This Tiny Island has Insane Traffic

Visit wren.co/start/notjustbikes to start offsetting your carbon emissions with Wren and get your first month for free! The best part of these comments are the people who try to guess the island and they're wrong ... but it really goes to show you that so many islands are like this!

Absolutely insane to me that places that could be literal paradise on earth turn their cities into car hell.

The conversion of Nassau's main streets into one-way couplets really stood out to me, prioritizing the traffic moving through downtown versus making downtown the destination.

Crazy to imagine that an Island of this size could be literally personal-car free

I'm in Boipeba now, a car free island in Brazil. It has 40% of Nassau/Amsterdam size and people get around by walking, bike, quadricycle and tractors-buses (literally a tractor carrying around 20 seated people). Everything being walkable has another advantage, people are concentrated in spots and leave 80% of the island for the preserved nature. Therefore there are a lot of animals and birds around! I asked one local about cars and he said there are only two...ambulances!

11:55 This is actually something I noticed a while ago. Many people don't realize how cars work like an "atmosphere capsule". The feeling outside a car is always so different than inside a car. It is like the inside of a car is capsuled off from the real world. (Edit: I mean they literally are metal/glas capsules.)

This reminds me of Costa Rica. It's a tiny little country only twice the size of Vancouver Island, but has nothing but winding country roads and highways. There's a national train service, but it really sucks. The result is that San Jose is an unwalkable parking lot when it has the potential to be one of the nicest metropolis in Central America.

Also, the topography seems perfect for public transport and biking, good weather and perfectly flat terrain

As a local my frustrations finally feel heard. I have many European friends (most in the Netherlands in particular) and got very interested in city planning as a hobby, And could see (atleast on paper) how easy some simple things would be to implement. I was really taken aback by this video (in a good way) and it made so many parts of the island look really nice. (The Nassau Pronunciation bit was also a very nice addition) I look at simliar island nations some of even bigger sizes and see what they come up with and it just disappoints me that things here seem so lazy. (To play devil's advocate) There's a variety of things I could mention but none I feel are quite appropriate for a comment such as this. To everyone at Not Just Bikes, this video blew me away and as an overview on my country's traffic problems it was spot on.

I live in switzerland and until now I haven't realized how beautiful it is that when walking in the city, it doesn't look like the city is crumbling.

Maltese here. If you have the time, maybe you can do a similar video about Malta. It's also a tiny island with immense (and I mean immense) traffic congestion, shitty public transport, road widening to no avail, the usual shit show.

As someone who started recently driving in Malaysia (I still walk and take public transit if its faster or better for my sanity), it is absolutely true you don't notice shit going around you in your car. I have walked to work and back to home before. The road I take is 30 minutes long by feet. By car is 5 minutes. Same route, yet I noticed new and old businesses going in and out only by walking. It is definitely harder to notice if you're driving as well, you're more concerned about the cars around you than the business next to you going out.

Bahamian Local here. Thank you sir for pointing this stuff out. Our City planning was basically non existent Nassau modernized as the U.S did the idea of modernization was "pave roads" and we ended up with this mess. We have had proposals to organize the Jitneys and better urban designing but these issues aren't a priority for our leaders. Creating more tourism jobs via foreign investment is their favorite pass time.

People really underestimate how much prosperity a switch away from car dependency can bring. Especially a place like the bahama's which (i assume) has to import all its gasoline and cars. Imagine a shift away from cars there, it would mean drastically reduced imports of gasoline, cars and car parts, all the while reaping large health benefits due to the decrease in pollution and an increase in exercise rates

Having goosebumps seeing profound similarities between the problems of Bahamas Jitneys and Philippine Jeepneys 😔

Bahamas in ads: paradise. Bahamas in reality: this vid.

Driving is a bit of a status symbol in many of these small countries/islands. You can at least give off the impression that you've "made it" if you have a car. Even in places like the UK, USA everyone's kind of subject to the "do you own a car" stigma, like the famous one about needing to have a car otherwise a potential suitor could be potentially put off if travelled by bus or bike.

This reminds me a lot of where my grandfather lives in Australia: Beautiful weather, coastal mild climate but infrastructure dedicated to cars

The things you notice about your city when walking are stark and immediate. A car really just turns a city into a series of disconnected destinations.

This strongly reminds me of Cyprus. We rented some bikes to try to see a bit more of the island than the hotel, and it felt like a miracle that we returned alive. The biking infrastructure was practically non-existent.