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

I remembered this video, and it seems exactly the type of thing that these "people" see to be running towards. Perfect efficiency, no cars or congestion, all the "needs" of the people "met" and all urban design has been meticulously planned and optimized.
living closer to work is desirable, all other things being equal. the big problem is that people change jobs, and so if you literally want to live on the same block you work on, you need to move anytime you change job.

what amazes me is that suburbs are a solution to the problem, not a cause - nobody cares if the office they work in is part of a massive commercial/industrial complex, dense as hell; and if it literally is nothing BUT offices, it won't have many problems either if done right.

And now you have a central core for people to travel to for work, and suddenly things like "park and train" become reasonable options (but I can just hear the howling about how "park and ride" is "car enabling" and "ontologically evil").

amusingly enough besides working from home, the only time I could have actually had a walk-to-work scenario that wasn't college was when work was in the suburbs; but i was not able to arse myself to move, mainly because I knew the work situation probably wouldn't last that long (turns out it was something on the order of ten years so maybe I should have)
 
living closer to work is desirable, all other things being equal. the big problem is that people change jobs, and so if you literally want to live on the same block you work on, you need to move anytime you change job.

what amazes me is that suburbs are a solution to the problem, not a cause - nobody cares if the office they work in is part of a massive commercial/industrial complex, dense as hell; and if it literally is nothing BUT offices, it won't have many problems either if done right.

And now you have a central core for people to travel to for work, and suddenly things like "park and train" become reasonable options (but I can just hear the howling about how "park and ride" is "car enabling" and "ontologically evil").

amusingly enough besides working from home, the only time I could have actually had a walk-to-work scenario that wasn't college was when work was in the suburbs; but i was not able to arse myself to move, mainly because I knew the work situation probably wouldn't last that long (turns out it was something on the order of ten years so maybe I should have)
With welding and trades, Suburbs are great. It's better to live in a general area and drive to the shop/work site, which IS subject to change, than live in a hive with basically no personal space and no room to practice your skills- hard to weld or practice your HVAC skills in a one room apartment, not so bad in a home garage.

Some jobs it's nice to be walkable, especially with a light load (provided I'm armed lol), but others like mine, I want a home base with nice luxuries and room to expand and shove things into (I have quite a few hobbies). Really it depends on what you're doing, which is what the fuckcars crowd doesn't get, they expect everyone to be Sims
 
It amuses me to no end that transit freaks will NOT ADMIT buses suck! They only really have exceptional value in things like travelling from a parking garage to the airport or similar or for large group excursions - and that later they get their value FROM the already existing car network (roads). And the bikers know but may not admit that bikes can BTFO buses depending on how often the busses have to stop, but bikes on buses or trains is a fuck of various magnitudes.

Trains/trams/subways can be workable because they don't have the disadvantage of buses, and if done right (rarely) they can even beat out cars. And guess where those work best? In older cities and those actually designed around them (see: Japan, older Europe, even some places in the USA). What kills them? Going to shit because of crime.

There's a cope that "BRT is for third world countries" but BRT makes sense in many routes because it's 100% compatible with regular streets and can integrate with the rest of the network. Trains can't do that, but there's a huge thought pattern that "Trains are nicer = more people will ride transit" though there's two problems with that:

The first is that is that assuming everything works, the people that will switch to trains from cars is going to be insignificant on a traffic reduction/growth pattern and will have to be a smashing success to actually be more cost-effective than widening freeways.

The second is assuming everything works. Most lines won't have a winning line-up of popular destinations and the second you let crackheads, homeless, and lunchtime rowdies take over, say good-bye to any bump that people get from riding the train.

There is a place for trains, buses, and highways, but the urbanists have their head up their ass and believe both that highways are bad and that transit crime is not a real problem.
 
There's a cope that "BRT is for third world countries" but BRT makes sense in many routes because it's 100% compatible with regular streets and can integrate with the rest of the network. Trains can't do that, but there's a huge thought pattern that "Trains are nicer = more people will ride transit" though there's two problems with that:

The first is that is that assuming everything works, the people that will switch to trains from cars is going to be insignificant on a traffic reduction/growth pattern and will have to be a smashing success to actually be more cost-effective than widening freeways.

The second is assuming everything works. Most lines won't have a winning line-up of popular destinations and the second you let crackheads, homeless, and lunchtime rowdies take over, say good-bye to any bump that people get from riding the train.

There is a place for trains, buses, and highways, but the urbanists have their head up their ass and believe both that highways are bad and that transit crime is not a real problem.
They don't get the system we have is pretty good, which is a mixed system, integrating all of them. Even then the public aspect has issues with crime and stops slowing it down unlike cars. They want to destroy what works because they saw it work in City Skylines
 
The first is that is that assuming everything works, the people that will switch to trains from cars is going to be insignificant on a traffic reduction/growth pattern and will have to be a smashing success to actually be more cost-effective than widening freeways.
here's the reality, plainly spoken: people, by and large, do NOT switch to transit. They may MOVE to an area that is transit enabled, and start using it, but once you're in your rut of commuting, you'd need a damn express train with hookers and blackjack direct to work to get you to stop moving.

BRT well done can be nice, but the vast majority of things sold as BRT are just buses being buses. The way I look at it; if the BRT route could be mostly or completely replaced with a train/tram someday, it's probably going to be ok.

and that brings me to the takeaway - STOP BUILDING TRANSIT to try to reduce car usage. You build transit to enable densification of existing/new areas; the people who move into those NEW DEVELOPMENTS may make the decision to use your BRT or train or whatever.
 
They don't get the system we have is pretty good, which is a mixed system, integrating all of them. Even then the public aspect has issues with crime and stops slowing it down unlike cars. They want to destroy what works because they saw it work in City Skylines

The problem is that for all their cherry-picking, they're ignoring all the case studies where what SHOULD be their paradise ends up as anything but. I mentioned a few pages ago that my city (the metro area at least, I live in the suburbs) has resisted widening its freeways for years yet that hasn't actually tempered sprawl at all, it just makes commute worse.

The big problem is that the inner city is densifying significantly but the price is now so expensive that bugmen are now fleeing for the suburbs. Meanwhile, the city's homeless population has exploded in recent years.

here's the reality, plainly spoken: people, by and large, do NOT switch to transit. They may MOVE to an area that is transit enabled, and start using it, but once you're in your rut of commuting, you'd need a damn express train with hookers and blackjack direct to work to get you to stop moving.

This is why when advocating for public transit they always use straw polls like "70% of people wish there were alternative methods of travel" (or whatever), but that doesn't mean even half of those people will willingly switch to public transit. (There is going to be a tiny percentage of latent demand, but you'll be lucky if it hits 5%). But again, that's assuming that you have a winning line-up of destinations and no troublemakers, which is rare (I'm referring to the Red Lines of Houston and Dallas LRTs here, but that was before COVID).

Usually, trains just end up cannibalizing bus lines.
 
The problem is that for all their cherry-picking, they're ignoring all the case studies where what SHOULD be their paradise ends up as anything but. I mentioned a few pages ago that my city (the metro area at least, I live in the suburbs) has resisted widening its freeways for years yet that hasn't actually tempered sprawl at all, it just makes commute worse.

The big problem is that the inner city is densifying significantly but the price is now so expensive that bugmen are now fleeing for the suburbs. Meanwhile, the city's homeless population has exploded in recent years.
If they actually acknowledged and fixed issues like widening roads it would demolish their argument, which is why they don't. They don't want to admit why people are leaving, why one more commieblock won't drop prices or bring the rich people back. The cities are going to rot and the bug men are the symptom really
 
I wonder how many of the Traffic Soyboys get triggered by this Alan Jackson country music classic (right behind it's 5 o clock somewhere) "When Daddy let me drive".

Man there must be dozens of country songs like that they hate. This one in particular comes to mind:


None of this dad teaching you to drive shit *cries internally*
If you didn't spend an evening as a teenager getting yelled at by your dad while wheeling your parents' Pontiac TransSport around an empty parking lot, did you really learn to drive?
 
there's a weird 'mass transit is needed to make dense urban cities work' and 'dense urban cities are needed to make mass transit work' loop that kind of hides the implied assumption that it's somehow good on its own. They claim to have a carbon/climate change argument why the bughives are more energy efficient or something, but I'm not sure how well researched it is. Every city I ever seen looks like it uses a hell more energy than a small town, and the earth handles a small town better than a city, too.
The density argument is probably true when you look at it from a per capita perspective. Their have been criticisms of this new urbanism not being as nice as life in the suburbs and the response has been to make due with less.

Basically:
You'll own nothing and be happy.

Now, the details are when the true horror lies. The way they can get their optimal society is to cram people into small spaces. I have already posted this somewhere but they calculated how much space a single person needs and that was around 100-400 sq feet. I will be generous and go right in the middle at 200 sq feet.

In their ideal society, you will live in your 200 sq foot cube, inside a complex about five to six stories tall with "third spaces" at the first floor, and with little to no car parking.

You don't need space to relax in your apartment because you have a third space (which will be used to reinforce correct social behavior), your small kitchen limiting you ability to cook can be mitigated by just eating out at the ethnic cafe around the corner, and you can get away from the evil Kiwi Farms and just socialize in the bus with the local thugs.

Personally, it just seems like an urbanist bugman lifestyle.
 
Wasn't a Pontiac but a rusty truck. Dad yelled Fuck at me once, which I consider a achievement lol
always surprised me that my dad would lose his shit on minor issues, but get the old stick shift in reverse and forget how to straighten out the wheel or push in the clutch and back through a shitty dying barbed wire fence on some ass-country road and no real complaints at all ha

ah we're just jealous; it's nothing like being taught by your wife's fifteenth boyfriend how to dodge the subwaystabbers

Now, the details are when the true horror lies. The way they can get their optimal society is to cram people into small spaces. I have already posted this somewhere but they calculated how much space a single person needs and that was around 100-400 sq feet. I will be generous and go right in the middle at 200 sq feet.
i think that's the sleight of hand; joe plumber in the suburbs lives in a size of house that is nearly unattainable in the bughive, so you're doing a bit of unfair comparison; just like I'm sure that Monrovia or the flavelas have a way lower carbon footprint per person than anything in America, but even the bugmen won't live like Africans to save the planet.
 
they saw it work in City Skylines
There's an exploit in that game where you can build a hellscape maze of walkable parks where pedestrians need to pass 20 toll booths before exiting and you not only make make infinite money from this taxes but you get the maximum levels of happiness because everyone is programmed to love their walkable parks that much. Thats the erotic fantasy that the reddit couch Urbanists masturbate to.
 
There's an exploit in that game where you can build a hellscape maze of walkable parks where pedestrians need to pass 20 toll booths before exiting and you not only make make infinite money from this taxes but you get the maximum levels of happiness because everyone is programmed to love their walkable parks that much. Thats the erotic fantasy that the reddit couch Urbanists masturbate to.
Paying tolls to walk thru a park somehow makes people happy?? Literally only bugmen could think of that.
 
There's an exploit in that game where you can build a hellscape maze of walkable parks where pedestrians need to pass 20 toll booths before exiting and you not only make make infinite money from this taxes but you get the maximum levels of happiness because everyone is programmed to love their walkable parks that much. Thats the erotic fantasy that the reddit couch Urbanists masturbate to.
"The ride never ends, and you are here forever", the exploit.
 
Paying tolls to walk thru a park somehow makes people happy?? Literally only bugmen could think of that.
exactly, When fuckcars posters die and go to heaven is basically this city. Where average pedestrian spends 2000$ and several hours walking each day just to go to work buts its ok because they have infinite money and they will always be happy because walking induces euphoric states.

"The ride never ends, and you are here forever", the exploit.
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living closer to work is desirable, all other things being equal. the big problem is that people change jobs, and so if you literally want to live on the same block you work on, you need to move anytime you change job.

what amazes me is that suburbs are a solution to the problem, not a cause - nobody cares if the office they work in is part of a massive commercial/industrial complex, dense as hell; and if it literally is nothing BUT offices, it won't have many problems either if done right.

And now you have a central core for people to travel to for work, and suddenly things like "park and train" become reasonable options (but I can just hear the howling about how "park and ride" is "car enabling" and "ontologically evil").

amusingly enough besides working from home, the only time I could have actually had a walk-to-work scenario that wasn't college was when work was in the suburbs; but i was not able to arse myself to move, mainly because I knew the work situation probably wouldn't last that long (turns out it was something on the order of ten years so maybe I should have)
Don't forget most people have families and that means multiple daily destinations like daycares, schools and work. Moving so that everyone can be within 10 minutes from where they need to be isn't exactly always possible.
 
There's an exploit in that game where you can build a hellscape maze of walkable parks where pedestrians need to pass 20 toll booths before exiting and you not only make make infinite money from this taxes but you get the maximum levels of happiness because everyone is programmed to love their walkable parks that much. Thats the erotic fantasy that the reddit couch Urbanists masturbate to.

Most of Cities Skylines' mechanics is just straight copying of SimCity's abstractions and simplifications without understanding or questioning why they're done that way or how they actually work, and then made it even stupider by combining theme parks and regular parks and thinking they have the same effect. (Living next to a theme park IRL must be an absolute nightmare in terms of noise and light pollution, and Walt Disney was right to build his parks in the middle of nowhere).
 
Paying tolls to walk thru a park somehow makes people happy?? Literally only bugmen could think of that.
It abuses the fact that the simulation doesn’t check cost when routing, and sims don’t simulate money, and they get a happy thought from entering a park, which can have an entry fee.

It’s as realistic a way to build cities as using dwarf fortress for mental hospital design. A good enough dining room would FIX San Francisco I’m telling you!
 
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