Why City Design is Important (and why I hate Houston)

I'm not an urban planner, so you might ask, why do I run a YouTube channel about urban planning and walkable cities? It all comes down to a life of travel, and a terrible walk in the suburbs of Houston.

NJB Live (my bicycle livestream channel):

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References and Related Reading

Federal Highway Association National Household Travel Survey

What's wrong with comparing Seattle to Houston?

Out of Control - Houston’s roads, drivers are country’s most deadly
Houston Chronical

Eerste van der Helststraat
Stadsarchief Amsterdam

Historical Photos of London, Ontario

Historic Photos of Houston

Giant Brontosaurus Rib: 5 Must-Try BBQ Dishes at Mighty Quinn's
Tasty (YouTube)

High Frequency: Why Houston is Back on the Bus
Streetfilms (YouTube)

A Year After Bus Redesign, METRO Houston Ridership is Up

Houston just dramatically improved its mass transit system without spending a dime

Houston Rolling Back Parking Requirements

How does Houston plan without zoning?
City Beautiful (YouTube)

The Energy Corridor District unveils west Houston's first protected intersection

More performative pedestrian infrastructure

No, Houston isn’t a walkable city, but you have to start somewhere

Katy Freeway by Aliciak3yz - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

Katy Freeway by Socrate76 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,

Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
City Commentary

What Dallas, Houston, Louisville & Rochester can teach us about widening freeways: Don’t!

Houston commute times quickly increasing

Houston’s $7 billion solution to gridlock is more highways

North Houston Highway Improvement Project

The big picture for a big plan

“The truth about a city's aspirations isn't found in its vision. It's found in its budget.” - Brent Toderian

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Chapters

0:00 Intro
0:05 A Brief History
1:19 Living car-free when unemployed
2:23 Insane amounts of travel
3:42 A fateful trip to Houston
4:25 The walk in Houston (Willowbrook)
7:26 Urban planning and history
9:00 Forgetting those who don't drive
11:13 Houston: sprawl and average BBQ
11:51 What Houston is doing right
13:12 There's still a long ways to go
15:19 Conclusion
16:29 Patreon shout-out
16:40 Outro

[krishnakarthik]

My dad on his bike got hit by a pick-up truck on a stroad and ended up in hospital for months.
The investigating officer tried to convince me that it wasn't my dad who was hit by a truck, but it was the truck that got hit by my dad.
Thanks for doing this.

[drimblewedge]

I’m a Houston native and you omitted one HUGE HUGE problem; flooding. There is so much concrete that covers Houston that when it rains, it floods, because there is no soil to absorb the large amount of water from a large storm. The water has nowhere to go. Sure, drainage systems are built but as expansive as they are, they are still unable to accommodate the occasional hurricane or tropical depression that plague our coastal city.

[TAURELLIAN]

I’m an Uber Driver here in Houston, and up to 80% of my clients in some parts of the city are minimum-wage workers who cannot afford a car.

[Jbam]

As a Houston resident, one of our most common complaints that you hear from people living here is "There's nowhere to just go walk around, even downtown"

[bdqgojg]

Walking in the US feels like you're committing a crime because everyone looks at you from their cars like you're the weird one for using your feet.

[gnegna]

As a European visiting the USA, my first cultural shock was an airbnb host who told me with a lot of enthusiasm: "this neighborhood is great because it's walkable!". I thought it was a joke. It was like saying "I love this restaurant, the food is edible!".

[eevie]

I live in Houston, I'm 17, in a single parent household. My mom is too blind to drive, so my entire life my family has never had a car. We still don't. I ended up missing out on a lot of experiences going on, and I hardly ever got the chance to go to places. Often times when my family needs to go grocery shopping, we go walking to the Walmart nearby. That one grocery trip takes up the whole day. Sometimes when were finished shopping, it's already dark out, and we ask our relatives if they can give us a ride home, even though they live 30 minutes away. We do that because it's just not safe to walk back in the dark for 30 minutes. There's no street lamps, and we live in an unsafe neighborhood. There used to be a bus going to the Walmart, which helped us a lot, but they shut it down.

I've asked my aunts and uncles to teach me how to drive but its always "you live far away and I'm too busy" It feels at times as if I'm stuck. I can't learn how to drive without a car. And we're not financially stable enough to even afford a car. It's hard for me to get a job and help out because, well, how am I supposed to go to work. I ask for rides, and lately we've been relying a lot on ubers just to live. It gets expensive, making it even harder to save up for a car. My mom takes the Metro in the morning to work, and an uber at night. I've been looking for cars online, but everything good is way out of our budget. And if we get one too cheap then it'll be too expensive to keep up with it. I've had a friend trying to teach me how to drive, but she lives almost an hour away so we've only been doing lessons once a week. And I still need to go to a driving school and get my permit. Its hard living here without a car. I feel stuck. I feel like I'm trapped into a small bubble and being able to leave it is an expensive luxury we cant always afford. When I was younger I thought I would have fixed our situation, but I was so wrong.

[tireeandcoll]

When we visited (from the UK) my daughter who was living in Atlanta, we thought we would walk to a nearby supermarket. This was difficult because there were no pavements. When we reached the store, we couldn't find the entrance. Eventually we realised we had to go into a multi storey car park - the store entrance was in the basement of the car park. There was NO provision for a pedestrian to access the shop.

[ryanharford]

Being younger than 16 in Houston is like being under house arrest until you’re old enough to have a license.

[capitalb]

One thing this shows is that travelling teaches not just about foreign countries but also your own.

[CollinTheBlind]

I am a disabled individual. I literally cannot operate a motor vehicle in a legal capacity. I cannot live in most US cities because of the lack of public transport and inability to walk places. I WANT THIS TO CHANGE. I am visually impaired, but I want this to change not only for me, but others like me whose disability would not hinder their life nearly as much if the cities they lived in were walkable cities. This would also benefit the mental and physical health of future generations, granting younger people the opportunity to see more of their home town in a safer environment.

[msjodh]

Ive never actually visited the US, but once had a layover at Houston on my trip from the Netherlands to Argentina. We had about 6 hours to spend at the airport, so we thought of having a walk around just to kill some of the time. I was so confused when you simply couldn't. There was nowhere to walk to, and nothing to walk on, it was a huge culture shock within the first minutes.

[mikemc]

True story. When I was nineteen (I'm from ireland) I moved to the suburbs of Chicago. I decided to go for 'a walk'. I met NOBODY on my 30 minute walk. It was surreal. I felt like I was being watched even through the quiet streets. When I pressed the button to cross the street I nearly got run over by a car because they could turn left on red or something. A cop pulled me the same day for Jay walking. It's honestly so stressful just to go for a stroll in suburban America

[Parker]

For those who don't already know, 800m is roughly half a mile. In a sensibly designed environment, it's about 10 minutes walk.

[comment]

As a disabled houstonian I love this video. This city is highly and I mean HIGHLY inaccessible for wheelchairs. I sometimes have to ride on the side of the road risking my life because there is no sidewalk on the way to my destination. It's incredibly frustrating and depressing.

[joejjj]

I had a friend in the US make some long explanation about why it was important that jaywalking was illegal and punishable by pretty large fines (at least for the context). I was just gobsmacked until I realised it was just because he was so reliant on his car, he wasnt even thinking about the pedestrian that probably had nowhere to walk or cross the street

[dnlrx]

This also severely chokes and takes away independence from children and the elderly due to the poor public transportation and over reliance on cars because of our auto industry owning our government.

[helgakrobo]

in a stunning turn of events, it's actually Houston who has a problem

[LisaBeergutHolst]

"[These cities] weren't designed for the car, they were bulldozed for the car." Great line.

[nickisuperhot]

Honestly, I LOVE walking everywhere and I am from Houston. I’ve always had to walk everywhere since I was in middle school. Luckily, nothing was more than 4-5 miles away from my home. When I stumbled across your video, it hadn’t occurred to me that we have drastically failed to put sidewalks/bike lanes for pedestrians. I guess being raised in Houston it was normal for me to just walk on grass and across random little areas that were dangerous. I’m glad you’ve brought this to attention. The older I’ve gotten, them more I’ve thought about where my taxes go? Why do we have to drive everywhere? Why is America so different than the rest of the world? And the answer is always the same: it’s all for business. Time to make change and I’m all for it!!