if i am not mistaken will lead to really big and revolutionary changes in the next years to come. 50 years after the epic Nieuwmarkt struggle, who would have guessed?
..and how the "liberals" betrayed the movement up to this very day with Femke Halsema.
@@petertraudes106 The trend is erasure, of all that the squatters have achieved, throughout the Netherlands.
@@ArmageddonAfterparty Please explain, i don't quite understand your point. What i wanted to say is that the squaters movement changed the way people and politics thought about urban development, away from suburbanisation towards the compact city with room for residential, educational, recreational and commercial and retail functions, all mixed together in a small scale people friendly public space. You can see this now in allmost all neighbourhoods of Amsterdam. It is contrary to the modernistic ideas of separation of Urban functions as propagated by Corbusier and realised on a grand scale in the USA. An example in the Netherlands can be found in the Bijlmer neighbourhood but even there you can see a rethinking of the original context.
The answer is: Paris! Car-free city starting 2022! I'm going there this Christmas to check it out (again). I'm there every three to five years and it's bee great to see the changes!
Yeah.. I wish them good luck with that. It's not happening.
@@Nyx_2142 While it would be good, Paris singing the praises of doing next to nothing aside from a few central routes feels predictive: "yes we did it, we don't need more".
Now you can have a look at Moscow. It is a car-centric city where tube and road network grow rapidly , but a lot of people live inside the city. It could be a bike-city , but a car is a symbol of wealth here, and one half of the year bikes are extremely uncomfortable and dangerous to ride due to extreme weather conditions ..
New York had Robert Moses,who destroyed transit,and neighborhoods,with a meat ax,and never took responsibility for his displacement of people,and businesses,and the almost dissolution of New York City,and parts of Long Island! That's one major reason why,now,New York is so hard to get around in,and the dearth of public transport! Thank you for your attention ☺!
There is a similar video about London. There it partly happened. And in San Francisco the Embarcadero was actually built; fortunately they had an earthquake and then they decided not to rebuild it.
Toronto, too, with the Gardiner Expressway. They bulldozed the neighbourhood of South Parkdale, for instance. Most cities have a story like this. And most cities weren't able to stop it.
@Andrew Smith 1. If they had made ringways you'd still have congestion. 2. You have a public transportation system many times better than most American cities.
I sometimes travel to Houston. The "Katy Freeway" has if you count everything 24 or so lanes. And they all stand still. Really, more roads are *not* the solution.
In Tilburg in the 60's a lot was actually demolished by the mayor Cees Becht, nicknamed locally as Cees den sloper. Or Cees the demolisher.
The city was actually pretty before, as can been seen in the Tilburg archives. After not so much. In an American tourguide it was compared to east Berlin even.
Nowadays they are renovating and rebuilding a lot, esp in the old railway area. Keeping as much of the original buildings as possible. Wich is really nice. Hope they keep it up.
Lots of cities in Noord Brabant and Limburg were demolished in the sixties to accommodate cars because of the industries closing down.
Just look at Roermond, Eindhoven, Helmond. God awful what they did there. Helmond is absolutely the worst off. There’s an overpass next to the castle close to the city center. If you see older pictures of Helmond you will cry.
I think the sixties demolished more beautiful cities than WW2.
I wish my country can be like this, aesthethic, modern and liveable at the same time.
Watching your channel makes me feel so happy and fortunate to live in Amsterdam.
Fortunately the old center was not sacrificed, suburbanisation still happened though. After the 60s Amsterdam lost almost 200.000 inhabitants to suburbs like Almere only to be regained by newcomers in 2020. Even the ring road was still built, just much further outside the old center. This is the A10, a mostly 6 to 8-lanes highway and connects the suburbs within city limits such as Nieuw West and also directs traffic out and into the city.
Yes, there was still a push in those times for people to live outside of the city and drive in. Instead of bulldozing the centre they focused on Park and Ride.
Unfortunately today all the people who live in those suburbs now expect easy access to the city by car and are constantly demanding more expensive highway expansion.
In Germany we call this "autogerechte Stadt" ("city adapted to cars") and many big cities in Germany (West more than East) were more or less rebuild that way after the World War II.
I like the inner city of Leipzig much for this. The city center is an all pedestrian and bicycle area and the neighboring areas are easily accessibly by foot, bike, or public transportation. The TRAM system they have there is almost perfect.
But at the same time, traversing the city by car is also not too huge a struggle. The city highways are far from as crammed as those of Berlin or Hamburg and the layout is really straightforward and easily navigable.
@Martin Schulz Ok "Martin Schulz"
Frankfurt
It’s such a shame Algiers wasn’t lucky enough to avoid the highways that have now destroyed our city and making it regionally known for traffic
This brings to mind Plan Voisin, Le Corbusier's idea for turning Paris into a modern urban hellscape.
A similar thing was proposed for Copenhagen, luckily the country could not afford it and what was planned to go ahead was heavily protested against.
Motorways are good outside cites basically connecting cities but inside cites they are a nightmare
Great video, very educational. Thanks!
Concise, great quality videos that everyone can understand. Bravo!
It made me nervous even though it was over fifty years ago and didn't happen.
Stockholm was completely destroyed by similar modernisations in the 50s and onwards. It makes me wonder what currently modern ideas will be seen as crazy in 50 years.
I'm guessing it'll be something healthcare related, that'll make this look like the dark ages. I have studied the stock market and economics for a while - pharmaceuticals seem to be the only industry where the highest cost producer of a treatment continually wins. Small drug companies must partner with bigger ones and charge more to become successful. It makes me think there's a bit of backroom dealing going on, plus lots of politics/oligarchies behind the scenes - and politicians/government won't tackle it because if they reigned in spending and called out companies for obscenely inefficient ways of doing things, people would die.
I fully expect to look back in 20 years and be like... "Yeah, we could've spent $100b on that COVID thing and saved more people, rather than tens of trillions worldwide." It'll be stupidly obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
I like your content! Its nice to see someone from a foreign country telling what they think about what is “usual” for me.
Indonesia as The Dutch former colony, right now many cities in Indonesia trying to copy Amsterdam as they were like in 60s. Many cities and towns more become car & motorbike-centric, the government are more likely to build wide road & tolls across the island instead doing reactivation of The Dutch Railway Network.
This was pretty bad, good that most of it didn't happen!
In the 1960's, anything seemed possible, and there seemed to be no limits. Rotterdam, a city that likes to brag about having the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, etc., had a plan for its port that even dwarfs this one. Look for 'Rotterdam 2000+' (select images) , the most megalomaniacal and devastating plan ever designed for anything in the Netherlands. The plan was, to more than double the port's industrial area, sacrificing all of the island of Voorne-Putten and part of Hoekse Waard; on top of that, a whole new city for half a million inhabitants was projected on the isle of Goeree-Overflakkee, basically ruining that island as well.
Needless to say, this plan also met a little resistance after its presentation ;)
And they call every new building an icon.
I'm hooked on this series!
As a fellow Canadian now loving life in Amsterdam, I can't believe this almost happened! Just discovered your channel...great work!
You don’t look very Canadian
@@andrewmartin9995 That's pretty racist of you. 🙄
@@willjfang playing the race card are we? Just be happy we tolerate you here so you don’t have to live under oppressive communist rule. We’ve had about enough in Richmond
After The Joker plan Amsterdam realized a ring highway system around the boundaries of the city called Ring Amsterdam. It forms so to speak a wheel around the city and there a many roads like spokes of a rim, that leads to the main city center.
The mono rail mentioned in the video became a metro system which rises above and underground.
In the video the so called 'boulevard' is indeed a part of a highway that never got realized. It suppose to connect Amsterdam North thru the IJ tunnel via Jonas Daniel Meyer Square to the south/east part of the city.
It is indeed a strange site to see old neighborhoods cut in half by a modern lay out of roads and new modern tall buildings. Actually it is a awful site to see.
To good part is that traffic inside the city does no longer go thru the small and narrow streets of good old Amsterdam. It's functions as a ring inside a ring.
2:22 This is literally where I walked past for a few years to go to college. Behind the camera is the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, the main College in the city,
Rotterdam was rebuild with a modern plan (the Basic Plan) which like all plan end up failling and open up toward less car oriented approach. However, it also create a very comfortable and integrated car and bicycle network. This basic infrastructure, for me, are today the carriers of real densification in the city centre, fighting the urban growth and the growing lack of housing. I feel sometime that is what Amsterdam lack. Those infrastructures also decide how a city can adapt to problematic of big cities. Amsterdam today suffer from a dramatic lack of housing and the city is totally unaffordable. Densification is quite difficult, so they develop new neighborhood quite far from the city centre. Amsterdam Noord has a real potential, but its lack of adapted infrastructure has let it unable to suffice the need of housing development. Without going to the extrem of north america's road infrastructure, I do believe that Amsterdam need to start changing scale in their answers.
As a long time resident this is shocking and fascinating to see. I wasn't born here but my city is certainly one of the most liveable. Fortunately, Amsterdam did get a chance.
Plz dont stop the content. IT IS EXCELLENT!! From the Central Valley of California
The same situation almost happened in Edinburgh here in Scotland.
These plans do sound absolute ridiculous in today’s standards. However they had a valid point back in de 60’s. De Pijp for example was a place nobody wanted to live. Small, badly build houses, often without even a shower where whole families lived in. As welfare grew in the 50’s and 60’s those houses in the Pijp and other working class neighbourhoods needed major renovations due to the increased welfare. People who could afford moved to more spacious environments like Almere, Zaandam or Hilversum. That one area that was demolished after all, was demolished to build the old Metrotunnel which eventually gave space to buid the 4 lane Wibautstraat.
Something similar happened in Prague (Czech Republic).
And because the communist regime was in power, they succeeded.
Now we have giant, oversized, multi-lane roads in Prague, which often cannot even be passed from one side to the other. And people here literally have to lay down their lives in order to make a difference for the better. One example for all. The death of cyclist Jan Bouchal in 2006, an ecologist and promoter of bicycle transport.
The intersection was not rebuilt until 2012.
A link to a Czech website describing how Prague got rid of the crossroads of death. Please use Google Translate.
ekolist.cz/cz/zpravodajstvi/zpravy/praha-se-zbavila-krizovatky-smrti-cykliste-ji-uz-projedou-bezpecne
Jan Bouchal
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Bouchal
North-South highway in Prague
wikipage cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severoji%C5%BEn%C3%AD_magistr%C3%A1la
Impeccably executed! Your videos are brilliant. I, however, must express utter sadness that the Americans did inspire the Dutch to build motorways, and they are ubiquitous. In addition, there is no dearth of traffic queues, urban sprawl, strip development, and ugly development. All of these aforementioned elements did not appear until the late '70s and '80s. I was fortunate enough to see The Netherlands in the early '70s when it was a veritable open air museum.
Makes me think of Quebec City. There are beautiful places around the Chateau Frontenac but many of the working class neighbourhood who looked great too have been partly destroyed. Most of the city is a pain to look at and to live in without a car.
2:53 looking for traffic inspiration in america was a wrong choice to begin with. Looking at their "cars only" city plans. Even nowadays.
Here in Brazil we have some cities where the main way of commuting is the bicycle. One of them is a city named "Campo Bom" (Good Camp) in Rio Grande do Sul. But despite the fact that bicycles are better for the environment, the citizens use them because most people are too poor to afford cars.
In the state's capital people commute with things like Uber because public transportation is too expensive, depending on the trip's length. Not only that, but Uber and its similar services destroyed the ecosystem of public transportation. We had buses, microbuses, cabs and even electric trains. They weren't perfect but at least we didn't have a lot of congestion as we have now.
Before March 2020 I used mostly public transportation, my car was (and still is) only used for trips outside the metro area. Now I'm walking as much as possible, because the city is too hostile towards bicycles and scooters.
We had very similar plans here in Helsinki, Finland in the 1960's called Smith-Polvinen. Not sure if there's much material of it in english, but as they say ''picture is worth a thousand words'' . If you'd like can link you a great 3D visualization of it.
I guess you live in (or near) Åbo ( or Turku in Finnish)....
Please post the link!
And wasn't Jokinen a Finnish-American too?
@@ixlnxs At least his surname is Finnish.
Us Europeans really looked to America on how to do this stuff, then we were like "hang on, lets not"
China + Japan: *"Ok, I'll copy America by 20% of what they told me!"* 🤣😂
did I just get subliminal stimulation to get the Simpsons reference? 😂👌
Yes you did! I did too! 😆
Very nice video. Love from Amsterdam 🇳🇱
If this happend I would be living next to a gigantic highway.
Ironic that the Advert that played before this was for a petrol engine Kia SUV (I know it’s TH-cam that chooses ads)
I suspect any video about "highways" and "cars" will get car ads. Pretty funny. I wish I could choose which ads to show (or not show), but I am at the will of Google! 😁
KIA IS kust a geest dat. Planning to but a Sorento. Love SUV's
Jason, A Great explanation of what happened in the '70s in Amsterdam. This needs to be shown around the planet to all city councillors who have grandiose ideas about themselves and super-highways. Auckland NZ is one such example of the disaster that ensues when wrong thinking is followed. Of course it helps to not have self regulation and hard line selective neoliberal economics running the show.
all that wibautstraat footage takes me back to my days studying there, and all the walking we did just reach the AH!
looking back it’s such a different experience compared to studying in the city centre. i still do plenty of walking while there, but by choice, since it’s much more fun than the treks through the dreary, cold wintunnel that is the wibautstraat
Wow, I'd never realized why it works so well here and so badly in the US. If you build stuff around cars, you have huge N-lane roads and giant parking lots, moving all buildings far apart, so people will want to take a car to get anywhere because it's too darn far to walk. No way to fix it, because people expect the distances to remain the same when cars are removed, and you can't fix the distances before the cars are gone.
That is exactly right. Unfortunately once you've bulldozed your walkable neighbourhoods, and given all of the space between buildings to cars, it's extremely difficult to go back.
@@NotJustBikes Not just that; if you were to propose a walkable neighbourhood in the US now you wouldn't get any traction - where would you park your car so people won't want to move there, nobody will come to the shops so no shops will go there, nobody thinks it'll be a success so nobody will want to fund it.
Wow, never new that. Thank you for the interesting video.
AS A FINNISH PERSON U SAID ”JOKINEN” REALLY GOOD. it’s a finnish surname
That's entirely because I grep up in Canada and Olli Jokinen was a famous hockey player, so I heard his name a lot.
Funny that the left most plan at 00:51 is pretty much exactly how the highway system turned out. A highway aroud the city rather than through it, fortunately.
So awesome as your second video!!!
I dread every time I have to go into the center of Amsterdam with a car. It's madness and chaos. And parking costs an arm and a leg.
Yes, it's great!
No not true. Use park and ride. Pay less then 8 euro’s for a whole day. ArenA, Olympic stadium etc. (unless of course you have carry a lot of stuff)
Omg, imagine this all has happen. I would cry if I saw old photos of old Amsterdam, so lifeable, and now inefficient city structure... I think these old structures from the car-free time are the best in the world
Nice shot if Oxford and Wonderland. I hate driving in London and I drive for the LTC.
In Utrecht the Catharijnebaan (nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharijnebaan) was build to prioritise the car. Now it is converted back to a canal...
the reverse to Amsterdam is Dubai, hideous urban design, and very very unfriendly towards predestrians
oh and don’t forget the lack of sewage system
Dubai is a contender for the worst city on earth
Ah, Dubai. The 'city' that failed to be. The single most artificial and soulless 'settlement' to ever exist and only made to be a playground for people with more money than sense.
God, could you imagine how far back we would have been set back in terms of infrastructure if we didn't have a model infrastructure country like the Netherlands?
What are the bikes with the kid pod in the front? Are those available in the US?
It's a bakfiets, usually just called "cargo bikes" in English, but that's confusing. They are available in many US cities. Just search for a bike shop near you that sells cargo bikes. They can be expensive though, as most are imported from Denmark or the Netherlands.
@@NotJustBikes Thanks!
I wish I lived in Amsterdam.
0:19 those look like the houses that an El Al flight once hit, I wonder if they are the same
Yes, they are. It's the Bijlmermeer.
Hey Jason, loving the videos -- just heard about you on The War on Cars and I think I just binged your whole channel over the weekend. Are you slowly working up to some recommendations for American and Canadian cities? The Armchair Urbanist roasted you pretty good with a summary of your channel (paraphrasing): "Frustrated by American infrastructure? Just give up and move to Amsterdam." I hope you took his joke lightly, he seems like a good fella, but he brings up a decent point. How do we help change this? Is it cultural? Is it political? I watched your episode on zoning and still don't know what I can do about it. Is zoning something I vote on? Is it something elected officials vote on? How does it even work? I'm not a homeowner (I'm an American millennial after all) so I don't really **need** to understand zoning and can't really afford a car because of student loans (I'm an American millennial after all) and the existential climate crisis can't really afford me to have a car, either.....so how do we fix this?
Looking forward to more videos! Thanks!
2:19 That is exactly the same place as in the picture at 2:05. Judging from the corner building in about the top right.
damn nice spot
@@marcoroberts9462 thanks
I just notice....why is there a scene of the Simpsons hidden in the video around 1:28???? XD
I didn't know Shelbyville was in Holland! 😆😆
I've now watched any and all content of yours
I found a few of your Videos over some time,
in the last couple of days I saw a few more, and as a Wanna be Channel My self, Subscribed ( I know how important it is
👍) I have a Himiway E-Bike and just got into the Bike Culture and like your Content and as I saw some very recent Videos,
have gone back to your beginning,
I was in film classes in college and like the style of video you produce.
Much Love from Vancouver,,,,,,,,,,,WA.
I know what it's like, I've lived 4 years in the city with the second highest ratio of km of highway per habitant in Canada. Scooters and cars with spare tires were completely blocked by highways. Scooters used bike bypasses all the time. Now imagine being a pedestrian? It's so sad.
There is plan to build basicly roof over one major highway in Prague with parks and sports grounds and even tram over it.
damn insane... good example how renovation and renewal needs to be tested against the needs of the people, and not against a futuristic view that hasn't been proven, only in the mind of the project manager.
Hey, nice video, I'm glad I watched it. I am just curious now if there are have been any other well-documented stories like this Plan Jokinen in Amsterdam and Hague?
Anywhere else across future European Union that the sprawled car-dependent suburbia was gonna rise?
Seoul is slowly adapting this into thier city
Tons of European cities had plans like this that were carried out more or less but many were thankfully stopped by fierce protests and resistance and since roughly the 1990s the history of European cities has really just been undoing the damage of the 20th century. It was back when people in Europe still thought that America was an ideal to follow and the vision of the future because of the Marshall aid, interacting with American troops, media and a hefty dose of propaganda. Europe slowly became disillusioned with America though and at this point most Europeans either feel uneasy with the US or see it as an example of what not to do and have some amount of contempt for the country.
Same in Rotterdam.
Unfortunately beautiful buildings were demolished for big roads in the 60s.
Rotterdam was already flattened by the Germans in 1940. The first architect that had the job to reconstruct Rotterdam was Witteveen. He designed Rotterdam with respect to the historical architecture of Rotterdam, but the Nazis weren't satisfied with it and in 1942 it was completely halted. This meant Rotterdam wasn't rebuilt at all until the war had ended and that it had urban farming like medieval Rome, and today Detroit. In the meantime, Witteveen got a burn-out in 1944 and was succeeded by van Traa that came up with the _Basisplan_ , that had Nazi infrastructure, but the plans for architecture crystallised a year after the liberation in 1946. That's why after the war Rotterdam was rebuilt as the modern, car-friendly city as we know it. It could have been worse in the 1970s, but people woke up and stopped the megalomaniac plans.
wederopbouwrotterdam.nl/artikelen/wederopbouwplan-witteveen
wederopbouwrotterdam.nl/artikelen/basisplan-van-traa/
versbeton.nl/2018/05/historische-besluiten-nee-tegen-het-rottetrace/
I met Herman Feddema yesterday at Huis de Pinto. He participated in the social movement against the highway. I think it would be great for you to meet him.
Expressways are great, and they get a lot of criticism. The main problem with American cities isn't that expressways exist, its that they go through the urban center instead of staying at the periphery. Trains and bikes are obviously superior for the urban core.
This is actually really similar to how San Francisco stopped the freeway plan around the same time period, which is interesting as Market St is currently transitioning to a car-free street and part of it is already only accessible by bikes and public transit. Let's hope we can see a similar future of SF then, providing that people are willing to get e-bikes. Let's face it, those hills can kill even the most badass cyclist 😂
Let's hope it stays that way. Our VVD overlords are still to this day pushing for more roads as the solution to traffic congestion.
With them winning every election I totally see that happening
Try driving a car in istanbul,you need super human powers to do that
So the locals have super human powers there?
How are you not famous yet
Because people forgot to share, like, and subscribe. 😢
@@NotJustBikes 😂😂😂