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

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

Reading this made me realize the outside temp and the temperature inside my car are similar enough that I can just turn the car off.

This is literally the most good fuckcars has ever done.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

"Devoid of life because it prioritizes cars over pedestrians" is a shockingly bad take, even for Reddit standards. So I guess all those bustling strip malls with big parking lots in suburbia are successful because they prioritize pedestrians?

 

[teriyakiburns]

They don't use the Rx symbol in Euroland? It's practically a symbol for any pharmacy.

Rx is generally limited to North America. Over here, the typical symbol for pharmacies and prescriptions is a green cross, sometimes with a bowl of hygeia interposed, but usually just by itself.

 

[Yamamura]

This begs a question--why are urbanists always freaking out about space and size? It's true that city limits have finite space, if you want to remain within, say, Chicago's city limits, most of that has developed. But the Chicago area still grows out.

But when you go from "no, stalker child, you shouldn't have free parking" to "no, stalker child, you shouldn't have a toilet in your apartment that isn't shared with others" that has to be pathological, right?

I always thought of it being related to a combination of autism and efficiency maxing.

"Devoid of life because it prioritizes cars over pedestrians" is a shockingly bad take, even for Reddit standards. So I guess all those bustling strip malls with big parking lots in suburbia are successful because they prioritize pedestrians?

Their take on anything entirely depends on whether or not cars are involved somewhere in the equation.

no cars + successful businesses = point in favor of urbanism
having cars + successful businesses = bad
no cars + unsuccessful businesses = car brains made it fail

I want to say it's similar to the "real communism hasn't been tried before" sentiment. Except whatever their version of it is.

 

[Atypical Dog]

Filipino /r/fuckcars user is mad that no one wants to walk outside in the heat:

Humid 30+ deg C (temperature, not heat index, which is usually around 38 C as in the reddit screencap). is a slow and insidious killer, but also a wall of heat that nobody wants to deal with and get sweaty. Here, have some weather:

https://www.weather-atlas.com/en/philippines/iloilo-city

30 C temperature on a cloudy/thunderstorm day and 42 C Heat Index. Not walking weather - most outdoor venues here are only alive at night for a reason.

@Atypical Dog , you live in the Philippines, right?

Yep, not from that area though. Still, I can provide some context.

Iloilo City is one of the richest and densest cities in the country (outside of the big 3 of Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, and Metro Davao, the three economic and administrative centers), born of sugar wealth in the Negros Island and Western Visayas regions, which used to export the world's sugar. The city's main use as an export port that naturally creates giga density around the port (if you zoom out from the linked streetview, you can see that it's basically a big concrete island in a sea of green and blue). Iloilo is thus renowned in the Philippines for excellent public transportation infrastructure, partly because they have a lot fewer people than everyone else, but also because they truly do put a lot more emphasis on it.

Basically from what I've heard, this guy lives in the most urbanist city in the Philippines, and people still deal with traffic hell on top of a bulked-out transport network (with basically everything but light rail). As a relatively recent boom town thanks to business process outsourcing (think call centers) and playing host to a central business district in Visayas, it's basically the exact situation where urbanism makes sense, which explains his frustration.

Though I challenge them to take an hour's walk outside at noon with a bottle of warm water and no umbrella/hat with a meeting right after.

Articles:
Iloilo builds active transport and biking facilities.
Governor defends need for modern transportation infrastructure.
Someone's blog for jeepney routes.
JICA traffic report.

Reddit:
Horrible traffic etiquette (literally every city in the PH has this so take with grain of salt.)
Someone pulled out the checkbook argument against urbanism (wait, rails cost money!?)

Reading this made me realize the outside temp and the temperature inside my car are similar enough that I can just turn the car off.

This is literally the most good fuckcars has ever done.

Probably even better for you because there's a lot more airflow.

"Devoid of life because it prioritizes cars over pedestrians" is a shockingly bad take, even for Reddit standards. So I guess all those bustling strip malls with big parking lots in suburbia are successful because they prioritize pedestrians?

The pedestrians that have to walk from their gated community to the mall along a main thoroughfare? Sure chief, those people with cars and used to air-conditioned offices will walk.

tl;dr: fuckcars user better be willing to get sticky and sweaty for his beliefs. I get looked like like a weirdo for walking a kilometer to the train station and taking rail into Makati because I don't want to count on parking in a crowded CBD. I get sweaty for it, but wherever I'm going has the aircon to make up for it.

 

[TowinKarz]

One of the things they teach the cops is that it is very hard to stop car with bullet. You get the fuck out of the way and hide behind something big and huge.

It's really a bizarre world we live in....

A cop mag-dumping a guy in a car who has already refused to pull over and then drives INTO his marked police vehicle in an effort to evade capture? EXCESSIVE MURDEROUS FORCE! HE WASN'T A THREAT, HE HAD NO WEPON! HE WAS JUST SITTING IN HIS CAR!!!!


A guy deciding to threaten a person just sitting in traffic? WAH! HE WAS BEHIND THE WHEEL OF A TWO TON MURDER MACHINE THAT COULD'VE KILLED ME!!!!

I was curious so I did check Amtrak's prohibited items list in compared to the litany of items that the TSA has issue with. You'd think Amtrak would be much more permissive since you're not flying at 20,000 feet and trains are a rare terror target, but they're actually almost restrictive as TSA. Sharp items aren't allowed even in checked baggage and there's an oddly specific ban on seafood for Amtrak. (Comparatively, TSA will let you put a live lobster in checked baggage).

What technology doesn't obsolete? Regulations and fear of litigation will finish off.

The biggest draw to driving cross-country might just be that nobody will force you to unload and screen your baggage at every state line.

The cost for a one way trip is $650 when adjusted for inflation for a coach class seat. The cheapest first class seat on the best domestic airline is $443 for 11/5.

Rail is a great way to travel if you cannot fly or just want to enjoy the journey.

This is the reason that passenger rail in the US was sick in the 60's, on it's deathbed in the 70's and alive today only through massive Federal grants on all but maybe 3 Amtrak routes that actually turn a profit.

Once commercial air travel became fast and safe enough? The trains were all doomed by the basic economics.

In fact, only mail contracts kept most of those trains limping into the 70's in the first place, once they ran out and had to be renegotiated? The railroads lost them all to trucks. Ironically, containerized transport would bring a lot of that traffic back in the 80's and 90's, (train from port to distribution hub, truck for local and last-mile delivery) but by then it was too late.

Without mail/freight services? Passenger rail would've been dead by 1957..... the train has been obsolete for practical coast-to-coast travel in the US for a lot longer than any of the mass transit people want to admit.

HSR will not fix this, but will probably waste billions trying.

 

[Apple Porcupine]

Train... bad?

This is the level of entitlement Jason and urbanists at large project onto drivers: "you need to get me where I want to go at the expense of food, construction materials, and anything else that the people at large might want to consume." And if that's not the attitude they'd unironically need to ask for one more line bro, specific to passengers, which is infeasible from a profit perspective because planes have won that war.

Source, Archive

 

[The Grimace]

Shared bathrooms are just like public transit, when given the option people will always choose to eschew it in favor of something more private.

And furthermore, like public transit (in America anyway), it's gonna be run down, filthy, and disgusting.

 

[LaxerBRO]

Train... bad?

View attachment 6488043

This is the level of entitlement Jason and urbanists at large project onto drivers: "you need to get me where I want to go at the expense of food, construction materials, and anything else that the people at large might want to consume." And if that's not the attitude they'd unironically need to ask for one more line bro, specific to passengers, which is infeasible from a profit perspective because planes have won that war.

Source, Archive

Exactly.

The reason why the law is under enforced is because enforcing such a law fucks with supply chains. I don't understand what these fuckcars types don't have the ability to tie this shit all together.

If you asked these fuckers about the rail strike and if rail staff are overworked, then they would probably agree with that.

Well, guess what running shorter trains results in?

More train that will put greater demands on the staff of freight railroads. Getting all the staff and equipment ready for more journeys will be a pain in the ass.

 

[Lady Bizness]

After 5 years paying attention to this shit as I have watched my community be distorted, I have come to the conclusion that the venn diagram of urbanists and fuckcars people is nearly a circle, and these people do not love nature.
I'm sorry, they're putting in another five over whatever in an area that was unbuildable due to environmental impacts.
Can someone tell me who the actual environmentalists are now? I'm not talking climate hand-wringers. It seems the only people who care are hunters, who tend to be conservative, but outside of them most conservatives want to dismantle national parks for resource extraction.
I just want to preserve some nigger-free spaces, please.

 

[DavidS877]

I just want to preserve some nigger-free spaces, please.

Oregon has a law which says cities must draw a line around their city for all expected growth in the next 20 years, the urban growth boundary. Inside the line can be annexed and get city services when built. Outside is subject to significant development restrictions, typically.

Oddly, land inside the line costs more since it can be built on. Periodically the whiners come through and go "We should abolish the urban growth boundary to make housing cheaper." and also "We love Oregon and all the open spaces."

These people are obviously retarded. And the cost of land is usually one of the lower parts of the price. What the developers don't want is dealing with all the city bullshit and fees. They want the Texas model with "5 acre ranchettes" as far as the eye can see with barely any city services or fees needed.

I don't know where this rant was going, but it's funny to me that they hate the Texas model and then say in the same breath they want to use it everywhere else. But this time it will be dense housing of course. How about some dense infill in the fucking cities, what, that costs too much?

 

[Big Budoo Troy]

View attachment 6486723

I know this might be beating a dead horse but I still can't get over the "Commie Commuter" tag they have. As if you needed any more reason to think these people were completely insane and have no intention of doing what's actually right for society.

Although to be honest, not sure why TrainsandMore would be complaining about an empty shopping mall. Sorry comrade, I thought we weren't meant to encourage bourgeois things like that.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I always thought of it being related to a combination of autism and efficiency maxing.

The thing about efficiency as a concept is the challenge of improving it without significant degradation of everything else or making costs shoot through the roof. We tend to be cynical these days about efficiency since a lot of the current water/power-saving "efficiency" models tend to suck, but I know that old toilets used far more water than anything in the 1980s and 1990s yet still struggled to actually flush properly. (I know from experience).

There's a bunch of appliances and other things that have become more efficient without degrading quality or increasing costs significantly. The invention of the barcode means that supermarkets can scan things automatically instead of looking for a tiny sticker on the package and manually punching it in, for instance.

However, efficiency only goes so far before you get to quality-of-life degradations. This is why the slave ship is on point. Extremely good at transporting a large number of people but at the cost of being absolutely inhumane.

Humid 30+ deg C (temperature, not heat index, which is usually around 38 C as in the reddit screencap). is a slow and insidious killer, but also a wall of heat that nobody wants to deal with and get sweaty. Here, have some weather:

https://www.weather-atlas.com/en/philippines/iloilo-city
30 C temperature on a cloudy/thunderstorm day and 42 C Heat Index. Not walking weather - most outdoor venues here are only alive at night for a reason.

I believe it. Having been familiar with Houston (high temperature, high humidity) I know "there's shade under the building" as one Redditor points out means jack shit unless it's pouring rain (with no wind).

There's a reason why there's no true "outdoor malls" in Houston; it's either all indoor malls or strip malls. Even the outlet malls which are "outside" are partially covered and any other "outdoor mall" area is a small extension of an enclosed mall (trends in overall retail).

There's also CityCentre, which is a cluster of mixed-use buildings out in the more suburban area with some "urbanist" features like apartments on top of stores and restaurants but that's probably not preferable because it's at the junction of two freeways (ironically, a bit hard to access from both), not much mass transit, and parking garages every other block.

The biggest draw to driving cross-country might just be that nobody will force you to unload and screen your baggage at every state line.

Road trips are fun but having no restrictions in baggage was a HUGE reason why I liked driving (some of my items I took on my last trip were either stuff I couldn't take on carry-on and checked would be extremely expensive.

Oregon has a law which says cities must draw a line around their city for all expected growth in the next 20 years, the urban growth boundary. Inside the line can be annexed and get city services when built. Outside is subject to significant development restrictions, typically.

Oddly, land inside the line costs more since it can be built on. Periodically the whiners come through and go "We should abolish the urban growth boundary to make housing cheaper." and also "We love Oregon and all the open spaces."

These people are obviously retarded. And the cost of land is usually one of the lower parts of the price. What the developers don't want is dealing with all the city bullshit and fees. They want the Texas model with "5 acre ranchettes" as far as the eye can see with barely any city services or fees needed.

I don't know where this rant was going, but it's funny to me that they hate the Texas model and then say in the same breath they want to use it everywhere else. But this time it will be dense housing of course. How about some dense infill in the fucking cities, what, that costs too much?

All these states have different rules about annexation. In Texas, you have Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction which is basically a five-mile radius part of their boundaries. There's building permits but no zoning, there's no taxes (directly to the city, though the school district/water/etc. have their own areas) or city services, and so forth. You also can't petition to create your own city in that area unless the controlling city gives it their okay.

I know Houston has incredibly strange city limits where it follows along roads and then expands out and there are pockets of the "city" where it's not actually in Houston proper but they still pay some sort of commercial taxes...it's all a big mess. While Houston has sprawled out unlike the cities in the East Coast/Midwest, even as sprawl heads out in that direction, there's a limit to how much they can swallow up because they start running into the ETJs of smaller towns that incorporated years before. (Austin, San Antonio, Waco, Dallas...all of the city limits are locked in at this point or close to it).

A St. George, Louisiana type formation couldn't happen in Texas because those subdivisions would be Baton Rouge's ETJ and Baton Rouge would legally have the final say in that (if they said "no" like they wanted to, that'd be the end of it).

 

[Lady Bizness]

We should abolish the urban growth boundary to make housing cheaper." and also "We love Oregon and all the open spaces."

Not in Oregon, but this is the cognitive dissonance that's going on in my area.
I'm of the mind that some places are just going to be expensive, and maybe even should be. I did my time as a poor living in a city.
No one needs to live where I do. There's no industry. I live here for what I thought was peace and the gorgeous environment. I realize I'm half lucky, half hard working. But the powers that be keep plucking the homeless heart string and these dummies I live amongst are just going to give it away.
Luckily for us we're removed from the worst of the development but I pretty much just stay in my private neighborhood to keep my sanity.
But I am going to shank the next weak old bitch who tries to reason with me that we've got some obligation to break up areas of concentrated poverty by inviting it into our community. I swear the dumb old hippies that think they didn't sell out are so feebleminded. Or maybe they don't have long to live with the consequences and they want to go out on a high horse.

 

[BulkForceFive]

Train... bad?

View attachment 6488043

This is the level of entitlement Jason and urbanists at large project onto drivers: "you need to get me where I want to go at the expense of food, construction materials, and anything else that the people at large might want to consume." And if that's not the attitude they'd unironically need to ask for one more line bro, specific to passengers, which is infeasible from a profit perspective because planes have won that war.

Source, Archive

"The rails" ah yes, and who installed those rails? Who built the bridges and blasted the tunnels and dumped and graded all that fill and ballast? That's right, private companies. If they don't want to run passenger service AT ALL, they don't have to. If it's such a great business venture, pull a Van Horne and finance your own railway, urboids.

I made the mistake of clicking on one stupid thing on Instagram and now I'm getting the same reguritated post about 'since half of Canada's population lives in this corridor from Toronto to Montreal, we should have a high-speed train like the Euros do'. Absolutely zero brainpower into anything but that shower thought, like the engineering needed to eliminate all the level crossings, or how much time would be saved over the existing service when the train will be made to stop at dozens of stations along the way, or even why you need to go from Montreal to Toronto in 3 hours in the first place. Just magical thinking from childish dipshits that somehow this will all work out and be cheap and clean and convenient.

 

[Yamamura]

Also, all the photos on Google Maps with people are taken at night, which makes sense if it's hot during the day.

There's something hilarious about this fuckcars user asking how Filipinos afford a car. Not only because it's somewhat ignorant in general, but also because how much he's probably overestimated what a car actually costs. I don't really blame him since if he's a kid and all he's been listening to is fuckcars rant on about how a car will financially cripple you.

It's similar to the other fuckcars user saying they wouldn't want to drive a car in the rain because they're afraid of crashing. And I'm thinking, these guys have been filling each other's heads with ideas that are so detached from reality that they just keep spurring each other on.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

'since half of Canada's population lives in this corridor from Toronto to Montreal, we should have a high-speed train like the Euros do'.

I'm all for this, as an American. Watching Canada fuck up major infrastructure projects and have them go incredibly over budget and then barely be useful at all is one of my pastimes. If they end up having to call US companies to unfuck it in real dollars it's even funnier.

There's something hilarious about this fuckcars user asking how Filipinos afford a car. Not only because it's somewhat ignorant in general, but also because how much he's probably overestimated what a car actually costs. I don't really blame him since if he's a kid and all he's been listening to is fuckcars rant on about how a car will financially cripple you and that it will cost and arm and a leg to run.

It's like that "kids cost $200k-400k" (a) studies that scare people into not having kids. They're asinine because they include shit that isn't paid by you, you're already paying for, or just isn't required.

Nobody needs to buy a $120k luxury car, but you always find the car cost bitches using shit like that, and then doubling up and otherwise making it stupid (don't forget the $5 billion per car per year that the feds spend on gas tax!) - when any retard can see "poor people own cars, cars must not be that expensive if you can own one as a poor."

 

[TowinKarz]

"The rails" ah yes, and who installed those rails? Who built the bridges and blasted the tunnels and dumped and graded all that fill and ballast? That's right, private companies. If they don't want to run passenger service AT ALL, they don't have to. If it's such a great business venture, pull a Van Horne and finance your own railway, urboids.

Especially if he knew even 5 seconds of history - he'd know all that stuff I ranted about, that railroads USED to be passenger focused, until that became unprofitable.

This was not a moral outrage to be set "right" by bureaucratic overreach and more taxes.

People forget, prior to the uber welfare state we have now? Unprofitable ideas/practices were discontinued, instead of subsidized to please the sensibilities of people who weren't using them anyway.

The railroad tycoons didn't meet in a building somewhere and say "what do we illogically take from the public today just to piss em off?" , they looked at a big chart and realized the passenger division was losing more and more money year by year and axed it.

Or, axed as much as they legally could.

The rail regulations used to be that not only could you not de-prioritize passenger trains? You couldn't even discontinue them without tacit ICC approval.

Even if they ran empty? You still had to run them or you got a fine.

Because the regulations on them even as late as the 60's were based on standards set from the 19th Century, when cars, trucks and planes didn't even exist, that assumed trains would always be the only practical means of travel and there would always be enough rail traffic that it wouldn't hurt you to stop for just a lone passenger here or there.....


Railroads pleaded with the Feds for years as they declined after WWII to relax/remove them so they could stop bleeding money and focus on freight, which could actually turn a profit.

Congress finally relented in the late 70's

But by then?

15 - 20 railroads in the northeast had bit the dust.

But the transport visionaries don't know any of this, and don't care to learn it..... their idea of how the world works must be how it does..... their ideas are just too good and their motives too pure to be wrong.

It's similar to the other fuckcars user saying they wouldn't want to drive a car in the rain because they're afraid of crashing. And I'm thinking, these guys have been filling each other's heads with ideas that are so detached from reality that they just keep spurring each other on.

It's the exact same self-reinforcing bubble that sucks in people who start out with just locking their front doors, but, through mutual worry and one-upmanship with their like-minded peers? Eventually have more security on their house than a bank, but STILL "feel unsafe" or are "scared to leave" - Yet if polled? They'd swear up and down they are only expressing "normal" levels of fear of the unknown.

Perfect example - guy I work with is so concerned for his family's "safety" that he's installed those door cameras that go off if someone steps up to the porch. And linked them to his phone. If he gets a warning that they've gone off? Even if you can clearly see from the camera feed that it was the FedEx guy? He calls them and tells them to not answer the door until he gets home, in case it's someone just pretending to be a delivery guy......

His family has accordingly learned to be paranoid and will proactively call him if they see a person on the sidewalk they don't know who doesn't even break stride walking past the house and wonder if they should call the cops for "strange people" in the neighborhood.

To the point his wife takes twice as long to commute home as he, because she uses nothing but backroads since she's convinced she'll die in a fiery crash if she uses the "unsafe" freeway.

Why's it unsafe?

He told her it was......

 

[Lobster Cult High Priest]

There's something hilarious about this fuckcars user asking how Filipinos afford a car. Not only because it's somewhat ignorant in general, but also because how much he's probably overestimated what a car actually costs. I don't really blame him since if he's a kid and all he's been listening to is fuckcars rant on about how a car will financially cripple you.

It's similar to the other fuckcars user saying they wouldn't want to drive a car in the rain because they're afraid of crashing. And I'm thinking, these guys have been filling each other's heads with ideas that are so detached from reality that they just keep spurring each other on.

Do they realize that people drive for the conditions of the world? You ain't going to be doing 120 KM / hour in a dense fog rainstorm

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

Do they realize that people drive for the conditions of the world? You ain't going to be doing 120 KM / hour in a dense fog rainstorm

Found the non Californian.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-people-killed-9-injured-pileup-closed-fog-shrouded-5-california-rcna132667

https://archive.ph/R0hpG

The best argument for pubic transit (just like the best argument for gun control) is that everyone is a fucking retard. Still a bad argument, though. But made by retards. Notice that people arguing against cars or guns are often those you don’t want to have them anyway.