I spent many formative years in London Ontario Canada. Jason of Not Just Bikes has said many things, but I made this video to add my own comments about the city. As much as I have tried to lay out that which redeems the city. It is still a place that I do not wish to move back to.
OurRetiredLife:
Bike Tour: Thames Valley Parkway, London, Ontario
NJB Links:
Suburbs that don’t Suck – Streetcar Suburbs (Riverdale, Toronto)
Throwing Good Money After Bad Car Infrastructure – Wonderland Road
Why We Won’t Raise Our Kids in Suburbia
0:00 Is Fake London Really That Bad?
0:28 What is Fake London?
1:50 London is car infested
2:44 London is primarily single family homes
3:28 A car is required for every trip
4:10 Crossing the street is dangerous
4:44 You’re stranded until you can drive
5:33 Biking in London is suicide
6:30 London transit sucks
7:21 Kids don’t go outside
8:01 Why London sucks
9:17 Good things about London
10:46 London Ontario has potential
11:27 Conclusion
11:55 Outro
37 Comments
If you are not familiar with what a stroad is, feel free to watch this video from Not Just Bikes https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM?si=_N24NTobASCDgzIr
pretty good video. I think you where very reasonable in your critic!
You sound just like Jason… are you secretly Jason….? 🙂
Before you will make next video go to europe first
So, it is not as bad as the narrative hyperbole would make it seem, but it's still surprisingly bad for a city of 500k people? Okay.
One positive thing London does; apartment towers! They are everywhere even in many new suburban developments.
NJB fanboys are downright vicious to anyone who disagrees with their master. Bravo to you for making this video!
Is REAL London (in the UK) any much better? 😒
So it's just like any other North American city? So what's the criticism on NJB's take?
dramatic reinactment lol
I've lived in London my whole life (aside from university), it will always be my hometown. Having worked for the city for two summers I've flip flopped between being very optimistic for London's future and feeling hopeless and helpless to change it. The city recently added bike lanes with no barriers to a segment of Colborne street where one side of the street had served as street parking for as long as I can remember. A few years ago they also added bus route 1 which turns left onto Colborne from cheapside, where almost every time it makes the turn, cars in the turn lane have had to back up to let the bus in. Now there is no centre turn lane and the bike lanes are right in the path of the bus. It's a recipe for disaster
The trees on the Boulevards were only planted in the past 15 years or so, which means if they had thought ahead a little, they could have just put the bike lanes on the boulevards.
I really wanna hope for the city but I'm not convinced those who are responsible for those decisions are competent enough to do it right. When the neighborhood raised objections to this particular bike lane plan on Colborne, they were outright ignored.
Still I have a bit of hope, thank you for helping me see it again
Sounds like Edmonton. You need a car to get anywhere and is generally a hell hole.
73% of all trips were done by car? Thats bad. I live in Brno, Czech republic, which is similar in size to Fake London. Even though I have a car and the country is still pretty car infested, I can manage 95% of my trips without a car, even travelling abroad (well countries are smaller here). Those trips I chose to use a car were mostly for fun I get from driving (I love driving) and some for convinience.
If I didnt get a car from my grandparents, I wouldnt even thought of having one (because no money as a student), so I cant even imagine how I would manage to survive in Fake London
I stopped watching NJB when he went on a Twitter rant about how he makes his videos for people like him, who can afford to move to other countries to have better infrastructure. Not very often do I get a YouTube telling me their videos aren’t for me and watching them isn’t really gonna do anything for me other than making me feel bad.
As somebody who grew up in Michigan, thanks for proving that NJB is correct. Is progress good? Yes. Is there still a lot more to do? Does it still suck? Yep!
It seems to me that you and Jason simply compare (fake) London to different versions of good. Jasons reference is from the Netherlands where good means that the land use and infrastructure is consistantly built to promote a healthy lifestyle. Yours is one from america where "some bike infrastructure is being built in some places" counts as good. That is my conclusion having watched your video.
I visited friends in Fake London about 15 years ago. We were staying in one of the older nieghbourhoods, about a 15 minutes walk from the downtown shopping areas. We didn't have a car, but we still managed to get about. Being from England, we didn't find it strange to walk to wherever we needed to get, but we did get some funny looks when people asked how we got about without a car.
On some days, our friends would drive us out to some of the restuarants or shopping areas which we didn't visit on our own without a car, mainly because we didn't want to be carrying potentially heavy bags all the way back.
Public transit was not the best, but since we didn't have a schedule to keep (holiday) it wasn't really an issue. I could definatley see it being a problem for commuters each day.
It's good to see that London is trying to improve and build less car-centric infrastructure. It'll be interesting to visit my friends again next year, to see what has changed.
I like Jason's channel. He brings EXCELLENT points I never even thought about, but he needs to leave politics aside. He tends to constantly associate cars with conservatives and promote democrat policies based on urbanism.
I don't know what Jason expects, he's displeased with his home city for being North American?
the idea of turning suburban malls into transit hubs for trains and busses is actually a fascinating idea
I am a fake Londoner as well and when I first moved here I used to ride my bike all the time. After being hit by a car on 4 different occasions within a year and having my bike stolen twice I decided I won't do it anymore. Furthermore, I lived downtown and worked by Fanshawe college and because of the shitty public transit infrastructure I would walk to work an hour and 15 minutes a day to and from work. I now have a car and my daughters school is a 15 minute walk from my house but it's terrible, unsafe and loud so we just drive most of the time. So recently I tried to take up biking again and Jesus Christ that's a full and absolute no for me.
Also I used to live in the apartment building you showed with the super parking lot and we used to drive across the street to see a movie cause it was safer and more convenient
Compared to other North American cities this isn't any worse (and in fact many Canadian cities show changes in the right direction), but compared to the Netherlands or anywhere around? That's another universe.
One if not the most "car-infested shithole" in Germany is probably Duisburg. 1 Meter wide bike lanes with the quality of mountainbike trails and cars parked on it, beside sidewalks with cars parked on it and crappy roads with… you guess it: Also cars parked on it. Still 26% of all trips in this city are done by walking or biking, while cars make 58%.
And while you still have hope for that "seismic shift in public opinion", Jason has moved to a place, where this shift has happened 50 years ago.
I think it's really important to take a more nuanced look into these type of car-oriented towns and cities across NA. I'm really glad you made this video. Blanket statements like "all North American suburbs are bad" are unhelpful because they don't take into account the local context and the interventions that are needed to make them better. It makes people pessimistic and unnecessarily disappointed.
Fake London, like most Canadian cities and suburbs, are very different from their American counterparts and that's important to acknowledge. Canadian suburbs are orders of magnitude denser than most American suburbs due to urban growth boundaries (Californian suburbs are similar). Exurbs are also mostly absent in Canada. Average transit usage per capita is usually 3x higher north of the border for any given city of a comparable population size. London Transit may suck but it would be practically nonexistent if it existed south of the border.
Examples of unfortunate urbanism exists practically everywhere in NA, but it exists on a scale from unlivable to not great, not terrible. That's important to talk about.
When you need to regularly cross 6 lane stroads without even a pedestrian crossing at your disposal, your city is not walkable. It's like saying a freeway is walkable, just because you are physically able to put one foot in front of the other.
Thank you, antihero Jason.
This has been quite informative.
Alot of fair points, but NJB's video still seems very much warranted to me.
73.5% car trips alone is abysmal and completely unacceptable even if it's slowly improving… only unless you compare it to the average North American city, which should never serve as a baseline but as an example of what to avoid. And at that, I think his video succeeds.
how do you go from 1 neighborhood to another on a bike?
this is the crux of the issue: if you're stuck in your neighborhood when you don't have a car, then the city is car centric…
I don't care that this city is "good on the american standard". It as if you told me that having AIDS is a good health situation, within terminal diseases. It's still bad.
This is a great counter point, thanks for the context from a local expert! Jason's not wrong overall but taking a closer look can be really worth it to find some bright spots too
Well, my thoughts regarding Jason, the typical holyer-then-thou-save-the-planet Bike Cult contributor trashing his home city in favour of Bike-friendly cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen. Seems to ignore some hard facts such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen areas being 219 Km2 and 180 Km2 relative to London's 410Km2. He also ignores the climate where London experiences actual winters with temperatures frequently below -10 and where the winter description includes the words "snow belt'. London receives frequent and significant snow storms. Not very conducive to bike riding. Even the summers present several weeks of 30C + temperatures rarely seen in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
Jasen also ignores that cars allow spacious homes averaging 223 M2 in London versus 60-75 M2 in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. And let's not even consider the expanse of front and back yards relative to the window flower boxes that are supposed to pass as gardens.
But the Bike Cult has been very successful in lobbying the city council to spend 10's of millions of dollars for bike lanes on major thoroughfares such as Fanshawe, Wonderland and Hyde Park. I drive these almost every day and I may see 3 or 4 bikes a month! Meanwhile, 2,000 people are homeless.
I know, I know, bikes will save the planet as would everyone in Mao Suits but few Canadian cities are suitable to become Amsterdams!
just look at it on google maps it looks surprisingly quite nice
Another fake London resident here. Yes, it is pretty bad… But more than anything it's just a generic nothing of a city. I've always said if you put "North American City" into a generative AI tool it would spit out London Ontario. Nothing unique, no redeeming qualities… Just a boring, crap, North American city.
The "Not Not Just Bikes" intro with the horn was so funny
Oh I thought this video was about London, England, but this video seems good either way
I was never under the impression it was one of the worst, my takeaway was this was the standard and therefore bad.
I pressed automatically, thinking it’s NJB, based on thumbnail style, thinking “weird, missed this one”. I was open to see Jason being challenged, did not expect to basically confirm the same things with more data, well presented nonetheless(great job on that one).
11:49 I tried imagining myself at the end there, walking there and it literally gave me anxiety
London is the home of an over load of partying students, we don’t want them, staying here after they graduate. There are to many cars for the roads there are, not enough housing, not enough jobs, not enough schools. So students don’t stay here, there are more dental offices, and lawyer offices than Tim hortons? Students go back to your home towns, or areas. And people that are thinking of moving here, don’t move here.
i lived in fake london while attending western, it does suck ther, its old and dirty, buss service sux, junkies everywhere, smelly bad drinking water, a dirty river that smells, the wealth of the area id def with the farmers outside the city. i would never recommend anyone to move there esp when the GTA is so near.