Not Just Bikes / r/fuckcars / Urbanists / New Urbanism / Car-Free / Anti-Car - People and grifters who hate personal transport, freedom, cars, roads, suburbs, and are obsessed with city planning and urban design

[Beautiful Border]

Yeah man, that's kind of the point. I don't care about the sanitized public-facing persona they're presenting, I care what they're saying when they think they aren't being watched by people outside of their little clique. If the news caught a liberal politician saying "fuck niggers" behind closed doors, he's likely not gonna get a pass because "sorry I was venting and I went a bit too far oopsie doopsie". It's why Twitter liberals in general are so entertaining and horrifying, because they're saying the things the people with suits and super-PACs are afraid to say but probably believe.

What's the worst thing a user on /r/fuckcars has actually said, anyway? They've no doubt had some dumb takes, but I really can't imagine actually being offended or horrified by anything on there (unless you're a sentient car in a Pixar movie, I guess).

Those are constraints placed on you by the government, not the technology itself. I also didn't toss all my guns in the garbage and buy 14th century broadswords because the government made me register them.

This is sophistry. In an abstract sense cars give you more mobility, but in the real world owning a car also imposes on you a litany of legal and financial obligations. This wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that many people have to own a car because the city they live in is only designed with drivers in mind. That's what a lot of the people in this thread aren't getting - being anti-car dependency is not the same thing as being anti-car.

Also, it's worth repeating that cars drive on a pre-built road system in much the same way trains run along pre-built tracks. Most people aren't using their cars for the Dakar rally.

And if you don't think you'd be under even harsher regulation if you were reliant on public transit, why don't you go ask the Chinese how that's going?

So the government can deny you from buying a train ticket but it can't suspend your driver's license? Also, if your government is acting like the PRC you frankly have much bigger problems to worry about.

 

[Captain Chromosome]

"Can you tell me what "car-dependent infrastructure" actually is without resorting to posting a video? Can you explain it in 50 words or less?"

Los Angeles is a prime example. Everything is so fucking spread out it's impossible to get anywhere without a car and the shitty transit doesn't help. Try getting from Burbank to Thousand Oaks/Santa Monica/Downtown etc without a car and see how long it takes.

 

[DumbDude42]

I actually have an interest in urban design, mostly because I want America to be better.

see that's the key difference here. you think of urban design and see different ways to make life better for the people, while they see it as different ways to punish and humiliate the people, masked under a thin veil of "for the greater good" utopianism.

 

[John Andrews Stan]

Los Angeles is a prime example. Everything is so fucking spread out it's impossible to get anywhere without a car and the shitty transit doesn't help. Try getting from Burbank to Thousand Oaks/Santa Monica/Downtown etc without a car and see how long it takes.

LA has shitty public transportation but it’s still easy to get places on it. And I say that as someone who has never used their subway and doesn’t even know anyone who has.

But shit, Thousand Oaks to downtown is a 50 mile trip and you can do it by bus with only one change. In what scenario were you going to be walking that? “Impossible to get anywhere without a car” is simply not true.

I’d also point out that there’s a fundamental difference between having to own a car and having to rely on a mix of public transport and Uber/Lyft. Especially as more people WFH, it often just doesn’t make economic sense for singles or couples to own a car. I know plenty of people in LA (including retired older folk) who don’t have a commute and are perfectly happy spending $300/month on Ubers instead of having a car payment, insurance, gas, maintenance, etc. to worry about.

Families are a different story, and I eagerly await the anti-car crowd’s tale of how wonderful and easy it is for a parent to haul their little ones and all their groceries on public transport.

 

[DumbDude42]

Families are a different story, and I eagerly await the anti-car crowd’s tale of how wonderful and easy it is for a parent to haul their little ones and all their groceries on public transport.

yeah groceries are one of the biggest problem on public transport. you can only carry a relatively small amount in bags on your person, if you have a family to feed that means you'll be making trips to the store basically every single day, and those trips will take a long ass time if you go by bus.
meanwhile with a car, you go once a week and just load a ton of stuff into your car at once, and you're set. depending on the distance to the store, this can easily save you 3 to 4 hours of time every single week.

 

[John Andrews Stan]

yeah groceries are one of the biggest problem on public transport. you can only carry a relatively small amount in bags on your person, if you have a family to feed that means you'll be making trips to the store basically every single day, and those trips will take a long ass time if you go by bus.
meanwhile with a car, you go once a week and just load a ton of stuff into your car at once, and you're set. depending on the distance to the store, this can easily save you 3 to 4 hours of time every single week.

Again, this is where the likes of Uber really shine. You can get public transport to a store, stock up and get a car service home very easily. Do this one to three times a month and you’ll come out on top financially over making daily trips to the store. (Anyone who has time for that many shopping jaunts per week is probably not working that much.) There’s a case to be made for just ordering groceries online, and in some cases it’s worth the fees, tips, and higher prices. But many lower income people would probably rather do it themselves and avoid those.

Of course, in cities like NY and LA, where the politicians want to punish people for wrongthink, the most affordable stores (Walmart, Sam’s Club) are not allowed to operate anywhere near the poor people who need them most. (There’s a Walmart in Compton because Compton is a city run by and for blacks. Not so downtown, Fairfax, or any of the other areas where a Walmart would help the working poor put food on the table for much less money.)

Which is the problem with almost all of these urban planning freaks: They back such moves because they see the rule of law as a tool to reshape society and force people to do what they don’t want to do, for some imagined greater good. They think they’re part of some enlightened committee of intellectuals who can perfect the world through regulation if only given the chance. See Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies to find out why this isn’t about left versus right (Patrick Buchanan and Ralph Nader both hold fast to this fantasy) but about stasists versus dynamists. Stasists think innovation can be done tidily and thus needs to be regulated to the hilt. They should not feel welcome in polite society.

 

[Meriasek]

Today on German anti-car Twitter, some guy is saying the quiet part out loud. Got to it because the aforementioned Katja Diehl retweeted Michael Stein.

rsp-wn, to a picture of a tram going along a coastal route:
"Sounds nice and all, but have you ever tried carrying all the beach stuff for you family in that tram? You'll see how quickly you'll be outside with your beach tent and cooling bags and your kids and so on again, and then taking the car instead."
Michael Stein:
"A Picture Book for Lovers by Tucholsky is about a weekend trip to the countryside via train - that worked in 1912 very well without a car, why not today?
We'll have to say goodbye to a lot of habits; "Driving stuff around" will be one of them."

Basically he wants people to live like the early 20th century. I'll assume he knows that taking a fun little weekend trip was something only the rich could do, because that's exactly what people like him want. The masses simply shouldn't do all the stuff they're doing. They shouldn't travel, they shouldn't drive a car, they shouldn't eat non-local foods, they shouldn't have hot showers and so on. The german anti-car community is pretty radical in their environmentalism. They don't want things to be better for everyone. They want things to be much worse for everyone, although they think it's better, of course. They want radical deindustrialisation and basically a return to monke. Of course, most of them are either authors and activists, or otherwise dependent on gummint money, so they'll only care about industry when they realise who actually enables their lifestyles.

I really like this thread and think the German subsection of this clique has great potential since they're so radical and generally vile and stupid, but well, it's also German.

 

[Cyberpunk Panatela]

"Sounds nice and all, but have you ever tried carrying all the beach stuff for you family in that tram? You'll see how quickly you'll be outside with your beach tent and cooling bags and your kids and so on again, and then taking the car instead."
Michael Stein:
"A Picture Book for Lovers by Tucholsky is about a weekend trip to the countryside via train - that worked in 1912 very well without a car, why not today?

There was a lot of stuff you could do in trains in 1912 that you can't do today, especially if you were rich. For example: rent an entire compartment or even an entire carriage.

In fact, I'm pretty sure railroads in Europe still offered "specials" (British term, don't know what they were called on the Continent) back then - chartered personal trains to the destination of one's choice at whatever time desired. Of course, they cost a hell of a lot of money. Their other problem was that they had priority over almost everything else which caused snarling up of the rail network.

I know British Rail stopped offering these when World War 1 started.

On another point: For defenders of the neologisms this group comes up with (especially Strong Towns): Why is it necessary to make up this specialised vocabulary (which is used in place of technical terminology which already exists in the field of Town Planning, and may in some cases be misuse of existing definitions)?

In my opinion it just makes those who coined the neologisms look like cranks and those who quote them sound like members of a cult group or secret society. This isn't the best way to get taken seriously.

 

[John Andrews Stan]

Why is it necessary to make up this specialised vocabulary (which is used in place of technical terminology which already exists in the field of Town Planning, and may in some cases be misuse of existing definitions)?

Look at all the work James Lindsay and co. have done pertaining to CRT and the centrality of a special lexicon when it comes to these cranks. It’s a way to signal that you’re not in the out-group if you use the in-group’s terms. If you don’t, how fucking dare you?

 

[Cyberpunk Panatela]

Look at all the work James Lindsay and co. have done pertaining to CRT and the centrality of a special lexicon when it comes to these cranks. It’s a way to signal that you’re not in the out-group if you use the in-group’s terms. If you don’t, how fucking dare you?

I must admit I don't know Dr. Lindsay's work, but then again my electronics is bloody rusty and I last looked at vacuum-tube stuff at introductory university level.

However, this in-group speech is exactly what I was talking about. If these people are really interested in being in The Cult of the Choo-Choo Train with a vocabulary which is incomprehensible to everyone other than their fellow members, they should be taken as seriously on matters of town planning just as the Church of Scientology, with it's "clears", "thetans", "Xenu" and "Sea Org", is taken on astrophysics (or even worse, mental health).

That is, not at all.

 

[Markass the Worst]

You are but the crowd you keep. If NJB and Adam make a video denouncing r/fuckcars, we might change our opinion, but they have remained clandestinely silent for the moment, and whose userbase easily makes a good half or so of their viewerbase.

Right, I forgot to include this in the OP, but NJB more or less approves of the Tyre Extinguishers' "activism" methods:

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The only good thing I can say is that the last tweet says "I completely agree" (that it is "100% super shitty"), but that one phrase falls completely flat when in the rest of the tweets he says "This was inevitable", "This vandalism will escalate into violence as long as people continue to drive [SUVs]", "if governments continue their inaction, it will only get worse", etc. which all pin the blame on the people owning the cars (and governments) and not the people who, you know, are actually doing the violence.

Further, I have no idea why you would expect NJB of all people to denounce or even ignore extremist action when he has such a strong conviction that cars are bad that he and all other urbanists call road accidents "road violence". Once you've categorized something as literal violence in your viewpoint, is it not then morally justified (in your worldview) to use actual violence once the difference between real and imagined violence is erased in your mind? It's the same thing as extremist pro-lifers deciding to attack abortion doctors or abortion clinics, because they truly do see that abortion is murder and violence, and thus find it okay to use violence to prevent what they think is violence. Or trannies who truly believe that misgendering (which is only words and is at worst just verbal harassment) is literal violence, akin to stabbing someone with a knife or putting someone in jail, and thus find nothing wrong with physically attacking or imprisoning someone who used "he" to refer to a "she/her".

It all comes back to the Final Solution to the Car Question. I hate to make Nazi comparisons because obviously banning cars isn't as morally reprehensible as exterminating all the Jews. But come the fuck on, if you keep hearing complaints from people about how cars are bad and they keep finding all these reasons why cars are bad and they make several videos about the problems with cars and they don't denounce or even more-or-less implicitly associate with an entire subreddit dedicated to hating and banning cars, is it really that absurd to conclude "they must want cars banned?" For fucks sake, even NJB complains that there are too many cars in Amsterdam. Like it or not, urbanists trip over themselves trying to answer the Car Question, and for good reason - it's because they want to answer "yes" but don't want to give it away.

 

[John Andrews Stan]

Like it or not, urbanists trip over themselves trying to answer the Car Question, and for good reason - it's because they want to answer "yes" but don't want to give it away.

Bingo. NJB has earned his place against the wall.

 

[Lone Dogma]

Right, I forgot to include this in the OP, but NJB more or less approves of the Tyre Extinguishers' "activism" methods:

Of course the faggot does. Can people not enjoy trains without being speds like this cunt and his ilk?

 

[Becky McDonald]

Right, I forgot to include this in the OP, but NJB more or less approves of the Tyre Extinguishers' "activism" methods:

View attachment 3603892
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The only good thing I can say is that the last tweet says "I completely agree" (that it is "100% super shitty"), but that one phrase falls completely flat when in the rest of the tweets he says "This was inevitable", "This vandalism will escalate into violence as long as people continue to drive [SUVs]", "if governments continue their inaction, it will only get worse", etc. which all pin the blame on the people owning the cars (and governments) and not the people who, you know, are actually doing the violence.

Further, I have no idea why you would expect NJB of all people to denounce or even ignore extremist action when he has such a strong conviction that cars are bad that he and all other urbanists call road accidents "road violence". Once you've categorized something as literal violence in your viewpoint, is it not then morally justified (in your worldview) to use actual violence once the difference between real and imagined violence is erased in your mind? It's the same thing as extremist pro-lifers deciding to attack abortion doctors or abortion clinics, because they truly do see that abortion is murder and violence, and thus find it okay to use violence to prevent what they think is violence. Or trannies who truly believe that misgendering (which is only words and is at worst just verbal harassment) is literal violence, akin to stabbing someone with a knife or putting someone in jail, and thus find nothing wrong with physically attacking or imprisoning someone who used "he" to refer to a "she/her".

It all comes back to the Final Solution to the Car Question. I hate to make Nazi comparisons because obviously banning cars isn't as morally reprehensible as exterminating all the Jews. But come the fuck on, if you keep hearing complaints from people about how cars are bad and they keep finding all these reasons why cars are bad and they make several videos about the problems with cars and they don't denounce or even more-or-less implicitly associate with an entire subreddit dedicated to hating and banning cars, is it really that absurd to conclude "they must want cars banned?" For fucks sake, even NJB complains that there are too many cars in Amsterdam. Like it or not, urbanists trip over themselves trying to answer the Car Question, and for good reason - it's because they want to answer "yes" but don't want to give it away.

Extremely well said. At the core of all the hours of videos they've produced, all the sentiments they've expressed, all the times they've pretended to support something they'd otherwise have little interest in is for one purpose, and one purpose only: they hate the car, and it kills me that most of them can't simply flat-out admit it. They hate everything it represents. If they could, they'd travel back through time and try to strangle the likes of Henry Ford and Karl Benz with their noodly, soy-filled arms.

And it does not surprise me in the slightest that NJB does indeed endorse that sort of behaviour, but it does lower my personal image of him even further than it already was. Since I'm not huffing his ballsweat every hour of the day, I could not have known this. But of course, it's ultimately a strike for the "lolcow" bin.

Nothing about slashing tyres is "inevitable". Anyone who believes so is an extremist trying to excuse away the more primal monkey-brain parts of your noggin, and you want to force your way of life upon everyone else because you are a fascist tyrant at heart who cannot stand anyone living in a different manner to you.

 

[Gamercat]

Right, I forgot to include this in the OP, but NJB more or less approves of the Tyre Extinguishers' "activism" methods:

View attachment 3603892
Source (archive)
View attachment 3603891
Source (archive)
View attachment 3603890
Source (archive)

The only good thing I can say is that the last tweet says "I completely agree" (that it is "100% super shitty"), but that one phrase falls completely flat when in the rest of the tweets he says "This was inevitable", "This vandalism will escalate into violence as long as people continue to drive [SUVs]", "if governments continue their inaction, it will only get worse", etc. which all pin the blame on the people owning the cars (and governments) and not the people who, you know, are actually doing the violence.

Further, I have no idea why you would expect NJB of all people to denounce or even ignore extremist action when he has such a strong conviction that cars are bad that he and all other urbanists call road accidents "road violence". Once you've categorized something as literal violence in your viewpoint, is it not then morally justified (in your worldview) to use actual violence once the difference between real and imagined violence is erased in your mind? It's the same thing as extremist pro-lifers deciding to attack abortion doctors or abortion clinics, because they truly do see that abortion is murder and violence, and thus find it okay to use violence to prevent what they think is violence. Or trannies who truly believe that misgendering (which is only words and is at worst just verbal harassment) is literal violence, akin to stabbing someone with a knife or putting someone in jail, and thus find nothing wrong with physically attacking or imprisoning someone who used "he" to refer to a "she/her".

It all comes back to the Final Solution to the Car Question. I hate to make Nazi comparisons because obviously banning cars isn't as morally reprehensible as exterminating all the Jews. But come the fuck on, if you keep hearing complaints from people about how cars are bad and they keep finding all these reasons why cars are bad and they make several videos about the problems with cars and they don't denounce or even more-or-less implicitly associate with an entire subreddit dedicated to hating and banning cars, is it really that absurd to conclude "they must want cars banned?" For fucks sake, even NJB complains that there are too many cars in Amsterdam. Like it or not, urbanists trip over themselves trying to answer the Car Question, and for good reason - it's because they want to answer "yes" but don't want to give it away.

Christ all of this over fucking suv's SUV'S

 

[talk talk talk]

Thread still isn't funny. No cows.

 

[UmQasaan]

Thread still isn't funny. No cows.

Yeah it's pretty much a bunch of posters who are trying (and failing) to group NJB and Strong towns into the anti-car lunatics category. The thread would have been much more entertaining if it was just the r/fuckcars subreddit

 

[Chuck McGill]

Yeah it's pretty much a bunch of posters who are trying (and failing) to group NJB and Strong towns into the anti-car lunatics category. The thread would have been much more entertaining if it was just the r/fuckcars subreddit

Yeah, because of a little something called pattern recognition. We learned the hard way from feminists and SJWs that when they say "we don't want to ban X", they absolutely do want to ban X, they just need to keep the moderates at peace until they have the political clout to steamroll them. You don't want to be lumped in with the extremists of your movement I suggest you put in a bit more effort to distance yourself from them lest you be called a spineless faggot for being nominally against what they do but still benefitting from their extremism. Hell even if you don't believe in these things personally you are still helping to move the Overton window in the direction that they want. You are no better than normies that were sold on the idea that "gays and trannies just want to be left alone gais!" You may not have had the intention to pave the way for Drag Queen Story Hour but you absolutely did. It's a distinction without a difference.

 

[nine inch perfect drugs]

I watched a fair bunch of videos and read a high amount of posts written by these people and they seem to have a very retarded conception of history that is on par with the average cartoon about cavemen living with dinosaurs.
They actually believe that all modern cities were directly designed and built by car manufacturers lobbies.
I shit you not.

You can make a semi-convicing lie about that being true about the United States and its suburbs, but Europe, China... come the fuck on!

Cars weren't a common sight in my country until the 1960s and yet the claim cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao, Oviedo, León, etc... that exist since the dawn of time are designed the way they are because car manufacturers.

 

[John Andrews Stan]

come the fuck on!

Seriously. Having lived in major cities in the US, Europe and Asia, it’s unbelievable to me how many Americans who fancy themselves “urbanists” buy into this shit because they’ve never been anywhere else. There’s no shame in staying home, but don’t make like you have great understanding of global urban dynamics when the furthest you’ve traveled is from your Twitter couch to the fridge and back.

Nine times out of 10, the people ranting on these forums about how much better everywhere else is don’t even have passports. That’s pretty funny in theory, but in practice it’s just obnoxious and insufferable.