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

[LaxerBRO]

Yes, there is an easy compromise. Buy some land on the outskirts of the city with a bunch of likeminded individuals and build your dream car-free neighborhood there.

But you won't be happy and the first thing you will do is complain that you can't leave it and demand that the rest of the city pay for a transit system and transform their neighborhoods so that you can travel to their businesses and attractions.

You're acting like we've never seen communist incrementalism before. Plenty of well-meaning people have tried to compromise by proposing the construction of bike trails, pedestrian bridges, garages, etc. only to be rebuked by urbanists who complain that cars aren't being inconvenienced enough.

No one has any problem with a transit system that pays for itself, but people don't want to pay for something they don't need and they don't want traffic deliberately slowed down in an attempt to force people onto transit. Drivers are used to paying for their own infrastructure and don't understand why transit and cycling activists throw a fit when asked to pay for their infrastructure.

I don't understand why they can't build a mixed use community. The retort that it cannot be done due to funding is fallacious as it does not have to be your personal money. If such an idea has so much appeal, they private equity will jump at the chance to lend money for it to turn a profit.

They could even for the NotJustBikes LLC and these urbanists could invest portions their life savings for shares in the corporation. Additional funding can be provided by private equity or hedge funds.

I can envision it now. A mass transit hub is on the outskirts of a community a few square miles wide and inside no cars are allowed. Single family housing on lots do not exist and the only housing are rowhouses or mid-level, mid-density housing. You can have access roads for emergency and service vehicles with a nice greenbelt with segregated bike and pedestrian trails.

Now, when they try to turn other communities or portions of the city into car free areas, I get the feeling that they don't want to risk personal assets as they are afraid such communities will not work. Such they want to psychologically nudge / rope people into accepting their ideas of utopia by eliminating choice.

It's the same with the push for single payer healthcare. Private insurance and employer provided insurance must be banned as if the people have an alternative that can be better our shitty system will fail.

 

[quaawaa]

"subsidized" roads lol:

Not sure what the source of that graph is, but those are likely operating expenses. If capital costs were included the fare recovery ratio would go way down. By the way, drivers would be marked at 100% on that graph as they pay for all of their operating costs like tires and fuel.

 

[DumbDude43]

EASY? It's so easy that it's constantly happening everywhere... it's happening pretty much nowhere.

it's almost like not many people are actually interested in throwing away a hundred years of technological progress and go back to a 19th century lifestyle

what a crazy revelation, all the big brain redditors told me this would be super popular and in high demand!

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

I can envision it now. A mass transit hub is on the outskirts of a community a few square miles wide and inside no cars are allowed. Single family housing on lots do not exist and the only housing are rowhouses or mid-level, mid-density housing. You can have access roads for emergency and service vehicles with a nice greenbelt with segregated bike and pedestrian trails.

They'd reply "muh illegal to build it" - even though with a bit of effort and time you can do it (see: Disney World, which they themselves point out as an example). But that gives the lie to why they cannot do it - because only poor people use transit because they're fucking forced to. Anyone with money buys a car

Not sure what the source of that graph is, but those are likely operating expenses. If capital costs were included the fare recovery ratio would go way down.

yeah it's one of the PDFs I linked and most of the capital costs are paid for by gov't bonds, and those bonds are paid for by TRANSNET which was a tax https://www.keepsandiegomoving.com/transnet-about.aspx

 

[Markass the Worst]

I don't understand why they can't build a mixed use community. The retort that it cannot be done due to funding is fallacious as it does not have to be your personal money. If such an idea has so much appeal, they private equity will jump at the chance to lend money for it to turn a profit.

They could even for the NotJustBikes LLC and these urbanists could invest portions their life savings for shares in the corporation. Additional funding can be provided by private equity or hedge funds.

I can envision it now. A mass transit hub is on the outskirts of a community a few square miles wide and inside no cars are allowed. Single family housing on lots do not exist and the only housing are rowhouses or mid-level, mid-density housing. You can have access roads for emergency and service vehicles with a nice greenbelt with segregated bike and pedestrian trails.

There's actually a car-free neighborhood being planned/built in Tempe, Arizona called Culdesac. Apparently residents are moving in next year.


source (a)

I'd be interested to see how it pans out.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

There's actually a car-free neighborhood being planned/built in Tempe, Arizona called Culdesac. Apparently residents are moving in next year.

View attachment 4072473
source (a)

I'd be interested to see how it pans out.

cull de sac; e.g. cut off the balls. But nice, that's exactly what I want to see, and hell, good luck to them, I want it to succeed, then people who want it can go live there, and I'll continue to commute to work in a HEMTT M977

 

[quaawaa]

There's actually a car-free neighborhood being planned/built in Tempe, Arizona called Culdesac. Apparently residents are moving in next year.

View attachment 4072473
source (a)

I'd be interested to see how it pans out.

That's not a neighborhood.
It’s an off-campus college apartment complex that is ironically less walkable than other nearby complexes that have parking.

What the complex currently looks like (Street View is dated November 2022):

It is walkable to a number of great locations like a storage container facility, a UPS depot, auto parts stores, sheet metal fabs, used-car dealers, various trade shops, and a gun store. Just what your average car-free urbanist student loves! (The "neighborhood" is the brown rectangle).

It is 15 minutes away from campus by transit (though the train only comes once every 15 minutes), six minutes by car, 10 minutes by bike, and a half hour walk (though nobody sane walks in Phoenix when it is over 100 degrees out).

The apartments closer to campus have much better commercial neighbors for students like restaurants:

Note that the apartments in the screenshot mostly have parking and they make up more of a neighborhood than Culdesac does.

They don't mention their proximity to Arizona State University on their website anywhere (the only search results for "ASU" and "Arizona State University" are employee/resident introductions on their blog where people mention that they are attending/graduated from the school), but they do have quotes from three different urbanists editorials from major publications on their page:

New York Times Article (Archive)
Bloomberg Article (Archive)
Wall Street Journal Article (Archive)

The Bloomberg article doesn't mention ASU, the WSJ article only mentions it once in passing:

The site is next to a light rail that connects residents to a grocery store, Arizona State University, downtown Phoenix and the airport.

and the NYT article mentions that Tempe has a university but doesn't say make it clear that Culdesac is near it:

To be fair, Tempe, the home of Arizona State University, gets high marks for bike friendliness and has seen a recent boom in high-rise construction. But outside the campus area, it is very much a part of the region’s autoscape. Culdesac’s immediate neighbors include an R.V. park, a mechanic, a transmission shop and an auto-parts store, and nearby apartment complexes — the competition — are surrounded by parking lots that shimmer in the three-digit heat.

Silly NYT, the competition is surrounded by local business that students would actually patronize and has parking garages that are mostly in the shade.
They also imply that it is disconnected from the university:

Daniel Moreh, a software engineer in Oakland, Calif., isn’t even interested in Tempe itself. He’s heard nice things; he knows it has a university. The real appeal of Culdesac is the idea of being part of something new.

None of those puff pieces mention that Culdesac's tenants are likely to be university students.

To top it all off, it's not even car-free:

I'm guessing they built more than the minimum number of parking spots because they were unable to find any commercial tenants without them.

They also have an option to more than double the number of parking spaces without further approval should they discover that the car-free thing isn't working out:

Source is the City of Tempe's development review (Archive).

Culdesac is grifting money from gullible out-of-state urbanist investors who don't realize that they're investing in a very average college dorm and from naïve students who don't realize that they're paying more for less than the traditional apartment buildings offer.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

They'd reply "muh illegal to build it" - even though with a bit of effort and time you can do it (see: Disney World, which they themselves point out as an example). But that gives the lie to why they cannot do it - because only poor people use transit because they're fucking forced to. Anyone with money buys a car

It would be very hard to build anything close to Disney World these days, but then again, even "starting a business" is ridiculously expensive even when figuring in inflation. You read about the history of these restaurant chains and the down payment is like $8000 in today-money...a hefty amount but not a six-figure debt trap.

But like most of their shit, the "illegal to build" isn't actually true. As an example, my town has notoriously strict zoning rules, yet still attached townhomes, 'plexes, and the like still get built (as well as apartment complexes, which don't come up in "missing middle" discussions), and I wouldn't be surprised if the "illegal to build" rumors started out as referring to old tenement-style buildings that wouldn't pass current fire code.

That or it's a salve when development doesn't go their way. I have seen forum threads on developments on other sites go from smug YIMBYism to crying, coping, and seething when it gets announced that a redeveloped lot is going to be a one-story building with parking in the front.

 

[DavidS877]

Urbanists constantly demand more transit service because they want to leave their utopia, despite, on paper, it having everything they need within walking distance. The sane people eventually buy a car and use it to go to things outside their neighborhood (and some of them discover that they like the suburbs and move there for more space), but the urbanists will never do that.

I find this hilarious about people who move to Portland, OR to be 'car free' and 'experience the outdoors'. Yea, that's not going to happen. Sure there's a couple busses out of the city and you could take an Uber(but not get back, because there's no cell coverage and no drivers outside the city). But if you want to actually explore the outdoors around Portland you need a car or friends with a car, or a rental car. So much for your car free utopia.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

goddamn it I was going through the pictures and said "this looks like a fucking apartment building wtf" and turns out it was.

But if you want to actually explore the outdoors around Portland you need a car or friends with a car, or a rental car. So much for your car free utopia.

some of the urbanist ideas are really good even if impractical to apply to existing cities; greenbelts and such are wonderful - you SHOULD be able to travel from one side of a city to another in a block-wide park, and have things like central park or the boys de Bologna in paris. And you don't need to sacrifice cars on the altar of modernity to get them, either.

 

[LaxerBRO]

There's actually a car-free neighborhood being planned/built in Tempe, Arizona called Culdesac. Apparently residents are moving in next year.

View attachment 4072473
source (a)

I'd be interested to see how it pans out.

I scanned their website and it seems to only offer market level rents for apartments. It seems like an enclave for those with money instead of being mixed income. All that does is concentrate wealth which in progressive circles is a big sin.

Let's look at some data:

Estimated Rents for a two bedroom* unit in the Culdesac development costs about $1,000 for a studio to $2,200 for a three bedroom, however actual prices have not been released yet.

As Culdesac is a market rate development, I will use those for my analysis. A two bedroom unit coats $1,800 in Tempe. Such the yearly rent is $21,600. The median income in Arizona is $50,068 for Blacks in Arizona, such the cost for rent is 43.14% of the income for Blacks.



Now using data from the Brookings Institute we can see that when rents are 55% of income the label is "severe burden" such I will label 43% of income as moderately rent burden.

Just based on the rents and data I have presented it seems that this community will be excluding the wonderful BIPOC community of Tempe in favor of wealth Whites and Asians. So I will go ahead and concede that if you concentrate groups with wealthy in a small community, it could succeed.

*I am using a two bedroom rate as that's what is used on all those articles about housing is unaffordable for the poor's articles.

 

[quaawaa]

goddamn it I was going through the pictures and said "this looks like a fucking apartment building wtf" and turns out it was.

some of the urbanist ideas are really good even if impractical to apply to existing cities; greenbelts and such are wonderful - you SHOULD be able to travel from one side of a city to another in a block-wide park, and have things like central park or the boys de Bologna in paris. And you don't need to sacrifice cars on the altar of modernity to get them, either.

Central Park and Bois de Boulogne aren't greenbelts, they're just parks.
A greenbelt is another name for an urban growth boundary and is always at the edge of the city:

A green belt is a policy and land-use zone designation used in land-use planning to retain areas of largely undeveloped, wild, or agricultural land surrounding or neighboring urban areas. Similar concepts are greenways or green wedges, which have a linear character and may run through an urban area instead of around it. In essence, a green belt is an invisible line designating a border around a certain area, preventing development of the area and allowing wildlife to return and be established.

Essentially, it's a policy that makes building anything on rural land illegal.
Greenbelts/Urban Growth Boundaries and immigration are two of the major reasons for high housing prices. Immigration increases demand and greenbelts restrict supply. Supply staying constant and demand rising means higher prices.

 

[DavidS877]

Central Park and Bois de Boulogne aren't greenbelts, they're just parks.
A greenbelt is another name for an urban growth boundary and is always at the edge of the city:

Essentially, it's a policy that makes building anything on rural land illegal.
Greenbelts/Urban Growth Boundaries and immigration are two of the major reasons for high housing prices. Immigration increases demand and greenbelts restrict supply. Supply staying constant and demand rising means higher prices.

Having lived in Texas with no urban growth boundary and in Oregon with one. I'll take the UGB every time.
Texas used to have a fair bit of open space between Austin and San Antonio, circa 2000. Now it's 107% sprawl and "5 acre ranchettes" as far as the eye can see along IH-35. In Oregon, even along the freeways, there's still open spaces between cities, sure they're farms but they're not entirely strip malls and Buc-ee's, not that there's anything wrong with Buc-ee's.

This is one of the few things I agree with the anti-car-brigade on. Really it would be nice to upgrade the Portland UGB to a wall, with razor wire on top.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Central Park and Bois de Boulogne aren't greenbelts, they're just parks.
A greenbelt is another name for an urban growth boundary and is always at the edge of the city:

Essentially, it's a policy that makes building anything on rural land illegal and they have the side effect of increasing housing prices.

The bigger problem with greenbelts is it ends up becoming a giant homeless encampment. Seattle's is pretty notorious but there are probably others in other areas.

If you can't take care of it and it becomes an active hazard to the community around to it, you need to get rid of it.

 

[quaawaa]

Having lived in Texas with no urban growth boundary and in Oregon with one. I'll take the UGB every time.
Texas used to have a fair bit of open space between Austin and San Antonio, circa 2000. Now it's 107% sprawl and "5 acre ranchettes" as far as the eye can see along IH-35. In Oregon, even along the freeways, there's still open spaces between cities, sure they're farms but they're not entirely strip malls and Buc-ee's, not that there's anything wrong with Buc-ee's.

This is one of the few things I agree with the anti-car-brigade on. Really it would be nice to upgrade the Portland UGB to a wall, with razor wire on top.

Yes, but the average person a can afford a house in Texas, but they can't in Oregon. That's the trade off, but urbanists like to lie and say that their policies will make housing cheaper when they actually make it more expensive. It you have more people coming to/being born in your state you MUST build more houses or else prices will rise.

Portland needs a wall to keep the crazy in, but that won't lower their housing costs.

Texas also has a lot of empty land, even with the ribbon of development along the highway:


You're also falling for the same thing that inspired the Town and Country Act of 1947 in the UK. People had built houses along rail lines and travelers were horrified when they rode the train between cities and it looked like the entire country had been built up, even though behind the houses there was miles of undeveloped land.

Ribbon developments arose following Industrial Revolution, predominantly along railway lines, such as the ‘Metroland’ following London’s Metropolitan. They became more prevalent along roads radiating from towns in the 1920s and 1930s, but also along ridge lines, canals and coastlines. One reason for their popularity with developers was that services provided along the roads could be exploited, reducing the cost of development.

They became the focus of criticism for their inefficient use of resources and for their tendency to lead to urban sprawl, with towns and settlements that were once separate entities becoming more closely linked, or merging. They also made it more difficult to plan the expansion of settlements, and they hindered access to farmland.

The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 introduced green belt policies, intended in part, to curtail the spread of ribbon developments. Green belts establish a buffer zone between urban and rural land, separating town and country and preserving land for forestry, agriculture and wildlife where environmental conditions can be improved and conservation encouraged.

Source (Archive)

The bigger problem with greenbelts is it ends up becoming a giant homeless encampment. Seattle's is pretty notorious but there are probably others in other areas.

If you can't take care of it and it becomes an active hazard to the community around to it, you need to get rid of it.

That's not Seattle's greenbelt, that's again just a park. This is their greenbelt and it is rural land mostly free of homeless people:

Red line is the urban growth boundary, development is heavily restricted outside of it.
The result is untouched nature east of the city and high housing prices:

The problem is that urbanists don't tell people that there are actual costs to expanding the population and restricting development.
It's not "everything stays the same but now nature is protected", it's "we protect nature (and invite hundreds of thousands of immigrants in) and you/your kids will never be able to afford a house".

/r/fuckcars brainstorms ways to damage cars:



Break the law by illegally putting parking tickets on people's windows:

amazon_link (Archive)
vendor_link (Archive)



Be incredibly disgusting to own the carbrains:




"nondestructive":



Of course:

Source (Archive)

 

[Markass the Worst]

Of course:

It's very naive of that redditor to suggest therapy. Nowadays the industry is so jammed up with political lefty activist types people shop around for therapists that validate every delusions they have.

 

[talk talk talk]

The good thing is the majority of those posters are shut-ins who only fantasize about riding their bikes.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

This is what I've always suspected; the "everything walkable/transitable" boils down to "I want everything in the New York Metro available to me via the metro. It's too much. If you ever get them to actually sit down and define what they need to be walkable; you'll find tons of locations that would fit, but they'll have an excuse for each one.

other sperging; found details: https://afdc.energy.gov/conserve/public_transportation.html

I went ham doing an investigation on San Diego MTS which is actually a pretty well-run transit system it seems, they average out about 26 people per bus hour whatever that means so they may actually do better than average. see https://www.sdmts.com/sites/default...rmance_monitoring_report_route_statistics.pdf and https://www.sdmts.com/sites/default/files/attachments/mts_impact_study_final.pdf

key takeaways:

View attachment 4072014

transit is for working poors (hell just make that the entirety of the pro-transit argument; it's for poor fucks, sure sounds good give it to 'em).

this may be the worst graph I have ever seen outside of shittygraphs or whatever it is

View attachment 4072020

i'd ride the fuck out of this (even if "In today’s dollars, that would amount to $3.90 versus a typical current
one-way fare of $2.25 to $2.50."):

View attachment 4072026

"subsidized" roads lol:

View attachment 4072029

San Diego is pretty unique for a southern Californian city and its use of public transit. Unlike LA and SF, San Diego and its neighboring cities are for the most part all along the coast. There are some residential areas near it that service the military bases and on both ends of the city, you have two massive state universities flanking it. In addition to the two huge schools, there are a slew of smaller private universities and state schools peppered about in between. I think this unique geography and financial case allowed for such public transport to be developed. If I'm not mistaken, it's still being developed with new tram routes and bus routes being added. There's also a VA hospital network with several locations in the city. A huge government presence also really helps fund that expensive public transport network. San Diego also has a homeless problem and they tend to camp out near downtown like you see in most cities.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

San Diego is pretty unique for a southern Californian city and its use of public transit. Unlike LA and SF, San Diego and its neighboring cities are for the most part all along the coast. There are some residential areas near it that service the military bases and on both ends of the city, you have two massive state universities flanking it. In addition to the two huge schools, there are a slew of smaller private universities and state schools peppered about in between. I think this unique geography and financial case allowed for such public transport to be developed. If I'm not mistaken, it's still being developed with new tram routes and bus routes being added. There's also a VA hospital network with several locations in the city. A huge government presence also really helps fund that expensive public transport network. San Diego also has a homeless problem and they tend to camp out near downtown like you see in most cities.

Yeah the most successful cities in general are the ones constrained by geography in some way.

You’d think pubic transport on Hawaii would be impeccable but I’ve no idea if it is.

 

[Cool kitties club]

The fundamental issue these neo urban planning types hit is population density. Contrary to what they think most people don't want to live in commie block pods so they are willing to put up with cars if it means being able to live in a house or a less crowded apartment. Basically any one of their solutions would just be making everyone live in 2-4 mile bubbles centered on a large set of commie block pod houses with businesses around and then maybe train transport between theses centers which would quickly become crowded and miserable.