ClimateTown, along with Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, City Nerd, and the like give me hope that the message is getting out.
That being said, the more I watch these videos/listen to their podcasts the more I understand that city planners, specifically those in charge of managing traffic and parking, have been taught _incorrectly_ for decades. These content creators regularly say that if we want change we are going to need to go to city council meetings and speak up, but in reality what credentials do I have to talk about this stuff? It's my word as a software dev who consumes content about this against someone who's studied this stuff for years of their life. I don't personally blame the city planners, but I do think that car-centric planning has been engrained into their education fundamentally to the point where plans are made based on factors solely considering number of cars moving through traffic lights for example, vs. number of people crossing an intersection irrespective of mode of transportation.
I think the primary difficulty is not telling planners this, but telling citizens. Most people are so ingrained to use cars in the US that any mention of transit or biking gets a pretty severely negative response, and I’ve seen this in people I know across conservatives, liberals, and even (dumbfoundingly) progressives/leftists. To do this well also requires more dense apartments and mixed use zoning, which similarly upsets many across the political spectrum.
I am somewhat hopeful the trends are angling towards proper cities, but my impression of those trends is that it is moreso forward thinking cities/planners trying their best against an extremely misinformed citizenry + our existing terrible infrastructure + under/misfunding + impossible bureaucracy. It’s going to take a lot of effort to get people to actually use alternatives, and I think those channels will only appeal to a very small bubble of urbanism focused leftists.
(side note: e-bikes are my personal urbanism bet; they seem good enough to vaguely navigate surface roads and even some stroad conditions, while being able to interface with old bike path networks, and can be easy to park in areas where cities provide bike racks. I’ve had a good experience with one, and no longer use a car for most trips)
Planners actually already mostly know and are mostly good. The problem are more often the uneducated elected officials and the transport engineers. State DoT are particularly bad.
That being said, the more I watch these videos/listen to their podcasts the more I understand that city planners, specifically those in charge of managing traffic and parking, have been taught _incorrectly_ for decades. These content creators regularly say that if we want change we are going to need to go to city council meetings and speak up, but in reality what credentials do I have to talk about this stuff? It's my word as a software dev who consumes content about this against someone who's studied this stuff for years of their life. I don't personally blame the city planners, but I do think that car-centric planning has been engrained into their education fundamentally to the point where plans are made based on factors solely considering number of cars moving through traffic lights for example, vs. number of people crossing an intersection irrespective of mode of transportation.