In this new series, we will be chatting with urbanist content creators from across the globe about their craft. First, we have Patrick from the video channel Oh The Urbanity!
Chapters
- 00:00 | Intro
- 01:00 | How did you get into this?
- 02:49 | Snow clearance
- 04:33 | How has your approach to the videos changed?
- 15:14 | Topics that don’t work on video
- 17:05 | Time budget for filming
- 20:22 | Balancing topics that are personally interesting with channel growth
- 27:16 | Dealing with negative comments
- 30:10 | The Parklet
- 31:00 | Covering general topics vs specific projects
- 36:54 | Should we all move away from North America?
- 44:19 | Advice for new video creators
- 48:56 | Peertube
- 51:07 | Shoutouts to other video creators
- 51:53 | Outro
Links
- Oh The Urbanity! On YouTube and PeerTube
- Kyno
- Yet Another Urbanist
- RMTransit
- Paige Saunders on YouTube and PeerTube
- Shifter on YouTube and PeerTube
- Alex Davis
- Nimesh in Los Angeles
Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.
This episode was produced by Parker Seaman aka Strongthany, and was edited and transcribed by Ian R Buck. Many thanks to Patrick Murphy for coming on the show! We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
Transcript
[00:00:02] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful uptown Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R. Buck. Today we bring you the first episode in a series from producer Parker Seaman, presenting conversations with urbanist content creators from across the globe. Let’s chat “for fun and for profit” with Patrick from Oh the Urbanity.
[00:00:33] Parker: Hey Patrick, thanks for making time to talk with us today.
[00:00:36] Patrick: Happy to be here. I have a channel called Oh the Urbanity which talks about urban cycling, housing, density, stuff like that, based in Montreal, Quebec, the second largest city in Canada, and I like to use Montreal, among other things, I like to use Montreal as an example for urban improvements on the cycling and pedestrian side for a North American audience.
[00:01:00] Parker: Cool. Tell us a bit more about why did you start making these videos? What got you into this?
[00:01:06] Patrick: Moving to Montreal just before the pandemic, and then the pandemic happened, and then basically having some time on my hands, my partner and I started making these videos. At the very beginning it was about bike trips around Montreal and then expanding into talking about the bike infrastructure, the housing, because Montreal is kind of unique in a North American context for all of the walk-up apartments, the missing middle housing, and basically at the time seeing different YouTube channels talking about urbanism in Japan, in Denmark, in the Netherlands, all cool places, but I thought it was useful to also have a North American example that feels often more relevant to people. Cycling here is not as impressive as it is in Copenhagen, but it’s pretty decent and it feels, if you’re from Boston or Chicago or wherever else, it feels much more like, “oh yeah, I could just copy that to my streets.” And that’s one side of the channel. I also talk a lot about housing policy, housing supply, more density, but on the cycling side, it’s that.
[00:02:16] Ian: I love that you’re presenting a city that you’re hoping has less of a, “well, they do it there, we can’t do it here,” kind of vibe, where I have heard people in New York City saying things about, “well, that’s Minneapolis, we can’t do that here in New York City.” And I’m like, “wait, that’s what people in Minneapolis say about New York, what are we doing here?”
[00:02:39] Patrick: It very much is a reflexive, people will just look for any example. They’re like, “well, that city is bigger than mine. We can’t do that.” “Well, that city is smaller than mine. We can’t do that.”
[00:02:49] Parker: “That city gets more snow than mine.”
[00:02:51] Patrick: Yes. And that’s a very useful thing because living in Montreal, which is the coldest and snowiest, across cold and snow, the most wintery large metro area in North America, I do have the credibility that, yes, winters here are very real. For comparison to Minneapolis, the temperatures are similar, but we get 50% to maybe twice the snow.
[00:03:22] Ian: Yeah, seeing some of your footage of snow clearance happening in the bike lanes is, I am very impressed by the logistics of all of that.
[00:03:31] Patrick: This city is very good at handling snow. The snow blower, the big machines that gobble up snow and put them into trucks, that was invented here, I think, in around 1910, 1920, something like that. Most cities in the US, lots of cities in Canada, don’t plow their sidewalks. I believe Minneapolis is included there, except for a pilot project. You guys can fill in the details on that.
[00:04:00] Ian: It’s very small.
[00:04:02] Patrick: But yeah, Montreal plows the sidewalks and it’s great. The density helps as well. Being a denser city, the kilometer length of sidewalks per person is smaller, so it’s easier to cover faster. But many cities in Canada also don’t plow their sidewalks, like Calgary and Edmonton. And I don’t know that I could ever live in a city that doesn’t plow the sidewalks, especially with the stroller recently.
[00:04:33] Ian: Right, yeah. So that kind of leads me to our next question. How has your channel changed from the start to where it is now? Has your focus changed at all? Has your approach to how you make videos changed?
[00:04:46] Patrick: Yeah, definitely there’s a slow process of going from talking just about Montreal to covering other cities as well. Obviously, Montreal is my home base. It’s easiest to get footage here. I know it the best, so I can talk about it most easily. But trying to cover more and more places, like I did a video not too long ago about the rates of car-free households in different cities across Canada, the US, Australia, the UK, Ireland, trying to cover more places because it’s fun and because you reach a bigger audience like that. Also, it’s definitely true that speaking on recording my voice has been something that I’ve been working on being more natural at over the course of the channel. Just like small changes here and there, different setup, like using different microphone setups, stuff like that, tweaking and just trying basically, at the very beginning, I personally had the experience of freaking out about so many things. You can get thumbnails perfect, try to get the audio perfect. And one of the things that I personally learned was that that’s a form of procrastination and to just make videos and try to make each one a little bit better in some way. And then over time, you’re going to end up doing things differently, improving. Another thing, I guess, to mention is that part of the strategy to make speaking more natural was to stop writing my scripts in a very paragraph way, try to write it in a more conversational way. So I have an academic background, so I tend towards long paragraphs and stuff like that and just trying to write it in a way that makes it easier, more conversational to say has helped.
[00:06:52] Ian: But they’re still fully scripted. You’re not going all the way down to bullet points or kind of thing.
[00:06:57] Patrick: No, no. Well, occasionally there’s somewhat often I’ll change something while recording it, but it’s very hard to do this stuff without being scripted, the kind of videos that I do. And I’ve always tried to have, since the very beginning, I don’t want to waste people’s time. I want to have it be relatively information dense. And if you’re- not that, you know, on a podcast like this, you know, it’s conversational, it’s chatting, it’s not super cut up necessarily. And that’s fine. It’s like a thing you might watch or listen to rather when you’re on the bus or something. But for the videos that I want to do, I want to have it be more compact, be more information dense. And to do that, I do need to plan beforehand things through the script and everything.
[00:07:50] Ian: There’s a reason that they call them video essays, right?
[00:07:54] Patrick: Yeah, yeah, basically.
[00:07:55] Parker: You say that with that intention now, you’re wanting it to be something that people are watching and paying attention to rather than something that plays in the background.
[00:08:03] Patrick: Yeah, ideally. Although, you know, I understand that people often often watch this sort of things in the background. But if a video is, you know, ten minutes long, it’s just not going to be as, you know, if you’re going for a walk, you want to put on something that’s going to last for a half hour or an hour or whatever, instead of, you know, switching between YouTube videos that are ten minutes long. So, yeah, I think making the videos be reasonably concise, you know, sometimes they’re longer just because there’s a lot of stuff I want to cover, but making them be on the shorter end naturally helps it be something that, you know, you do watch and pay attention to. Also, because, you know, often have graphics and stuff like that, which, you know, on a podcast, you don’t have to. You don’t usually have to, you know, see any of the visuals. It’s just a different different type of of medium.
[00:08:56] Ian: Yeah. Speaking of visuals, one of the hallmarks of most of your videos throughout history has been like, OK, it’s your voice talking a lot of footage, some graphics and stuff. We never, ever see your face. Right. And like I remember last summer when myself and a group of friends came and visited Montreal and you were going to like give us a little tour. And we were like, “we have no idea how we’re going to recognize Patrick.” And then I feel like it was like a month ago, you published a video where suddenly I was like, “whoa, wait, there he is in front of his microphone on a black backdrop.” Like that was that’s a difference.
[00:09:36] Patrick: It is. Yeah, it was never planned at the beginning. Oh, I’m trying to hide my face or anything. It was partly because making the videos with my voicing and my partner’s voicing as well, like it doesn’t really make sense to, you know, switch between two faces like that. Like, I’m sure you can make it work somehow, but it’s not it’s not as natural in that context. Also, I didn’t really know how, you know, starting this channel. I didn’t have any video experience. I was learning things as as I went. So knowing how to record, you know, the A-roll inside of my of of my face, I just didn’t have just didn’t know how to do that, honestly, which is part of it. So I, you know, I got this set up with the the sound blanket and figured out. I’m using a different camera now from from what I usually use. But yeah, I just figured it out. I have a light up there as well. Yeah. The reason I changed that it was a few reasons, partly it offers more flexibility for different topics. So some topics, it’s just hard to find footage that really fits, especially more abstract topics related to housing policy. Like if I’m talking about, you know, here’s this protected bike intersection. It’s easy. All the footage is the intersection and maybe other intersections in other countries, other cities. But in some more abstract topics, it’s just like hard to find footage. And so that was that was one of the one of the reasons. Also, another one is weirded me out. Honestly, ever since ChatGPT came out, I would get people confidently saying that I’m an AI voice. It’s so weird. It’s like it just turns people they they they see it everywhere, I guess. And they were just like, it wouldn’t even be like, “is this an AI voice?” You’d be like, “drop the AI voice, dude.” And it was it was just so weird. I don’t even know what the mindset of somebody who says such a weird thing is.
[00:11:44] Parker: I had a professor this semester before last, who was a similar sort of mindset of those people in your comments. If I turned in a paper with weird formatting or weird spacing in my citations or anything like that, he would give me an automatic zero on the paper. I’d have to meet with him or to like contest it and basically just be like, “no, that’s not I’m not using AI. I’m just like this.”
[00:12:10] Patrick: Yeah, gosh, I don’t even know what it would be like to go to university during the AI period. That must be wild.
[00:12:18] Parker: It’s interesting. I’ll tell you that much. As your channel has grown and changed from that starting point, like has the vision for what you want it to be or the kind of things you talk about changed much or like your angle for what you feel like important to bring up to people?
[00:12:36] Patrick: It’s broadly similar in terms of, you know, a few key points of using Montreal as an example on cycling infrastructure, stressing the importance of housing supply. You know, yes, in my backyard approach to housing. One change, I guess, has been at the very beginning. I was quite fascinated by Montreal’s missing middle housing and the missing middle medium density stuff was a big angle. And I still think that’s very cool. The fact that the baseline housing, at least in the central city, is a two or three story walk of apartment. I like that. That’s awesome. I’ve become more frustrated with the fact that many urbanist leaning people are kind of NIMBYs about, you know, “that’s the universal ideal type of housing and tall buildings are bad.” That’s annoyed me quite a bit, especially when you talk about the context. Like so like missing middle housing is like an excellent way to add, you know, housing supply broadly across the city, especially in suburbs. You can add a bunch of housing that way. But if we’re talking about, you know, high demand areas like near downtown, near transit stations, I don’t think you can be precious, too precious about the height. And if you are, then it has the effect of basically excluding people from the city who want to live near transit, because my perspective is I think it’s awesome that I live in this place where, you know, I can walk by, I can take transit. The percentage of neighborhoods across the continent that are like that is not that high. You know, obviously, New York is great. You know, Minneapolis has lots of areas with great bike infrastructure and the LRT and stuff, but like it’s not the average place by any means. And having, you know, more housing to allow more people to live in a context like that is very important, more important, in my opinion, than some people’s views about the aesthetics or that would look out of place and stuff like that. So that’s the maybe the biggest area I can think of where I’ve gotten kind of frustrated and wanted and, you know, change the focus of the channel somewhat. So, you know, many videos talking about high rises are good. They’re, you know, like if the demand is there for them, then they’re good. And the demand is usually there for them near jobs, near transit. And it’s been, you know, a bit of a challenge trying to balance those two sides, because I do genuinely like the medium density housing as well.
[00:15:14] Ian: Are there any topics that you would really like to be able to discuss, but the video medium just isn’t right for it?
[00:15:20] Patrick: That’s been partly fixed recently with using my face more because I’m more able to talk about some of the more abstract things that I don’t have footage for exactly. Like, I guess maybe the video on free fares recently is probably an example like that, because, yeah, I can have, you know, a whole video of just like footage of fair machines while I talk about fares or maybe just footage of buses and trains. And that’s fine. Like, you know, it’s doable, but it’s, you know, it’s maybe a little repetitive, a little more difficult. And if for half of it, it’s me talking and then, you know, 40 percent of it is, you know, shots of trains and buses and stuff and fair machines and then 10 percent charts and data and stuff, then I think that’s a better balance. I guess one of the things that kind of goes back to one of the principles I’ve had since the beginning of the channel, which is trying to balance different visual perspectives. So one of the tools that I like the most for doing these videos is the is a stabilized gimbal camera like the DJI pocket line. They keep the camera stabilized, pointing straight. Allows me to take stabilized shots while walking and cycling. And I like to combine those, I use those, use some drone shots to get perspectives of neighborhoods from above and then use, you know, more conventional mirrorless camera, you know, zoomed in to get different types of visual perspectives on things like bike infrastructure, like housing, and also sometimes Google Earth in there as well. And then I guess the adding in my face is just like another type of visual variety along those lines.
[00:17:05] Ian: How much time do you spend? Just like, all right, I’m going to set up a tripod and, you know, have this camera pointed at this particular, you know, bike lane for a little while. Like, like, yeah, what’s what’s your time commitment for like getting B-roll footage?
[00:17:20] Patrick: It depends a lot. So sometimes I can just rely entirely on my catalog. I have, I don’t know, five terabytes, six terabytes, something like that.
[00:17:30] Ian: Is that all stuff that you took? That’s none of that’s like stock footage?
[00:17:34] Patrick: No, I have very. I use very little stock footage. I use Google Earth, more than stock footage. I have recently been collecting some footage from other people. I put out a call for footage from different places, which I’m still trying to organize. And recently, you know, again, some friends like Reece Martin from RM Transit. He gave me a bunch of the footage that he took in cities like London, Berlin, stuff like that. But the vast majority of the footage is just mine taken. I have, I don’t know, 50 to 60 thousand clips, I think. I haven’t looked recently.
[00:18:13] Ian: You’ve got to have some kind of like cataloging software. Yeah, there’s a program I use called “Ki-no” or “Kee-no.” I’m not sure how it’s pronounced, K-Y-N-O, which allows me to tag it with, you know, the city, of course, the location, if it’s relevant, like the street and then, you know, bike lanes, cyclists, winter cycling, stuff like that. Oh, yeah, sorry. The other thing. So you asked, how long does it take to film? And it is. So there are those cases where I can rely almost entirely on my catalog. There are, you know, if I’m doing certain projects like, you know, here are a few transit oriented developments around Montreal or something that can be a few days of being out there filming like almost all day, depending on like, you know, how much I need to get. But with the with relying on my face more, I don’t have to get quite as much footage. So it’s a little less. It’s a little less extreme. Also, in terms of using my face, it’s useful for many of those videos about a particular place or feature, because I kind of think you have it feels like there’s a bit more presence if you’re there talking about it. Not that there’s a right or wrong approach to it, to be in it or not. But there are some advantages to, you know, being there and say, like, you know, pointing out, you know, this is a bike lane. This is a good feature. This is a bad feature.
[00:19:43] Ian: Right, right. And the audience, like even if they’re not consciously reacting to this, I feel like people have a very different reaction to like, you know, a Tom Scott video where he’s literally starting the episode with “I’m at so and so” right versus like a Wendover Productions where it’s like, OK, you you definitely had a script writer and then you recorded this in your studio and nobody on your team actually like needed to visit the location that you’re talking about.
[00:20:13] Patrick: Yes. And that’s why, you know, I don’t like dislike Wendover or anything. But I like Tom Scott more. And the type of videos that that he does.
[00:20:22] Parker: So taking this time to go to those locations and get that footage and just generally, you know, talking about all the sort of stuff that your channel does is it’s a lot of time spent talking and working on something that you’re really passionate on. But it’s also and it’s been something that’s been able to make your channel grow quite quite a lot. So how do you personally balance that? Talking about something that you’re passionate about and also making a living off of it and maintaining the channel and everything else that you have in your life. Like, how do you best maintain those different poles without letting them like burn you out?
[00:21:04] Patrick: So I have not really done that much optimization for growth on YouTube. I could probably be, you know, looking up what are the very best topics to cover, stuff like that. I mostly just talk about what I’m interested in. I definitely have a push towards covering more places that that’s kind of done under the goal of growth. And I wouldn’t maybe normally do that naturally so much. But I also think it’s a good thing to do in general. Like, I don’t want to talk about a place just for the sake of having a video. That’s one frustrating thing. Many people are like, “you should do a video on this. You should do a video on that.” And I think like, oh, you know, I’ll do a video of I think it can be a good video or an interesting video or I’ll find it, I’ll find it fun rather than, you know, just to have a video about a place because, you know, often, you know, there’s a better person to do that video. Some people say, I go, why don’t you do videos about South America? It’s like, well, because I’ve never been there. You know, it’s not impossible to do a video about a place that I’ve never been. But it’s it’s harder.
[00:22:14] Parker: There’d be a level of detachment from like I don’t. It’s more than just using the the transit system or using the bike lanes. It’s like what it actually how it integrates with the rest of the city and the culture and everything there.
[00:22:29] Patrick: And some some things are easier, like, you know, I talk about density a lot. And that’s easier because you can use…
[00:22:34] Ian: That’s literally a number.
[00:22:36] Patrick: Yeah, exactly. And so did a video about Spain being the densest country in Europe. And I have been to Spain, but it was a while ago. And, you know, it wasn’t really based on any of my personal experiences there. It was based on the the numbers and some of the research I did. So I was fine with that. But I couldn’t really do a video about how what it’s like to bike in Spain because I haven’t done that. And so I think being able to do, for the most part, videos that I just I’m interested in myself, topics that I’m interested in, allows me to, you know, not get burnt out as much as somebody might if they really are trying to just like optimize for like not to knock on Wendover or whatever. But I’m sure they pay a lot of attention to what the what topics are trending and stuff like that. And that can make it feel like a grind in terms of optimizing for growth and stuff. I kind of make a distinction between the video and the title or the thumbnail. I will definitely do, because I learned early on that this stuff actually does help, like a more dramatic title or thumbnail, which I don’t love doing. But if it allows me to make basically the same video that I would like to make just with like a kind of a little more exaggerated title or thumbnail, it’s fine. But that’s the you know, it’s a balance between between optimizing for growth and being happy with what you’re doing. But in terms of having done this for a while, I still find myself quite passionate about the about the topics interested in learning more of a long list of videos that I would like have no shortage of topics to cover in the future. You know, it’s always a question of like you can have a topic, but do people want to watch that video? That’s that’s, you know, never guaranteed. You know, in terms of being burnt out. Well, there are some challenges with the relatively high workload with having a baby. But like in terms of being, you know, I’m still very much passionate about about the field that hasn’t really weighed or anything.
[00:24:38] Parker: It’s it’s really interesting hearing you talk about like designing the videos to strike that balance really relevantly because I like yesterday watched a video where another YouTuber, Dan Olson, got invited to Mr. Beast’s headquarters, and he didn’t know why, because he’s a YouTube essayist who like talked about how weird the GameStop bubble was and other sort of things. And one of the things he talks about is how Mr. Beast’s channel will start the idea for a video by the thumbnail creation. And if the thumbnail is good enough, then they will make a video based on that.
[00:25:21] Patrick: That is very much, you know, that that is a quote unquote good idea from the perspective of succeeding on YouTube. And that is not how I have really ever done it.
[00:25:34] Parker: Right, because it seems like there’s a difference between their channels. Intent is, how can I get to be as large as we can, as fast as we can? Versus, I just think urbanism buses and bikes and trains are just neat. And I’ll talk about that. And I guess an emergent part of this is the platform I upload this on has an algorithm that likes it when a thumbnail looks like a specific thing. I guess I can cater to that a little bit, but I’m still going to talk about the thing I care about.
[00:26:02] Patrick: Right. Everybody makes the like it’s a spectrum and everybody puts themselves somewhere in the spectrum. And I don’t really judge people who go more towards the, you know, the end of selling out. I just personally maybe watch them less. But if you know, yeah, if they want to optimize for that more, that’s I they’re all personal decisions, honestly. And, you know, some people might be more purists and judge me for having, you know, some annoying titles or whatever. And I just it really is a personal thing. You have to find what works for you. It’s such a cliche. Everybody says it, but it really is true. And, yeah, I guess on that, one of the… for people who are considering getting into stuff like this, one of the things that is really striking is, you know, negative comments. You will get so many negative comments, especially if you have if you grow in views and if you talk about some controversial things like, you know, bike lanes are controversial in most cities. And you really just have to learn to tune it out and treat it as noise. It’s just part of the job, part of the gig.
[00:27:16] Parker: And I imagine it’s also a difficult thing, too, on the metric of you can’t like completely ignore negative comments, because sometimes they’re making valid criticisms and decent points. But there’s also a large amount of them that are just inane stuff that isn’t worth giving a second thought to. But then you end up getting stuck in it sometimes. Because how do I sort like what is legitimate? What’s not out at times?
[00:27:40] Patrick: Yeah. And if people are it is very much it’s a challenge because you just get like so many. And, you know, I’m a medium sized YouTube channel. I don’t have it the worst by any means. But I understand how big channels can go kind of crazy with this stuff. You get these mean, rude, very pointed comments about, you know, whatever. Like, obviously, you’re you’re, you know, you’re too left wing. You’re too right wing. You look stupid. You’re whatever. Like, I understand how it’s easy to put up a wall and, you know, tune out all criticism. And that’s why I think if you have some smart, thoughtful criticism to give, you are much more likely to reach them. If you put concentrated effort towards, you know, making it seem, you know, not non combative, like, you know, start with, you know, “this was a good point. But I think this,” or like, “have you considered this,” being like it seems annoying from the perspective of somebody who’s trying to, you know, make a correction on the Internet that you should have to do that. It’s like, “well, shouldn’t the facts just speak for themselves?” And maybe they should. But if you want them to pay attention to your comment among all of the others that they’re getting, you have to make it seem like make it clear that this is a good faith attempt at, you know, coming to the truth, because like, honestly, it’s just so easy to tune out stuff like that, because like so many, so many comments that I get, I can respond to with just like, “oh, you should watch till the end of the video.” And when you get so many like that, it is easy to tune out anything critical. And, you know, I try I have I have I have strategies for how to deal with this stuff. I personally I try to not read comments at the very beginning or I don’t want to watch comments roll in. I wait a day or two and then I read a bunch. And then it’s easier to look at them objectively like that. I can see, OK, you know, “this person is being an a-hole. This person is crazy. This person made a good point. Fair enough.” It’s easier to do that when you just go through a bunch of them at once than if you are like sitting there refreshing on a new video.
[00:30:10] Ian: Before we continue with the episode, let’s take a quick break in the parklet. Streets.mn is having a springtime fundraising drive. As an all volunteer nonprofit organization, sustaining donors are what keeps Streets.mn running and supports our mission to foster positive connections and inclusive conversations about better places in Minnesota. As a small token of our appreciation this month, all new sustaining donors will receive their choice of a Streets.mn bike spoke card or a sticker that can be used to add some flair to your Go-to transit card or whatever else you want to use it on. Help support our mission with a sustaining donation today by going to [https://streets.mn/donate].
[00:31:00] Ian: Speaking of controversies, what you said earlier about, like that you try to to not be pushed into, like you should make a video about such and such a place because chances are there’s somebody who could do a better job of talking about that place. It reminded me of a couple of years ago, there was a guy who made a video who was calling out urbanist content creators in general with the criticism of like, “none of you ever talk about actual concrete, like, you know, policies or like concrete, like projects that we should be advocating for.” And and I remember watching that video and going like, “hey, dude, we’re here. You just don’t know about us because we’re making content that is so specific to like the place that we are. Like, you don’t live in Minnesota. You’re not interested in watching a video about Minnesota.”
[00:31:57] Patrick: Absolutely. And and like, you know, it’s it’s not happening. Like a lot of the local stuff is not happening on YouTube. It’s happening on Discord. It’s happening on blogs. It’s happening on Facebook. And it’s happening in real life. There’s a pro-housing group in in Montreal that had their annual meeting recently. We missed it because of travel. But like, yeah, YouTube is you could do some of this on YouTube. But like, it’s not the most natural place for a lot of this local organizing. And like, you know, there are there are pro-housing groups in, you know, almost every city now. There are Strong Towns, chapters, and those are the people. But like, I think he was talking about, I don’t know, like Colorado Springs or something like a smaller, a smaller city. And I do agree that it is important that people don’t just get involved in this space to be angry or watch videos. I think people should at the very least vote in their elections for whoever is the, you know, the more urbanist leaning candidate or whatever, considering other priorities as well. But get it get involved in local groups. You know, a lot of the a lot of involvement in local politics is, you know, this is kind of like a ladder of difficulty. There’s, you know, voting at the is the easiest. And then, you know, often there will be, let’s say, a bike lane project or a complete streets project that is up for public consultation. You can submit written feedback. And like you hear all about all this stuff from your local groups. And I can’t provide that for like I can provide it for a few cities that I that I know better and that I follow. Like I did something kind of like that for Edmonton. But like I just like I can’t do that for Colorado Springs or whatever. It’s like the the I… what he wanted a focus on was fair, but expecting that from YouTube was not fair. And I don’t know about Colorado Springs, but like, you know, like you said, these groups already exist for the most part in a lot of cities and they’re already doing it. You just need to follow them to get involved.
[00:34:11] Ian: Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes when I see, you know, people like City Nerd making a video about like Minneapolis or whatever. And it’s and, you know, I simultaneously have a reaction of like, man, I wish that he had like reached out to somebody, you know, because we have a decent number of content creators here who could have collaborated on something like that. But that’s that is like a very high effort thing for, you know, at the very least, it’s like, oh, could you like direct people to some of the local advocacy organizations in the place that you just talked about?
[00:34:44] Patrick: Yeah, that’s fair.
[00:34:44] Ian: That’s a little bit of research to do, but like, yeah. Yeah.
[00:34:48] Patrick: Yeah. So it’s difficult because I I totally get where you’re coming from. Well, certainly in terms of directing people towards advocacy groups, in terms of reaching out to people. The problem is that it depends on the logistics of the trip.
[00:35:04] Ian: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
[00:35:05] Patrick: For example, we we were in Toronto recently because of my partner, a partner, my partner had a work thing, which she was doing for two of those days. So I had one day to film stuff. And I used to live in Toronto. I know it. So I don’t like nobody needs to introduce me to Toronto or anything. But if that was a a new city I’d never been to, like, like, you know, Winnipeg or Milwaukee or whatever, like it might be the case that, you know, yes, I would like to spend more time here and talk to more people, but also within the constraints that I had, I did my best. And actually, this was, yeah, like with a few years ago, I went to Miami because winter is very cold. And and like we it would have been nice to stay longer to to talk to more local talk to local groups and stuff. But like it’s like in that case, it was just like our own money paying for the trip. So we just didn’t have…
[00:36:02] Ian: Right. Right. You can’t make your entire job be like, OK, we’re going to like hang out with this local group for the entire week. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:36:10] Patrick: It’s definitely good to do if you can. So, for example, went to Victoria, British Columbia, a very good small cycling city in the fall and interviewed different people, including from the city. And like it is a good thing to do if you can make it work. But it was also like honestly quite stressful trying to balance that with visiting the city for our own leisure purposes, and especially with having a baby and not wanting to, you know, leave the baby to my partner for the whole time, like wanting to, you know, balance workloads. And yeah, it’s it’s it’s good to visit places and and and it’s good to get that local knowledge when possible. But sometimes with the logistics of the trip, it’s difficult.
[00:36:54] Ian: The other controversy that we have on our list is when when the Not Just Bikes guy said, “everybody in North America should just move away.” Like that was a lot of people got up in arms about that. What was your take on on that whole situation?
[00:37:13] Patrick: Well, first of all, I think there’s I have nothing against people who moved to other places like I moved. I didn’t grow up in Montreal. I grew up in another part of Canada and I moved here. And it’s perfectly fine. I, you know, when I was in high school, I thought I was going to move to Sweden for university. It didn’t end up happening. But there’s nothing wrong with doing that. My problem is just that that’s not why the vast majority of people watch these videos. Like, it’s just not. And the way he was describing it, like, you know, “my channel has always been about trying to get people to move to the Netherlands.” It’s like, OK, how many videos have you done on the visa process on learning Dutch, stuff like that? And, you know, he’s under no obligation to cover any of those topics. But if he doesn’t, he should understand, like, why people are watching his videos. Although I do understand to some extent how, you know, it can be frustrating for him to, you know, he moved to a place he likes better. Totally fair. And then, like people from other places, you know, kind of want him to be their savior. And it’s like, you know, kind of like when I get, you know, comments about like places, you know, I’ve never been or don’t know much about. Like, you know, I am not going to be the person who saves Colorado Springs. So, yeah, I understand kind of some of the frustrations that he that Not Just Bikes has about this stuff. But like, yeah, I think if you’re going to move somewhere, you should recognize that that is a relatively rare thing to do. Like, I have never looked into it, but like I can’t just like move to Europe right now. Like, I don’t have legal status there. And, you know, like there are certain contexts where it is more practical. Like, you know, if you’re a university student, it’s generally more easy to get a visa to other country that way. But like, it’s a relatively rare thing to do. Most people are not watching our videos because of that. And I don’t think you should move to a place and then kind of like be so discouraging to the other people who didn’t move for because of family, friends, money, whatever preference. And then, you know, like there are people who didn’t move that are doing this activism work in so many cities and basically every city. Some cities are moving faster than others, but like don’t denigrate them, I guess. I guess the way I think about it, like it is true that cities in North America are never going to be exactly like the Netherlands. But that doesn’t mean that serious improvements can’t happen. And, you know, maybe things are moving faster in Minneapolis than in Colorado Springs or whatever. I think also people should consider before trying to do some big move to another country, because that comes with so many other challenges, not just visas, but also language and finding a job and that stuff. People should consider moving to a more walkable neighborhood within the city they currently live in, or at least, you know, another city in their country first. Like we visited Chicago a few years ago and Chicago was great. It’s like, you know, not as bike friendly as the Netherlands, but I guess it’s a pretty cool place. And, you know, moving to Chicago for Americans or Toronto or Montreal for Canadians, like those are things that, see if you can get 80 percent of the lifestyle improvements for 20 percent of the effort. And if you can’t, then, you know, again, like I said, nothing wrong with moving to another country. It’s just relatively rare and not why people watch these videos.
[00:40:51] Parker: I think another way to look at it, too, along a similar sort of line is I forget who made a video about it or talked about it, but let’s talk about their frustration about how who’s the who’s the chef guy that yells at people?
[00:41:07] Ian: Gordon Ramsay.
[00:41:08] Parker: Yeah. How Gordon Ramsay has a video where he talks about how to make a steak. And the way that he frames the video is this is the correct way to make a steak. This is the way you have to do it. And like, sure, that is _a_ way to make a steak or to make food. But it doesn’t have to be _the one_ correct way. So like likewise, like, yeah, if you move out to the Netherlands, if you move out to Amsterdam, you’re going to go to the cream of the crop for for bike, bikeable cities. But that doesn’t have to be the one way to be able to get into a place that has these other sort of aspects that you want.
[00:41:44] Patrick: Yeah. And it’s the way I think about it is, again, be like, see if you can get 80 percent of the lifestyle benefit for 20 percent of the effort-
[00:41:54] Ian: And for like 20 percent of the cost. Right? Like if everybody in the world took his advice and everybody moved to the Netherlands, then like, you know, housing prices, it just wouldn’t work. Right. Whereas, you know, like we have a few places in North America that are extremely bikeable. And, you know, they are Mackinac Island, you know, where it’s like, OK, everything is super expensive there because it’s a tiny place and you can’t fit everybody there. So like if we’re not trying to build better stuff where people are, then we’re not going to have good outcomes.
[00:42:31] Parker: Ian, are you saying the city is full?
[00:42:34] Patrick: That’s a very, very California, very California idea. And also, I think people often don’t realize just how new a lot of this stuff is. So Montreal was quite early in building bike lanes, starting in the 80s for North American standards. But like the really the big push came since 2010. Toronto and Ottawa both had their first protected bike lane around 2013, I think. So and, you know, there are, you know, lots of things to be frustrated about. Well, in Ontario, they banned bike lanes that take space from cars or they take lanes from cars, which is like mind-numbing. Like it hurts so much.
[00:43:17] Ian: That actually went through.
[00:43:19] Patrick: Yeah, yeah. Oh, no. They also banned speed cameras.
[00:43:25] Ian: Yeah, like province wide? Geez. OK, great.
[00:43:30] Patrick: It’s it’s weird. So this is a Canadian thing where one of the differences between Canada and the U.S. I think is that in Canada, the public transit is less polarized ideologically than in the U.S. I think like Doug Ford, conservative premier of Ontario. He’s building a bunch of transit. He’s not managing it particularly well, but he’s definitely not anti-transit. But he is very anti-pedestrian, anti-bike. Like that’s where the really big political polarization is in Canada. Same with Alberta, the most conservative province arguably. They’re coming up with a passenger rail master plan some point in the next few weeks. But they’re also very much anti-bikes, anti-pedestrians, anti-speed cameras. So it’s weird.
[00:44:19] Parker: Going back to your roots again, a little bit, there’s very little in the way practically to stop somebody from making video content about their specific town or municipality or something like that. So if somebody was interested in that, coming from the perspective of somebody who got started relatively not that long ago, but to learn very, very quickly, do you have any tips, tricks, thoughts, comments on somebody getting started in a sort of similar way?
[00:44:49] Patrick: The thing that I think is quite important is hitting the right balance between positivity and negativity. So there are many on the, let’s say more, you know, academic side, people doing, you know, planning degrees, stuff like that. They don’t want to be controversial. They don’t want to criticize, you know, maybe some municipalities that they want to work for, stuff like that. Understandable. But like if you’re too positive like that and just like, you know, it’s not realistic. It can be boring, stuff like that. The opposite side, if you’re too negative and that’s very much like an online activisty thing, “everything sucks,” then, you know, it gets a lot of views. It’s cathartic and that’s fine. But it’s tiring, I think. So I think people should try to be able to criticize things, be willing to criticize things clearly, strongly, while also trying to find good examples to praise. Try to get the balance between positive and negative. That’s one of the things. Another important principle or trade-off, I guess, there’s no right answer to this, but like the more, you can be more locally focused and have like a big impact in your smaller context, or you can be, try to be more broad talking about things that are relevant everywhere and you have, you know, more dispersed impact with a bigger audience, let’s say. And I think a lot of the opportunities for new creators are with the more local stuff, because, you know, do we need another video talking about how car dependency is bad in general? Like, not necessarily, but a video about how, oh, what was that guy? Yet Another Urbanist, used to live in Reno, Nevada, you know, talking about specific places like that. Like there was, you know, I don’t think anybody else was talking about urbanism in Reno, Nevada. He’s in Seattle now, but like.
[00:46:48] Ian: Another person who just moved to a better place. Look at that.
[00:46:52] Patrick: Yeah, like there’s still so much room for like talking about not some abstract video about how car dependency is bad, but why, you know, the changes that can be made in Milwaukee or, you know, Louisiana, New Orleans, whatever, like different places and.
[00:47:10] Ian: And that’s where, like, you know, that’s where the news is going to happen, right? Like if you want something new to talk about every once in a while, then like pay attention locally, because you can always talk about like, okay, what’s the latest like street reconstruction project? How can we like make this design better? Yada, yada, right?
[00:47:29] Patrick: Right. And you can take particular projects like that and make them, make it more locally focused, like talking about, you can focus on, you know, the campaign, like what politicians to support stuff like that. Or you can, you know, put it in a broader international context and say, like, you know, this is like this other project in Calgary or Salt Lake City or whatever. Like you can, you can take the same topic and present it in this more general audience way or in a more local audience way. And there’s no right answer, except that, yeah, I do think that the more locally focused stuff, you know, it’s kind of like journalists. Like there are tons of people, too many people talking about, well, especially in the U.S. national politics, like there’s no shortage of people in the U.S. talking about national politics, but obviously in Canada as well, because it’s like a big thing that, you know, 40 million people in our case and 340 million people in your case, it’s like a big audience. It’s like, you can be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond, I guess. Like, you know, but if you’re the person talking about, you know, local politics in your city, like you are having a bigger impact. There’s less competition, but yeah, depending on what you’re doing, maybe it makes sense to do YouTube, maybe it makes sense to be a blog or, you know, creating a group. Those are some of the things that I think about.
[00:48:56] Ian: Speaking of YouTube, one of the reasons that I started watching your videos actually was because you published them on PeerTube as well. And it is unusual enough for people to be posting both on YouTube and PeerTube that like, that is just like an automatic, like, “oh, I’m more interested in this person now, knowing that they support this platform that I like,” but I also know that I am very unusual, right? So what went into that decision of also publishing on PeerTube?
[00:49:25] Patrick: That is basically entirely because Paige Saunders, who is another local Montreal YouTuber, he runs a PeerTube hosting site, he’s also like, you know, more generally, Fediverse hosting, like Mastodon, different platforms like that, all on the Fediverse. And he was testing out his hosting platform and said, do you want me to automatically mirror your videos there? I said, sure. I think he’s done it for a few other people, set it up for a few other people as well, maybe Shifter, Tom Babin, and maybe Reece Martin, RM Transit, when he made videos. But yeah, thanks to Paige Saunders.
[00:50:07] Ian: I didn’t realize that Paige was the one who created Canadian Civil.
[00:50:10] Patrick: Yeah, that was the, originally the name of his podcast that he did during the pandemic with people like Uytae Lee of About Here. And more recently, he is turning Canadian Civil into like a bigger platform, like kind of like a creator collective that will involve some collaborations, like I’m working on a video. He has a set up like a Patreon type thing where people can support Canadian Civil itself. And one of the projects that’s going to support is me working on a video with him. So kind of using, he’s very good at video production stuff. I have data stuff and some other skills and making a video that combines some of those skills and will, I will learn stuff from his video production prowess. And yeah, so that’s happening through Canadian Civil.
[00:51:07] Parker: Yeah, speaking of other kind of content creators in this space, people working in this, kind of as we reach the end of this, do you have any urbanists, transit, or other sort of channels or things on the topic that you’d like to give a shout out to that you think people would be worth people checking out?
[00:51:27] Patrick: Yeah, I think there are two channels based in Los Angeles. There’s Alex Davis and Nimesh in Los Angeles that are, they’re both talking about LA. I find LA quite interesting because there are a lot of contrasts there because of the challenges, the ambition and some of the advantages they have.
[00:51:53] Ian: Since I went and visited Montreal and you showed us around and gave us a little tour, you definitely have an open invitation to visit the Twin Cities anytime and we’ll definitely give you, we’ll roll out the welcome mat for you.
[00:52:10] Patrick: I appreciate it. Visiting the US is not totally easy at this point, but I appreciate that. Yeah, it will be very cool to see, to see Minneapolis and St. Paul.
[00:52:23] Ian: Yep. And then to finish this off, our last question for you is, what are you doing to spark joy right now?
[00:52:32] Patrick: We got a bike seat set up for our baby and we went for our first, it was 11 kilometers, so not super long, but first substantial bike ride with them yesterday. Nice.
[00:52:45] Parker: Well, Patrick, again, thank you for making the time to come onto the podcast. It’s been an absolute delight having you here.
[00:52:53] Patrick: Happy to chat about this very interesting work we’re all doing.
[00:52:59] Ian: And dear listener, if you’re feeling inspired by this conversation to make videos about urbanist issues in Minnesota, Streets.mn could be the home for your content. Get in touch, we’re working on making sure that the process is as streamlined as possible. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. The show is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative license. So feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. This episode was produced by Parker Seaman, AKA Strongthany, and was edited and transcribed by me, Ian R. Buck. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn Podcast. So if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [[email protected]]. Find other listeners and discuss this episode on your favorite social media platform using the hashtag #StreetsMNPodcast. Until next time, take care.