I lived in Busan at the time this project was done, and visited Seoul only a few weeks after it opened. I didn’t know anything about urbanism at the time, I just knew it was such an incredibly nice place to be.
The UK also has many examples of terrible patchwork asphalt, where parts have been patched multiple times but the entire surface doesn’t appear to have been repaved in decades.
Ah, that explains why the auto-suggested title didn’t work here when it did work in !nebula. My damn mouse has a habit of double-clicking when I use the button I have set to paste.
The stock clip used at 3:20 involving a driver unabashedly on their phone is brilliant.
The 5:45 clip of a dude in a bigfoot costume cycling through Tokyo was unexpected.
6:00 the self-shout-out had me laugh out loud.
The idea of lowering local street speed limits not actually making your trip take much longer is so true. Brisbane-based cycling safety advocate Chris Cox has a video where he gives a demonstration. He drives the same route twice, once sticking to 30 km/h on the local streets, and once trying his best to get up to the speed limit of 50 km/h on those streets. (Driving to the predominantly 60 km/h speed limit on arterial roads.) The video on the whole is actually incredibly similar to this one, down to the safety/speed curve, the FOV comparisons, and the dismissal of the ridiculous arguments against 30 km/h. Because yeah, Jason’s words in the conclusion to this video are so right: the data is really, really, really clear here; at some point we have to realise that anybody fighting against lower speed limits within cities is either wilfully ignorant or they’re a selfish arsehole who values their convenience more than other people’s safety. But here’s a timestamped link to the bit of Chris’s video where he starts his experiment. It took a whopping 9 extra seconds. 9 seconds, on a 10 minute journey.
It’s called Cheonggyecheon, 청계천. Google Maps in Korea is really, really poor (for legal reasons). The satellite quality doesn’t even come close to capturing this (you can barely even tell it’s there), and Street View is just from the road (as of 2018 at the most recent) where you can see that it’s there, but not get much of a sense of it. There are a very small number of those individual non-path Street View photos.
At one point Jason talks about how tragic it is that it takes a death for the council to do something about making a road safer.
Which is definitely true, but gods even that makes me wish I had a council as good as the ones in Montreal. Brisbane City Council doesn’t even give a fuck when there is a death. There can be a cyclist die on a road where safety advocates have been saying for years there’s a dire need for safety upgrades, and they still won’t even countenance improving the safety. They’d rather spend council resources repeatedly removing the ghost bikes set up at the location memorialising the killed cyclist.
Kind-of similar to what they did in Utrecht. In the 1960s, they built a stub for a highway in part of the Utrecht canal. Then in the 2010s they turned it back into the canal it once was. And it led to a MUCH better atmosphere.
First of all, if you don’t wanna watch it, you could just…not watch it? No need to vice signal by announcing it to the whole world.
But second, you don’t pay for Nebula to watch this one video. You pay for Nebula as a way to support the dozens of creators on the platform, including many of the best urbanist channels including the one whose community you are currently visiting. And to get this and all the other Nebula-exclusive videos on the platform, most of which are merely addendums to public YouTube videos, but some of which are full exclusives. And to get all the videos ad-free.
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