Quote:
Originally Posted by Truenorth00
I love his tone.
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I'm going to have to agree with ssiguy this time around.
I've met some people who have met Jason Slaughter, and the word on the street is that he's kind of a dipshit. He knows that cities in North America are making some progress on the urbanism front, but he deliberately downplays these in his videos to get clicks. It turns out you can rage farm walkable urbanism to dissatisfied North Americans.
To be perfectly honest, things are moving about as fast as they can on this front in Canadian cities. Rebuilding the entire built form toward something urban and walkable will take decades. In Toronto, for example, the transportation department has been very aggressive with building bike lanes, but they're not going to tear up a street to build cycle tracks until the road and all the associated infrastructure under it is due for replacement. Building separated bicycle lanes at the height of the sidewalk - which has been standard in the Netherlands for over 40 years now - requires moving the placement of storm drains ($$$), so unless this is up for immediate renewal, it's not going to happen. Despite this, the city still forges ahead with interim solutions like placing temporary concrete barriers beside newly-painted bike lanes at surface to make them separated from traffic, but still conform with existing infrastructure.
Same with his criticism of the GO train system. He trashed the one rail system that is going through the herculean transformation from a park-and-ride commuter train into a regional rail system. He slams GO for having mammoth parking lots and no TOD, despite the fact that:
- there are thousands of condo units planned or U/C near GO stations
- our train lines historically went past low-value industrial sites and getting developers to build residential there is only something possible in a housing crisis and boom;
- the provincial government changed and overrode existing municipal zoning to allow density within transit station areas
- they set up an office (Infrastructure Ontario) to work with private developers to plan and build TOD
It's for reasons like this that Canadian urbanist YouTubers like Reece Martin and Oh the Urbanity! have to create reaction videos to dispel the things NJB posts.