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”.)
This story is from the June 25 - July 1, 2022 edition of New Zealand Listener.
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This story is from the June 25 - July 1, 2022 edition of New Zealand Listener.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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