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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.
Like in Manhattan? Or in Tokyo? Both cities famous for their ubiquitous pedestrian bridges.
Just because Manhattan and Tokyo have lots of pedestrian and motor traffic and have little pedestrian bridges, doesn't mean that pedestrian bridges should never be built. Las Vegas is an example of a city with lots of pedestrian and motor traffic, and lots of pedestrian bridges.
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