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

[MS Paint Gigachad]

To be fair you either look like a Homeless guy or a complete and utter retard pushing one of those around.

Would you look any smarter pushing a LAUNDRY BASKET ON A SKATEBOARD?

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Maybe this post?

I don't know much about Urban3 specifically, but the two major issues that urbanists make with their financial analyses are that they never look at city budgets to find out what the actual costs are and that despite constantly preaching that we need to "build cities for people, not cars", they don't realize that people pay taxes, not buildings. They live in an made up world where low-density infrastructure costs way more than it actually does and where high density infrastructure is cheaper due to the power of division (ignoring issues like the complexities of building in a dense environment and corruption). They're also very evasive as to what a subsidy is; typically they'll claim that cars and suburbs have enormous amounts of untaxed "externalities" while handwaving away explicit transit subsidies and developer incentives as being necessary for the public good. Property taxes on office buildings are a "subsidy" for city centers paid for by suburban commuters who contribute money but don't consume any services; I've never seen an urbanist mention them.

City centers and their suburbs are so intertwined I doubt it's possible to accurately figure out who is subsidizing who, but it's likely that regardless of density, middle-class and above areas are self-funding and subsidize poorer areas due to the progressive nature of the tax system.

The "suburb/city" paradigm is often hand-waved away, because in most situations, the suburbs are completely different municipalities than "the city" and "the suburbs" is a constantly moving target. Are "the suburbs" stuff that was built in the 1970s but now completely surrounded by development? Does a suburb stop being a suburb when "enough" higher-density buildings are built? The Woodlands (Houston), for instance, might be a "suburb" and was definitely originally so but now has major employers in the area like a massive ExxonMobil campus.

 

[DavidS877]

Another interesting thing is to watch how urbanists behave when confronted with the fact that remote work is infinitely more environmentally friendly than commuting to work in an office building by transit. They get as squirrely as a climate change cultist does when asked why we can't build more nuclear power plants and keep our comfy lifestyles.
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Source (Archive)

All of their environmental/financial/social/etc. arguments are post hoc and not made in good faith. They want you to live in the pod and they will say anything to try and convince you to do so and they won't accept you working around the "issues" that they point out.

These people always assume that everyone lives alone, turns off their heat or AC entirely during the day, etc. If you have roommates on different shifts, kids, a spouse, etc, you're using most of the same power anyway. Very few people turn off the heat or AC when they're not home, they just change the temp so it can recover quickly when they do get home. Your computer will use the same power at the office as at home, you don't turn off your home Internet when you're not home.(etc etc etc etc)

I would be very surprised if working from home was not an overall win for energy usage. It certainly is an absolute win for my quality of life.

 

[TheGoodNamesHaveBeenTaken]

I liked "everyone making their own lunch individually uses more energy".
So do most places have school style cafeterias that extrude the exact same amount of lunch on to everyone's plate in a hyper efficient manor?

No place that I ever worked did.
Some people brown bagged it, most people drove someplace and bought somthing from a drive up.
Making somthing in my own kitchen would be way more efficient, cheaper and possibly healthier.
I have never had a job that was compatible with working from home but I would think it would be a huge win for anyone who can do it.

The only downside I see is the world is full of people who barely get any work done at the office.
How productive are they going to be at home?

 

[Lobster Cult High Priest]

The only downside I see is the world is full of people who barely get any work done at the office.
How productive are they going to be at home?

Not to mention how unsocialized someone is if they work from home and they don't have a tight circle of friends.

 

[DavidS877]

Not to mention how unsocialized someone is if they work from home and they don't have a tight circle of friends.

Luckily I have plenty of friends. I just wish they would SHUT UP from time to time... ok, they may actually be squirrels.

There's the people who need interaction to do work, they do less well working from home. Then there are the people who don't get any work done at the office due to the constant interruptions.

I'm somewhere in the middle. In return from working from home I have no problems when I'm needed for a late meeting with someone in Asia or something else, since in return I can duck out and go to the store or go for a walk when it's been an annoying day.

The major downside is that managers who "manage by wandering around" don't do well. And those same managers often barely know who is the dead weight when you are in the office are even worse at keeping things running well when working from home. So, it does require more intelligent managers... an oxymoron I know.

 

[Pedophobe]

Do these people not realize suburbs can and do have mass transit services?

 

[Epic Fail Man]

Do these people not realize suburbs can and do have mass transit services?

They are pretty shit though. Usually a bus line comes every hour, and are widely inconsistent.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Car-brained infrastructure from before the fin du siècle. I see so many stroads, Paris must be going bankrupt about now.
re telecomuting and walking or biking we can actually calculate this out, but ill do that tomorrow

 

[Idiot Asshole]

At first I thought this was a troll, but post history makes them look serious.
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Dude literally called Strong Towns the Bible.
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Pretty much any town with a population of 5-20,000 is going to have a large, possibly multi-lane road running down the middle of it. It will be the highway the town was originally built on, most likely within spitting distance of the railway the highway was built to run alongside, and have been widened over time as population increase mean an increased demand from both locals (who regularly go to the shops that will inevitably have been built along the main street for ease of access) and outsiders (who are passing through). And a lot of the time those main streets would have been relatively wide even before the advent of cars, because they're in the middle of nowhere and have literal space for miles.

Retard inner-city bugman discovers country towns designed in the 1800s don't resemble the Kowloon Walled City and blames cars. Many such cases!

 

[quaawaa]

Has anyone done a breakdown on why Urban3 is misleading? Genuinely curious.

Strong Towns' latest article (archive) is perfect for illustrating the flaws with their analyses:

As reported by The Globe and Mail, residents spent a total of $181 million at curbside patios within 13 weeks of summer in 2021. If those spaces had remained dedicated to parking, only $3.7 million would have been reaped during the same time period.

Hmmm...sounds like it's a no-brainer financial decision to remove parking spots and replace them with patio space. Those business owners who were opposed to losing their parking spaces sure look stupid now. I wonder how they computed that stat though:

Researchers for an association of local business improvement areas estimated that customers spent $181-million in the repurposed parking spaces in the summer of 2021. The same spaces would have generated $3.7-million in parking revenue, according to the local parking authority

Oh, so they compared apples and oranges. The correct figure to compare to is the amount of money that people who drove to the restaurant spent, not the amount of money that the government collected from parking fees.

The other problem with that study is that it was during covid and many restaurants were forced to reduce the number of indoor tables for "social distancing", meaning that having extra outdoor tables is just offsetting the loss of having their inside tables closed. That's shown by the lobbyist graph linked in the article:

This is what the CaféTO tables look like:

Since when can a handful of patio tables produce more revenue than an entire building's worth of tables?

 

[OutInTheRain]

I don't stop heating my home, when I'm not at home. There is this thing called WINTER and pipes can freeze and burst. Especially if you're in one of the many places in North America that becomes a frozen wasteland. Now, programmable thermostats are a thing, however must people don't bother with them. It's probably much more efficient to keep a home at a steady temperature, rather than let it cool down, and then have the furnace run for hours to get it back to something reasonable.

But this is all just cope by these people, to force everyone into the superior and holy bugman future.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I don't stop heating my home, when I'm not at home. There is this thing called WINTER and pipes can freeze and burst. Especially if you're in one of the many places in North America that becomes a frozen wasteland. Now, programmable thermostats are a thing, however must people don't bother with them. It's probably much more efficient to keep a home at a steady temperature, rather than let it cool down, and then have the furnace run for hours to get it back to something reasonable.

But this is all just cope by these people, to force everyone into the superior and holy bugman future.

Even if you have a physical dial, it's more efficient to crank it up a few degrees or down a few degrees while away. In a southern summer, when leaving on a vacation, NEVER turn the thermostat just off because it will cost a fortune to get the house cooled again (and promotes mold growth).

Pretty much any town with a population of 5-20,000 is going to have a large, possibly multi-lane road running down the middle of it. It will be the highway the town was originally built on, most likely within spitting distance of the railway the highway was built to run alongside, and have been widened over time as population increase mean an increased demand from both locals (who regularly go to the shops that will inevitably have been built along the main street for ease of access) and outsiders (who are passing through). And a lot of the time those main streets would have been relatively wide even before the advent of cars, because they're in the middle of nowhere and have literal space for miles.

Retard inner-city bugman discovers country towns designed in the 1800s don't resemble the Kowloon Walled City and blames cars. Many such cases!

"Main streets", with the downtown they supposedly cherish, are basically the same thing as "stroads". In almost any situation for North American numbered highways, there's usually a main business route that goes through town, has businesses along it, and has been there for at least a hundred years, and a freeway bypassing most of it. But apparently, both of these things are bad!

Appeasing them with wide sidewalks as they do here in greater Austin is not going to impress them...so why do it, really?

 

[Chuck McGill]

/r/fuckcars discusses whether or not bike cops are better than car cops. They are divided between people who believe that bikes automatically make people better behaved and antifa who mindlessly hate all cops.
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Spoiler: Friendly, Non-Intimidating European Police

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Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of ACAB people:
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Spoiler: More antifa sperging

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Source (Archive)

I can guarantee you if they actually did this these people will complain about "fascists marching up and down their streets scaring beautiful BIPOCs." This is just like the raised pedestrian bridge debate. If you do nothing they'll whine, if you do what they want they'll whine for a different reason. Even if I accepted fuckcars' unflattering caricature of drivers at face value, they would still be preferable to deal with because they're at least generally consistent in what they want.

 

[2lolis1cup]

This isn't technically from notjustbikes, but it might as well be. It's from an "engineer" that reddit and youtube loves to promote. His insights into how we would fare with no electricity is infuriating to say the least. Just like the redditors for /r/fuckcars this guy believes everybody is as stupid as he is and cars are not a great asset.

If you don't want to watch It's basically cars no go in black out since all stations and fuel suppliers in general just stop working.

his channel if you want to subject yourself

https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel

 

[Chuck McGill]

This isn't technically from notjustbikes, but it might as well be. It's from an "engineer" that reddit and youtube loves to promote. His insights into how we would fare with no electricity is infuriating to say the least. Just like the redditors for /r/fuckcars this guy believes everybody is as stupid as he is and cars are not a great asset.

If you don't want to watch It's basically cars no go in black out since all stations and fuel suppliers in general just stop working.
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his channel if you want to subject yourself

https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel

More like (((engineer)))

 

[Amber the Hedgehog]

This isn't technically from notjustbikes, but it might as well be. It's from an "engineer" that reddit and youtube loves to promote. His insights into how we would fare with no electricity is infuriating to say the least. Just like the redditors for /r/fuckcars this guy believes everybody is as stupid as he is and cars are not a great asset.

If you don't want to watch It's basically cars no go in black out since all stations and fuel suppliers in general just stop working.
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his channel if you want to subject yourself

https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel

Wow this guy is dumb.

First of all we know from wars that if a society goes really down somewhere it goes down fast. It's two or three day process at most and then we are savages. Neat.

But otherhand if you have otherwise peaceful time and just have massive critical failures people don't just get frozen. They get working, both as individuals at home and co-operating at work and wider society. Getting some power to those compicated automatic systems is actually really easy as even multiple computers don't take that much power and can be connected to a generator in minutes with basic cables. But let's assume that for reason you can't, that's why the manual override systems exist and are regularly trained for. Factories are really expensive to stop and get running so they are build be able to function despite something important being broken somewhere because redundancy tends to cheaper that stopping to fix stuff.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Car-brained infrastructure from before the fin du siècle. I see so many stroads, Paris must be going bankrupt about now.
re telecommuting and walking or biking we can actually calculate this out, but ill do that tomorrow

Ok using this figure of .015 kWh per GB of data we can compare, using wolfram alpha it takes 87kcals to walk 1 mile (1.6 km for you eurocucks) thats 6x the energy it takes to send a gigabyte through the tubes, walking is awfully inefficient so lets compare biking , 45 kcals per mile biked, thats 3x the energy it takes to send a gigabyte through the tubes. Now how much extra data does wfh'ing use compared to office work? The data sucks ass, but here's a rough number 8-10 GB per month, so assuming your office is only a mile away you need to walk/bike 38-44 miles a month, because you have to get back home. So wfh is more efficient unless you live in Kowloon, now of course this doesn't include heating and cooling energy costs nor shit like zoom but it also doesn't account for the amount of data you would use if you worked in an office anyways plus heating and cooling the office, but at a base level the intuition that its more efficient to inconvenience a few electrons than haul your carcass around is correct.

 

[quaawaa]

Jason defends an office park centered around a highway purely because it is in the Netherlands:



Dallas Central Expressway for comparison:




Source (Archive)

Great idea, though unusual coming from an urbanist. Let's look at these two areas from street level to see what people actually experience.

Here's Zuidas:

"You don't even notice that the highway is there":


And here's Dallas:

Crossing the highway:

Looks like the Dutch need some tips from the Americans on how to design pleasant cities.

Also of note, the American highway is 330 ft wide including exits, and the Dutch highway is 920 ft wide with exits and 412 ft without.

Spoiler

I did cherry-pick photos, here are some more representative pictures of Zuidas:

If only Jason would be honest and actually visit places before criticizing them instead of hating them based off of aerial pictures and statistics...

 

[lolwatagain]

They are pretty shit though. Usually a bus line comes every hour, and are widely inconsistent.

So it's just like the big city bus lines, only without the stale piss smell.