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This seems like a pure strawman. The bulk of the urbanist content I'm aware of is focused on things like "make walking safe", "have stuff closer together", "run more frequent trains" etc. that all are based around improving the QoL for non car-users. And you even have https://youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k which is about how driving is better in the Netherlands! What, specifically, are you referring to?
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."
If you look at the video I linked, he makes the point that requiring cars to sometimes take a slightly longer route makes it faster to drive, since some people won't drive, reducing congestion.
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.
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.
There might be people who hate all driving and want to ban cars, so fine, it's not a "pure strawman." 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.
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.
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.
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.
Alright, well I'm not doing that.
It may not be the primary intention, but it does help.
I think there's just a very far inferential distance here. Why are the only options "bridge" or "nothing" in the first place? 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." 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.
The very short mention about the drug users seems to be taken as more of a joke--as far as I can tell, he doesn't linger on it or claim it's because of the bridge. (He does actually talk about public safety around 1:50 in https://youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw&ab_channel=NotJustBikes, with the concept of "eyes on the street".)
A weakman can exist (that's the whole point) and be popular, but it's still the weakest form of the argument. The original claim was "I find it curious 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." There's quite a lot of the latter. 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. But there are certainly lots of other arguments, and it doesn't matter if the relative size of each group is 1:99 or the other way around.
What self-regulation do you want to see? I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone on this forum even go so far as to disclaim the worst NIMBYs. It's not like NJB or City Beautiful or CityNerd or Oh the Urbanity can do anything about /r/fuckcars or an opposing blog. Would you want to be grouped in with everyone who posts here on TheMotte, and have your arguments dismissed because of who posts here?
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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".
Indeed, they can't. But they can at least distance themselves from them.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. This statement looks either tautological (only cars use the road) or essentially false (pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders get way less consideration than drivers) to me.
Having a few pedestrian bridges doesn't mean that all of the infrastructure is car-centric. 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. Pedestrian bridges are just one piece of infrastructure of many--no one feature makes or breaks a city. 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.
If you recall, the reason we're talking about pedestrian bridges is because you wrote:
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.
"Negatively impacting property values" is a common NIMBY argument for opposing any sort of zoning reform. My inclination is to take these people at their word (like I do with NJB above) unless there's convincing reason otherwise.
In this case, I think you're making the same error I accused Randal O'Toole of making in one of my other comments. Dense areas have higher property values than sprawling ones because a lot of people want to live there. That's what makes them dense in the first place! But for a given neighborhood, building more housing will lower the price of renting or buying, because that's how supply and demand works, and is confirmed by the highest quality evidence that I'm aware of.
One individual might be able to make more money by building the only apartment building surrounded by single family homes, but that's not an option.
So... is the same true for YIMBYs?
The video you linked said it's not actually clear if this is a crime, and NJB calls it "really extreme behavior." Maybe I've just spent too much time on this forum, since that doesn't feel disproportionate to me. This comment just casually drops a mention of executing all the homeless and got 10 (net) upvotes and no response.
As far as I can tell, all the channels I mentioned have explicitly disavowed the idea that one should ban all cars or whatever. Demanding they explicitly go through and also disavow each individual person/group who does hold such a view seems, in my book, to mostly be bad faith smear attempts, akin to when the left threw a fit over Donald Trump not disavowing each different KKK member specifically or whatever the details were.
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.
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:
,
,
Even this one where the poster says "most nations", not just America:
,
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.
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.
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.
It still feels like we're talking past each other here. Merely having a pedestrian bridge, without knowing any other context, is not the be-all end-all of city design. There probably are good reasons to sometimes have them.
It's kind of hard to tell with the Japan example, but it looks to me like there could have easily been crosswalks on the road below. If I'm just trying to cross one of the roads, say on the left, then a crosswalk would be something like 1/4 the length and not require walking uphill. But it looks like it might be connecting to a higher building on the right? I can't really tell.
The one in China looks like a good example of the urbanist complaint. Why is there such a massive road there to begin with? (Also, does this picture look digital to you? Something about it seems off). There's absolutely no way it's feasible for all of the people who live/work in all of those huge buildings to get in and out by car. It already has crosswalks and an intersection, so it's not like it's preventing traffic from having to stop. Replacing some of the car lanes with bike lanes and a train or dedicated bus lane would make the road easy to cross at street level and increase capacity.
Is this just a question of what one is used to? Without the alternatives being pointed out to me, I would have never thought about many of these things. For example, why are crosswalks at street level, requiring you to step down from the sidewalk? That seemed obvious to me, but in some places the crosswalk is raised and cars have to go over it. This has a number of advantages (forces cars to slow down at intersections and in places where pedestrians are likely to be, makes the trip smoother for those with disabilities, makes children more visible to those in high vehicles, etc.) but seems to be practically unheard of in North America. To someone who's used to it, narrow car lanes and limited road and parking space might seem "fine and usable." Or maybe "fine and usable" is just a low bar for a major city in a country as rich as the United States, which spends lots of money on infrastructure, but still manages to be full of congested and crumbling roads.
Car traffic already doesn't flow unimpeded in cities, because of congestion.
Again, "annoy drivers" is not the end goal. The goal is to make walking, cycling, and transit easier. The problem is that these alternative modes all get vastly fewer resources and consideration than driving, which makes them much worse and makes driving slightly better (well, in the short term). If you theoretically could have a pedestrian crossing that was as easy as a crosswalk but didn't require cars to stop, that would be fine. But we don't have that--we have to tradeoff between these things. That's what the complaint means: Drivers are not being asked to make any compromise or sacrifice while pedestrians are being asked to make a very substantial one.
The center of a city should have the absolute minimum possible number of vehicles. As you move to a more spread out area, cars make more sense.
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.
I think you weren't sure about what constitutes the "worst NIMBYs." By coincidence this video just came out, and I think it provides a decent example. There's no issues of pretending that zoning is a property right, it's just very obvious that the neighbors are claiming the right to prevent anything from being built on some nearby land the city already owned because it might be slightly inconvenient for them. There's a good kafkatrap as well (opposing having too many affordable units and then opposing too few affordable units, and also all the time demanding the market-rate units are "luxury"). The already-existing taller building got in on the action as well. It also points out that several of the representatives claimed to support affordable housing... just not in their district, I guess. To paraphrase you, if I wanted to spread the message that I cared about anyone other than myself, or supported affordable housing, I wouldn't do, well, any of those things.
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Like in Manhattan? Or in Tokyo? Both cities famous for their ubiquitous pedestrian bridges.
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.
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