InfoTeddy
1yr ago
We shouldn't require by law (and encourage by implicit and explicit subsidy) that all suburbs be sprawling and car-dependent.
[...]
It seems like he's overall strongly favor, but doesn't like the fact that the underground spaces are cheap while the garage was expensive to build, which subsidizes cars.
I can agree with ditching things like parking minimums. But what's wrong with roads getting subsidies? Transit gets subsidies too; the New York MTA receives subsidies of billions of dollars a year.
In any case, dropping subsidies for all modes of transportation is probably reasonable, won't really kill them, and maybe should be done. Dropping MTA subsidies would likely force them to, for example, employ the same number of people that Spain does for tunnel-boring machine work (nine people) instead of 25, along with cutting other similar excesses in the authority.
It also still seems to me, based on the alleged contradiction in those quotations, that you are conflating "banning cars" with "making it possible to get by without a car."
No, I'm not. We could install protected bike lanes and traffic calm roads in every last suburb tomorrow (i.e. make it possible to get by without a car everywhere, but not necessarily be faster than a car), but the impression I get from urbanists is that this simply wouldn't be enough for them, and more drastic measures need to be taken. If they're actually fine with only those things, that's cool! But that's not the impression I'm getting.
First, this number is substantially higher in Amsterdam--I believe a majority of households do not own a car.
Yes, this is because the Randstad is a very urbanized area, in contrast to the rest of the Netherlands, which needs more cars. Since this quarter figure is an average over the whole country, that means that the number is likely lower than a quarter in rural areas. Are urbanists fine with all of those cars in rural areas? (For all the many videos Not Just Bikes has made about the Netherlands, he surprisingly doesn't seem to have covered much of the country that exists outside the Randstad.)
Second, making households completely car-free is not the only measure of success. The US is at around .89 cars per person, while the Netherlands is at .588. The number of multi-car households is quite high (https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/household-vehicles-united-states/), so there's a lot of room to reduce the number of cars in each household without necessarily making many households car free.
Okay. Making households need only one car at most could be a reasonable proposition. Are urbanists fine with only doing that? And what's the ideal number of cars per person they want? .588 doesn't sound low enough, if NJB's comment that "there are still too many cars in Amsterdam" is anything to go by (and since he's talking about Amsterdam, the relevant cars-per-person figure is actually already lower than .588).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Florida governor Ron DeSantis will not assist with extradition: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/desantis-trump-charges-are-un-american-says-florida-will-not-assist-in-extradition-request-by-manhattan
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
But it doesn't seem unreasonable to want to keep the subreddit for his channel primarily focused on his stuff and stuff he agrees with?
So yes, it's because he disagrees heavily with Rob, because Rob is more moderate than he is. I'm not saying it's unreasonable to ban him - it's his subreddit after all - I'm saying it's a sign that he's more radical.
,
I want to contrast two different lines of thought here:
You can still drive, too--he points out the parking lot at the grocery store in this video.
and
If you don't want to live in the middle of a big city and never use a car, you don't have to--again, at no point have I ever seen NJB or the other channels I mentioned say we should ban all cars everywhere.
BUT
Well, yes. That's the point: If you design cities and towns differently, then ditching the car isn't so serious! Obviously ditching a car in a car-dependent place is a big deal.
and
I mean, I think that message is wrong. There are a lot of things that you would have to change to make it so that a substantial portion of the population could reasonably not own a car if they don't want to.
and
Adding a bike lane here or there is an improvement, but isn't going to change that basic fact.
So I can see the intended message of "If you don't want to live in the middle of a big city and never use a car, you don't have to" - what I get from that is that if someone wants to live somewhere with a car, then they shouldn't live in NYC, or LA, or SF, or in a city at all, they should just live in a suburb and not drive their car around the city, right?
Except these same urbanists then turn around and say we need to stop building suburbs, or start building denser suburbs or mixed-use neighborhoods or whatever you want to call it, because adding bike lanes is an improvement but it's not enough. It seems to me here that they object to the thought of there being any car-friendly place in America at all, because that could mean that someone, somewhere would be afflicted with the horrors of car dependency. And it's not enough if they're able to move to a place like NYC where they don't need a car; those car-centric places just shouldn't exist at all. After all, the reason why bike lanes aren't enough is that over a spread-out area, cars will still be faster, and therefore most people will naturally choose cars anyway; it's not enough that people have the simple choice of a bike lane or not because most people will still choose cars.
Therefore, the urbanists propose, we should densify. But of course, that comes with its own set of problems that people have that they, well, sort of just gloss over.
At the end of the day though, it's not hard to be skeptical of urbanists when they say all they want is just to give people choices. If we all move into denser areas enriched with transit, biking, and roads - well, driving will most likely be impacted because you can't have as many lanes in a dense area and some space will have to be taken away from drivers. But more importantly, if people are given the choice, many people will still drive, and many will still own a car. And this is bad, because cars pollute and kill people and private vehicles are parked 99% of the time. As mentioned earlier upthread, 69% of people in France still drive to work and only a quarter of Dutch households are car-free (a decreasing figure!).
And if people own cars, then planners will do things like build expensive parking garages beneath canals which end up doubling the number of parking spaces, and having more parking spaces is bad because as long as they're there, people will still want to drive (as NJB says). If the Netherlands was good enough for NJB because people have choices there - why does he complain when car infrastructure is improved (while simultaneously improving infrastructure for everyone else by removing street parking)? Didn't he make a video about how the Netherlands is the best country in the world for drivers? These are conflicting messages.
So sure, maybe they don't secretly want to ban cars everywhere. But the messages they send are pretty mixed; it's no wonder people think they harbor a secret desire to see cars eradicated, or just dislike them in general. In fact, I don't see why they don't think this way; cars have so many problems (according to them) that I'm not sure at what percentage of the population owning cars they'd be happy with - 10%? 5%? 1%? Certainly I doubt 75% or 69% is acceptable to them, but feel free to prove me wrong. Maybe they just don't see the logical conclusion of all their arguments - they keep saying "2 + 2" but don't want to admit that it means "4".
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Like if those are all lies, why not allow Rob's stuff on the subreddit?
I don't think that follows. I'm not saying those are all lies, but I do wonder why else he wouldn't allow Rob's stuff on the subreddit, if not because he says exactly what he says - he doesn't want to promote car apologism. To my knowledge, he doesn't cite any rules like "no other people's stuff", he has consistently said that it's because he's a car apologist. So I dunno, you tell me why he doesn't allow Rob's content on his subreddit.
I think it's much more likely that you are missing something, or misinterpreting something, than his whole video about rental cars and his whole video about driving in the Netherlands being, as well as the vast array of videos where he says "there should be some car-free areas" and "separate cars from pedestrians and cyclists" and very much does not say "ban all cars" are what, a big psy-op?
No, of course not. The problem is, while his solutions are technically not banning cars, it results in dramatic lifestyle changes that many people aren't much keen to take on.
For example, if you don't have a car, you can't load up on groceries every week or two, so the urbanists say you should just go to the supermarket every day. Well, many people take issue with that, and don't want to go to the grocery store every single day, and there's also concerns about impulsive buying (that saying about how you shouldn't shop hungry). Many of the alternative solutions just also don't work either. For example, having to pay for a rental car instead - it has all the potential headaches of having to pick up the car, or if not that then the car potentially not being in working order, or maybe there's no cars available or you have to wait a while, etc. - all of which simply don't exist (or are very mitigated) if you simply own the car instead. (And even then if you rent, urbanists will still complain about pollution, traffic, accidents, wasted space, etc. but at least the rental car isn't parked 99% of the time.) Or using one of those cargo bikes which really don't look like they can carry very much. Or paying for groceries to be delivered instead (which this time has problems coming from the urbanist side, who complain about delivery drivers on scooters being too fast and just ruining the streetscape of a city). Et cetera, et cetera, the proposition of ditching a car in any meaningful way is a very serious proposition to make to someone, and that is what people think of when they hear about banning cars.
Anything short of that is just not something urbanists want to endorse. For example, Not Just Bikes hates the implicit message of Road Guy Rob's videos, where car infrastructure in the USA isn't fatally flawed and if we just fix a few things here or there it'll be all good. I agree with NJB's interpretation here; I don't see RGR making a video anytime soon advocating for ditching car ownership. By his own admission, he is unabashedly pro-car.
So yes, nobody (except for the weakmen) is advocating to literally ban cars. But that's still a far cry from a policy proposal that most people won't have issues with. And all of these problems are just glossed over when urbanists refuse to talk to people to understand what they actually want and how they can make their proposals work for them.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
The Alan Fisher video is literally an entire video of jokes, come on now. Without knowing more about Road Guy Rob or what exactly NJB's issue is, which isn't explained, I can't really comment.
That's the second time I've been told "it's just a joke". I don't think it's a good norm to allow people to say "it's just a joke" when it's not clearly a joke, because it opens the door to letting people have enough plausible deniability such that they can say whatever outlandish thing they want, and if there's no objections it can be taken seriously, but if there is objection then they can safely backpedal, similar to Schrödinger's Douchebag. Does Fisher's jab at NJB come across as a joke? Yes. Do his "roasts" about other channels like Road Guy Rob or Wendover Productions come across as a joke? No; in fact, Fisher goes on a minute-long rant about Wendover at the end. Or maybe my sense of humor is outdated and it's a perfectly reasonable "joke" to sound like you hate someone for a minute straight. On Wendover's latest video about trains, Alan Fisher commented about Wendover still leaving his video open-ended (which is the thing he went on a minute-long rant for in the roasts video) which makes me think it's less of a joke than he would have you believe.
In any case, even if Fisher legitimately was joking (which I doubt), I don't think NJB is. Here, Not Just Bikes echoes Alan Fisher's sentiment about RGR being a car apologist, which reads as completely serious to me. And judging from the title of the submission that that comment was on being a title that mocks RGR's video about HAWK beacons, NJB is not alone with this dislike of RGR ("North American traffic engineers cautiously approaching the idea that it might be bad for people in crosswalks to be killed by cars; try to invent solutions to this problem, addressed nowhere else in the world, while of course making sure to minimize impediments to the flow of traffic"). He even commented on the video himself and it comes across as a negative comment to me, mocking the solutions presented in the video (RGR replies to his comment).
RGR's recent livestream sheds more light on this interaction as well as what happened after. After RGR made his video about HAWK beacons, NJB ended up making a video about crossing the street. In it, he ridicules the HAWK beacon (calling it "Over-engineered bullshit" in the chapter title), and other alternatives that were first presented in RGR's video such as the crossing flags. RGR definitely noticed this maneuver and talks about it in his livestream, describing it as "taking one of my videos and turning it inside out and said all my suggestions were terrible". He talked to him and apologized to NJB for having suggestions he disliked, but NJB said that he wasn't even thinking about him when he made that video. Which I very much doubt, given that NJB not only commented on the /r/notjustbikes submission but also commented on the video itself. Meanwhile, NJB has allowed RGR's videos to be posted to his subreddit a couple times in the past, but recently (in the past several months) has seemingly changed his mind and no longer allows it. He's a car dependency apologist. His content is not welcome here. He's a car apologist and he doesn't want to promote car apologists. And as I mentioned earlier, RGR thinks NJB is mad at him. And I don't blame him, given that he keeps calling him a car apologist over and over again.
I don't know how else to make this point any clearer. NJB's issue with RGR is what he keeps saying all this time: He's a car apologist, who apologizes for cars. Or, in more charitable terms, RGR is someone who doesn't think most North American car infrastructure is inherently terrible. He sees that like other types of infrastructure, car infrastructure has benefits and drawbacks, instead of mostly having drawbacks. In contrast, NJB and others think the opposite, that car infrastructure in America has so many drawbacks it's not even worth enumerating the benefits. In NJB's mind it simply doesn't matter that RGR has championed all sorts of non-car infrastructure such as edge lanes, bike boulevards, decriminalizing jaywalking in California, traffic calming (multiple times), bus rapid transit, transit-oriented development, raised bicycle medians, freeway ramp crosswalks, etc. - at the end of the day, to him, he's just a car apologist, full stop. The message is clear to me: If you're less than completely hostile to car infrastructure in North America, then you are a car apologist to Not Just Bikes, and to many other people. Even if you're ostensibly on the same side as people who just want to make urban planning better. And that sort of hostility is helpful if you want a movement full of radicals (NJB talks about being "orange-pilled", i.e. being radicalized against car infrastructure, after all), but it's not conducive to having a healthy, productive discourse about urban planning.
This is the most complete enumeration of the interactions between Not Just Bikes and Road Guy Rob that I could find. If you have any evidence of NJB feeling differently, I would love to see it.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I thought stochastic terrorism covered non-violent messages, which is what made it idiotic? There has been plenty of violent rhetoric from trans activists that have cleared the (admittedly extremely low) bar of "stochastic terrorism" and have gone straight to almost fedposting (actual fedposting, i.e. "threat of specific imminent danger" would likely have been removed by the platforms they were posted on).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Having a few pedestrian bridges doesn't mean that all of the infrastructure is car-centric. [...] Pedestrian bridges are just one piece of infrastructure of many--no one feature makes or breaks a city.
I don't disagree, but if pedestrian bridges (not at-grade) are car-centric, then they're bad and that means that something has gone wrong in the planning process, right? If they're bad, then maybe the planner somehow didn't take into account all road users, for example. But yes, it only means that this part of the city is bad and car-centric; the rest of the city will still be pretty okay.
I don't know about China; Tokyo was definitely not car-centric. Not all pedestrian bridges are bad--the video even says that they're fine if they keep pedestrians at the same level.
Okay, here are two pedestrian bridges (that do not keep pedestrians at the same level), one of which is in China and the other Japan.
https://old.reddit.com/r/InfrastructurePorn/comments/so0m50/pedestrian_bridge_in_japan/
https://old.reddit.com/r/InfrastructurePorn/comments/r6ydbe/chengdu_china/
Do you think they're bad and shouldn't have been built? I personally don't see any problem with them, and in fact there are a few people in the comments section who like them too. But then there's these urbanist types who say things like the following:
These are terrible. If you're walking look at how much extra you have to walk just to get around cars. Cars don't live in cities. People do.
,
I dream of a city where cars have to climb stairs to get out of the way of people.
,
I wholeheartedly agree that it's better to make the cars go out of the way, and they should pay for the infrastructure required.
Even this one where the poster says "most nations", not just America:
Cool idea, but it perfeclty illustrates the mentality of most nations, pedestrians are guests on the turf of cars.
Fuck that, let's return to actually walkable cities, instead of 4 lanes in each direction, yuck.
,
Ew, cars
I didn't have to go to the bottom of the comments section to grab these or anything; these are all decently upvoted comments near the top.
And I should've made this clearer, but this sort of conceit isn't unique to pedestrian bridges. You can find complaints of car-centric infrastructure for basically every nation in the world. If you think the Czech Republic would be well-liked for being in Europe, think again.
At the end of the day, if I think that these complaints come from a place of actually caring about car-centric infrastructure, I get confused and start wondering why people would complain about something that seems perfectly fine and usable. It makes a lot more sense to me if I realize that a lot of the time, these people object to car infrastructure existing at all, rather than car-centric infrastructure. For example, in the video I linked, Adam Something walks down a narrow corridor that can barely fit one car, and cars must pass by slowly here - but apparently this is too much for him and it's car-centric.
But in much of the US, they seem to be thrown in for the primary purpose of not slowing down cars, while every other consideration is secondary. This is true of a lot of infrastructure, like slip lanes for right hand turns: slightly more convenient for drivers, but much less safe for pedestrians.
Well, yes, you can think of pedestrian bridges' primary purpose as to not slow down cars, rather than a means to let people cross the road. In fact, this is probably why some people think that many complaints about pedestrian bridges come from a place of wanting cars to be slowed down. Which was my point - there's a big focus on removing car infrastructure and/or worsening the quality of life of drivers precisely because existing solutions like pedestrian bridges don't slow down cars. This doesn't seem to be from a calculation that "well, we have limited funds/space so we can't build a pedestrian bridge, we'll just slow down the cars instead". It seems to be from a dislike that car traffic gets to flow unimpeded.
As an aside, I wouldn't put slip lanes in the same category as pedestrian bridges. Arguably, bridges are safer for pedestrians than not - they are completely separated from car traffic that could easily kill them if a driver is inattentive or disobeys the red. There's a big difference between being less safe and being slightly inconvenienced.
You can disagree, but I see no reason to assume that NJB's stated reasoning is a cover for a desire to annoy drivers, which is not something you have any evidence for.
[...]
As far as I can tell, all the channels I mentioned have explicitly disavowed the idea that one should ban all cars or whatever.
Have they really? NJB may have said that he "doesn't hate cars, just car infrastructure", but what should I make of his multiple statements (which I can't find right now) that a city gets better the less cars there are? Doesn't that lead to the logical conclusion that a city should basically ban almost every car?
How about the things they do disavow? All those channels exist on a sliding scale of more or less car hatred, but some of the more car-hatey ones hate the YouTube channel Road Guy Rob, who notably does not hate cars and says himself he is pro-car while recognizing that many of the Dutch infrastructure NJB champions as being great for bicycles are great for cars alike. However, despite his numerous videos about infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, he gets called a "car apologist" by Alan Fisher. This is a sentiment that NJB shares. In RGR's latest livestream, he mentions that NJB may even be mad at him.
If I wanted to spread a message that I didn't hate cars (and a genuine message, not one half-hearted just so people stop asking me about a radical position that they think I hold), I wouldn't hate on Road Guy Rob.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Just because Manhattan and Tokyo have lots of pedestrian and motor traffic and have little pedestrian bridges, doesn't mean that pedestrian bridges should never be built. Las Vegas is an example of a city with lots of pedestrian and motor traffic, and lots of pedestrian bridges.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Proof of what?
And the analogue isn't a 500-follower account who has not disavowed white supremacy, it's one that explicitly promotes it. Though, I'd imagine that such accounts are censored (or at least were before Elon Musk took over). In any case, I think it's reasonable to understand that any disavows of white supremacy would also disavow any 500-follower accounts promoting white supremacy.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
This may be the position that gets the most pushback, but I just don't care about China. I don't want to spend more American money and lives on foreign conflicts when there is so much to work on domestically. I don't like the ideology and policies we are exporting to the rest of the world and don't want it to spread completely unopposed. I don't want to die in some "unifying" conflict across the world for a government that pushes domestic policies designed to economically and politically disenfranchise people who look like me. The USG has lost the Mandate of Heaven and it should focus on getting that back, rather than picking more fights abroad.
I agree with this, and at this point, this is also how I feel about the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Sure, it sucks that Russia invaded them, and ideally they shouldn't have done that, but so what? If Ukraine falls, America is still separated from Russia by a continent and is completely secure. Russia has no reason to invade any NATO members, and if they did, that would be justification enough to annihilate them.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Well they have, haven't they? At least people like Trump have, multiple times.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Why are the only options "bridge" or "nothing" in the first place?
When you're at the point where you're considering building a bridge, you probably have problems with putting a crosswalk there anyway (there's a reason we don't build bridges everywhere), e.g. there's a lot of pedestrian and motor traffic. I don't mean to say a crosswalk is bad; a crosswalk is perfectly fine too and can co-exist alongside a bridge. But that doesn't mean that a bridge is strictly worse and should never be built, which is really my gripe with urbanists.
The thing being complained about is not that "a crosswalk would annoy those damned cars" it's that "pedestrians are forced to take a much longer and more difficult route to prevent cars from experiencing even the slightest inconvenience."
For the ones in Vegas at least, the route isn't that much longer, or more difficult. As a pedestrian, I was perfectly fine with using them rather than having to walk across the street. You even get to be able to stop and look out from the bridge, which you would never be able to do on a crosswalk in the middle of the road.
It's not that making driving miserable is an end goal; it's that most American cities have unlimited appetite to add the slightest convenience for drivers at the cost of arbitrary QoL loss for every other form of transportation.
I hate to make hasty generalizations like this. This doesn't seem true to me; they take into account everyone who uses the road. Unless you're willing to claim that the uniquely-American way of urban planning has spread around to cities all over the world such as in Japan and China (where they build pedestrian bridges too)?
I could say something like "people who like zoning are just racist and greedy." Probably there are some people who support strict zoning for those reasons; it wouldn't be hard to find example of NIMBY's using "home values" as an explicit argument.
See, the "greedy" argument falls flat because if they really wanted money, they would gladly invite in the densification, as dense urban areas lead to higher property values (not including maintenance and taxes). And the "racist" argument is true insofar as being against crime is racist (that is, you'd have to be racist yourself in order to believe that being against crime is racist; yes, being tough on crime will disproportionately affect certain races, but that's only because the base rate of crime is disproportionately committed by those races in the same way). So, it's uncharitable to call them "racist" (extremely so), but it's not completely out of field of what a steelman NIMBY would actually believe.
I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone on this forum even go so far as to disclaim the worst NIMBYs.
That's only because this forum has a social norm where people are assumed to have already disclaimed that. Though, I don't have a good idea of who "the worst" NIMBYs are.
Would you want to be grouped in with everyone who posts here on TheMotte, and have your arguments dismissed because of who posts here?
I mean, this happens all the time on the internet, for basically every community. But ideally, no.
In any case, I'm not discarding urbanists' arguments just for being urbanists. I take them quite seriously. Although maybe I shouldn't, if NJB's bit about drug users was just a joke.
What self-regulation do you want to see?
I want to see condemnations of people committing crimes such as the Tyre Extinguishers. Instead, we get people like Not Just Bikes who apologize for their behavior by mostly placing the blame on governments who've "done nothing".
It's not like NJB or City Beautiful or CityNerd or Oh the Urbanity can do anything about /r/fuckcars or an opposing blog.
Indeed, they can't. But they can at least distance themselves from them.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Personally, I don't think it even matters how representative it is. What matters is that many in the movement don't call out their own for bad behavior like this. And this extends to every time someone in the trans movement has committed some form of bad behavior.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Unless the vertical component is excessive (e.g. several ramps), I don't think it's "unnecessary". The pedestrian bridges in Las Vegas have a simple staircase and elevator and they get plenty of foot traffic.
Pedestrians have the same right to cross a road safely that cars in a cross street do, and everyone agrees that cars in a cross street are entitled to some kind of arrangement allowing them to cross at-grade within a reasonable waiting time (generally 30 seconds typical, 60 seconds maximum) - usually a traffic light.
Okay, but this conflicts with many of the positions espoused by urbanists I've seen that say that pedestrians and cars are different and therefore should be treated differently in some respects. E.g. urbanists ridicule when pedestrians are told to make sure they look both ways when crossing the road, even though when cars cross the road, they are taught (at least in drivers' ed) to look both ways too. The standard here doesn't seem to be consistently applied.
In any case, underpasses (which don't have a vertical component) are ridiculed by urbanists too. They also ridicule even at-grade solutions like HAWK signals.
If your community is serious about that, then I suppose the bridge does benefit pedestrians, in much the same way that a mugger benefits you if he lets you keep your ID while he takes your cash and credit cards.
This analogy does not follow. No one is being "robbed" here in any metaphorical sense.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Ironically, sprawling suburbs often have these exact same limitations. Cul de sacs are very popular, and suburban roads are often windy rather than direct, because everyone realizes that having cars go through your neighborhood sucks--but for some reason we don't think about these forms of road design as "limiting freedom to drive" or whatever.
In that case it's not exactly about improving the quality of life of car users, just mitigating their externalities. Which, for the record, I agree with in this case.
If the route is only slightly longer though, I doubt it would make a meaningful difference in the amount of traffic. But this argument does have some merit to it and is why, for example, I-5 in California doesn't go through populated areas like Fresno.
NJB's argument about pedestrian bridges seems to focus entirely on how they lower QoL for pedestrians, in direct contradiction to the claim that "so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners." You say this doesn't make sense, but he makes several specific arguments and you don't offer any explanation at all, you just make an assertion about his state of mind.
Okay, I will elaborate.
He says they lower the QoL of pedestrians in contrast to the alternative that they will "just walk across the ground to get to where they're going", but this is a false alternative. The alternative to a pedestrian bridge is not being able to cross the road at all. And it's not like people don't use them; they're plenty popular and packed on weekends in Las Vegas. See also this response by Road Guy Rob (he misspeaks and says "crosswalks" instead of bridges, but the message is still the same).
When he points out that some pedestrian bridges and/or underpasses have crackheads on them, that's not the fault of pedestrian bridges or underpasses. That's just the fault of a city not willing to crack down on drugs and drug addicts. Otherwise, I could say that a city having alleys is bad because alleys are places out of sight where people deal drugs (and then claim that NYC is a great place because it has no alleys). It's actually quite infuriating that this is one of the only instances where Not Just Bikes will acknowledge that crime exists, because to my knowledge he doesn't acknowledge crime elsewhere in his channel, and crime (and policing) is probably one of the biggest differences between North America and the Netherlands (or, hell, even Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas; CityNerd's recent TEDx Talk talks about how he moved from Portland to Vegas but he doesn't acknowledge crime (i.e. why Walmart and Cracker Barrel have closed or are going to close all stores there) and gives other, seemingly-virtuous reasons why he moved).
And the bridge he derides as a "concrete ditch" actually looks pretty okay. But this is just a beauty/subjectivity argument, which I'm not a fan of.
There might be people who hate all driving and want to ban cars, so fine, it's not a "pure strawman."
What, like this guy with 1.2 million views? Or this guy? Or /r/fuckcars?
To some extent I have sympathy here because, to some extent, all movements are plagued by radicals and extremists, but my sympathy wanes when movements don't self-regulate in this matter.
I still think it's a weakman to boil all arguments in favor of urbanism down to "they just hate cars" so all arguments can be ignored.
Alright, well I'm not doing that.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
From the footage released, the shooter did not shoot the lock. Instead, the doors had glass panels, which were shot out and easily traversed through.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
"Induced demand" isn't a real thing for traffic, or at least, some of the new demand is proportional and will take up less than 100% of the new supply (and some will just be latent demand that was suppressed due to the system being previously congested). It is perfectly reasonable to just build more houses to alleviate the demand, much like you would supply more bread if the shelves at the grocery store kept running dry.
Of course, you could also recognize that much of the new demand for both housing and transportation comes from migration, and therefore argue that we should limit migration to prevent our transportation/housing system from being strained.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Byuu's emulation and reverse engineering efforts were more meaningful than anything KF has done.
Not sure what the point of this is. Both can be meaningful in different ways.
Privacy is a requirement for free speech.
Could you make the point of this sentence clear? Do you mean that they invaded his privacy? If so, that's false; they never knew his real name until he pulled his 'suicide' stunt, and still to this day literally no one knows where he lives/lived (well, no one with credibility, that is).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Trans activists are already way ahead of you on this one. They have argued many times in the past that transgenderism is not a mental illness, and any law that would consider transgenderism a mental illness in regards to being disarmed would be immediately ridiculed and shot down by trans activists.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Well, many of the stuff they champion as improving the QoL of non-cars also just happens to worsen the QoL of car users, e.g. Oxford's traffic filters plan. I think this difference is easier to see if we talk about the proposals they say don't increase the QoL of non-cars, even though they do. For example, Not Just Bikes complaining about pedestrian bridges, and claiming they're "only built for the benefit of people driving, not walking", even though that doesn't make sense. I highly suspect the real reason he dislikes them is because, as he says later, they don't hinder the flow of traffic, and therefore don't worsen the QoL of car users.
And then there's articles like this which directly address your (NJB's) claim that the Netherlands is the best country in the world for driving by saying "...and that's a bad thing."
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Apparently the manifesto was found in the home by police, so most likely it was never published online. I doubt the police would ever release it.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Pretty sure the perpetrator wasn't a student.
According to this NBC News article, the shooter was a former student.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Another good example is Kiwi Farms being blamed for the supposed suicide of Byuu.
Remember how back in 2016, there was a funny meme going around about how you could text to vote for Hillary? A man named Douglass Mackey was behind that, who has been found guilty of election interference by a jury in New York. The argument goes that this effectively deleted a bunch of votes that should have gone to Clinton. Okay, so how many?
...I'm not an expert on the 2020 allegations of election interference, but come on now, I'm pretty sure those allegations were more than just thousands of votes. And they were dismissed on account of not likely having affected the election. Regardless, the meme was clearly a joke; that 4,900 number seems absolutely paltry and criminally charging him is making a mountain out of an anthill.
More importantly, it's not hard to interpret this in the light of Trump's recent indictment for a matter that also transpired in 2016. Now, I can understand the argument that the reason they didn't try to charge him then was because he was the president, and it would be pretty hard to try to bring charges against the president while he's in office, therefore they waited until he was out. Or, they didn't know that he paid off the porn star until recently. But this? Douglass's tweet was very public and they could've easily charged him all the way back in 2016 if they wanted to. Why are they doing it now?
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