Ray Delahanty spent most of his career working in urban planning. But, today, he’s best known as CityNerd — his YouTube Channel with nearly 300,000 subscribers and 30 million views. It’s all about cities and transportation, and, you guessed it, he has come to Phoenix.
He came here at this time of year at the request of the Urban Phoenix Project, an urbanist organization that’s all for walking, biking and urban transit. They did an event at The Royale in the Melrose neighborhood while he was here, as he traveled the city via light rail, Waymo and, yes, by foot. He’s not a fan of the controversial reverse “suicide” lanes on Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, but he thinks the city is doing some things right — especially in new developments along the light rail and in downtown Phoenix.
And, now, he’s made one of his hallmark videos outlining his impressions of Phoenix’s urban transit — the good and the bad, and the mildly dystopian, as he calls it. He joined The Show to talk more about it.
RAY DELAHANTY: When I go to cities, I like to kind of try to tease out the things that are unique about them. And one thing you could say is unique or exceptional about Phoenix is how hot it gets for definitely the peak of summer, but a lot of months of the year. And that really informs the way people live and the way they get around the city.
And so when I go and shoot video on location in cities, I mostly spend my time walking because that’s really just kind of the best way to experience things. Sometimes I’ll bike, and I’ll take transit or whatever — but I try not to rely on cars too much.
But I spent quite a bit of time walking out in like a 108-degree heat shooting film of things like Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. So that wasn’t super pleasant, but it was really interesting for sure.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so you come to Phoenix in probably the hardest time of year, the worst time of year. There’s not as many people, I’m sure, on the street at this moment. But what you’re looking at is the way in which the city is structured for pedestrians, for bikers, in terms of public transit. Want to talk about the good and the bad and your impressions, right?
But let’s start with the good, because Phoenix gets a really bad rap in this arena, as I’m sure you’re aware. So you talked about the light rail. You talked about some of the newer developments. What is Phoenix doing well, from your point of view?
DELAHANTY: I spent quite a bit of time in the downtown area, one thing I do like is and I’m kind of a sports fan, so I love a downtown stadium or a downtown arena. I’m a huge NBA basketball fan. Not really a Phoenix fan, grew up in Seattle and lived in Portland for a while. The Suns have always been kind of a rival. But I love an arena and a baseball stadium that are really well connected to transit and that are in close proximity to all the amenities that you have in the downtown area.
And I spent some time up on Roosevelt Row, which, in the middle of the day in late June, is not particularly bustling with people out walking from place to place. But I made a point of going back there after dark. I think I went back at like 9 p.m. or something, when people actually start coming out and spending time outside.
GILGER: We’re nocturnal here, yeah.
DELAHANTY: Even though it’s still probably like 98 degrees or something like that, but it’s relatively livable at that point. So I’ve enjoyed seeing just kind of the way people live and the way people adapt and respond to what are pretty inhospitable conditions.
So I kind of enjoyed that area and was sort of inspired by the way the city is kind of leveraging the infrastructure there and the old urban street fabric and the grid that’s already in place.
GILGER: OK, so some good things. But let’s talk about the bad, because there were certainly some parts of Phoenix that you were not as impressed with. Let’s talk about the sevens: Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street. Tell us about your impressions there.
DELAHANTY: That was something I really wanted to make a point of spending some time filming and thinking about. Because it is — I wouldn’t say it’s completely unique. There are a couple other cities that have reverse lanes. I think Santa Clara up in the Bay area still has a reverse lane roadway, but it’s something that you used to see more of.
And those still exist in Phoenix, so I wanted to see the way they were laid out and the way drivers use them and how hospitable they were for people walking or taking transit. And it’s tough out there. Everything about it is really engineered to try to provide as much capacity for drivers as possible, but to the detriment of any other person who could possibly be using the street.
So like me out there walking like an idiot on a 108-degree day, right? With very few exceptions, it’s just what we call a curb-tight sidewalk. So there’s no planted strip between the sidewalk and the roadway. So you’ve got cars zooming by you usually like 45 or maybe more miles per hour. And so it’s noisy and kind of dirty and uncomfortable.
GILGER: Those reverse lanes are super controversial here. But you call them — and I never heard this term before, so I have to ask you about it: “stroads.” What does that mean, a stroad?
DELAHANTY: That’s going to be a new term to a lot of people. So a strode, it’s kind of like a mashup or a portmanteau of “street” and “road.” The idea is that a street is a roadway that is kind of built to provide access to commercial destinations. So you think about like a main street with storefronts along it.
And then the road part is more like a highway. It’s really there to provide limited access and high speeds and efficiency as far as traffic goes. And so a strode is a roadway that is really trying to accomplish both those things at the same time and just not really succeeding at either. And I’ve heard it referred to as kind of like the futon of transportation infrastructure, where it’s kind of a couch and it’s kind of a bed, but it doesn’t really work well as either.
GILGER: Basically the criticism there is that it’s so car-centric, right? Which is kind of the way the city was built, or at least has been built up until maybe the last 5 or 10 years. Is that a bad thing? Like, is there a way to balance both of those things? You know, have a road where people can drive back and forth quickly in the middle of the city, but also have it be pedestrian friendly?
DELAHANTY: I think it’s really tough. It's possible. You can find highways that have like separated multi-use paths on them, where’s there’s some kind of physical barrier between the highway and the sidewalk. But you usually won’t find something that in an urban environment, because the access to commercial properties on either side of the street is so important.
And that’s something you observe on Seventh Avenue, for example, through the Melrose district. There are tons of you know, commercial destinations along there. But then at these peak times a day where the center lane on Seventh Avenue is functioning as kind of a through traffic lane and left turns are either prohibited or limited to to a couple locations, that’s tough for those businesses.
GILGER: I want to ask you about Waymos, because I know you did a little experimental riding in some Waymos that are all over Phoenix roads today. They’re not in a lot of other cities. What did you make of this and its possibilities for the future of urban transportation?
DELAHANTY: Coming to Phoenix, I didn’t realize that they had been so widely adopted and they had such a large service area. And so a couple of people told me, “Hey, that it’s part of the experience. You have to try it when you come out.. And I was like, “Hey, I’m kind of nervous about that.” But as I walked around, I saw a few from an operation, and I thought, Oh, that looks reasonable, I would try that.”
And plus, I have a YouTube channel. How can I not make content about that? So it was kind of a must. And so I ended up writing the Waymos four different times, I think. That came in handy because transit was not going to get me where I wanted to go. And the impression that was most striking to me was that they adhere to traffic laws in a way that human drivers just don’t, right?.
So I kind of came away thinking even a stroad or a very car-oriented street could be a lot safer and more humane if there were nothing but Waymos on them, which is not the impression I expected to come away with. But that’s what I feel after a couple days of both walking around Phoenix and then riding the Waymo.
And about those reverse traffic lanes: there’s an effort to end them in the Valley. But the City has cited a study it commissioned in 2021 that found traffic would increase more than 40% without them.
