Canadian Reacts to Germany’s “Green” City Freiburg (More Bikes Than Cars!)

Here is my reaction and commentary to Germany’s “Green” City (with more bikes than cars!)

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Original Video :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vil5KC7Bl0

Mo welcome back to the channel everyone it’s your friendly amateur neighborhood Canadian and today we’re checking out Germany’s Green City with more bikes than cars that’s interesting I’ve always had a fascination with City Planning and the infrastructure of cities and how that affects its population and just day-to-day life Canadian cities if you’re not in one of the big ones your transportation and walkability is going to be poor so let’s uh take a look at this one uh it’s sad because we are definitely we rely on cars we rely on the combustion engine right now uh electric vehicles are still not really feasible economically uh they are trying to phase those in by I believe 2030 uh and Beyond they’re trying to end the sale totally of combustion engines but the fact is that our public transportation is just really weak so let’s have a look at this Germany’s Green City this is fryberg in brow City in the Black Forest it’s often referred to as Germany’s Green City it’s a city with more than twice as many bicycles as cars and over 400 km of bicycle Lanes it’s a city with a lot of trams and amazing pedestrianized streets over the past few decades fryberg has become a leader in modern sustainable Urban Development and they’re building an absolutely amazing and that’s the way it should be cuz look at look at the communal effect here the community um the people being able to participate in life walk to the grocery store walk to get a coffee walk to go shopping walk to school walk to all of these different places amazing City in the process if not walking obviously biking which is even better exercise goes up and health goes up fryberg Germany is well known for its car industry and auto bonds but fryberg is different this is a city where cars do not rule fryberg is a university town and around 10% of the population attends the university so obviously you see a lot of students cycling to and from school and a lot of bicycles parked outside the university but you also see a lot of cargo bikes and families a key indicator that fryberg has a very Advanced bicycle culture the old town in the center of fryberg is a wonderful place to be there’s old architecture alongside the new and the streets are beautiful too isn’t this amazing I even managed to film two trams going through here at once appreciate my patience and good timing everywhere you look there are trams people cycling and lots of people of all ages out enjoying themselves there are nice narrow streets and lots of outdoor patios the city center is almost entirely pedestrianized so of course it’s very quiet yet another reminder that cities aren’t loud cars are loud yeah and when you do see the occasional car it looks comically out of place with so many people around so I’m just curious I’m going to search it up really quick I I’m curious what the population of this town is cuz look at all these pedestrians you will never see this many pedestrians I mean maybe in Vancouver Toronto uh but that’s pretty incredible fryberg population 230,000 wow so yeah that’s that’s a pretty big population Center the city center has these Open Water channels and it said if you fall in one you’re destined to marry someone from fryberg but the best part is that kids actually make boats to sail on the water isn’t this just one of the most wholesome things you’ve ever seen this is so much fun hearing I was lucky enough to meet up with ashon from the YouTube channel type Ashton while I was in town she and her family are from the US but they loved fryberg so much that they decided to stay in Germany per cat’s meowing I’m just going to open the door cuz there you go door’s open permanently Ashton has great videos on her Channel about everything from macroeconomics to micro urbanism and she talks a lot about the differences between the US and Germany I’ll leave a link to her Channel below and of course she’s also an expert in fryberg which was great for my first trip here to this amazing City seriously the fryberg Oldtown is one of the nicest places I’ve ever been to so you might be thinking okay okay okay this is an old medeval city but actually it’s not what you might think sure fryberg was originally founded in the year 1120 but most of fryberg was leveled in World War II which was the case for many cities in Europe of course but what was truly unique about fryberg it’s not mindblowing it’s founded in 1120 so in The Next Century we’re coming up on a thousand years of this of this city is that when they rebuilt it they made it similar to what it used to be instead of being rebuilt for cars so remarkably pretty much everything you see here is less than 75 years old unfortunately the rest of the city was not so lucky but it was leveled in it’s commonly said in fryberg that the war destroyed 80% of the city and cars destroyed the other 20% outside of the city center neighborhoods were built with that car Centric vision of modity that was common across the world in the 1960s this road just outside of the city center used to be a narrow Street just like the rest with several popular beer gardens and restaurants but they were all destroyed to build the Ring Road the 1960s really were the decade of destroy stuff to build roads and we’re still paying for those decisions today it was only very recently that activists were finally successful in getting a car Lane remove to build this totally insufficient bicycle lane this area will likely never return turned to its original Beauty and it’s entirely because of car infrastructure ironically the center of fryberg though rebuilt in the style of the original city was completely overrun by cars and asphalt look at this difference between this footage from 1973 and how it looks today this pedestrian Square used to be a parking lot I know cities like Vancouver have a long history of City Planning and and Innovative infrastructure and there’s lots of arguments to be made on many different sides about uh the benefits or negatives of certain initiatives but they have the theory or system of vancouverism I think which is the one that they uh try to promote which is sort of a belief in a mixed use system and having you know shops and residential uh units and parks and all of these things within certain areas to make them more livable right now parking for the city center is in garages on the periphery there were several key decisions that put fryberg on the right path and avoided the destruction that comes from making a place car friendly in 1972 the city voted to keep its tram Network this had a massive impact on the fryberg we see today there’s one consistent thing I’ve seen in cities all over the world every city that retained its tram network has better urbanism than any nearby City that didn’t but fryberg went a step further and actually expanded its tram Network through the 80s and 90s while other European cities were removing theirs um if anybody’s been to Vancouver you’ve probably If you flew into Vancouver you’ve probably taken the Canada line which is really efficient really great it takes you right from the airport directly downtown you can be from the airport to downtown in 20 minutes so I have flown into Vancouver before uh I’ve left the island I’m over on Vancouver Island and by the time you take a flight uh it’s about a 25 30 minute flight you can be downtown Vancouver in literally an hour and a half which is pretty good when you’re traveling hundreds of kilometers the first part of the city center was pedestrianized in 1973 and once the cars were removed the city center became a successful business district with a popular Market that is still active today the market surrounds this beautiful cathedral and it’s one of the genuine highlights of the city center and of course I’m guessing that Cathedral is something that survived uh the bombing in World War II this used to be a parking lot too in the 1970s there was a growing environmental movement that protested any developments that would destroy the neighbor ing Black Forest this kept the city more compact than most cities that were built or rebuilt for the automobile after the war in 2002 fryberg elected the first green party mayor in Germany and since then fryberg has become the model for sustainable City development in Europe one great example of this is voban a suburb completed in the early 2000s that was designed to be environmentally friendly from the start the buildings here were built to a very high Energy Efficiency standard and you see solar panels on roofs and balconies all over the neighborhood we’re starting to see more and more of those around uh even in my city here you’ll see houses with them all over the roofs and they’re obviously really good ways to uh harness the power of the Sun and really smart right some of these buildings even generate more energy than they consume the neighborhood was built on the location of a former military base and some of the apartments were were built from the original Barracks one really unique element is that many of these apartment buildings are collectively owned a group of people would come together and build an apartment building themselves instead of buying units from a developer today the majority of residents in foban live in housing cooperatives or social housing developments when foban was first built only about half of households owned a car but remarkably that number has actually decreed inreased especially after the tram line was completed in 2006 today the V that’s the thing if you lived in a city that had a proper Planning Network and was proper properly planned from the beginning with uh sufficient infrastructure to decrease the need for a vehicle then you should be able to have a vehicle that’s shared between a group of people pretty easily but people are greedy I mean in like North America vast majority of households in foban do not have a car and there are only about 170 Motor Vehicles per thousand inhabitants I wonder if these old Clunkers count towards that number you don’t have to walk around very long to realize that a lot of people get around here by cycling even though this is a suburb on the edge of the city the neighborhood makes extensive use of modal filters allowing people walking or cycling to pass through while being off limits to cars this is exactly the same method that the Netherlands uses to describe scourage car traffic especially through traffic in residential neighborhoods this makes the streets of foban very safe for children and you see lots of kids out on their own and some of the streets here are design that’s been an off uh Target of criticism for the City Planning and infrastructure in North America right and especially now where you have people complaining oh kids aren’t playing outside anymore and this and that well the streets they’re living in the suburbs the streets and the the cities are not designed or safe for walking or cycling and you have vehicles speeding around right so it’s yeah I don’t know designated as play Streets this neighborhood has one of the highest percentage of children in all of Germany which isn’t that surprising because places without cars are better for kids faan is also very well served by Transit on the west side is a transit station with tram and bus stops connecting residents to other parts of the city but the tram line also runs along the whole side of the neighborhood making it easily accessible to everyone who lives here this should be the model used to design new suburbs everywhere unfortunately not all neighborhoods in fryberg are as well designed as phobang so you’ll see other districts with streets lined with parked cars and it how always annoys me when cars are supposed to be parked on the sidewalk because while fryberg spent only a few decades building car Centric infrastructure those places still remain as it takes many decades to repair that kind of damage but you can see some of those repairs taking place with extra space being given back to people who walk and cycle there is of course a lot of bicycle infrastructure in fryberg including many curb protected Bic pass unfortunately even major intersections are totally unprotected designed in the Copenhagen style as opposed to using much safer Dutch designs and there are still many painted bicycle gutters and dangerous merge lanes on busy roads yeah you’ll see cyclists driving in downtown Vancouver it’s sketchy so clearly there are still opportunities for improvement but many of the streets in fryberg have so little car traffic that dedicated bicycle infrastructure is not required and some of these have been designated as bicycle streets where people cycling can use the whole street and drivers need to yield to bikes and it’s always great to see parking spaces converted to outdoor seating for local restaurants now there’s a lot that’s been written infrastructure in I the network is one of the city’s best features fber refers to its tram system as a stbon instead of a Sten Bond the usual German word for tram this is because they consider it to be better with separated tracks traffic light priority and a higher average speed than most tram systems the trams in fryberg are very modern with level boarding at tram stops making the system very accessible though there are still some older trams that have yet to be replaced the tram Network covers most to the city and even goes out to several suburbs and the current planning rules state that new housing cannot be built unless it’s within walking distance of a tram line I didn’t even cycle while I was in fryberg because if I have a choice between cycling and taking a tram I will take a tram I was able to get everywhere I wanted to go and I never had to wait very long for a tram either because the trams have a signal priority and a dedicated Lane for most of their getting around by tram is extremely quick and efficient and there are so many grassy tram tracks here I love grassy tram tracks I guess just cuz they’re aesthetically pleasing but it’s not like they’re really they’re not useful as like for humans right they’re more useful for just being aesthetically pleasing to the city also I like the new tram and bus station at Europa plots with chargers for the electric buses and the roof of this station is covered in solar panels in fact the entire tram Network as well as all of these electric buses are run off of renewable energy because of course they are fryberg is not a sprawling City so it’s very easy to get out into the black forest we heard there was a great view from a cable car nearby so we set off to visit we took tram 2 out to the end of the line in the South where we picked up a bus we had to walk all the way from the tram right here this is so great I know this is just a silly trivial trip to a tourist attraction and this trip doesn’t really matter at all but this is the way public transit should be everywhere not just for the center of the city not just for commuting but for all kinds of trips that someone might want to take now the weather wasn’t the best but the view from the gondola was nice and when we got back the tram was waiting for us so I know Vancouver aspires to be a green City but I don’t know to what level it gets and if that even touches such as fryberg friberg’s train station is centrally located though not very pretty we got here by Train by the way and while the road directly outside of the station is not as nice as it should be there is a separate area above the station where you can board a tra and go into the old town without interacting with any cars at all or you can pick up a bike share bike to continue your journey into the the city and there are clearly a lot of people who cycle here and if you need I’m sorry but that was just funny because there’s all these bikes and there’s a McDonald’s in the background a lot of people who cycle here and if you need to access the other side of the city this walking and cycling bridge will take you over the train tracks which also used to be a car Bridge until 1996 because of course it was I prefer it like this and now it leads directly to this bicycle parking garage for the train station fryberg is a highly desirable city that is sustainable both environmentally and financially and with great public transport it’s a beautiful place that’s safe for children accessible to all kinds of people and enjoyable to be in and yet it’s not thousands of years old every one of us probably knows someone who is older than the fryberg city center which really does make you wonder why can’t we bu build more places like this it’s not like it’s lost knowledge we know how to build like this and we know people like being in places like this this is what the sustainable city of the future should look like not a place with wide roads and self-driving cars but a humanized city with clean and efficient public transportation and streets that are safe enough for everyone over the past few years fryberg has become very well known by urban planners in Europe and many planners and politicians come here to learn about sustainable Urban Development which is great because as far as I’m concerned the more cities that copy fryberg the better so I’m interested this guy’s thoughts on Vancouver and city planners in general their thoughts on Vancouver if you’re a fan of carfree places you might enjoy my video about zermat a carfree town in the Swiss alpes Vancouver especially the city center has a lot of issues because it’s landlocked and and it’s very small and surrounded by mountains ocean and rivers I’ll put a link to that video down below which you can watch now but only on nebula nestled very nebula is the subscription streaming service that was built by creators it’s not an ad driven platform all right that’s a very interesting video I’m going to quickly look uh just out of curiosity let’s check out um Vancouver transit map Transit System Map all right so yeah this is a pretty simplified version here um so yeah you have the Canada Line right here that’s the airport and you come down the Canada Line This is obviously not how it’s um this is not the actual geography this is like a simplified version of it uh you go from the airport all the the way right downtown and then once you get downtown you can get off at this stop if you need to go out to bernabe um and Simon Fraser University if you need to go to um Richmond and sui you can take this line here and then so it’s actually really really good anyways interesting video uh City Planning like I said at the beginning fascinating to me and we’ll see you on the next one ciao