It’s amazing — there’s no mention whatever of bicycles or for that matter, any road vehicles in this award-winning video! It’s not like road vehicles are going to disappear entirely even in the most New Urbanist communities. Buses will be even more indispensable if there is less use of private motor vehicles. Use of bicycles and light, efficient motor vehicles ought to increase — and they also can play an important role in mitigating the problems with existing sprawl development — please see this Web page .
And also — Streetcars are heavily featured in this video, but rail lines don’t belong on streets. The routes are inflexible, breakdown of one streetcar stops others, construction and maintenance are expensive, and streetcar tracks are a serious hazard to bicyclists. Bogotá installed a huge bus rapid transit system at 1/5 the cost of a rail system. Buses make more sense in many ways. So does off-street rail.
I don’t like cul de sacs, but are cul-de sacs, as the video claims, a worse threat to our planet than nuclear war? A major nuclear war could be our planet’s greatest disaster since the Jurassic meteorite impact. The claim doesn’t tickle my funnybone, sorry.
And as to style: the video has clever animated titles, but I think that it got its award mostly because the judges support its point of view. Maybe the impersonality and lack of narration give it an impact with some audiences, but it reminds me of PowerPoints in which the images are topic outlines for the speaker rather than pictures to illustrate the speaker’s talk.
Overall impression: a tight little promotional piece but too impersonal for my taste, and not quite on the mark on the issues.
