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

Highway worker here... you can blame the regulations, in the traffic law, that say unless the corner of that sign is within a set number of inches of the edge of the travel lane? Then it legally doesn't exist (and can therefore be ignored) for that.

Call your Congressman and maybe that will change, bellyaching on the net' will do nothing.
 
They're not because Texas Central is incompetent and has no money (they're so broke that they're being sued by counties along the route for nonpayment of property taxes). Amtrak (i.e. the feds) may try to build it, but there's no state support and if Trump wins there will be no federal support. American rail advocates don't seem to realize that California's boondoggle has made HSR a laughingstock in the rest of the country.

A better solution would be to widen I-45 from two to three lanes, which would be far cheaper and doesn't require eminent domain. Luckily, TxDOT is already planning on doing that and unlike Texas Central, they can build their project without any money from non-drivers/riders (TxDOT's budget comes from gas taxes, oil refining taxes, vehicle registration fees, sales taxes on cars, tolls, and the federal Highway Trust Fund (which is funded by gas taxes)).

There's a lot of things regarding Texas Central and the comedy of errors, first talking up how it was all going to be privately funding then using Kelo to demand that the government eminent domain a bunch of land for them...the fact that they couldn't make College Station a halfway stop and then half-heartedly announced Shiro as the mid-stop (a tiny village halfway between Houston and Dallas, there's nothing there except for a railroad and a two-way highway miles away from Bryan-College Station).

When the station was first announced to be at Northwest Mall in Houston (not downtown) I remember a bunch of urbanists on the forum that I was on at the time crying about it (it's about seven miles from downtown). The mall site is owned by TCR through shell companies and it is a 55 acre site at a prominent location; they'd likely make more money through flipping it to developers.

On that note, there's some extra right of way between the freeway and other buildings south of the mall; they were demolished for a potential "high speed transit corridor" by TxDOT as part of the master freeway widening plan (TxDOT is owed more respect than what they get from urbanists) but a judge said that was illegal and they had to compensate the affected businesses in full. (Urbanists love to cry crocodile tears over highway ED victims but its a little hard to be weepy over warehouses built in the 1980s).
 
LA and San Diego
I've ridden that train. It suffers from the usual train problems, made worse by the sheer size of LA and San Diego and the lack of transit. I had to get from SD to near-LAX. Luckily I had a car and could park at the SD train station, I'm not sure transit would have worked, maybe Uber. Then you crawl slowly up I-5 while the traffic on the freeway passes you much of the time. Then you end up in downtown LA. And then you spend another hour getting to LAX, or get off the train earlier and take other transit. It's over an hour longer than the drive.
 
Stumbled upon this short of a bicycle lawyer out of New York complaining about safety screens set up around the perimeter of a construction site that hinders bicyclists from going as fast as they please, because apparently they go so fast they can't see through this netting. He speculates if it's to keep debris from being spread out of the construction site and, with no facial coverings whatsoever, says this safety netting is dangerous and asks if an "exception" can be made so that him and his gaggle of retards don't have to slow down around construction going on. Something about his cumquat face is very irritating and just this brief clip and some of the titles of his other videos are typical bicyclist entitlement.
Safety nets are dangerous?

Why indeed, would a city of over 8 million people need "enormous trucks" when surely they could bicycle products to businesses just as easily, right?
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He has a relatively small channel so there aren't any funny comments on his videos but I remembered that this thread exists and this is another lawyer being annoying on YouTube (my favorite topic lately) so I figured I'd share.
 
Stumbled upon this short of a bicycle lawyer out of New York complaining about safety screens set up around the perimeter of a construction site that hinders bicyclists from going as fast as they please, because apparently they go so fast they can't see through this netting. He speculates if it's to keep debris from being spread out of the construction site and, with no facial coverings whatsoever, says this safety netting is dangerous and asks if an "exception" can be made so that him and his gaggle of retards don't have to slow down around construction going on. Something about his cumquat face is very irritating and just this brief clip and some of the titles of his other videos are typical bicyclist entitlement.
Safety nets are dangerous?
lmao he's in Central Park. Cyclists are supposed to yield to pedestrians there and stop at all the lights, but they never do. The bike lane also doesn't matter (since the road is closed to cars), so they could take a wider line to be safe, but that would be slower and would mess up their times.

Imagine their rage if a sports car driver advocated for getting rid of bike lanes because he's hit a couple of cyclists "hanging out" on the apex of a blind corner.

He's also retarded:

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Maybe that's because you're riding in the car lane, not the bike lane:
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That video was uploaded three days ago, so it's not like NYC added a bike lane since he made the video.
 
When the station was first announced to be at Northwest Mall in Houston (not downtown) I remember a bunch of urbanists on the forum that I was on at the time crying about it (it's about seven miles from downtown). The mall site is owned by TCR through shell companies and it is a 55 acre site at a prominent location; they'd likely make more money through flipping it to developers.
Nothing pisses me off more than when Urbanists say that Train Stations should be built downtown like in Europe. They have no grasp on History. If you look up a map at the time the station was being built you would immediately realize that the station was build on the outskirts of town, with a few exceptions ( A couple are Amsterdam-Centrum, which was build on reclaimed land, and London Bridge, which as the name suggests was build on a bridge). Then the city built up around the train station. So this facination of down town railway station is a complete fantasy, and impractacal to do both today and in the past.
 
"if every American got a free trip to Europe and Asia, our politics would be wildly different":
I actually agree.

But not in the way they believe more so in a live and work in Europe style.

We saw what happened when Trump was elected in 2016 and a handful of people carried out on their threat to try to move to Canada or Europe. Their idea of Europe or Canada being a super accepting place for immigration vanished.

None of this vacation crap, day to day grind.
 
You either design your whole life around it (live near a station, work in Downtown LA) or you just ignore it, or only use it for fun.
I still think this is one of the big things that doesn't really click with the urbanist crowd. Unless you're living in a downtown bughive, your average person really doesn't want to center their entire life around external transportation systems.

"And yet you choose to center your life around car-centric infra-" Shut the fuck up. If you own a car, you can live basically wherever the FUCK you want as long as there's roads. And there's always roads. If you don't have a car, you are BEHOLDEN to living within walking distance of a bus or train network, and not necessarily one that will get you everywhere you want to go. Simply meeting up with friends or visiting someone's house suddenly becomes a complicated matter of planning and time management and "oh fuck the 480 is running late, if it's not here it won't be at Maple street in time for me to hop on the 822, oh shit what do i do".

Public transit is not for centering your life around. Public transit is for taking into the city when you don't feel like dealing with how terrible the roads are in the city or you just want to get shitfaced downtown.
 
Then the city built up around the train station. So this facination of down town railway station is a complete fantasy, and impractacal to do both today and in the past.
This continues to happen to this day - in places where mass transit is desired and useful, buildings spring up around it and it becomes a density center.

Of course, urbanists are also likely to fight any form of redevelopment that would allow this to occur, so it doesn't work as well as it should.
 
Stumbled upon this short of a bicycle lawyer out of New York
The two terms that hate the most combined together are "bicycle" and "lawyer". In my mind I immediately default to thinking of them as ambulance chasers Saul Goodman types after one of their clients did something stupid and wants a payout.
 
I still think this is one of the big things that doesn't really click with the urbanist crowd. Unless you're living in a downtown bughive, your average person really doesn't want to center their entire life around external transportation systems.

"And yet you choose to center your life around car-centric infra-" Shut the fuck up. If you own a car, you can live basically wherever the FUCK you want as long as there's roads. And there's always roads. If you don't have a car, you are BEHOLDEN to living within walking distance of a bus or train network, and not necessarily one that will get you everywhere you want to go. Simply meeting up with friends or visiting someone's house suddenly becomes a complicated matter of planning and time management and "oh fuck the 480 is running late, if it's not here it won't be at Maple street in time for me to hop on the 822, oh shit what do i do".

Public transit is not for centering your life around. Public transit is for taking into the city when you don't feel like dealing with how terrible the roads are in the city or you just want to get shitfaced downtown.

A lot of the fuckcars crowd does indeed focus on "BUT WHAT IF I WANT TO GET DRUGGED OUT AND DRUNK AT 2 AM?"

The idea of centering life around public transit is always a gamble, I remembered how pissed I was when the university decided to reconfigure its bus routes that included eliminating several ones I took on my normal route. I ended up just having to do a bicycle because that's the only choice I had. When I left college I basically never looked back as far as transportation went.

I'm not sure transit would have worked, maybe Uber
When I was in Houston coming back from Florida I had to wait for a shuttle bus for the last 90 miles (basically a private bus company with the sole business model of transporting people to and fro the Houston airport—not a bad experience and my fellow passengers seemed like decent people).

As I looked around it was where passengers were picked up. As janky as they looked I would've trusted Ahmed's Taxi Service (or whatever) over the Houston bus system with myself and my luggage.

This continues to happen to this day - in places where mass transit is desired and useful, buildings spring up around it and it becomes a density center.

Of course, urbanists are also likely to fight any form of redevelopment that would allow this to occur, so it doesn't work as well as it should.

"Transit oriented development" could be a good barometer where transit is useful. There was a lot of song and dance about how Houston's light rail "revived" Midtown but it may have also been a coincidence, meanwhile the same thing has not happened for the lesser-used expansions of the line...and even for the original successful Red Line, the terminus was a large parking lot right next to a Sam's Club (which has since closed).

Amsterdam has CARS?!?:

It's funny how surprised they are about it. All the pictures plainly show that there's room for one automobile lane, one parking lane, and very little right of way for anything else, including delivery trucks or emergency vehicles. It's hardly the "multi-modal" street they love promoting (then again, they also love those little alleyways in Japan—but something like this is "car-centric").

I guess they really are that clueless.
 
"Transit oriented development" could be a good barometer where transit is useful. There was a lot of song and dance about how Houston's light rail "revived" Midtown but it may have also been a coincidence, meanwhile the same thing has not happened for the lesser-used expansions of the line...and even for the original successful Red Line, the terminus was a large parking lot right next to a Sam's Club (which has since closed).
Most transit oriented development, at least in the US, has nothing to do with transit and the development would have happened without it. Residents park in garages and a small fraction of them use the rail line to commute. You also have places like Downtown Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Long Island City where the transit infrastructure has existed for decades but the development is all extremely recent, which implies that just building transit is not enough to spur development.
It's funny how surprised they are about it. All the pictures plainly show that there's room for one automobile lane, one parking lane, and very little right of way for anything else, including delivery trucks or emergency vehicles. It's hardly the "multi-modal" street they love promoting (then again, they also love those little alleyways in Japan—but something like this is "car-centric").
It is multi-modal; you missed the massive boat lanes that take up most of the street.
 
You know all those glorious Tokyo suburbs... Guess what's available every few blocks. A car rental/car share place.
I mean understandable given like a third of mainland japan is basically just tokyo. Public transport will only help so much when your city is the cities skylines equivalent of a 9 year old throwing on infinite money and just filling out the entire map on autopilot without much tought or planning for the entire night straight.
 
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