Jason's latest video is out. It's him angrily complaining about the "US is too big to be built like the Netherlands" argument:
The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities
He seems to care a lot about the US for someone who has supposedly written it off as a lost cause.
The video starts off with a massive self-own where he shows that the entire country of the Netherlands is about the same size as the Seattle-Tacoma Metro area:
Next, Jason argues that because 45% of trips are less than three miles, they can easily be replaced by walking or biking.:
What he doesn't seem to realize is that the short average trip distance disproves his argument that sprawl causes people to have to travel long distances to run errands. All urbanists should have to do to be happy is bike/walk the totally reasonable (Jason's words, not mine) < 3 miles and shut up and let everyone else enjoy their houses and cars.
Jason claims the average commuting distance in the US is about 20 miles.
He neglects to mention that the average American commute time is
27.6 minutes (archive).
Meanwhile in the Netherlands:
Source (Archive)
Under urbanist logic, it's a bad thing to be able to have a short commute without living next door to work.
By the way, unsurprisingly, Jason's average American commuting distance is wrong:
The median commute of top state, Maine, is 9.8 miles, which is 72% longer than the 5.7 mile median commute in Wyoming.
Source (Archive)
He spends some time talking about how US cities used to be built around railroad lines and had streetcar tracks and how in the 1800s you could take a train anywhere:
He has no explanation for how airplanes outcompeted passenger rail for long distance travel or how buses replaced streetcars.
He then shows this map of possible high-speed rail routes for the US despite having spent the rest of the video talking about how only intra-city travel matters when talking about the size of countries:
Ironically, this map shows exactly why rail is a terrible idea compared to airport/interstates. Who wants to travel from Phoenix to Vegas by taking a detour in the wrong direction through Los Angeles? His map shows that someone wanting to travel from Pittsburg to Boston would have to stop in DC (wrong direction), Philly, and NYC. The only way to fix this would be to spend hundreds of trillions building HSR rail lines between every pair of cities (and there's a lot more cities than just the 20 shown in the map) or we could just use planes/cars instead.
He cited the example of Roman sidewalks that people have shared in this thread as an example of walkable cities existing for millennia:
Why did they need sidewalks Jason, unless there were car
ts driving in the road?
He then hilariously shows a clip of a massive tram with one passenger:
in that car, there's a handful of other passengers in one of the other cars. Still an inefficient use of space
and of a pedestrian blocked from crossing the street because the tram didn't yield to him:
So much for efficient transportation or walkability.
He then asks that if Netherlands is small enough for public transit and bike lanes, then why don't other similarly sized places have similar amounts of public transit and bike lanes.
Is he stupid? How does he not know about population density?
He then claims that Americans are so dumb that when a store goes out of business they just leave the building to rot instead of redeveloping it into a dense walkable neighborhood:
No Jason, the reason why that mall hasn't been redeveloped is because the city that it's in has a poor economy and therefore there is no demand to redevelop it.
He then claims, without evidence, that instead of redevelopment, new big box stores are built on empty land which causes things to be too spread out for public transit. But remember, at the beginning of the video, Jason claimed that 45% of American vehicular trips are less than three miles in length and therefore could be replaced with walking/biking trips. Which is it? You can't have it both ways.
He then says people don't cycle because it's too dangerous to bike due to all the cars while showing a road with a massive trail next to it:
His editor has to be trolling him. No one can be this dumb.
He then complains about a park-and-ride lot in Oakville, Ontario, Canada that allows thousands of suburban commuters to commute into downtown Toronto by train instead of driving all the way in:
Jason, the alternative to that lot isn't a bunch of apartment buildings, it's everyone who commutes by rail either driving in, working from home, or working at an office in a suburb instead of downtown. The former is bad for your anti-car crusade, and the latter two are bad for the economic health of the city core (but are good for the suburbs).
Also, one thing I've noticed about Jason's videos is that clips of "bad" cities have their saturation reduced while clips of "good" cities are in HDR. This has the effect of making the "bad" cities look more depressing and the "good" cities look warmer. Look at how desaturated the above picture is and compare it to Google's version:
He complains about Ontario "destroying" 175 acres of land per day in order to build more houses.
Canada has a declining native population. It only needs new houses due to the million+ immigrants it imports each year. I haven't heard Jason advocate against immigration to prevent sprawl. He's also full of crap because the GTA has a greenbelt that bans nearly all suburban construction and its cites have built an enormous number of condo and apartment buildings with little effect on housing prices due to the sheer amount of immigration.
He then shows a clip of an tram in a "good city". Shortly before doing this, he declared that all of the US looks like this:
That isn't just any tram, it's a
Houston METROrail tram.
Google Maps of the location in the clip.
The second-to-last clip of the video shows a bunch of cyclists in an American city biking in the road instead of using the perfectly good bike lane:
His editor has to be trolling him.
Some YouTube comments:
Apparently YouTube highlights paypig comments:
Jason is also still using reddit to promote his videos:
Source (Archive)
So much for his boycott.
