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I don't think he sees "car dependency" as a problem.
An older article:
Thanks in part to cars, the average American takes only about three or four thousand steps per day and looks like a WALL-E character. I suppose that the standard libertarian perspective on this would be that the revealed preference of Americans is to avoid physical movement and that governments should try to accommodate that preference, but it's surely not how I'd like my city to approach things.
I walk a ton living in San francisco. But I also step over a lot of shit and see a lot of demoralizing stuff on the street. Couple days ago saw someone feeding a mouse near a dumpster to their pitbull.
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I walked way more when I was in grad school and lived with my parents in a far exurb of LA. I almost never walk at all now that I live in a very "dense and walkable" urban neighborhood. Walking in the exurbs was pleasant, leaf-dappled, and contemplative. Every fifth house or so, kids playing in the front yard. Dogs running behind backyard brick walls and barking "who are you!?!"
Walking in the city is an exercise of stepping to the curb to let other people pass every 10 feet, having to rewind the podcast I'm listening to because of sirens, stepping over homeless, trying not to trip on the shitty uneven sidewalks, and not skewer myself on all the wrought-iron and chain-link fencing. Not appetizing at all.
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Yesterday I walked to a large park down the street from my suburban house and kicked a soccer ball with my son. I am lean and my son walks, runs and bikes through large parks and trails with me regularly.
The suburbs are great for outdoors exercise. Rather than walking him past open air drug markets and homeless encampments, we're walking through clean parks and trails.
I choose not to be a fatty and the suburbs easily accommodate me. I do drive to work though, so I suppose I get fewer steps in than some alternative. But then I absolutely won't live by my office building and I will not subject myself or my family to the urban blight ruined public transportation.
I guess I'd say I'm revealing a preference for an active life in a clean environment. So of course I don't live in the local major urban center.
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That’a certainly one of the drawbacks, but it’s also worth considering this in both historical and global contexts.
From historical perspective, Americans have been driving a lot for many decades now, but obesity rates have only shot through the roof relatively recently. This means that other factors contributing to obesity might have much bigger impact than driving.
Second, it is worth observing that European countries, which allegedly are more walkable, and where people drive less, are rather quickly catching up to obesity rates of Americans. The upward trend is clear and is not looking like it is plateauing in most countries. See eg. Germany or UK.
The fat people I know might very well walk to the store but prefer to drive. You only need to get fat once, for whatever reason, and walking suddenly becomes unfeasible. And there are many reasons for which people become fat regardless of whether their neighborhood is walkable. What's more, I suspect that the kinds of people who get fat are the kinds of people who would not want to walk in the first place.
Linking walkability to obesity is largely nonsense, in my opinion. I can't give you a definite cause for why obesity has become more prevalent, but it has little to do with sidewalks and distance to possible walking targets.
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What explains Europe? Is it the food? It can't be smoking or leaded gasoline that was keeping the obesity down over there (unless they regulated those things later than us).
This is not Europe, this is everywhere. As for explanation, I like how Charles Murray's wife has put it:
Even if you refrain from eating snacks or sweets (and these also have been extremely optimized for palatability, with many different local maximums to choose from), we are no longer constrained by difficulty of obtaining ingredients, or cost for normal breakfast/lunch/dinner sort of food. Everything is available close by (or can be ordered online), and everything is very cheap relative to our incomes.
...That does make sense. We're more globalized, and we're also the opposite of starving, in general.
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In this article, the same author considers various studies on alleged links between sprawl and obesity. According to him, one study (peer-reviewed in a medical journal) shows only "small but significant associations" between sprawl and obesity, and two other studies suggest that "obesity causes sprawl. That is, obese people choose to live in sprawling communities because such neighborhoods are better suited for their needs."
Of course, that article is sixteen years old at this point, and many of the links in it are dead, so maybe the conclusions to which he comes in it are wrong.
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Furthermore, even in FRANCE, 69% of urban workers commute by car:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1017215/car-usage-to-go-to-work-by-residential-area-france/
Cars are so popular because they are incredibly useful and greatly improve the lives of those who use them. I find it curious that so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners.
This seems like a pure strawman. The bulk of the urbanist content I'm aware of is focused on things like "make walking safe", "have stuff closer together", "run more frequent trains" etc. that all are based around improving the QoL for non car-users. And you even have https://youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k which is about how driving is better in the Netherlands! What, specifically, are you referring to?
Well, many of the stuff they champion as improving the QoL of non-cars also just happens to worsen the QoL of car users, e.g. Oxford's traffic filters plan. I think this difference is easier to see if we talk about the proposals they say don't increase the QoL of non-cars, even though they do. For example, Not Just Bikes complaining about pedestrian bridges, and claiming they're "only built for the benefit of people driving, not walking", even though that doesn't make sense. I highly suspect the real reason he dislikes them is because, as he says later, they don't hinder the flow of traffic, and therefore don't worsen the QoL of car users.
And then there's articles like this which directly address your (NJB's) claim that the Netherlands is the best country in the world for driving by saying "...and that's a bad thing."
If you look at the video I linked, he makes the point that requiring cars to sometimes take a slightly longer route makes it faster to drive, since some people won't drive, reducing congestion.
Ironically, sprawling suburbs often have these exact same limitations. Cul de sacs are very popular, and suburban roads are often windy rather than direct, because everyone realizes that having cars go through your neighborhood sucks--but for some reason we don't think about these forms of road design as "limiting freedom to drive" or whatever.
NJB's argument about pedestrian bridges seems to focus entirely on how they lower QoL for pedestrians, in direct contradiction to the claim that "so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners." You say this doesn't make sense, but he makes several specific arguments and you don't offer any explanation at all, you just make an assertion about his state of mind.
There might be people who hate all driving and want to ban cars, so fine, it's not a "pure strawman." I still think it's a weakman to boil all arguments in favor of urbanism down to "they just hate cars" so all arguments can be ignored.
In that case it's not exactly about improving the quality of life of car users, just mitigating their externalities. Which, for the record, I agree with in this case.
If the route is only slightly longer though, I doubt it would make a meaningful difference in the amount of traffic. But this argument does have some merit to it and is why, for example, I-5 in California doesn't go through populated areas like Fresno.
Okay, I will elaborate.
He says they lower the QoL of pedestrians in contrast to the alternative that they will "just walk across the ground to get to where they're going", but this is a false alternative. The alternative to a pedestrian bridge is not being able to cross the road at all. And it's not like people don't use them; they're plenty popular and packed on weekends in Las Vegas. See also this response by Road Guy Rob (he misspeaks and says "crosswalks" instead of bridges, but the message is still the same).
When he points out that some pedestrian bridges and/or underpasses have crackheads on them, that's not the fault of pedestrian bridges or underpasses. That's just the fault of a city not willing to crack down on drugs and drug addicts. Otherwise, I could say that a city having alleys is bad because alleys are places out of sight where people deal drugs (and then claim that NYC is a great place because it has no alleys). It's actually quite infuriating that this is one of the only instances where Not Just Bikes will acknowledge that crime exists, because to my knowledge he doesn't acknowledge crime elsewhere in his channel, and crime (and policing) is probably one of the biggest differences between North America and the Netherlands (or, hell, even Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas; CityNerd's recent TEDx Talk talks about how he moved from Portland to Vegas but he doesn't acknowledge crime (i.e. why Walmart and Cracker Barrel have closed or are going to close all stores there) and gives other, seemingly-virtuous reasons why he moved).
And the bridge he derides as a "concrete ditch" actually looks pretty okay. But this is just a beauty/subjectivity argument, which I'm not a fan of.
What, like this guy with 1.2 million views? Or this guy? Or /r/fuckcars?
To some extent I have sympathy here because, to some extent, all movements are plagued by radicals and extremists, but my sympathy wanes when movements don't self-regulate in this matter.
Alright, well I'm not doing that.
It may not be the primary intention, but it does help.
I think there's just a very far inferential distance here. Why are the only options "bridge" or "nothing" in the first place? The thing being complained about is not that "a crosswalk would annoy those damned cars" it's that "pedestrians are forced to take a much longer and more difficult route to prevent cars from experiencing even the slightest inconvenience." It's not that making driving miserable is an end goal; it's that most American cities have unlimited appetite to add the slightest convenience for drivers at the cost of arbitrary QoL loss for every other form of transportation.
The very short mention about the drug users seems to be taken as more of a joke--as far as I can tell, he doesn't linger on it or claim it's because of the bridge. (He does actually talk about public safety around 1:50 in https://youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw&ab_channel=NotJustBikes, with the concept of "eyes on the street".)
A weakman can exist (that's the whole point) and be popular, but it's still the weakest form of the argument. The original claim was "I find it curious that so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners." There's quite a lot of the latter. I could say something like "people who like zoning are just racist and greedy." Probably there are some people who support strict zoning for those reasons; it wouldn't be hard to find example of NIMBY's using "home values" as an explicit argument. But there are certainly lots of other arguments, and it doesn't matter if the relative size of each group is 1:99 or the other way around.
What self-regulation do you want to see? I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone on this forum even go so far as to disclaim the worst NIMBYs. It's not like NJB or City Beautiful or CityNerd or Oh the Urbanity can do anything about /r/fuckcars or an opposing blog. Would you want to be grouped in with everyone who posts here on TheMotte, and have your arguments dismissed because of who posts here?
When you're at the point where you're considering building a bridge, you probably have problems with putting a crosswalk there anyway (there's a reason we don't build bridges everywhere), e.g. there's a lot of pedestrian and motor traffic. I don't mean to say a crosswalk is bad; a crosswalk is perfectly fine too and can co-exist alongside a bridge. But that doesn't mean that a bridge is strictly worse and should never be built, which is really my gripe with urbanists.
For the ones in Vegas at least, the route isn't that much longer, or more difficult. As a pedestrian, I was perfectly fine with using them rather than having to walk across the street. You even get to be able to stop and look out from the bridge, which you would never be able to do on a crosswalk in the middle of the road.
I hate to make hasty generalizations like this. This doesn't seem true to me; they take into account everyone who uses the road. Unless you're willing to claim that the uniquely-American way of urban planning has spread around to cities all over the world such as in Japan and China (where they build pedestrian bridges too)?
See, the "greedy" argument falls flat because if they really wanted money, they would gladly invite in the densification, as dense urban areas lead to higher property values (not including maintenance and taxes). And the "racist" argument is true insofar as being against crime is racist (that is, you'd have to be racist yourself in order to believe that being against crime is racist; yes, being tough on crime will disproportionately affect certain races, but that's only because the base rate of crime is disproportionately committed by those races in the same way). So, it's uncharitable to call them "racist" (extremely so), but it's not completely out of field of what a steelman NIMBY would actually believe.
That's only because this forum has a social norm where people are assumed to have already disclaimed that. Though, I don't have a good idea of who "the worst" NIMBYs are.
I mean, this happens all the time on the internet, for basically every community. But ideally, no.
In any case, I'm not discarding urbanists' arguments just for being urbanists. I take them quite seriously. Although maybe I shouldn't, if NJB's bit about drug users was just a joke.
I want to see condemnations of people committing crimes such as the Tyre Extinguishers. Instead, we get people like Not Just Bikes who apologize for their behavior by mostly placing the blame on governments who've "done nothing".
Indeed, they can't. But they can at least distance themselves from them.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. This statement looks either tautological (only cars use the road) or essentially false (pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders get way less consideration than drivers) to me.
Having a few pedestrian bridges doesn't mean that all of the infrastructure is car-centric. I don't know about China; Tokyo was definitely not car-centric. Not all pedestrian bridges are bad--the video even says that they're fine if they keep pedestrians at the same level. Pedestrian bridges are just one piece of infrastructure of many--no one feature makes or breaks a city. But in much of the US, they seem to be thrown in for the primary purpose of not slowing down cars, while every other consideration is secondary. This is true of a lot of infrastructure, like slip lanes for right hand turns: slightly more convenient for drivers, but much less safe for pedestrians.
If you recall, the reason we're talking about pedestrian bridges is because you wrote:
You can disagree, but I see no reason to assume that NJB's stated reasoning is a cover for a desire to annoy drivers, which is not something you have any evidence for.
"Negatively impacting property values" is a common NIMBY argument for opposing any sort of zoning reform. My inclination is to take these people at their word (like I do with NJB above) unless there's convincing reason otherwise.
In this case, I think you're making the same error I accused Randal O'Toole of making in one of my other comments. Dense areas have higher property values than sprawling ones because a lot of people want to live there. That's what makes them dense in the first place! But for a given neighborhood, building more housing will lower the price of renting or buying, because that's how supply and demand works, and is confirmed by the highest quality evidence that I'm aware of.
One individual might be able to make more money by building the only apartment building surrounded by single family homes, but that's not an option.
So... is the same true for YIMBYs?
The video you linked said it's not actually clear if this is a crime, and NJB calls it "really extreme behavior." Maybe I've just spent too much time on this forum, since that doesn't feel disproportionate to me. This comment just casually drops a mention of executing all the homeless and got 10 (net) upvotes and no response.
As far as I can tell, all the channels I mentioned have explicitly disavowed the idea that one should ban all cars or whatever. Demanding they explicitly go through and also disavow each individual person/group who does hold such a view seems, in my book, to mostly be bad faith smear attempts, akin to when the left threw a fit over Donald Trump not disavowing each different KKK member specifically or whatever the details were.
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Like in Manhattan? Or in Tokyo? Both cities famous for their ubiquitous pedestrian bridges.
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Because non car owners are either poor enough that they’re unnoticed in public conversation, or they’re weird enough no one wants to talk about them.
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Significantly improving the quality of life of non-car-owners, especially with the additional constraints that whatever you do has to work for everyone and not exclude anyone (including the unsheltered homeless), is not feasible. Making car owners lives worse is pretty easy. So if you actually just don't like people to have cars, it makes sense to use the stick rather than the carrot.
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That's because many proposals for improving the quality of life of non-car owners, such as building pedestrian bridges, are ridiculed by urbanists for improving the quality of life of car owners too.
The issue with pedestrian bridges is that unless the road they cross is a freeway, they make the quality of life worse for pedestrians (and better for drivers) compared to a crosswalk, by adding an unnecessary vertical component to the journey. The bridge only helps pedestrians if the baseline is no crosswalk. Assuming that there is a pedestrian route crossing the road with sufficient traffic to justify building the bridge, this is not a sensible assumption. Pedestrians have the same right to cross a road safely that cars in a cross street do, and everyone agrees that cars in a cross street are entitled to some kind of arrangement allowing them to cross at-grade within a reasonable waiting time (generally 30 seconds typical, 60 seconds maximum) - usually a traffic light.
A crosswalk costs less than a pedestrian bridge - even if you install a push-button operated traffic light to fairly allocate priority between cars and pedestrians (as opposed to a zebra crossing where pedestrians have priority at all times). The additional cost to build the bridge has negative benefit to pedestrians (climbing the steps takes longer than waiting for the green man), so it isn't pedestrian infrastructure.
If your response is "But the crosswalk would never be built, but the bridge might be" then you have to ask why. The reason is probably "because it is politically impossible to ask cars to wait for pedestrians the way they wait at red lights for cars in cross streets". If your community is serious about that, then I suppose the bridge does benefit pedestrians, in much the same way that a mugger benefits you if he lets you keep your ID while he takes your cash and credit cards.
Unless the vertical component is excessive (e.g. several ramps), I don't think it's "unnecessary". The pedestrian bridges in Las Vegas have a simple staircase and elevator and they get plenty of foot traffic.
Okay, but this conflicts with many of the positions espoused by urbanists I've seen that say that pedestrians and cars are different and therefore should be treated differently in some respects. E.g. urbanists ridicule when pedestrians are told to make sure they look both ways when crossing the road, even though when cars cross the road, they are taught (at least in drivers' ed) to look both ways too. The standard here doesn't seem to be consistently applied.
In any case, underpasses (which don't have a vertical component) are ridiculed by urbanists too. They also ridicule even at-grade solutions like HAWK signals.
This analogy does not follow. No one is being "robbed" here in any metaphorical sense.
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