There's Something Wrong With Suburbia (The Orange Pill)

I'd like to thank my supporters on Patreon, who pay me to spend way too much time and money shitposting to YouTube. Apologies to the Wachowski sisters and Laurence Fishburne.

I'd like to thank these people for putting together this wonderful work of art:
Cinematographer & Editor - Broderick Steele
Assistant Camera Operator - Samuel Crick

This video was filmed on an actual CRT monitor, in an actual pile of garbage, at the side of an actual stroad.

NJB Live (my bicycle livestream channel):

Includes licensed stock footage from Getty Images

[NotJustBikes]

Yes, this was filmed on an actual CRT sitting in an actual pile of garbage at the side of an actual stroad in actual Michigan.




Edit: this was not edited or filmed by me. I gave my editor, Broderick Steele, a voiceover file and a budget, and with the help of Samuel Crick (Assistant Camera Operator) they came up with this masterpiece. 👏

This is mentioned in the description, but obviously nobody reads the description.

[PikaPetey]

In my childhood I knew something was wrong. I HATED where I grew up because i couldn't go ANYWHERE without a car. I would see cartoon shows of "Hey Arnold" of kids taking the city bus to go places and I was envious.

[pastrybess]

This should be the channel trailer, I think its pretty accurate to the transformation that new viewers will go through watching this channel

[ChineseCookingDemystified]

This is absolutely hilarious, and a little creepy how well it actually works.

[Grimren]

"My legs, why do they hurt?"
"You've never used them before."

[alanthefisher]

this is fantastic. But seriously sometimes art can reach people when normal videos cant :)

[liamwinters]

I have been orange pilled. I simply cannot unsee or forgot how car dependency makes my city miserable. Now my friends are sick of hearing about bike lanes, train service, and walkable neighbourhoods, but it has actually become an issue I'm super passionate about now. All thanks to stumbling upon NJB

[connerwilson]

I never realized how bad the suburbs were until I looked back on my childhood and realized I couldn't have friends who lived too far away, I couldn't maintain high school relationships, and I couldn't go downtown or see anything meaningful without a car. It was just normal to me, but after seeing how other people live without car dependency has helped me to realize how much of a bondage we are used to here. We just casually accept that without a car you can't go anywhere or do anything. This sums up many kids experiences throughout middle and high school, since you want to go places but don't have a car and can't get your parents to drive you everywhere.

[JacketyJacket]

So far I've orange-pilled three people: My mother, one of my best friends, and a random internet stranger. This is becoming my life, and I am absolutely loving it. I'm planning to write to my city council soon, simply to try to make a change, though I know that most things I do will have little to no impact, but that's okay. I will continue to try to make a difference, any difference. I would like to thank you, Jason, for everything that you have taught me from the moment that I found your channel, and for everything else I've learned from research I've done myself, other channels that you have recommended to your viewers, and also interviews you have done with other people, as well as a couple of podcasts that you went on, most notably This Sustainable Life, and the Eric Norcross podcast.
From the bottom of my heart, thankyou.

[JulianOShea]

Moves to Netherlands and makes fun videos about cycling and quality of life.
Flash forward. Welcome to the cult.

[JDsVarietyChannel]

Until I found this channel last summer, I couldn't put my finger on why I hate American cities so much (having lived here my whole life.)
I never knew what to call the hellscape where the businesses congregate, so I just called them commercial districts. Endless asphalt and pedestrian hostility as far as the eye can see, dotted by every soulless fast food joint and bank institution you could dream of.
I couldn't take it anymore, and moved to a lesser populated area. Yes it's still stroads here, but with less congestion and high blood pressure.
Many intersections are extremely dangerous in the US, and 2 years ago, I nearly had my car totaled at no fault of my own.
Stroad, stroad, go away, come again some other day.

[nickc]

Finding your channel really was like a red pill / blue pill moment for me. I can’t unsee the absurdity and injustice of my car dependent city.

[ckEagle]

This opener, the phrasing from the matrix, all of it, is EXACTLY how I felt my entire life! I could never explain in a simple, single sentence why I hated the city I grew up in, and why I was always drawn to places like Chicago, Pittsburgh, Kalamazoo, etc, but there was always something wrong, and I couldn't figure out the core of it. I could tell you all the individual things I hated: the constantly empty parking lots that do nothing for nobody, the giant road-adjacent curbs they called a sidewalk, the antisocial and overly suspicious nature of suburbanites, the stupid driveway requirements in suburban neighborhoods which require you to drive over a LITERAL CURB AT THE END OF YOUR DRIVEWAY INSTEAD OF A GRADUAL SLOPE ALL IN THE NAME OF SOMEONE'S STUPID IDEA OF WHAT CURB APPEAL MEANS TO THEM!!!, etc. But this opening was my entire, depressed childhood with nothing to do, and nowhere to go.

I hated everything about the city I lived in, except for a few, tiny specs of land that made it feel... slightly more bearable...

It wasn't until I went, in May of 2022, to Greece where my wife is from, and saw how I could walk everywhere, that I started to figure out the nature of the problem: the car. And it was shortly after I got back into the US that I stumbled upon Not Just Bikes video telling me what a stroad was that I finally had words to describe what I always knew was wrong! Literally, everything clicked with the viewing of that video. I instantaneously became an anti-car urbanist, with a goal to destroy the car centric nature of the city I now live in.

I'm literally in the process of buying up abandoned properties that were turned into soul-sucking seas of asphalt and concrete and turning them into proper, person oriented land use. I'm working on acquiring a parking lot with an abandoned strip mall less than one tenth the size of said metal box storage desert, and turning it into a walkable mini neighborhood with office, retail, residential, and other use. It's also attached on the backside of the whole area, to a park that's over a mile long. If I can pull this off, it'll be on the YouTube channel I'm working on starting, showing actual land use changes.

Stay tuned everybody!

[klaasvanmanen]

I have lived in the Netherlands for all of my life. And I felt quite happy here. But it took some Canadian from Fake London to make me realize how 'lucky' I really am to have lived here all of my life. And apart from all the other things you explain very neatly and convincingly in your video's, I have to thank you for opening my eyes to that one fact. You make great videos that should be watched by city planners all over the world. Because we don't need cities that are in some kind of economic schedule; we need cities that people want to live in.

[JoeTaber]

"like everyone else you were born into a prison that you cannot escape (without a motor vehicle)"
Wonderful adaptation!

[ddogg]

This definitely speaks to my experience growing up in Texas. My first childhood home was on a 30 mph residential street. It was never safe enough to play in front of the house or walk anywhere in the neighborhood. My second home was on a cul-de-sac, which was extremely safe, but buried in an endless maze of single-family zoned houses bordered by stroads. My third and final childhood home was on a 20 mph street with rigorous speed limit enforcement... but was still separated from nearly anything worth going to by stroads that enforced car dependency. No bike paths. No buses. No trains. No sidewalks on many streets. I didn't realize anything was wrong, but I wasn't happy, especially as someone who couldn't afford a car until they were 18. I figured Houston's suburban sprawl and car-dependency might have been due to the heat - summer lasts 6 months here - but then I moved to a college campus in Alabama where the climate is equally warm and was surprised to find so many people using alternative modes of transit. I could walk, bike, or take a bus to class, work, or commercial areas, and I often did. I miss that, and it wasn't until I took the orange pill by watching this channel that I realized how human-scale urban planning and alternatives to private transportation is the NORM many other places (and used to be the norm here, even in the United States), not just a "diamond in the rough" sort of thing that only appears in some college campuses and old New England cities. I have just gotten back from my first trip to Europe and got to experience the sort of good urban planning that this channel highlights on a first-hand basis. I could walk, bike, ride a scooter, take a bus, tram, or train wherever I wanted to go and never felt unsafe. I was in awe of how the places people live, work, and enjoy life were not separated by stroads and freeways. I hope so many more people start watching channels like this, take the orange pill, and begin advocating to anyone who will listen on behalf of human-oriented urban planning. I'm so frustrated back here near Houston, surrounded by streets with no sidewalks, in a town with no bike infrastructure or public transit of any kind. Car-dependency is a dream I very much want everyone to wake up from. The places we live in can be so much better than that, and this channel helps articulate and explain so many of those frustrations about the environment in which I grew up.

[jesse]

The problem with the orange pill is once you take it you are constantly on the verge of outrage when you have to navigate any North American city without a car.

[ScoobyWild]

Living in Tokyo was such an eye opening experience to what living can and should look like. It was the first time without a car for me in my life and after a year there I did not miss it. Not once. In fact I felt I had better access to food, culture, people than I had ever had living in suburban Ontario. Now we live in downtown Vancouver, intentionally, to experience the same things.. no car, my kids have more independence, access to events, nature, art, food that they could never have in barren Suburbia. When I leave the city core and come across a parking lot, it just looks so… wrong.

[osochara]

It’s funny how, as a car enthusiast, I watch a lot of car videos, and then come back to this channel and agree with all the car hate.

Edit: it’s been almost a year since I posted this comment and I still receive notifications, so please consider that if you will defend about how it’s not about car hate but fighting car dependency, about 15 people already said it before you. If you will say that this same argument has been presented by NJB in other videos, I have seen plenty of his videos and never seen this argument being made, in addition to the fact that the way he talks about cars at any given time is always negative. So if such a video exists, please give me the title so I can watch it.

That said, I agree on the argument that car dependency sucks.

[andrewstringer]

"Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the solution is. You have to see it for yourself."

Yes yes yes! Every time my wife and I ride across an overpass and see thousands of people stuck in soul crushing traffic, we ask: why? Why would anyone subject themselves to that day after day after day? Sometimes there's no better alternative, but by and large it's just all people have ever known. We can preach all we want, but people have to see the solution for themselves, and this is why we as a society need to make it easy. Build infrastructure that lowers the barriers, and allows people to live it. The lower the barriers, the more people will try it, and the more people will unplug.