Cool seeing strongtowns here. Not Just Bikes is a YouTube channel that has helped popularize them recently, and has a lot of other videos about what makes living in the Netherlands so great (i.e. it’s not just bikes, although that’s a big part of it).
I can't find the exact video right now but I remember one where he compared a horrid stroad with a lovely Dutch street. The Dutch version contained two single lane streets, bike lanes, a lightrail line and lovely shade from all the trees. And ironically the second had a higher carrying capacity because single-occupant vehicles are just terrible at moving people.
The popularization is more likely the other way around: Strong Towns has been around 12 years, has a huge audience, and is a sponsor and promoter of Not Just Bikes.
I agree it’s an exceptional YouTube channel though. :)
> Strong Towns has been around 12 years, has a huge audience, and is a sponsor and promoter of Not Just Bikes.
St might have a huge audience amongst professional city planners, but in the “public consciousness” NJB is what popularised both ST’s concepts and knowledge of ST as an organisation.
NJB is closing in on half a million subscribers and has 11 vids above a million (one above 3), by comparison ST’s youtube channel is under 20k subs and their biggest video is 10 years old and has 350k views. Their 2 STROAD videos follow with 60k each, NJB’s top stroad video has 1.3m views. Hell, 3 videos of NJB’s “strong towns” series have more views than the entire strong towns channel.
The “bicycle dutch” channel is larger than ST, and it’s essentially a cycling vlog.
You say that ST is a sponsor and promoter of NJB, but NJB has a much larger lay audience and regularly plugs donating to strong towns.
On YouTube, Strong Towns has 9.7K subscribers and Not Just Bikes has 425K. NJB’s video about stroads has 1.3M views while Strong Towns’ videos about stroads have 62K and 63K and are 3 and 8 years old. I’ve only seen people talk about stroads online when NJB made his videos.
Since this wasn’t clear: I was not referring to YouTube audience, where ST makes no effort, but to overall audience across different media. ST primary media are blog articles and podcasts, and the main social channels are Facebook and Twitter.
Here’s Not Just Bikes’ video about Stroads: https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM