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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.
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.
... the video is literally entitled "Roasting Other Urban Planning and Transit Channels" and consists entirely of short snippets making fun other channels. I don't know what to tell you.
The other "joke" was... NJB mentioning those people using cocaine in the pedestrian bridge? Right? Where he says "the people were nice enough to offer him some of their crack cocaine. Canadians are so friendly!" That doesn't seem even remotely close to me. Like are you legitimately concerned that NJB is going to literally use this as an example of how Canadians are friendly?!
Ok. It seems like they disagree, and NJB prefers his subreddit to not have that content. Rather than reading into the choice of the term "car apologist" (which is generally anybody who defends a thing or position--it's not "apology" like apologizing for a personal insult) or the timing of videos, I think his direct statements on his opinions on cars and driving are much stronger evidence. 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? 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.
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.
I'm not him and I can't read minds. 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? It's probably not what I would personally do, but again I don't think it should be stronger evidence than what he explicitly says. Like, for another example, this line right here. Doesn't sound rabidly anti-car to me.
I wonder if they aren't keen to take them on in part because they don't seem to understand what the changes actually are. For example, you write:
"Every day" is probably an exaggeration. I shop largely by foot (or I stop on the way home from driving somewhere else, but buy enough I could easily carry it on foot). That's 2-3 trips a week. Just for me, but I also work from home and go out to eat pretty rarely. The other thing is that you don't have to "go to the supermarket;" you can stop by a small store or 2 on your way home from somewhere else. You can still drive, too--he points out the parking lot at the grocery store in this video.
And for what it's worth, looking at obesity and food waste rates in the US, it seems hard to imagine that "impulse buying" could get any worse. Maybe it would even be improved if you had to think more about what you buy, I don't know. I'm less concerned about this particular argument since there are many secondary costs and benefits one could think 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--again, at no point have I ever seen NJB or the other channels I mentioned say we should ban all cars everywhere.
Based on his video on the subject, it actually seems extremely convenient (I haven't had much reason to rent a car recently, so I can't personally attest). Owning your own car has headaches too--it can also run into mechanical trouble, for example, and then you don't have any alternatives and it's your responsibility to fix, while in a populated area, you might have several rental apps each with multiple cars. You also have access to different vehicles for different purposes. And it seems like it's much cheaper, unless you are driving more than a few times per week.
Serious question: have you tried? Or done some investigation to find out exactly? Or this just a guess? Personally I very rarely cary lots of cargo--rarely enough that few trips that couldn't fit in a cargo bike could be done by renting, Uber, or having things delivered (e.g. when buying furniture, most of which wouldn't fit in my car anyway).
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.
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. As emphasized in the video about IKEA I linked above, it would be nice to have options. Most American cities don't give you an option: You need a car to do the most basic things. It's literally written into a lot of municipal codes, which have parking minimums for homes and businesses that assume at least 1 car per customer/dwelling. Adding a bike lane here or there is an improvement, but isn't going to change that basic fact. But again, I think this is a disagreement, not "NJB secretly wants to ban all cars everywhere."
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:
and
BUT
and
and
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.
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