- Joined
- Mar 13, 2022
This thread is not for arguing if cars are good or bad. The point is to laugh at retards on the Internet. Go to Mass Debates to argue.
Do you drive a car? Do you live in the suburbs? Do you own a house? If so, these people hate you and insist you sell your car, move to an apartment in the city, and get on a bicycle while your town gets redesigned into a dense concrete nightmare.
There isn't an exact name for these people, the closest one being urbanists. But they are always identifiable when they bring up things like walkability/cyclability, public transit / alternative transit, multi-modal streets, traffic calming, urban planning, and city design; want to start or move to developments like 15-minute cities, transit-oriented development, and mixed-use neighborhoods; and hate on cars using terms like car-centric / car-dependent / auto-oriented, urban sprawl, missing middle housing, car sewers, stroad, induced demand, traffic violence, and a whole bunch of other terms you'll get to know if you ever have the misfortune of encountering them.
It turns out they are actually quite well-rooted, and the only reason they have gone relatively unnoticed for an extended period is because they more or less successfully faded into the background during the past couple years, intermingling with the usual environmentalist suspects. Many of these people are implicitly or directly BreadTube-adjacent, and likely hold similar radicalist views on other topics.
One thing which must be made clear is that they aren't just directly advocating for improved public transport and city infrastructure, which are good things. No, that's not good enough for them. That still provides choice. And they don't want people to have a choice, because that means people can choose to drive a car or own a house.
To them, there are no valid reasons as to why one would ever drive a car or own a house. Not the security. Not the directness. Not the comfort. Not pride of ownership.
In short, these are the people who bought into the climate change hysteria about fossil fuels, and then made more and more reasons to hate on cars, to the point where it's their entire personality. This community is a loose constellation of YouTubers (BreadTube-adjacent), subreddits, non-profits, think tanks, and other organizations whose sole mission is to spread the message and abolish cars.
Jason Slaughter is the man behind the biggest and quickly-growing urbanist YouTube channel named Not Just Bikes. Starting in 2019, his entire shtick is that bike-friendly Holland is better than anyone else at killing cars, and America and Canada should be ashamed of themselves.
His first video. The channel doesn't get any better.
Archive:
He's the only significant public figure in the urbanist movement who decided to permanently relocate to the Netherlands just to cement his car hatred and derides even the urbanists who stay behind in North America as trying to fix what can't be fixed. This is despite the fact that the source he cites the most is an American urbanist blog named Strong Towns (more on Strong Towns later).
(all emphasis mine)
He desperately tries to make himself and his movement relevant by crossing over with other lolcows, such as Olly Thorn:
(source, archive)
Vaush:
(source, archive)
Hasan Piker:
(source, archive)
And most recently, Lucas "Keffals" Roberts, because they both grew up in the same Canadian city of London, Ontario:
From this post, you can tell that Jason thinks it's funny to refer to London as "Fake London", as if anyone would ever get it confused with the capital of the United Kingdom.
Jason later deleted the above community post. But he still tweeted at Lucas:
(source, archive)
When he's not busy shitting on cars for existing, he works as a "Product Management Consultant" in the Netherlands. No idea what company though.
Just look at this fine specimen:
r/fuckcars is a subreddit dedicated to hating cars. It is the biggest and worst congregation of urbanists on the Internet. The subreddit consists of memes, rants, obsession with bicycle and public transit infrastructure and a complete hatred of all automotive infrastructure. And yes, their logo literally came from what they built on r/place.
(source, archive)
A typical r/fuckcars meme.
Anybody who defends cars or doesn't think they're the hellspawn of Satan himself gets called a "carbrain". They use this word in lieu of an actual argument.
(sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
(archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
You might think they're simply harmless keyboard warriors on the Internet, like any Redditor is. That is not so.
(source, archive)
They frequently approve of vandalising cars and harassing car drivers for the crime of existing.
(source, archive)
The adoration doesn't stop there. One of their biggest champions is a group called the Tyre Extinguishers, who go around deflating the tyres of SUVs because... that'll definitely own those stupid carbrains!
(source, archive)
And of course, this is all done under the guise of "activism".
(source, archive)
If you think you're safe from harassment in the U.S., think again:
(source, archive)
And to nobody's surprise, Jason Slaughter all but supports the Tyre Extinguishers, thinking the problem is with the car owners and governments, not the people doing the vandalism.
(source, archive)
(source, archive)
(source, archive)
When these people say "fuck cars", they mean it.
Charles "Chuck" Marohn Jr. is the man behind Strong Towns, a non-profit advocacy group that originally started as a blog in 2008. Strong Towns is the most consistently cited urbanist source for ideas like "stroad" and "suburbia is a growth Ponzi scheme", even though they have numerous problems.
(source, archive)
I can think of many other reasons why Detroit failed...
As usual, because urbanists have nothing original or new to say, Not Just Bikes has made multiple videos repeating Strong Towns' argument.
Chuck's entire shtick is that he is a self-hating traffic engineer ashamed of his profession for literally murdering children by designing unsafe streets. His latest book is literally titled Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.
(source, archive)
However, despite what he may tell you, Chuck is not an engineer. In 2018, his engineering license for the state of Minnesota had lapsed, presumably because he was too busy hating on cars to renew it.
In 2020, a complaint was made by an actually genuine engineer to the Minnesota board (whose name is so long that it's abbreviated to AELSLAGID), because Chuck did his shtick in a Strong Towns article about being a traffic engineer ashamed of other traffic engineers.
In 2021, AELSLAGID ruled that he lied about being an engineer and fined him $1,500 for the misleading claim, along with a demand he sign an order admitting he violated the law by lying about being an engineer. He doesn't seem to have paid the fine or signed the order, so AELSLAGID said they were going to take some yet-to-be-known disciplinary action.
Then instead of taking the L and moving on, he did the obvious logical course of action: He went to the press to claim that his first amendment rights were being squashed, because everybody knows that the first amendment gives you the license to say whatever the fuck you want and there are absolutely no restrictions on free speech. He also said this:
(source, archive)
So by his own admission, he's not an engineer.
And he doubled down by filing a lawsuit against them:
(source, archive)
It's not going well for him. The lawsuit was dismissed until the board renders their disciplinary action, so despite his attempts to avoid the consequences, all he can do is wait and suffer them, and only then will a judge evaluate his claim of a first amendment violation.
At the end of the day, even his claim of being a self-hating traffic engineer is a lie. Despite starting Strong Towns in 2008 to advocate against car dependency and single-family neighborhood zoning laws, in 2016, Chuck bought and moved into a single-family household in the car-dependent city of Brainerd, Minnesota.
While Jason Slaughter may be the figurehead of the movement, there are plenty of other urbanists to take up the crusade of killing cars and suburbs, who all repeat each other's arguments. All of the figures listed here have substantial followings on YouTube.
Adam Something
Adam (last name unknown) is a Hungarian leftist BreadTuber. So it's no surprise that he hates cars just as much as every other urbanist when he's not busy hating on the right-wing.
His latest video is a "review" of Prague, where he shits on cars so often your liver would die if you took a shot every time.
He gave the city a 5 out of 10.
He's notable for making video responses to CGP Grey and PragerU about cars.
As a result, even though CGP Grey's video is over 6 years old, the comments section is flooded with comments made in the last couple years from smug urbanists going on about how ackshually, the solution is public transit, you idiot, get with the program.
CityNerd
Ray Delahanty runs an American urbanist YouTube channel that adds a new spin to the car-hating genre of videos by making "Top 10" videos, e.g. Top 10 Enormous Parking Lots in the US, Top 10 Useless Urban Rail Systems in the US, Top 10 Biggest Freeways in the US, and so on.
Of course, just like any other good urbanist, he's talked about "stroads" and "bad land use" and "induced demand" and everything else. The worst video to sit through is probably his video on car crashes, where like all other urbanists, he dances around the term "accident" and insists on using "traffic violence" because it's "more respectful" somehow.
The Armchair Urbanist
Alan Fisher has an ongoing video series named "The Armchair Urbanist" that, you guessed it, repeats every single thing other urbanists say because urbanists can't think for themselves. Including the whole spiel about how suburbs are "unsustainable" and will crumble to dust. This is the "About" page of his channel:
To his credit, the first video was uploaded 4 years ago, one year before Not Just Bikes came onto the scene and kickstarted the movement. But by the rate of uploads, you can tell he's been riding high off of the trend since then without putting in much effort to his videos.
The most hilarious video to look at is the video where he roasts other urban planning YouTubers or YouTubers who talked about urban planning in passing. While he "roasts" his fellow urbanists, including Not Just Bikes, you can tell that it's not genuine while everyone else gets actual criticisms if they don't toe the urbanist line. He called Road Guy Rob (a non-urbanist transportation YouTuber) a "car apologist" and went on a minute-long rant about Wendover Productions, a wildly more successful YouTube channel, for... not pushing a thinly-veiled agenda like he does in his own videos.
Seriously, that's his entire beef. It starts at 6:00.
Climate Town
Rollie Williams is... okay yes he's literally just another urbanist with a YouTube channel who repeats the exact same things as all other urbanists. But this time from the climate change perspective, tying it all back to the original reason to hate on cars.
He's most notable for a video titled "How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream", which has been in everyone's recommendations a couple times.
Fortunately, I'm not linking to this.
He's also notable for being the first urbanist to collab with Not Just Bikes (besides Strong Towns of course):
Urbanists don't have anything new or original to say. Like people who can't read any book other than The Handmaiden's Tale, these same arguments are frequently invoked by them time and time again.
This only serves as a reference so you can know what the fuck a "stroad" or "induced demand" is since they'd rather have incomprehensible terms to keep out outsiders (who they refer to as "willfully ignorant suburbanites"). Refutations are left as an exercise to the reader.
Asking an urbanist whether cars should be banned is about as productive an exercise as asking a Nazi whether Jews should be exterminated. The respondent will come up with increasingly complicated responses that are not quite straight answers, to avoid giving away their true answer, which is "Yes, yes they should be, completely, full stop, no further questions."
Because of this, it's easy to cause them to twist themselves into pretzels by simply asking the Car Question, i.e. "Should we ban the concept of personal, private, non-commercial transport via use of motors and at least four wheels?" They know that banning cars is an extremely unpopular measure, so they dodge the question.
(source, archive)
This is from an article literally titled "What I Mean When I Say 'Ban Cars'".
Of course, like all radicals, there are some that say the quiet part out loud anyway. For example, there's a podcast named The War on Cars (archive) - which, despite the name, is not defending cars - and of course the literal name of r/fuckcars, and then there's this video:
At least he's being honest.
Whether you think cars are good or bad, it is undeniable these people are an embarrassment to be around. They think cars are the source of every single evil in the world today and have a fanatic devotion to abolishing them even when it doesn't make sense, akin to people who think Nazis are the universal source of evil and see Nazis around every corner. Like all mature Internet communities, they've developed a complete detachment to reality while being in a filter bubble so nothing and no one can change their minds, not that they'd ever want to. Enjoy!
Special thanks to @Becky McDonald and @quaawaa for helping with this OP.
Do you drive a car? Do you live in the suburbs? Do you own a house? If so, these people hate you and insist you sell your car, move to an apartment in the city, and get on a bicycle while your town gets redesigned into a dense concrete nightmare.
There isn't an exact name for these people, the closest one being urbanists. But they are always identifiable when they bring up things like walkability/cyclability, public transit / alternative transit, multi-modal streets, traffic calming, urban planning, and city design; want to start or move to developments like 15-minute cities, transit-oriented development, and mixed-use neighborhoods; and hate on cars using terms like car-centric / car-dependent / auto-oriented, urban sprawl, missing middle housing, car sewers, stroad, induced demand, traffic violence, and a whole bunch of other terms you'll get to know if you ever have the misfortune of encountering them.
It turns out they are actually quite well-rooted, and the only reason they have gone relatively unnoticed for an extended period is because they more or less successfully faded into the background during the past couple years, intermingling with the usual environmentalist suspects. Many of these people are implicitly or directly BreadTube-adjacent, and likely hold similar radicalist views on other topics.
One thing which must be made clear is that they aren't just directly advocating for improved public transport and city infrastructure, which are good things. No, that's not good enough for them. That still provides choice. And they don't want people to have a choice, because that means people can choose to drive a car or own a house.
To them, there are no valid reasons as to why one would ever drive a car or own a house. Not the security. Not the directness. Not the comfort. Not pride of ownership.
In short, these are the people who bought into the climate change hysteria about fossil fuels, and then made more and more reasons to hate on cars, to the point where it's their entire personality. This community is a loose constellation of YouTubers (BreadTube-adjacent), subreddits, non-profits, think tanks, and other organizations whose sole mission is to spread the message and abolish cars.
Not Just Bikes
Jason Slaughter is the man behind the biggest and quickly-growing urbanist YouTube channel named Not Just Bikes. Starting in 2019, his entire shtick is that bike-friendly Holland is better than anyone else at killing cars, and America and Canada should be ashamed of themselves.
Archive:
He's the only significant public figure in the urbanist movement who decided to permanently relocate to the Netherlands just to cement his car hatred and derides even the urbanists who stay behind in North America as trying to fix what can't be fixed. This is despite the fact that the source he cites the most is an American urbanist blog named Strong Towns (more on Strong Towns later).
(source, archive)Jason Slaughter said:
(source, archive)Jason Slaughter said:
(source, archive)Jason Slaughter said:
(all emphasis mine)
He desperately tries to make himself and his movement relevant by crossing over with other lolcows, such as Olly Thorn:
(source, archive)
Vaush:
(source, archive)
Hasan Piker:
(source, archive)
And most recently, Lucas "Keffals" Roberts, because they both grew up in the same Canadian city of London, Ontario:
From this post, you can tell that Jason thinks it's funny to refer to London as "Fake London", as if anyone would ever get it confused with the capital of the United Kingdom.
Jason later deleted the above community post. But he still tweeted at Lucas:
(source, archive)
When he's not busy shitting on cars for existing, he works as a "Product Management Consultant" in the Netherlands. No idea what company though.
Just look at this fine specimen:
YouTube (Not Just Bikes)
YouTube (NJB Live)
Twitter (@notjustbikes)
Twitter (@slaughterdotcom)
Reddit (u/notjustbikes)
Reddit (r/notjustbikes)
TikTok (@notjustbikes)
notjustbikes.com (redirects to YouTube channel)
The following links all go to LinkedIn, if you are signed in he will be notified.
jasonslaughter.com (redirects to LinkedIn, Jason Slaughter)
LinkedIn (Jason Slaughter)
LinkedIn (Not Just Bikes)
YouTube (NJB Live)
Twitter (@notjustbikes)
Twitter (@slaughterdotcom)
Reddit (u/notjustbikes)
Reddit (r/notjustbikes)
TikTok (@notjustbikes)
notjustbikes.com (redirects to YouTube channel)
The following links all go to LinkedIn, if you are signed in he will be notified.
jasonslaughter.com (redirects to LinkedIn, Jason Slaughter)
LinkedIn (Jason Slaughter)
LinkedIn (Not Just Bikes)
r/fuckcars
r/fuckcars is a subreddit dedicated to hating cars. It is the biggest and worst congregation of urbanists on the Internet. The subreddit consists of memes, rants, obsession with bicycle and public transit infrastructure and a complete hatred of all automotive infrastructure. And yes, their logo literally came from what they built on r/place.
(source, archive)
A typical r/fuckcars meme.
Anybody who defends cars or doesn't think they're the hellspawn of Satan himself gets called a "carbrain". They use this word in lieu of an actual argument.
(sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
(archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
You might think they're simply harmless keyboard warriors on the Internet, like any Redditor is. That is not so.
(source, archive)
They frequently approve of vandalising cars and harassing car drivers for the crime of existing.
(source, archive)
The adoration doesn't stop there. One of their biggest champions is a group called the Tyre Extinguishers, who go around deflating the tyres of SUVs because... that'll definitely own those stupid carbrains!
(source, archive)
And of course, this is all done under the guise of "activism".
(source, archive)
If you think you're safe from harassment in the U.S., think again:
(source, archive)
And to nobody's surprise, Jason Slaughter all but supports the Tyre Extinguishers, thinking the problem is with the car owners and governments, not the people doing the vandalism.
(source, archive)
(source, archive)
(source, archive)
When these people say "fuck cars", they mean it.
Strong Towns
Charles "Chuck" Marohn Jr. is the man behind Strong Towns, a non-profit advocacy group that originally started as a blog in 2008. Strong Towns is the most consistently cited urbanist source for ideas like "stroad" and "suburbia is a growth Ponzi scheme", even though they have numerous problems.
(source, archive)
I can think of many other reasons why Detroit failed...
As usual, because urbanists have nothing original or new to say, Not Just Bikes has made multiple videos repeating Strong Towns' argument.
Chuck's entire shtick is that he is a self-hating traffic engineer ashamed of his profession for literally murdering children by designing unsafe streets. His latest book is literally titled Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.
(source, archive)
However, despite what he may tell you, Chuck is not an engineer. In 2018, his engineering license for the state of Minnesota had lapsed, presumably because he was too busy hating on cars to renew it.
In 2020, a complaint was made by an actually genuine engineer to the Minnesota board (whose name is so long that it's abbreviated to AELSLAGID), because Chuck did his shtick in a Strong Towns article about being a traffic engineer ashamed of other traffic engineers.
In 2021, AELSLAGID ruled that he lied about being an engineer and fined him $1,500 for the misleading claim, along with a demand he sign an order admitting he violated the law by lying about being an engineer. He doesn't seem to have paid the fine or signed the order, so AELSLAGID said they were going to take some yet-to-be-known disciplinary action.
Then instead of taking the L and moving on, he did the obvious logical course of action: He went to the press to claim that his first amendment rights were being squashed, because everybody knows that the first amendment gives you the license to say whatever the fuck you want and there are absolutely no restrictions on free speech. He also said this:
(source, archive)
So by his own admission, he's not an engineer.
And he doubled down by filing a lawsuit against them:
(source, archive)
It's not going well for him. The lawsuit was dismissed until the board renders their disciplinary action, so despite his attempts to avoid the consequences, all he can do is wait and suffer them, and only then will a judge evaluate his claim of a first amendment violation.
At the end of the day, even his claim of being a self-hating traffic engineer is a lie. Despite starting Strong Towns in 2008 to advocate against car dependency and single-family neighborhood zoning laws, in 2016, Chuck bought and moved into a single-family household in the car-dependent city of Brainerd, Minnesota.
This private information is unavailable to guests due to policies enforced by third-parties.
Other notable urbanists
While Jason Slaughter may be the figurehead of the movement, there are plenty of other urbanists to take up the crusade of killing cars and suburbs, who all repeat each other's arguments. All of the figures listed here have substantial followings on YouTube.
Adam Something
Adam (last name unknown) is a Hungarian leftist BreadTuber. So it's no surprise that he hates cars just as much as every other urbanist when he's not busy hating on the right-wing.
His latest video is a "review" of Prague, where he shits on cars so often your liver would die if you took a shot every time.
He gave the city a 5 out of 10.
He's notable for making video responses to CGP Grey and PragerU about cars.
As a result, even though CGP Grey's video is over 6 years old, the comments section is flooded with comments made in the last couple years from smug urbanists going on about how ackshually, the solution is public transit, you idiot, get with the program.
CityNerd
Ray Delahanty runs an American urbanist YouTube channel that adds a new spin to the car-hating genre of videos by making "Top 10" videos, e.g. Top 10 Enormous Parking Lots in the US, Top 10 Useless Urban Rail Systems in the US, Top 10 Biggest Freeways in the US, and so on.
Of course, just like any other good urbanist, he's talked about "stroads" and "bad land use" and "induced demand" and everything else. The worst video to sit through is probably his video on car crashes, where like all other urbanists, he dances around the term "accident" and insists on using "traffic violence" because it's "more respectful" somehow.
The Armchair Urbanist
Alan Fisher has an ongoing video series named "The Armchair Urbanist" that, you guessed it, repeats every single thing other urbanists say because urbanists can't think for themselves. Including the whole spiel about how suburbs are "unsustainable" and will crumble to dust. This is the "About" page of his channel:
To his credit, the first video was uploaded 4 years ago, one year before Not Just Bikes came onto the scene and kickstarted the movement. But by the rate of uploads, you can tell he's been riding high off of the trend since then without putting in much effort to his videos.
The most hilarious video to look at is the video where he roasts other urban planning YouTubers or YouTubers who talked about urban planning in passing. While he "roasts" his fellow urbanists, including Not Just Bikes, you can tell that it's not genuine while everyone else gets actual criticisms if they don't toe the urbanist line. He called Road Guy Rob (a non-urbanist transportation YouTuber) a "car apologist" and went on a minute-long rant about Wendover Productions, a wildly more successful YouTube channel, for... not pushing a thinly-veiled agenda like he does in his own videos.
Climate Town
Rollie Williams is... okay yes he's literally just another urbanist with a YouTube channel who repeats the exact same things as all other urbanists. But this time from the climate change perspective, tying it all back to the original reason to hate on cars.
He's most notable for a video titled "How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream", which has been in everyone's recommendations a couple times.
Fortunately, I'm not linking to this.
He's also notable for being the first urbanist to collab with Not Just Bikes (besides Strong Towns of course):
Common urbanist terms and arguments
Urbanists don't have anything new or original to say. Like people who can't read any book other than The Handmaiden's Tale, these same arguments are frequently invoked by them time and time again.
This only serves as a reference so you can know what the fuck a "stroad" or "induced demand" is since they'd rather have incomprehensible terms to keep out outsiders (who they refer to as "willfully ignorant suburbanites"). Refutations are left as an exercise to the reader.
- Stroad: Instead of using the correct term, urban arterial, or literally anything else, they use the word "stroad", made up by Charles Marohn of Strong Towns. Usually applied to any American road with access to businesses and more than two lanes. Defined as a hybrid of "street" and "road". Furthermore, "street" is redefined to mean a low-speed destination, while "road" is redefined to mean a high-speed connection. Ignore the fact that "street" and "road" are already interchangeably used and most people see no difference between the two.
- Induced demand: A thoroughly confusing argument that says that if you build roads, people will use them, and people using them is bad. They do not apply this argument to public transit, biking, trams, trains, etc. They also use the converse ("less roads means less people drive") to argue for not building roads. This is a corruption of an actual economics concept, called latent demand, where the demand already existed and is capable of being satisfied by building more supply.
- Traffic violence: A term to replace "car accidents", based on the superstitious belief that replacing words improves things. Get ready to hear about how people killed in accidents were "murdered", not killed, despite murder meaning done with premeditated intent.
- Car sewer: A road or corridor that has too many cars, where "too many" for most urbanists will be any amount above zero.
- Traffic calming: Slowing down cars by erecting bumps, narrowing lanes, and other such obstructions.
- Multi-modal streets: Almost more of the same. The official definition is "streets with more than one mode of transportation" (i.e. not cars), but usually they just mean taking space away from cars to put in a streetcar/tram or add a bus lane. They'd rather have bikes get their own completely separate infrastructure.
- Pedestrianization / road diet: Yep you guessed it, this is just straight-up banning cars from specific roads in the belief that it will improve the city.
- Growth Ponzi scheme / suburbia is subsidized: A belief that suburbs are somehow financially unsustainable (i.e. cannot levy enough tax money from residents) despite the fact that many of them exist just fine in physical reality. So they explain the physical facts away by saying either that actually, suburbia is funded by a Ponzi scheme based on growth, or actually, suburbia is subsidized by urban cities.
- General Motors streetcar conspiracy: A real conspiracy to sell buses carried out by General Motors in the 1940s and 50s, but urbanists take the conclusions too far and often use it as one of the origin stories of car dependency.
- The suburban experiment: Often capitalized like a title. They use this to describe suburbs because calling it an "experiment" is their idea of a knockdown argument. Oh shit, you said that it's an experiment, my argument is completely ruined.
- 100 years ago...: "100 years ago, cities weren't built around cars." If you spend any time around urbanists (not recommended), get used to hearing this line often. Yes, 100 years ago we didn't have cars or car dependency. We also had a lower quality of life, polio, diseases, lower life expectancy, lower population, lower technology, etc. Basically conservatism except taken completely literally that we should go back to designing cities how they were 100 years ago.
- Land use: How land is used and allocated. This is often used in complaints about "bad land use" in North America.
- 15-minute city: Officially defined as "a city where one can access everything within 15 minutes of non-car travel". Ignore the fact that most cities touted as 15 minutes still have cars in them (but they're trying to kill those too), and ignore the fact that if the requirement for non-car travel is removed, nearly all car-dependent cities are 15-minute cities.
- Transit-oriented development: Often abbreviated to TOD. A dense development built around a bus stop, train station, or streetcar/trolley.
- Missing middle housing: "Middle" housing is housing that's in between a high-rise skyscraper and a detached single-family household. "Missing middle" is the complaint that this form of housing is missing. Often invoked as an explanation for the housing crisis, despite there being other factors that are arguably more important. Ignore the fact that it often already exists in areas they claim it doesn't.
- ...and many more to be documented in this thread.
The Final Solution to the Car Question
Asking an urbanist whether cars should be banned is about as productive an exercise as asking a Nazi whether Jews should be exterminated. The respondent will come up with increasingly complicated responses that are not quite straight answers, to avoid giving away their true answer, which is "Yes, yes they should be, completely, full stop, no further questions."
Because of this, it's easy to cause them to twist themselves into pretzels by simply asking the Car Question, i.e. "Should we ban the concept of personal, private, non-commercial transport via use of motors and at least four wheels?" They know that banning cars is an extremely unpopular measure, so they dodge the question.
(source, archive)
This is from an article literally titled "What I Mean When I Say 'Ban Cars'".
Of course, like all radicals, there are some that say the quiet part out loud anyway. For example, there's a podcast named The War on Cars (archive) - which, despite the name, is not defending cars - and of course the literal name of r/fuckcars, and then there's this video:
At least he's being honest.
Conclusion
Whether you think cars are good or bad, it is undeniable these people are an embarrassment to be around. They think cars are the source of every single evil in the world today and have a fanatic devotion to abolishing them even when it doesn't make sense, akin to people who think Nazis are the universal source of evil and see Nazis around every corner. Like all mature Internet communities, they've developed a complete detachment to reality while being in a filter bubble so nothing and no one can change their minds, not that they'd ever want to. Enjoy!
Special thanks to @Becky McDonald and @quaawaa for helping with this OP.
Last edited:
