Oh The Urbanity!
@OhUrbanity
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We traverse cities by foot, bike, and public transit and make informative and (hopefully) entertaining videos combining streetscapes and demographic data.
Montreal, Quebec
Joined December 2020
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If You Hate Density, Maybe Don’t Live in A City:
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The new bike lanes on College Street in Toronto are looking pretty darn nice
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Just a few years ago, this was a road! (Les Terasses Roy, Montreal)
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Separated bike lanes under construction on Eglinton (Toronto)!
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Florida things: today we waited FOUR MINUTES for a pedestrian signal to cross a street (and then we just gave up)
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An interesting response we've been getting:
“This video is cruel. I can’t leave the city. My job, friends, and family are here!”
Yes. That's why we shouldn't block housing in cities and price people out.
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Just to visualize this: here is the daily ridership of the Vancouver SkyTrain versus Portland Light Rail.
Judging a city’s transit system by how “impressive” its map looks is often not a good idea.
Vancouver moves about 5 times more people on the shorter SkyTrain system with less stations. A way bigger success story.
And obviously SkyTrain to UBC is the natural plan.
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Montreal’s massive snow removal operations never cease to amaze. The city is cold, snowy, and dense enough that just plowing snow to the side of the road isn’t enough. After larger snowfalls, they collect it all with big snow blowers and truck it away to snow dumps!
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The fact that so many urbanist YouTubers are Canadian and spend time complaining about Toronto (valid criticisms most of the time, to be clear) seems to give people the impression that Toronto is uniquely bad/car-centric within North America, which isn’t true at all.
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One of Montreal's newer bike corridors (Avenue des Pins)
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As the Winter Cycling Congress comes to a close, our hotel welcomes some new guests: the Really Big Truck Convention (also known as a Flames vs. Oilers game).
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Edmonton's new Valley Line has some great views, but for some strange reason it's still not visible on Google Maps 5 months after opening?!
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When your city mandates a minimum amount of parking but a maximum housing density, it’s not an exaggeration to say that they literally prioritize cars over people.
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Pedestrian pathways breaking up the cul-de-sac road layout are a simple improvement that can make such a big difference to an otherwise suburban environment.
(Saskatoon, Saskatchewan)
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One of Montreal's nicest new bike corridors also has lots of raised crosswalks! (Avenue des Pins)
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With over 250,000 trips per day, the CTrain in Calgary has the highest ridership of any LRT system in the U.S. and Canada.
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Utrecht seems to have the highest cycling volumes of all six Dutch cities we've visited on this trip
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Four directions of pedestrianization in Montreal this past weekend!
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Lest we give you the impression that Montreal is an urbanist paradise, this van blocked MTL’s 2nd busiest bike lane (also ped crossing) in the most disruptive way possible and told us “you're not supposed to bike in the winter”. (It was a very pleasant 1°C with clear bike lanes.)
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Was fun to ride the Waterloo LRT today, the smallest metro area in Canada with urban rail transit. It's a shame they don't use Presto cards for fares (like the GTA and Ottawa) though.
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Edmonton’s LRT carries 73,000 people per day — almost as many as San Francisco’s light rail (Muni Metro).
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The opening of the REM is bittersweet. Montreal is getting a lot more transit and that’s exciting! But it also highlights just how frustrating it is that activists and politicians shot down plans for the east end to get its own REM.
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This past fall, Montreal pedestrianized a section of street in front of this elementary school to reduce traffic and give the 400 or so students (who mostly walk to school) more space.
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Culture shock on a suburban bike trip yesterday. This one took 90 seconds!
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This old woonerf (1990s?) on Cambridge Street in Ottawa is pretty cool. Too bad they didn’t keep building these everywhere!
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Why not decorate an apartment building with bikes? (Gatineau, Quebec)
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Once fully open, the REM will have 1.1 million people living within 3 km of a station! (Based on 2021 population figures, not counting potential for future density)
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So many cyclists out after (and even during) the snowstorm! Here's another REV route too (Bellechasse).
It snowed 40 cm last night and cars are buried, meanwhile Montreals cyclists are taking to the REV undeterred - build it and they will come certainly applies to bikes
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We're halfway through our Netherlands adventure, arriving in Amsterdam today. Had a great time in The Hague:
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Some of these traffic fatality rates in the US are mind-blowing and hard to comprehend. This is Detroit, Michigan versus Windsor, Ontario.
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Some people have asked why we provided fatalities normalized by population instead of by distance travelled.
It's because designing cities to require lots of of driving is itself part of the problem. A city with lots of fatalities isn't a success just because people drive a lot.
Some of these traffic fatality rates remain legitimately surprising:
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Calling all cyclists who live in climates where winter is cold, rainy, or snowy!
We’re running a survey on the challenges people face in biking in the winter.
If you're interested, here's the link:
Sharing is much appreciated.
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Toronto is amazing and insane at the same time.
Amazing: allowing lots of high-rises near transit.
Insane: not allowing mid-rises everywhere else.
A look at transit-oriented development activity in central North York along the Yonge Street (Line 1) and Sheppard Avenue East (Line 4):
#Toronto
#urbanplanning
#transit
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How to take back your downtown streets with trains and bikes (102 Avenue, Edmonton)
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It’s amazing just how many people we see and hear about who are visiting Montreal this summer and taking back ideas and ambitions for cycling, transit, and public space in their home cities across the continent!
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Day 2 and there's no lack of demand for bike parking at REM stations! (Du Quartier)
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@mattyglesias
@jburnmurdoch
I'm from Canada and visited Florida recently. I'm used to smaller crossover SUVs but I'd never seen so many full-sized SUVs (GMC Yukon, Chevy Suburban) in my life.
Does it play a role in the fatality difference? I don't know. But I don't think the cars are exactly the same.
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This video was so fun to make. It would be cool to see equivalent videos for other cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, Boston. We can talk about things we see while visiting but it's hard to make a big list (and get footage) without living in a place.
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La piste cyclable sur Av. Pierre-de-Coubertin est exceptionnelle, mais comment est-ce que les cyclistes sont supposés tourner à gauche dans le carrefour giratoire? Ou est-ce que ce n'est pas encore fini?
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There's no place we'd rather come home to than Montreal, where we randomly encounter a street pedestrianization we didn't even know was happening
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By my quick calculations, Portland’s light rail “reaches” 860,000 people (within 2.5 kilometres) versus 1.2 million in Vancouver. (Obviously, not just a property of the transit system itself but also the cities.)
An important consideration in the Portland and Vancouver comparison, even though Portlands network moves way less people, perhaps it “reaches”? More people?
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They’re real! Spotted those crosswalk flags in Halifax. Not even in the suburbs, this was by Dalhousie in the middle of the city (also saw them in Dartmouth though).
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Always fascinating (and disorienting) that just as many people see tall buildings as “slums of crime and poverty” as see them as “luxury housing for the rich”.
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An under-appreciated YIMBY win is that media and the general public seem less likely to talk about rising home prices like the stock market going up. This sounds small but it was crazy hearing people refer to bad/worsening cities as having the “best performing markets”.
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The wildfire smoke is back in Montreal and it's... pretty bad
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It’s crazy hearing about cities that take days to clear bike routes when Montreal actively plows them during snowfall. (Granted, some boroughs/routes are better than others.)
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Contactless payment is a really big deal for making transit in a city convenient for visitors
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This new bike corridor (Rue de Champlain) was installed in the fall. It reduced cars from 67% of the street to 48%. It’s a great connection to the Jacques-Cartier Bridge (although it doesn’t quite reach to the bike corridor on Boulevard De Maisonneuve).
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It's the small things: tilted garbage cans with wide openings for cyclists to use while riding past
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Any serious attempt to understand a city has to include both the good and the bad. Relentless negativity and empty positivity are both boring.
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We're creating a list of local urbanist & YIMBY advocacy groups so that people can look up their city and know who to get involved with. We've created a form to submit your local groups to the list!
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Vehicular cycling (the idea that bike lanes are bad and cyclists should ride in traffic) is a *very* hard sell in Montreal. This bike lane is very popular, recording 1.5 million riders last year. It's wide and comfortable and the suggestion of getting rid of it is unthinkable.
@OhUrbanity
riders of differing abilities cant get around each other inside that bikelane lined with tripping-kerbz. esp if it were hilly. add-in zoomy battery bikes & we would all do better on a smooth wide road, room for everybody if we are courteous road users
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Toronto, New York, and Montreal have a much bigger share of their metro area population within the core city than other places like Dallas, Atlanta, or Miami. (DC too but that’s a special case.)
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Engaged activism like attending public meetings is great, but it’s a mistake to treat that as the minimum standard for “caring enough” about urbanism.
A lot of our videos are made with the hope of getting people to (1) vote and (2) talk to their friends/family about good policy.
Brief negative comment on this - no no no, learning is engagement and no, not everyone needs to become an activist (though of course activism is good!). Just being an informed voter can do enormous good!
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How do you solve the biggest housing affordability crisis in North America? Thanks to
@KahlonRav
for chatting with us!
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The Edmonton airport bus schedule was so bad. Hourly frequencies are easily enough to make you take an Uber.
From Ottawa to Vancouver, to Montreal & Toronto, big cities across Canada are all connecting their airports to rapid transit. It's time for the Albertan airports to catch up.
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For some reason, whenever Montrealers post about bike infrastructure or pedestrian streets, there is a crazy torrent of comments from people outside of the city talking about how much they absolutely detest Montreal, how it's ugly, sad, dirty, and poor.
@jacouzi
@Val_Plante
Tu dois pas te promener souvent dans cette ville sale et triste. Montreal ce n’est pas le tour du block.
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It’s interesting getting comments saying we need to focus less on housing reform in big cities and instead spread out to small towns.
You can already move to a small town if you want! Lots of people like that lifestyle. No need to force others into it by limiting cities.
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True or false? “Above the fifth floor, offices and housing should logically be the province of the air-traffic authorities [...] They no longer belong to the city.”
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We didn’t cover it in today’s video but Edmonton is doing a lot for bike infrastructure and safe streets too. Consider giving them a vote at:
Edmonton is being recognized as a North American leader on safer streets. We’re head to head against 16 other municipalities by
@StrongTowns
.
Please vote by Friday at
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Aesthetics are personal and some people dislike the look of tall buildings. What’s crazy is how common and accepted it is to resort to wild hyperbole and describe apartments as “destroying” neighbourhoods.
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Biking during a snowstorm versus a few days after, with plowing and snow removal. It's a totally different experience!
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We even said towards the end of the video that we don’t think most homeowners are sufficiently bothered by tall buildings that they’ll actually leave.
Part of the problem is that you can block new buildings for being ”moderately annoying but not that big of a deal”.
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This is The City to Beat on Housing Reform:
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Montreal isn’t perfect by any means, but it does have a level of momentum and popular support for improving itself that really stands out. Our latest video:
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Rue Berri (a well-used two-way bike path) is going to be upgraded to one-way paths on each side of the road!
I’d heard about this before but it’s good to see more concrete plans. It’s still a few years away though — maybe 2027, according to
@jacouzi
.
Avant-première de l'aménagement cyclable sur le futur REV Berri.
REV Unidir sur Berri : verdissement!
Élargissement aux normes de la Bidir sur Maisonneuve
(Dans le cadre des travaux de la STM à Berri-UQAM, la VdeMTL mandate la STM de faire les travaux de voirie).
#velomtl
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One frustration for cycling in N. America is that it's actually very easy to build a new suburb to be bike-friendly, but car-culture is so strong there that we don't do it. Places where car culture is weaker (built-up urban centres) require retrofitting streets, which is harder.
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@RM_Transit
Interesting how people project based on wherever they're from. No one could come to central Montreal in the winter and not see lots of cyclists. Not the same volumes as summer but it's still common and visible.
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What Happened When This City Banned Housing Investors:
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It's not just Montreal. People in Ottawa are perfectly happy to walk and roll on pedestrian streets too! (Wellington Street on Canada Day)
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April showers bring May flowers… hey, wait a second, something’s not right here
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You Don’t Need to Move to Amsterdam to be Happy:
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