Where the wheels fall off

If everyone's going to gad about on micromobile electric machines, we'll need to do better than this.

- RUSSELL BROWN

It’s about six months since I started coming home from the pub and watching urban-ist videos. It didn’t take YouTube’s algorithm long to notice. Oh, it said, you’ve just watched all 40 minutes of someone biking around Amsterdam praising the intersections and talking about mixed-use development – here’s some more of that for you. It occurred to me I was being radicalised.

The same mathematics that show people more and more videos full of stupid vaccine conspiracy theories and revolting far-right polemics had come into play.

Soon, it wasn’t just the Not Just Bikes channel, it was City Beautiful and Strong Towns. I came to believe that single-family zoning had ruined American cities and that “stroads” were the Devil’s doing. (Wikipedia characterises “stroad” as “a pejorative portmanteau of street and road”, coined by American urban planner Charles Marohn to describe an unhappy confusion of function between streets, a “complex environment where life in the city happens”, and roads, a “high-speed connection between two places”.)