About City Nerd

I started the CityNerd (one word — but I don't care if you use two and sometimes I do it myself!) YouTube channel in July 2021. It was a project borne out of (1) pandemic ennui, and (2) a lot of thinking, and a bunch of stories about cities and transportation I wanted to tell but had found no outlet for.

When I first started my channel and people started to subscribe, I was honestly shocked. There was an audience for difficult-to-parse deadpan humor and long-form narratives about high speed rail? Really? But as my audience quickly grew, I soon realized I had stumbled upon something much bigger: the existence of a massive, under-appreciated constituency for the things I talk about on the channel: the virtues of reducing car dependency; the importance of building to accommodate higher density population in our cities; siting optimization criteria for Insomnia Cookies outlets. I had tapped into a whole world that people cared about deeply — even if they couldn't articulate exactly why.

This is now the guiding star for everything I do: building that constituency so we can impact elections and policymaking, and arming that constituency with the vocabulary and understanding I've built over, not just a professional planning career, but a lifetime of...just being someone who is endlessly fascinated by cities and all the things that make them great.

About This Site

I launched this independent, ad-free publication in 2026 because I found that, while video is great for a lot of things, some of the stories I want to tell and ideas I want to share are better expressed with the written word. If you subscribe, you'll get full access to this website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Running this site and producing content isn't free, so it's paid subscriptions that really make everything I do possible. Thank you!

About Me

I'm an urban planner and the creator behind CityNerd, a (mostly) weekly video series that explores urbanism, transportation, and all the things that make cities unique and valuable. The CityNerd channel, launched in 2021, has over 400,000 YouTube subscribers and over 40 million views, plus an additional 25,000 subscribers on the streaming platform Nebula.

Prior to starting the channel, I spent 15 years as a transportation planner for public agencies and consulting firms in Portland, Oregon, usually being mistaken for a traffic engineer, and ultimately being labeled "urban planner who can speak traffic engineering." I hold a Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) from Portland State University and an undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, where I majored in English Literature.

I love cities — full stop — and I've lived in a variety of them across the United States. I'm currently hunkered down in an undisclosed location in the continental U.S. where I write, work on videos, and serve as an emotional support human for my chunky black cat, Charlie.