r/fuckcars / Not Just Bikes / 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

[Apple Porcupine]

CityNerd officially joining Jason's category of "anyone who disagrees with me is an idiot".

But Jason doesn't read comments, guys.

Source, Archive

 

[Rubick]

Or that it's almost identical to how apartment buildings handle trash in the US; the only difference is that in the US the dumpster is stored in a garage or alley instead of underground. There's no need to spend the extra money to bury it if you have enough space for a vehicle-accessible dumpster.

This underground communal appartement garbage bins aren't a new thing

Back in 2003 when i was living in Utrecht we had three such underground garbage bins. One for biological waste, one for general household waste and another for glass. I can tell you the general household waste bin was always full within a week which led people to pile up the garbage bags next to the bin. Because that bloody thing was to small to accommodate all the residents in the building.

A common problem and not only at my appartement building at that time. Also the garbage trucks had a problem lifting them out for whatever reason, to empty them. Which took usually additional week or more for them to be emptied.

It was a terrible setup.

Now i haven't lived in a appartement building for more then a decade but still seems to be a problem with this set up. Because it's still a common enough sight to still see garbage bags next to the bins.

BTW American way is still used here also In general for 2 to 3 story appartement building.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

They complain about automatic transmissions, 4WD and six-foot beds because those aren't for WORK

They also obviously don't work in a trade job. My company has a 2017 Chevy 2500HD Duramax as our shop truck. That motherfucker rarely goes anywhere without a big heavy trailer, gets driven very hard by guys who don't give a fuck, gets driven over fields and soft road jobsites usually while towing previously mentioned heavy trailer, goes way over its scheduled maintenance intervals, and just generally gets kicked to shit on a regular basis.

But you know what? Thing has 150,000 miles on it and hasn't had a single problem. The transmission is still perfect, the engine is still strong, the AC is still cold, the heat is still hot, the heated seats sterring wheel and mirrors still work perfect, the body and bumpers are still (mostly) straight, and the radio is still clear and loud as fuck. And the bluetooth still works too! I've owned older pickups myself and I've worked in places that have older pickups still in their shops, they suck. They require way more maintenance, they rattle, they stink, they're loud, the AC is busted more often than not, the radio has blown out speakers or busted dials, and they rust like motherfuckers. Sure I could McGuyver my '95 2500 Cheyenne back together with chewing gum, posicle sticks, and happy thoughts and it'd keep running but god damn do I not miss the rusted out fucking everything (I live in the Great Lakes region, we put salt on the roads and a lot of it, plus it rains like crazy) and the lack of AC in my noisy fucking rattletrap truck on ninety degree days. No one wants to live that way, especially not after I've just got done standing out in the sun busting my ass for ten hours digging holes hauling rocks and breaking concrete.

EDIT: And just to add to this, there is nothing wrong with a six foot bed. "WAH WAH WAH MY PLYWOOD DOESN'T SIT FLAT!!! WAH WAH WAH!" Suck it up pussy, it isn't going anywhere, strap it down if it bothers you that much. Mowers and blowers still fit in it fine and if you want to haul ladders or pipe then put a rack on it. Hell, a six foot bed will fit a diesel concrete saw or a Dingo. It's plenty big.

 

[quaawaa]

/r/fuckcars realizes that transit is slower than driving for long distances, even in dense cities:

---

The reason why the light rail in Seattle takes so long to get from Downtown to the Airport is because it makes a detour into the ghetto for "equity" reasons:


The line also used to be red, instead of green, but because it ran through the ghetto, that color was racist:

Central Link was renamed to the "Red Line" as part of a systemwide rebranding in September 2019 by Sound Transit to prepare for the arrival of East Link (the Blue Line). Two months later, the agency announced that it would consider a new name after complaints due to the similarity of the "Red Line" with redlining, which historically affected residents of the Rainier Valley. A new designation, the 1 Line (colored green), was announced in April 2020 and took effect in September 2021.

---

For visual reference, here are two cross town routes from a "well-designed walkable city" and an "inefficient suburban sprawl car hell city":

3 hours to go from southern Staten Island to northern Bronx via transit (a distance of 35 miles):

or 1.5 hours to drive from Conroe to Galveston, Texas (a distance of 90 miles):


Driving the NYC route takes about the same time as the Houston route, but is half the distance:

 

[Xarpho's Return]

/r/fuckcars realizes that transit is slower than driving for long distances, even in dense cities:

Houston driving does vary a lot WHEN you drive and what the outbound traffic is like. Still, when I've done comparisons like that on this thread I've tipped the scales and plotted it against bad Houston traffic and in most cases, it still comes out ahead.

 

[quaawaa]

Houston driving does vary a lot WHEN you drive and what the outbound traffic is like. Still, when I've done comparisons like that on this thread I've tipped the scales and plotted it against bad Houston traffic and in most cases, it still comes out ahead.

Even just comparing New York driving to New York transit, driving is often faster outside of rush hour. In my Google Maps screenshot, there is an accident on the route; it would be even faster without that.

Here's a trip I plotted right now (9:00 PM Sunday) from the NYSE to the Met, which spans almost all of the good part of Manhattan:

The car is 8 minutes faster than transit and over twice as fast as biking. This is in Manhattan, infamous for being a nightmare to drive in and having an amazing transit and bike network!

Google also assumes that you're driving the pathetically low speed limit of 25 mph, which I doubt anyone does at this time of night.

 

[Yamamura]

it makes a detour into the ghetto for "equity" reasons

I didn't think it possible, but I think you gave me another reason to prefer driving.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

I didn't think it possible, but I think you gave me another reason to prefer driving.

The worst part is that even if you don't use the light rail it's very existence is still a detriment to you by shuttling in cart loads of niggers to the nice part of town every night and weekend.

 

[quaawaa]

Ray visited Phoenix but he only visited Downtown Phoenix which is a boring area full of office towers and homeless camps.

Spoiler: YouTube

He talks about how awesome it is they're removing car lanes and replacing them with bike lanes but...

What's wrong? I've been told by /r/fuckcars that heat shouldn't stop anyone from biking.

He goes to an apartment building's garage in the middle of the day and says that it's a waste of space because it's mostly empty:

This Aspire Park Central apartment complex is just a behemoth but maybe even more jaw-dropping is the parking structure attached to it. Does 10 stories of parking reflect the Invisible Hand of the Free Market because I climbed the whole thing and I have some serious questions about utilization and whether this is an optimal use of available land but nobody asked me.

Maybe it's because, unlike you, everyone who lives there has a job and is at work?

I don't really like to film on transit vehicles so you'll just have to take my word for it that the line is pretty well used.

Sure...that's totally the reason why you don't have any pictures of the "well used" light rail.

It's hard to tell from the heavy tint, but this train looks pretty empty to me:


He then complains about a reversible lane:

This is bad for reasons and only exists in carbrained cities:

Sadly, I bet he would unironically call DC a "carbrained city" even though it has an extensive metro system and was designed by a Frenchman.

Triggered by a Kari Lake for Senate sign:


He spends half the video whining about the width of the sidewalks on an arterial road. He's a dumbass because he could literally have walked one block over and walked along a much quieter street:


He stayed at a hotel with "complimentary boozy popsicles":

Also, he whines a lot about the heat in the video for someone supposedly from Vegas.

This is what he had to say about riding a Waymo self-driving car:

Justified or not I kind of felt guilty riding an autonomous Jaguar instead of transit as I watched a Valley Metro train go by but if the Project 2025 wackos get their way ride hail Vehicles will be considered transit so maybe it's fine.

He clearly enjoyed riding them but feels he must be negative.

The funniest part of the video is something that isn't in the video. Because he's a car-free loser who doesn't know anything about the areas he talks about, he thought that "Downtown Phoenix" is the most happening part of the Valley and didn't visit the real "downtown" of the Phoenix metro area, Old Town Scottsdale. Scottsdale is way more vibrant and walkable (no light rail line though, just cars ).

Some photos:



I think you get the point.

The guy visited the city and stayed in the "suburbs" the entire time, but thought he was in the city center.

There are only a handful comments that pointed that out, none with any significant amount of likes:

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

The guy visited the city and stayed in the suburbs the entire time, but thought he was in the city center.

Why does every faggot on youtube do that stupid thing with their voices? You know the thing? Where they end every sentence with an upward inflection? Like everything sentence they speak is a question?

 

[JJLiautaud]

He then complains about a reversible lane:

I thought urbanists would love reversible lanes because they allow roads to be wider without wasting space.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Ray visited Phoenix but he only visited Downtown Phoenix which is a boring area full of office towers and homeless camps.

Downtowns haven't been the end-all be-all they've been since the 1960s (the freeways all go into them because they were still relevant at the time of their planning) but urbanists still worship the concept anyway.

Even in better times, they were what they were because they had destinations people wanted to see (department stores, hotels, restaurants), not because of dense buildings, and the second those department stores, hotels, and restaurants figured out they could achieve the same results with free parking and better demographics, they did.

He stayed at Rise Uptown Hotel, one of those hipster boutique hotels in areas that would've been considered iffy ten years ago and attracts bugmen like him. It was originally designed as a suburban office building but I guess it's okay now since it's right off the light rail (a mile to the northwest is Christown Spectrum Mall, which was one of the first enclosed suburban malls in the country).

 

[Lady Bizness]

If you are wondering where this MATI is coming from, my first job during/after covid was Conservation Corps. It was refilling the bins, trimming vines and bushes on public roads, clearing out dead leaves to make sure the area didn't have a forest fire.

I'm not religious but God bless you. During COVID everything like this stopped and our environment turned to shit as if a virus was more hazardous to the workers than working on the side of the highway. Anyone I would complain to would act like I was a privileged asshole to notice how shit everything looked, and somehow safety precautions against fires and droughts were forgotten. We know that environmental cleanliness affects people's mental health and vice versa. I don't know what happened to our values.

 

[quaawaa]

/r/fuckcars user suggests moving to a small town and outvoting the locals to turn it into Amsterdam:

Luckily for all small town residents, urbanists won't move there because of a lack of "culture" (i.e. nightclubs and vegan restaurants):

Source (Archive)

 

[xXthrowawayaccountXx]

I'm not religious but God bless you. During COVID everything like this stopped and our environment turned to shit as if a virus was more hazardous to the workers than working on the side of the highway. Anyone I would complain to would act like I was a privileged asshole to notice how shit everything looked, and somehow safety precautions against fires and droughts were forgotten. We know that environmental cleanliness affects people's mental health and vice versa. I don't know what happened to our values.

Oh, it was fucking insanity. You had to wear an N95 during all work hours. You know, wouldn't wanna get covid from the fucking trees.

You know what irony is? I was one of the first people to know about COVID. Back when it was still the coronavirus, effecting a few dozen people in wuhan that only some autists on 4chan were tracking.

I had to listen to people that didn't even believe me when I said it would grow to the US and might cause a lockdown lecture me about not taking it seriously because whatever damage it would do to people's health was now far outweighed by the sheer fucking damage we have been doing to our development and economy. I still see the damage it has done to how people talk and socialize.

EDIT: The glorious week that we were allowed to take the stupid masks off, until the NPC programming updated that you still had to wear them, despite having the vaccine, because.... Trust the science!!!! That was my tipping point.

 

[FILTH Tourist]

/r/fuckcars user suggests moving to a small town and outvoting the locals to turn it into Amsterdam:
View attachment 6273627
Luckily for all small town residents, urbanists won't move there because of a lack of "culture" (i.e. nightclubs and vegan restaurants):
View attachment 6273626
Source (Archive)

So they are just unironically supporting gentrification now?

 

[quaawaa]

/r/urbanplanning wonders how those dumb Republicans managed to have affordable housing while the enlightened blue states have expensive housing:


A lot of the comments focus on how Austin is affordable because it has a left-wing local government that resists the dumb right-wing state government, which is funny because it has the worst housing policy of any Texan metro area by far (because its city council are urbanists) and as a result has more expensive housing than Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, both of which are several times more populous.



Suburbs are a pyramid scheme:

Sounds like they accounted for it then?

Austin is affordable thanks to the Democrats (and not the Republican state government that builds highways over their protests and refuses to enact an urban growth boundary):


NYC is expensive thanks to Republican Long Islanders:

I thought they hated sprawl?

No, you can't make housing affordable by sprawling! That's not what my favorite YouTuber said!




NYC has a declining population, Austin has a growing population:


It's amazing how the truth comes out: they don't care about housing affordability at all; they only care about increasing density.

Why all red states need to pass abortion and trans surgery bans:


The tech narrative is cope. All of the Big Tech companies have been slowly diversifying to other areas for over a decade now and VCs are starting to realize that it's not the smartest idea to force every startup to move to the Bay Area.

Also, open carrying and banning weed helps to keep your state free of redditors:


Source (Archive)

 

[Xarpho's Return]

The tech narrative is cope. All of the Big Tech companies have been slowly diversifying to other areas for over a decade now and VCs are starting to realize that it's not the smartest idea to force every startup to move to the Bay Area.

They act like California doesn't incentivize everything. Despite the fact that there's not a realistic chance that the film industry (for instance) will pack up and move elsewhere, the state dumps a ton of tax money into them as incentives.

 

[Found the open sauce]

Has this already been asked or explained (especially over the 480+ pages on this thread)? The argument is that since the 40s or 50s, entire buildings and urban centers were demolished in favor of huge sprawling highways, and that republicunts actively insist on keeping commute distances as long as possible and population densities as low as possible, or else it's an Orwellian Stasi-like project to make surveillance and movement control effortless and also that it's another rat utopia experiment with plummeting birth rates and skyrocketing crime and drug overdoses. I also keep seeing urbanists complain about how our mental health crisis and increase in school shootings are directly attributed to our living and urban centers being built with only introverts in mind and encouraging living a sheltered and coddled life like Chris-Chan in 14BC, and also that the only viable form of in-person social interaction is in school or a few kilometers away from home. On the other hand, people in East Asia on average live in what satisfies urbanists' demands but have some of the worst mental health records in the world which can only really be attributed to cultural problems instead of convenient multi-modal commuting.

Jason Slaughter moving to the Netherlands to escape car-dependent hell is as absurd and lulzy as the handful of autists moving to Russia to escape wokeness and Marxism without any consideration on how un-MAGA that country's policies and workings are, especially its unwavering tolerance of socialist views.

I see the common arguments from those urbanists:

• Republicunts say that public transport should be defunded or abolished because its users disproportionately consist of unsympathetically impoverished lowlife violent criminals or pickpockets who never made the right decisions growing up, had an absymal academic performance and lengthy disciplinary record in school, and forever stuck at the bottom at their own fault and are either unemployable or only allowed minimum wage labor. Therefore, by making life complete hell for such people by not letting them go anywhere as they can't afford a car and are bad drivers, the city will be sunshine and rainbows again and safer than Tokyo and Singapore (two cities with a reputation of satisfying urbanists).
• Republicunts also say that commuting by bike is sluggish and doesn't have any carrying capacity for groceries or kids, which immediately contradicts all arguments for making commuting (especially by car) way longer.
• Quote-unquote "100 years ago", our cities used to be designed like western European cities today until conservative-led zoning laws came in and made huge sprawling highways plow down entire square miles worth of urbanization, as per the following posters down below. Wasn't the car-centric revolution pushed by only progressives and liberals, and the entire opposition being trad-family conservatives? And what's the reality of the difference between the same cities of the two different eras if it wasn't simply retrofitting horse carriage roads with modern asphalt and sidewalks? And there were also new safety standards like the ban on asbestos, which demolishing and building from scratch might've been cheaper and more practical than refactoring the same buildings.
• With the three points combined, it therefore means that both neighborhoods and cities in general will forever be car-dependent and inconvenient to go any other way, which therefore means more stress on the part of the especially big family, more frustration, and less incentive or emotional fitness to have children and fulfill the American dream, therefore being an unsustainable living model with shrinking birth rates and an increase in isolation and frustration-induced mental health problems besides the obvious irritability on the road. With this point, it's even easier to assume just how doomer that these urbanists are, especially the harder it is to prove it not happening.

They also use something like these posters as an argument:

View attachment 1722886520646.webp
View attachment 1722886579623.webp

 

[TowinKarz]

A common problem and not only at my apartment building at that time. Also the garbage trucks had a problem lifting them out for whatever reason, to empty them. Which took usually additional week or more for them to be emptied.

Whoever installed them, or directed their installation, probably didn't account for overhead clearance. Or did, but only by the most minimal of margins, meaning it had to be in JUST this ONE spot or else there was no way to dump it without hitting the ceiling.

You can never put something back EXACTLY where it was when you move it, so, chances are, after a few times, the bin had ever-so-slightly migrated out of position to the point it couldn't be emptied.

So then, they'd have to send in guys with crowbars and floor jacks to nudge it back into place or something.... which they probably were not eager to do, since they likely warned the landlord this would happen day one, but were ignored as "not being community focused" - and settled for "Whatever you can get, you get, leave the rest".

They act like California doesn't incentivize everything. Despite the fact that there's not a realistic chance that the film industry (for instance) will pack up and move elsewhere, the state dumps a ton of tax money into them as incentives.

Except the film industry has moved elsewhere to a degree, not for everything, and not for the executives, certainly, but, a lot of on-site filming doesn't happen in California these days.

Not just other states, but other countries.... The last three Disney live-action-remakes were made in England.....

Vancouver was jokingly referred to as "Fake Chicago" for most of the 90's and 00's as it was the cheapest way to put up the backdrop of "Generic North American City".

And as AI gets better? And the cultural significance of movies dwindles? Its gonna get worse, much worse, to the point that California will be lauded as "getting out in front" of the issue by offering subsidies before they were direly needed (But they'll still demand a bailout when Hollywood finally goes tits-up , mark my words)

Luckily for all small town residents, urbanists won't move there because of a lack of "culture" (i.e. nightclubs and vegan restaurants):

One of the few things I get solace from is knowing that they'll never move to my town because there's no microbrewery, yoga studio or organic grocery.

First time they'd have to follow a slow tractor for a couple miles? Or wait for a tri-axle dump truck to cut a 3 point turn to get on the scale at the quarry? They'd be running screaming for the hills.

Well, first they'd demand laws to ban those, but then, when it failed? Yeah, they'd go screaming for the hills.

The fact the recent Chevron ruling also likely deprives them of the ability to sic their Section 8 housing on me (and not thee), as they've been threatening to do for years, is a nice afterthought too. They'd boasted for a long time about how they'll finally be able to "fix" rural America when they get the OK from the EPA to set national zoning laws, ban single-family dwellings and fire up the bulldozers for neo-commie-blocks....