"This is CityNerd, weekly content on cities and transportation. Viewer suggested topics always welcome."
CityNerd is a YouTube channel by former city planner Ray Delahanty presenting information about cities, land use and transportation in a dry manner, peppered with sarcasm and running jokes. Most of the videos are focused on North American infrastructure and culture as Ray is from the United States.
In addition to the regular weekly videos the channel has also produced a few series with more specific focuses:
The channel may be located at this link
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Tropes in CityNerd videos:
- Big Eater: In What Makes POWER CENTERS Bad for Cities: Investigating Heinous Land Uses, Episode 1 Ray contemplates the type of person who would need to use the dedicated walkway between a Texas Roadhouse and a Golden Coral, concluding that anyone going to both on one trip should get a gold star and a free consultation with a gastroenterologist.
- The Comically Serious: A huge part of the appeal and humor of the channel comes from Ray's deadpan dry delivery of utterly ridiculous lines mixed in with the factoids and research.
- Cute Kitten: Videos recorded at home tend to end with a clip of the cat while credits run off to the side, where they won't cross over the cute feline.
- Documentary: The City Visit series are documentaries focusing on the transit and pedestrian development of various cities.
- Flat Joy: When acknowledging subscription milestones in videos Ray maintains his deadpan delivery and says thanks, while superimposing a very basic confetti effect over the video.
- Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: The subscriber count was always done using the biggest stadium they could fill, up until What Makes Lifestyle Centers Bad for Cities: Investigating Heinous Land Uses, Episode 3 which used Michigan Stadium and was the final video including subscriber count because it was the biggest stadium for which good satellite imagery was available.
- Hummer Dinger: Several videos address the dangers and costs of oversized vehicles and the staggering rate at which the size of persona trucks in the US has increased. The second such video also addresses the mindset of some owners of such vehicles since they attacked his first video on the subject in mass defending their choices and threatening harm to other road users.
- Money to Burn: "CityNerd Responds to Truck-splainers" makes a deadpan comparison between spending tons of money on rapidly depreciating oversized trucks to piling your money in the street and setting it on fire, and says he's happy to support your right to do both but that people should have a choice not to.
- "Number of Objects" Title: The Top Ten List videos all include the list name in the title, there are also other videos such as 56 High Speed Rail Links We Should've Built Already which fit the format.
- Running Gag: Calling the Cheesecake Factory the finest of dining establishments, and using it as a destination when graphing travel data. He also regularly acts confused by bad Cheesecake Factory reviews.
- Sarcastic Title: The subtitle for Stroad vs. Stroad: Land Use, Traffic Engineering, and What Happens When Suburban Arterials Intersect, a video focusing on the dangers and unattractiveness of stroads, is "The Joy of Suburban Intersections".
- Satire: While many videos on the channel use dry humor and sarcasm to address political choices that have resulted in poor and dangerous city planning the Investigating Heinous Land Uses series is dripping with satire on the racism, corruption, cluelessness and greed behind many of the zoning laws that require poor land uses.
- Scare Quotes: The quotations used in the title of "We "Honored" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. With These Travesties" make Ray's opinion on honoring Dr. King with stroads quite clear.
- Self-Deprecation: Frequent during calls for likes and subscriptions on videos, such as "Drop a like on the video if you enjoy detailed explorations of intersection ops, and really who doesn't".
- Shout-Out:
- The thumbnail image for To Improve a STROAD: How One City Is Reimagining an Orphan Highway is tilted "Where We're Going We Don't Need Stroads" after the famous line from Back to the Future
- In "How Seattle Is Becoming an Urbanism Juggernaut (Maybe in Spite of Itself)" Ray notes that sidewalks do not extend into the neighborhood where he grew up in North Seattle, and says that he grew up Where the Sidewalk Ends which he calls the poetry for the episode.
- The thumbnail image for To Improve a STROAD: How One City Is Reimagining an Orphan Highway
- Shown Their Work: Any video including graphs or statistics includes an explanation of how things were calculated and sources of information.
- Take That!:
- In Stroad vs. Stroad: Land Use, Traffic Engineering, and What Happens When Suburban Arterials Intersect Ray says that while he loves to do top ten lists of bad infrastructure he doesn't even know where he'd start on such a list of the "Ten Most Offensively Large Intersections" after a viewer pointed him to the intersection of SR7 and Forest Hill Ave in West Palm Beach, then says maybe they're all in Florida.
- Calls mattress stores money laundering operations.
- Every city and state DOT featured in Traffic Engineers Gone Wild: Why Interchanges and Intersections are Getting Worse, Not Better is given all the snide commentary their featured planning deserves.
- A casual line in Let's Shame the Awful Land Use of America's Ten Worst State Capitals is "After all, governing is hard, especially with a population as abjectly idiotic as a lot of Americans are."
- "I think there's a business opportunity in consulting with developers and making sure their ideas aren't completely bonkers stupid."
- In Stroad vs. Stroad: Land Use, Traffic Engineering, and What Happens When Suburban Arterials Intersect
- Top Ten List: Many videos are top ten lists of cities rated by affordability, transit or other things such as On the Right Track: The 10 Most Improved Cities In the U.S. for Transit, Walking, and Biking , Affordable Cities: 10 US Metro Areas With Underrated Livability, Walkability and Transit, and Is "Small City Urbanism" an Oxymoron? 10 Undervalued Cities to Ponder
- The Theme Park Version: Mocks Lifestyle Centers, especially those that don't include any housing, as near dystopian artificial imitations of the longed for main streets the same type of car centric development helped to destroy in much of North America.
- Verbal Backspace: When describing typical businesses on stroads one is money laundering operations, which is quickly corrected to mattress stores.
- Viva Las Vegas!: Discusses Vegas tourism and points out the many downsides and hostile engineering traits of the Strip since Ray lived in Vegas. Discusses several plans which might improve the experience for tourists and locals alike by making it less focused on cars instead of the scores of pedestrians.
- YouTuber Apology Parody: In response to the negative response to Problems with Pickup Trucks: Why the Growing Share of Large Vehicles is Bad for Everyone Ray released Inside the Mind of the Pickup Truck Owner: CityNerd Responds to Truck-splainers in which he responds to several of the individual comments with sarcastic apologies. The video does not try to actually paint itself as a true apology video though, since it merely doubles down on the things stated in the first one.
