Dutch Cities are Better for the Environment (and my sanity)

The story continues at Climate Town: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc Also don't forget to watch "How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo

Canadian farmer here... One thing that drives me nuts is seeing some of the highest quality farm land in my province get paved under, and yet you drive through downtown it is just so much wasted space. We have a lot more people to feed as time goes on, and losing high quality land is the last thing we need happening.

I wouldnt say the bike infrastructure is world class. Its rather Dutch class, and the world should strive to have Dutch class bike network 😉

Holy crap. My maths teacher did actually ride his bike to school every day because he disagreed with the pollution caused by cars. I left school more than 20 years ago. He was well ahead of his time.

It's crazy. I've lived in the same town in Arkansas my whole life. As a kid I could easily and quickly bike to the store. As it's gotten bigger, it has become impossible to walk or bike, even though my house and store are in the same spots. Sidewalks disappear, new roads emerge, old roads widen, vehicles have become so numerous and gigantic that you can see down the road anymore. And they wonder why nobody wants to leave the house and everybody that does is on drugs.

The crossover we didn't know we needed. Amazing videos guys!

It was actually Climate Town's video on fast fashion that made me stop buying cheap imports and start buying ethically made/ sustainable clothing. Good to see you guys collaborating!

When I go to the supermarket, I don't ask myself "should I go by car?" but "is it even worth the effort of taking out my bike or should I just walk?"

I'm sure if enough people in Canada wanted a European style district or city, it can be built. Thumbs up if you want a European city in Canada

Eyy thank you for the shout out! Honoured to be in such illustrious company

I used to live in the desert. When I first moved there I was amazed to learn that absolutely no accommodation to the dominant climate is made by home builders even though the wind blows 40mph from the same direction every day for months on end and daily temperatures are 115F. The homes there should be like Luke Skywalker's place on Tatooine or like they do in North Africa, but no, they all look like standard suburban homes, they just have fantastically higher air conditioning bills.

Fun Fact: the Netherlands government are motivating people to put grass on their garden then stones to prevent heating on summer days (because it gets hotter each year and dry dirt is also becoming issue), so less people are using Air conditioning.

Here in Ohio they are selling off farmland and building suburban platts as fast as they can, so fast that a forest can just disappear in a few days, the topsoil is bagged up and sold, the sterile dirt that's left is planted with sad lawn grass, and lagoons are put in as "mitigation" for just having destroyed a 10,000 year old wetland. Then they name the platt "Sherwood forest" or "babbling spring" to harken back to the habitat they just eliminated from existence.

I flew into Phoenix a few months ago, and was blown away by how... "same" everything was. It was literally the same house in the same culdesac Ctrl c ctrl v'd everywhere.

When you overbuild roads, bridges, tunnels, parking lots etc that can also lead to an increase in the urban heat island effect, which makes suffering during climate influenced heat waves even worse since the ground and buildings are so hot. I noticed this when I went to the town of Komoka outside of fake London this summer. The forested provincial park was a lot cooler than the parking lot outside of the local YMCA/community centre.

I am from the Netherlands, living in Amsterdam, just back from a horrible vacation in Texas. I started watching this channel before that trip, and I love every part of it. It opened my eyes to the obvious around me, the blissfully Dutch urban areas in which I grew up. In Texas, I was miserable. Sociability existed, but it seemed as if actual people magically popped into existence at home or at some venue like a shop or cafe. The medium in between was a dusty, grimey wasteland intersected by massive concrete deathroads populated by screaming, stinking machines - devoid of all humanity. Today, after watching this video, I walked outside into the beautiful Dutch spring weather. I had my headphones with me, but on a whim decided I didn't want to use them. Suddenly so thankful for where I live, a literal tear sprang to my eye. People walk their dogs, strangers have conversations, children run and laugh, people sit in the sun doing whatever wherever. Three times I was passed by loudly singing people on their bikes, and not the kind you would see in Texas - those are victims, doomed to walk the humanless wasteland, their humanity rotting away. A subtle difference in words, a clear difference in actual reality. What happened to many public places in the world in the past decades was a greedy capitalist crime, that still spurs on a global humanitarian crisis of apocalyptic scale, and of varying far reaching dimensions - decreasing human happiness, and causing climate annihilation. Its a tragedy of human nature that it tends to destroy what is wholesomely good, and replace it with something shortsightedly considered an improvement, sometimes motivated by greed and personal gain. I hope we can make the world good again some day. Your videos are an important step in that process, thank you!

For anyone who was wondering: "The name Humptulips was the name of a band of the Chehalis tribe who lived in the area. The name comes from a local Native American language, meaning 'hard to pole', referring to the difficulty local Native Americans had poling their canoes along the Humptulips River." (Wikipedia)

Mad props for boosting up Climate Town. That guy needs to have way more subscribers than he has now (he also needs to put out way more videos).

Since discovering you both I've literally been going back and forth between wanting to pursue a career in city planning or climate science. Depends on who uploaded most recently.

Watching this video I'm reminded that every time I bring up these necessary changes to my suburbanite parents (who commute into the city from a whole other city that just happens to border mine) they tell me that bike lanes and public transit are a waste of their tax payer money (they don't pay taxes in my city) and they never see anyone using the existing bike lanes so they should just remove them. All this to say, I see what you mean by better for your sanity.