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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.
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I want to contrast two different lines of thought here:
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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".
There is an important distinction between "we need to stop building suburbs because there are already too many suburbs, and what people want is more urbanism and less suburb than we have now" and "we need to stop building suburbs as a first step towards demolishing the ones that already exist, because nobody should live in a suburb". My impression is that the vast majority of online urbanism hold the first view, and definitely that the YIMBYs do - the whole point of YIMBYism is that places need to build more of what they don't have, not demolish what they already do. Of course, the American culture war is perceived as zero sum in a way which means that "we need more urbanism", "we need less suburbia" and "we need zero suburbia" all read to a moron in a hurry as "I stan fixed gear bicycle owners and spit on F150 owners".
My view is that America has too much suburbia, as demonstrated by the very large price premium housing commands in the small number of less-crime-ridden, less-car-centric places. America needs to build more less-car-centric places, and fix the crime problem in the existing ones. The UK, on the other hand, has a shortage of competently executed auto-orientated places - so Milton Keynes commands a price premium. In the British context, I am a housing maximalist - I favour more dense urbanism AND more suburbs (but please no auto-orientated suburbia in zones 1-4 of London or within walking distance of railway stations in the London commuter belt). The problem in the London commuter belt is that too much land is reserved for golf and horses, not cars.
There is a separate issue that the American model of one-car-per-adult suburbia sucks above a metro area population of about 5 million. If you look at the top-10 CSA's by population (I am using CSA's instead of MSA's because otherwise the Bay Area gets broken up which borks the statistics):
New York, Washington-Baltimore, Chicago, the Bay Area, Boston and Philly are all less-car-dependent by American standards.
LA is notoriously unlivable due to traffic and smog, and everyone agrees that further auto-orientated growth is a bad idea. In fact, you can make a decent argument that the financial failure of inappropriate auto-orientated growth in the LA exurbs was a major cause of the 2008 financial crisis - the mortgage bust began in the Inland Empire.
Houston is well aware that need to do something to stop their city turning into LA. Texan Republicans in the Houston suburbs are not willing to use public transport, but they are willing to vote higher taxes on themselves to subsidise other people using public transport. The success of Houston's light rail scheme suggests that there is unmet demand for public transport there. Greater Houston is also YIMBY in a way which makes densification of the core easier.
DFW is blithely turning into LA. For whatever reason coverage of DFW traffic jams doesn't cross the Atlantic the way it does for LA, Houston or Atlanta, but published surveys suggest that DFW traffic is actually worse than Houston.
Atlanta is in the middle of a political battle between the core and the suburbs about whether or not it wants to turn into LA, but so far a de facto alliance between the core and suburban NIMBYs seems to be slowing suburban growth, while the core is gentrifying and densifying.
So if you want to live in a large metro area and enjoy the benefits thereof (which by no means everyone does, but the most productive places are generally large metros) then urbanism is essential because suburbia doesn't scale. But at a national level, the whole point of YIMBY is that non-zero-sum outcomes are possible. More urbanism and about the same amount of suburbia is a thing that can happen, that would make both America and the UK better places, and that online urbanists would take as a win.
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No. We (or at least, I) say that:
We shouldn't require by law (and encourage by implicit and explicit subsidy) that all suburbs be sprawling and car-dependent. There are many urbanist videos praising suburbs and other areas that are not the middle of downtown Manhattan.
Central areas, like downtowns and cities, should have as few vehicles as possible.
Alternatives to driving should exist for as many trips as possible.
Cars generate a lot of negative externalities, such as noise, pollution, and safety, which should be internalized or regulated (especially when cars are used in populated areas).
Yes, if you want to drive a full size car everywhere (e.g. not a microcar, which the Netherlands allow on bike paths for the disabled), you should probably not live right in the middle of a major city. The unlimited use of any amount of public space for any purpose at any time, is not a right--as everyone agrees, since every time this discussion happens on The Motte you get plenty of people saying how the police should aggressively round up the homeless to stop them from sleeping or using drugs on sidewalks and in parks.
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."
A few things. First, this number is substantially higher in Amsterdam--I believe a majority of households do not own a car. Second, making households completely car-free is not the only measure of success. The US is at around .89 [cars per person](
(numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita)), 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.
I just re-watched that section. 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.
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.
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.)
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).
FWIW, I'm 100% ok with living in Ancapistan, and there are a lot of things I would not object to (or think about differently, at least) in that world. We don't live in Ancapistan, so if I'm being taxed to pay for roads, then I think it's reasonable to expect that e.g. those roads are safe to use.
Now, this is probably a rare position among urbanists. But from an economist's point of view, if you want to subsidize something, it probably makes sense to A) subsidize things with positive externalities or minor negative externalities over those with large negative externalities; B) have a plan for how you're going to handle the increased consumption. I think that walking, cycling, and transit are vastly superior to cars on both of these measures.
In addition, I think that subsidies and regulations are more relevant if you rely heavily on arguments like "I just want to live in a single family home" or "I like to drive." If someone legitimately thinks that building roads for cars, and no infrastructure for anything else, for example, creates positive externalities--then my pointing to subsidies wouldn't be a good counterargument.
Do those suburbs still have e.g. laws banning building anything other than single family homes? "Just" putting in bike lanes and traffic calming is not going to undo 75 years of mistakes, but personally I would think it makes more sense if the priority is to legalize some dense suburbs, especially around transit, with those features, and improve downtown cores, rather than redoing "every single" suburb.
(I know that "protected bike lanes and traffic calm roads in every last suburb" sounds like a lot, but given the vast amount of time, effort, money, and regulations that have gone into making almost every last corner of the US dependent on cars, I actually don't think it's very much. This report, for example, finds that 300 miles of bikeways costs the same as 1 mile of 4-lane freeway. What would these suburbs look like if they spent the same amount of money on alternatives as on cars?)
I think you already know the answer, which is: You would have to ask him (he does talk about rural areas in his Switzerland video).
I mean, they'd probably like the option to be car-free in and near cities. Beyond that, I couldn't say, but my internal model of people I know says basically yes. To be honest, the US is so far from even the most basic urbanist goals that I'm confused why this is such a big sticking point. Are you worried that if we make even moderate reforms, suddenly all cars will be banned? You are clearly aware that nothing of the sort has happened in the Netherlands, and what is going on there has taken decades to accomplish.
edit: I looked through the thread you linked and it seems like pretty much every comment is saying what I've been saying... don't need to get rid of all cars, but make other options viable.
No. I believe zoning laws are likely not necessary because the free market can easily decide between good and bad.
No. But the biggest problem with the urbanist movement is this sort of mixed and unclear messaging going on that makes people want to run away from them as fast as possible. If I was an urbanist, I'd focus more on championing alternatives (like Road Guy Rob) instead of enumerating the nth problem with cars. I'd explicitly tell people, hey, you can get to keep your cars if you want, but we just need to make walking and biking safer. (Or find some other way to get my message across because even what I just said has been used as the motte for a bailey that people are starting to catch on to.)
To compare and contrast with a different movement (which, admittedly, affects people less directly than urbanism, but still has a substantial amount of discourse online about), it'd be like if I was a right-to-repair advocate but spent a not insignificant amount of my time complaining about how proprietary software/hardware is ruining the world and everything should be open-sourced. I may believe that open-sourcing everything would legitimately make the world better after accounting for all the negative effects and second-order effects - I may even be completely fine with not getting this implemented and only having schematics, parts, and diagnostics made available (the moderate/mainline position) - but I should recognize that to most people, open-sourcing everything and gutting intellectual property rights is a radical position to take, and if they think I hold it they'll be turned off; therefore my time would be better spent on pushing the more reasonable points (e.g. it is absurd that after repairing a tractor, you need the blessing of a John Deere repairman to come down and "calibrate" it when it would literally work fine without it). And in fact right-to-repair has been weakmanned over this open-source (and intellectual property) point by anti-repair lobbyists.
As far as I can tell, urbanists propose quite a lot of reforms that are quite far from "ban all cars." Here's a handful (keeping in mind that not everything on the list is implemented everywhere all at once; the priorities would be for cities, downtowns, and areas near transit):
Repeal CAFE and replace it with a carbon tax and/or higher gas tax.
Create more pedestrian areas with few vehicles.
Build more bike lanes. Having lanes that are protected from cars and in useful places is more important than having many miles of bad bike lanes.
Repeal or reduce SFR only zoning, along with related policies like parking minimums, setback requirements, minimum lot sizes, etc.
Build more traffic calming measures. We already have speed bumps and low speed limits, even (especially!) in low-density suburbs, but those aren't really enough.
Instead of building infinite roads with the mistaken belief it will alleviate congestion, provide alternatives and use congestion pricing. Similar for parking; don't provide free or subsidized public parking.
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