Bughive Channels - You vill take ze train

[Corpun]

I'm getting around to this finally. This thread is for discussing bughive channels and their autism. Bughive channels are channels which promote and embellish urban living over rural or suburban living. Most of these channels are some form of leftist European trash who usually share a few things like slobbering over trains, being baffled by lawns, and hating cars with a passion. All my info is from this thread I made and I am using some of the write ups people have given, I'll source them.

Every single channel has this autistic viewpoint and can' t fathom why people wouldn't love living in a closet sized apartment and take a train to anywhere they want. They don't get why services aren't all within a five mile radius of eachother. They don't get why people want to leave cities. The channels are usually polluted with garbage like this for content and generally breadtube adjacent. This thread is more for talking about these channels but you can sperg out about cars and shit if you want.






Anyways big ups to @DJ Grelle for this write up.

The protagonists in our story are the following hive-tyrants

AdamSomething

A Czech Eurocrat with disdain for capitalism and a hateboner for Elon Musk.

NotJustBikes

An american who moved to the Netherlands because he fell in love with the bike-centric and walkeable cities. (ignoring that it's that way because the Netherlands is exceptionally flat. Seriously even small hills make biking far more difficult. And the latter is because they're cities designed in the age of horse and foot traffic.)

Alan Fisher

American sub-urb hater and train autist. With the hottest of takes that the California HSR isn't a bad thing:


Eco Gecko

American communist with a hateboner for sub-urbs.

I've left some tangentially related channels out since they're not really the focus
They're either pure train autists like: RMTransit
Or infotainment channels with a broader scope than just ragging on sub-urbs and cars like: Neo, OBF

Now why are they funny?
They've got horrible takes:
From defending the california HSR moneysink while ridiculing car garages (and also depicting oneself as a soyboy unironically)

Never mind that the california HSR already is two years overdue and three times over budget and it'll take a long time and a lot more money before it is finished.

To giving mid-wit takes about geopolitical and military questions as a urban planning/ engineering channel

And poorly-thought out videos based on wikipedia articles

This last one is especially telling. It starts with a reference to the atmospheric train and claims that the electric train is it's modern descendant (which is wrong, cable cars like the ones in San Fransisco are).

It's followed up by a call for using trolley buses instead of electric buses; which would draw their power from overhead lines instead of a battery. He claims that this is because electric buses *only* drive inside of cities which is patently false. Also overhead powerlines are a massive eyesore, require constant maintenance and are a hassle for all taller vehicles trying to pass.

Then it segues into an attack on battery production; saying it is polluting and uses the occasional slave labor (something which is true of pretty much every modern industry; but somehow the electronics in trolley buses are exempt).

His following point is on the cost of electric vs diesel busses, calling them an unnecessary large investment (which it isn't. Also no city buys 500 or more buses at the same time. The largest tender I've heard about was 30-ish buses at once from Montreal and the cost was about the same for electric buses as it is for diesel buses. I know someone who works at a bus-building company.)

It's the epitome of this bugman, soyboy channels: shallow takes based on ignorance and a bad understanding of engineering, combined with a smug sense of intellectual and moral superiority and the required references for performative activism. Truly, the atheist teens of the '00s grew up and got a home, and now their biggest gripe isn't mom dragging them to church on sunday but people not wanting to be bugmen.

@NevskyProspekt and @quaawaa For the justification of adding NotJustBikes, who is slightly more moderate but equally as spergy

I've mentioned it earlier but I'm not sure if NotJustBikes belongs here. Britmonkey and Adam Something absolutely, but not NotJustBikes. He's far less of a sperg and is more reasonable in what he advocates for (note his streetcar suburbs video, you would never see something like that in an Adam Something video).

He even states here: "There is not a problem with suburbs. Suburbs have existed almost as long as cities have existed, and there is nothing inherently wrong with them. The problem is car-dependent suburbs, and that is what I mean when I talk about suburbia." The man has a concept of nuance the more autistic ones lack. I'll give him credit for that. Plus he's never advocated for stuffing as many people as possible into high-rises or banning cars altogether.

These guys will complain about having to cross a two lane road but not having to cross a rail yard in the middle of the city that is as wide as a 20 lane highway. Every road in the city center of NotJustBikes’ favorite city of Amsterdam is as wide as a six lane road if you include the canals, sidewalks, and bike lanes, yet he doesn’t complain about having to walk a half a kilometer to go 50 meters as the crow flies (like if you wanted to go from the middle of a block to the other side of the canal).
View attachment 3387369

According to urbanists, it’s good to have your downtown split apart by a nearly quarter mile wide strip of railroads (Frankfurt):
View attachment 3387397
But it’s bad to have a 425 ft wide road in the suburbs (Houston):
View attachment 3387381

 

[NevskyProspekt]

I really think we'll need to be more specific regarding what constitutes 'bughive' thinking. A general preference for rail transport, mass transit, private apartments (which are different from multi-individual pods) and walkability does not a bugman make. Bughivery is far more extreme than that. Also we need to be specific about what kinds of cities people are fleeing from. American cities, yes, they're crap with even crappier public transport and horridly designed in general (I'm saying this as an American myself) but this certainly isn't the case everywhere. Same thing goes for lawns - there are plenty of single-family detached housing homeowners who dislike lawns and are replacing them with full gardens/re-wilding/xeroscaping. What bugmen hate is yards in general rather than just lawns.

 

[Suburban Bastard]

So is there anything funny?

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

You'll have to make this more generic unless there really are that many youtube channels. Reddit is full of these people, particularly the urban planning subreddit.
If you want bitching about cars by unhinged euros and cycle cult americans, just visit /r/roadcam and read the comments.

So is there anything funny?

No. Imagine breadtube video essayists but they just bitch about cars existing and how wonderful it would be to relinquish your freedom of movement to government officials.

 

[Caesare]

Adam Something had that one good Dubai video but pretty much everything else he does is fucking retarded and you really see the type of faggot foreigner he really is. Didn't he say nuclear war wouldn't be all that bad or something dumb like that? I seem to remember he did. He's a bum. What is he, some kind of arab? Nevermind, you said he's a czech.

there are plenty of single-family detached housing homeowners who dislike lawns and are replacing them with full gardens/re-wilding/xeroscaping.

There's really not that much of a difference between a lawn or a big garden in front of your house besides amount of work involved and commitment to it. I can't see someone "hating" a lawn but wanting what you said, but I can see someone having preferences for one or the other. It's either, you have a nice, clean, mowed strip of grass that looks pleasant like a golf course, or you have a big, lovely garden. Both are nature, just one takes a lot more labor.

 

[Red Hood]

I really think we'll need to be more specific regarding what constitutes 'bughive' thinking. A general preference for rail transport, mass transit, private apartments (which are different from multi-individual pods) and walkability does not a bugman make. Bughivery is far more extreme than that. Also we need to be specific about what kinds of cities people are fleeing from. American cities, yes, they're crap with even crappier public transport and horridly designed in general (I'm saying this as an American myself) but this certainly isn't the case everywhere. Same thing goes for lawns - there are plenty of single-family detached housing homeowners who dislike lawns and are replacing them with full gardens/re-wilding/xeroscaping. What bugmen hate is yards in general rather than just lawns.

The best yards are the ones that are all gravel with so much weed killer and pesticide sprayed on that they turn into Tiberium fields that are hazardous to cross.

 

[Mister Qwerty]

I believe we already have a thead on this subject.

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/i-hate-pro-bughive-channels.120626/

 

[Corpun]

I really think we'll need to be more specific regarding what constitutes 'bughive' thinking. A general preference for rail transport, mass transit, private apartments (which are different from multi-individual pods) and walkability does not a bugman make. Bughivery is far more extreme than that. Also we need to be specific about what kinds of cities people are fleeing from. American cities, yes, they're crap with even crappier public transport and horridly designed in general (I'm saying this as an American myself) but this certainly isn't the case everywhere. Same thing goes for lawns - there are plenty of single-family detached housing homeowners who dislike lawns and are replacing them with full gardens/re-wilding/xeroscaping. What bugmen hate is yards in general rather than just lawns.

I'll add to the definition later but generally I use the term to specify these people who promote urban development and defend shit like commie blocks, hatred of skyscrapers because they aren't all cubicle size apartments, and lack any real knowledge of urban development. Most of my annoyance for them comes form the idea they can take European models like the Netherlands biking everywhere and apply it to America, which is impossible because America is not a flat as shit country that is also small as shit.

Adam Something had that one good Dubai video but pretty much everything else he does is fucking retarded and you really see the type of faggot foreigner he really is. Didn't he say nuclear war wouldn't be all that bad or something dumb like that? I seem to remember he did. He's a bum. What is he, some kind of arab? Nevermind, you said he's a czech.

His community tab is full of LARPing as a journalist on the Ukraine war and giving extremely autistic hot takes on the whole topic like celebrating a guy who is probably ethnic Russian being carbombed for supporting Russia over Ukraine in the East of the country.

It makes sense he has a hate boner for Russia but if he wants to LARP as a journos reporting on the war you think he'd check an ethno-linguistic breakdown of the country.

I believe we already have a thead on this subject.

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/i-hate-pro-bughive-channels.120626/

People there wanted me to make a dedicated thread to talk about them. That was me mostly venting my annoyance with getting spammed by them on YouTube and being surprised so many people agreed.

 

[NevskyProspekt]

Most of my annoyance for them comes form the idea they can take European models like the Netherlands biking everywhere and apply it to America, which is impossible because America is not a flat as shit country that is also small as shit.

His community tab is full of LARPing as a journalist on the Ukraine war and giving extremely autistic hot takes on the whole topic like celebrating a guy who is probably ethnic Russian being carbombed for supporting Russia over Ukraine in the East of the country.

It makes sense he has a hate boner for Russia but if he wants to LARP as a journos reporting on the war you think he'd check an ethno-linguistic breakdown of the country.

People there wanted me to make a dedicated thread to talk about them. That was me mostly venting my annoyance with getting spammed by them on YouTube and being surprised so many people agreed.

American cities were much more European in design prior to WWII, and had the most advanced domestic passenger rail and inner-city tram systems on earth. If anything the current car-dependent (which is distinct from the presence of private cars in general) model is the historical aberration, a mid-century modernist experiment benefiting from the post WWII economic boom. Entire neighborhoods full of small businesses were cleared out for the inner-city highways rather than having ring-roads built around them, and historical structures were to be replaced with glassy modern corporate facades (check out the I.M. Pei plan for Oklahoma City, or the Gruen Plan for Fort Worth). Cities like Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Pittsburg, Minneapolis, Tulsa and Denver were closer to Amsterdam, Berlin and St. Petersburg in appearance before the 1950's.

Cincinnati (at the time dubbed the 'Paris of America') before 1950s 'urban renewal'

Dallas

Pittsburgh

Minneapolis

Cleveland

^ I would argue this is far more classic Americana than the way our cities are currently designed.

Adam Something absolutely is who I would consider a bugman sperg however and his commentary on Ukraine is pants-on-head stupid.

 

[Toolbox]

No. Imagine breadtube video essayists but they just bitch about cars existing and how wonderful it would be to relinquish your freedom of movement to government officials.

I don't agree with this assessment at least for the broad strokes being drawn about the entire topic. In the US, car dependent development has removed the ability for people to even develop neighborhoods that aren't. Same applies to Canada. The fed already removed quite a few land rights with this nonsense. At the same time I agree with you that the hatred of motor vehicles to the point that they want them banned for civilian travel at all is complete bugspeak.

 

[NevskyProspekt]

I can't see someone "hating" a lawn but wanting what you said, but I can see someone having preferences for one or the other. It's either, you have a nice, clean, mowed strip of grass that looks pleasant like a golf course, or you have a big, lovely garden. Both are nature, just one takes a lot more labor.

r/nolawns is a good place to start. It's primarily run by suburban single-family homeowners who are opting to replace the grass lawn with traditional gardens and native vegetation. Quite frankly, it's a movement I'm really glad to see. It keeps the greenery while also providing a beneficial environment for local pollinators and other wildlife. It's the opposite of the hyper-sanitized suburban fabric which was popularized in the 1950's and 1960's.

 

[Toolbox]

There's really not that much of a difference between a lawn or a big garden in front of your house besides amount of work involved and commitment to it. I can't see someone "hating" a lawn but wanting what you said, but I can see someone having preferences for one or the other. It's either, you have a nice, clean, mowed strip of grass that looks pleasant like a golf course, or you have a big, lovely garden. Both are nature, just one takes a lot more labor.

I don't have too much issues with back yards, but front lawns are useless and the part that hurts is they are mandated and normalized. I agree with the concept of what Nevsky says above. Just letting the plants that would grow there naturally exist there requires little effort in comparison to lawn care. Lawns aren't 'nature', they are as natural as pavement in most of the US. They require fertilization, constant watering, eventual replacement to be maintained. There is also no reason they should exist in the same form in every area yet they do. People even waste resources on them in mostly desert states. States that have enough issues with water supply as is. But useless greenery in neighborhoods isn't really the main issue, it's that this design decision has over taken urban design in almost every sense. Governments across NA in general promote turf to be placed everywhere even when it would have zero use case, like inside the area of a sidewalk or off the edge of a freeway.

 

[Begemot]

Are we including the Middle-class small apartment/ small house schtick as well? Never too small is good for that.

That said, Not just Bikes stuff is interesting, the 'missing middle' is a real thing and needs to be looked into....

 

[Coptakhenaten]

Myabe I prefer to live in mountains and woods. City people can have their homeless people yelling at trees and complementary syringe carpets on the streets.

 

[Caesare]

Just letting the plants that would grow there naturally exist there requires little effort in comparison to lawn care.

But these are the plants that would grow naturally in most places:

That looks awful. As opposed to something like this:
which looks lovely.

They require fertilization, constant watering, eventual replacement to be maintained.

If you live in a desert, maybe. Then I'd agree that a well manicured, patch of grass is probably too much work and requires too much water and upkeep to be sensible. Most everywhere else though, it requires cutting. That's it. The rain provides all the watering it needs.

It keeps the greenery while also providing a beneficial environment for local pollinators and other wildlife.

This is a good thing, particularly the pollination part. But idk about making it too comfortable for all sorts of other wildlife. You know what having lots of high grasses, plants, bushes, etc bring? Rats and mice. And those bring snakes. Not exactly something you want in a suburban neighborhood where kids and pets are plentiful. If it's extremely well manicured and cared for, then that might work and be nice. Like I said earlier, I love gardens and trees, and it's definitely preferable to have that then just some nice clean grass, but that's high maintenance as well. The great thing about a nice lawn is the low upkeep. You mow it every other weekend in the summer and you forget about it. And yet it still provides the benefit of having a nice little patch of greenery to frame a small garden in front of your home. A win/win.

 

[quaawaa]

I really think we'll need to be more specific regarding what constitutes 'bughive' thinking. A general preference for rail transport, mass transit, private apartments (which are different from multi-individual pods) and walkability does not a bugman make. Bughivery is far more extreme than that.

I would define "bughive thinking" as one or more of the following:

• Spreading bogus statistics about the cost and subsidies of suburbs, roads, car ownership, transit, etc.
  • If they can't provide hard numbers to back up their statements, they are just mindless repeating slogans.
• Mindlessly citing either Strong Towns or NotJustBikes.
  • For some reason, when challenged, most online urbanists will respond with one of those two as their source. They rarely, if ever, cite anyone else. The popularity of NotJustBikes amongst these people is why I believe that he deserves a spot in the list of "bughive channels".
• A lack of perspective on the types of cities around the world look like and what transportation methods their residents use.
  • There are areas in Europe that look like a stereotypical American suburb and there are areas in the US that look like a stereotypical European city, and there are also mixed-use areas built in a more modern style (e.g. blocks of 5-over-1s) inside of most American cities as well.
• An irrational hatred of cars and an inability to understand why they are useful to people.
  • A common opinion I've seen on the urbanist infected /r/infrastructureporn on pictures of Japan's multimodal infrastructure complaining about wide roads and pedestrian bridges (hated because they "prioritize cars over people") even though there is a massive amount of subway and high-speed rail infrastructure as well. For many urbanists, its not enough to be able to walk or take transit anywhere; they demand that there be absolutely no cars.
  • See /r/fuckcars for endless examples of mindless "car = bad" hate. The "we want options besides having to drive everywhere" is their motte and their bailey is a complete ban on all motor vehicles.
    • Two examples from the current front page:
      • A post saying that no one needs a truck to carry lumber because a bike with a trailer can do the job just as well.
      • A post complaining that people drove to a rural location for a festival instead of biking or taking transit.
• Inability to consider that space and privacy are things that people want and that many people do not care about having to (or even prefer to) drive everywhere.
  • This ties in with many of them being shut-ins with few hobbies besides consuming (i.e. non-productive hobbies like shopping, eating at restaurants, drinking at bars, and watching shows), watching TV/Netflix, playing video games, and browsing the internet. They certainly have no interests that require space and can't imagine why someone would want lots of space.
  • Nearly all of them don't have families and don't even think about a family needing more space than a single person.
• Support of laws that make it illegal to build things they don't like such as Urban Growth Boundaries and parking maximums. It's not enough to be able to build what they want or to build truly multimodal infrastructure; many of them want to ban all low density living and cars.
  • They'll often couch this in terms of making suburban residents "pay the true cost" of their lifestyle, but their calculations of externalities is deeply flawed and is more like a sin tax than actual internalization.
• A total lack of respect for blue collar workers and that they do in fact need large vehicles in order to do their jobs which make the bugman's comfy life possible.
  • An example I've seen is them successfully lobbying for loading zones to be replaced with bike lanes and then complaining that delivery trucks park in the new bike lane in order to make deliveries.

 

[AsbestosFlaygon]

Are we including the Middle-class small apartment/ small house schtick as well? Never too small is good for that.

That said, Not just Bikes stuff is interesting, the 'missing middle' is a real thing and needs to be looked into....

Really quite a few of the things they argue for are sound ideas, at least to a extent. In general I agree with them that we need more public transport, as well as the missing middle like you say. Where they start to lose me is when I see Adam spitting out ideas like completely banning delivery trucks from city centers. Fucking really? I understand that nobody sane wants 100 people being ran over by some truck driver going postal. But are we really gonna suggest that the only possible way to stop that is by banning all trucks?

 

[Begemot]

Really quite a few of the things they argue for are sound ideas, at least to a extent. In general I agree with them that we need more public transport, as well as the missing middle like you say. Where they start to lose me is when I see Adam spitting out ideas like completely banning deliver trucks from city centers. Fucking really? I understand that nobody sane wants 100 people being ran over by some truck driver going postal. But are we really gonna suggest that the only possible way to stop that is by banning all trucks?

I'm biased here because I like medium density. What I found interesting was the way roads work and how cars can engage better, not be deleted out of the ecosystem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad

I don't mind suburbia but the latest stuff being built in Australia doesn't even have that much outside space,

And yeah, the full-on anti-car guys are nuts, the dutch ecosystem allows for delivery access with Erftoegangswegen ("Access roads") just not off large highways. I bet you they call car users 'cagers' or some cringe shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_Netherlands#Roads_by_safety_policy_category

 

[Corpun]

I don't agree with this assessment at least for the broad strokes being drawn about the entire topic. In the US, car dependent development has removed the ability for people to even develop neighborhoods that aren't. Same applies to Canada. The fed already removed quite a few land rights with this nonsense. At the same time I agree with you that the hatred of motor vehicles to the point that they want them banned for civilian travel at all is complete bugspeak.

Part of the issue with lack of public transit in the US is the result of these developments as well, but the train fetishists are downright stupid because that is miles and miles of track that would need laid down and maintained every year, which drives up costs massively. Even today stuff like Amtrack runs at a loss because they just aren't financially viable. Train companies pay tax on every bit of track laid down and sliding it over to the government wouldn't make it better because congrats, you have the government eminent domaining a lot of private property and that is going to piss a lot of people off.

So we are stuck on car dependency, which is partly a side product of how spread out Americans are. Bugmen seem to think everyone can just live in cities and go as absurd with their viewpoint as to call trucks useless, as if we can haul material around on wagons or shit.

Are we including the Middle-class small apartment/ small house schtick as well? Never too small is good for that.

We can include them. I'll add this guy to the OP if he is notably autistic with promoting tiny as shit housing.

 

[NevskyProspekt]

Part of the issue with lack of public transit in the US is the result of these developments as well, but the train fetishists are downright stupid because that is miles and miles of track that would need laid down and maintained every year, which drives up costs massively.

The U.S. already builds miles and miles of new highway expansions every single year, which also require constant maintenance. States pour insane amounts of money into widening roads, which don't even reduce traffic (due to induced demand) yet they keep thinking if they just built 2, 3, 4, or 5 more lanes the problem will solve itself. Additionally, the largest single use of eminent domain in the U.S. is in the construction and widening of highways. It was even more extreme during the construction of the inner-city highway system, which outright cleared out entire communities and huge numbers of small businesses, some of which had been in place for at least a century. I want traffic solved, and I also want people to be able to own private cars (and have them be affordable too), but highway expansion doesn't solve it. A big part of the issue is how people drive rather than road capacity.

You would think Denver had been bombed by the sheer scale of what was cleared during the urban 'renewal' era.

Kansas City

New Haven

Train companies pay tax on every bit of track laid down and sliding it over to the government wouldn't make it better because congrats, you have the government eminent domaining a lot of private property and that is going to piss a lot of people off.

I repeat myself.