Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it’s normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They’re oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.
I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate “the free market”, this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It’s not that some of these companies aren’t bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it’s that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.
The example I like to give is that companies’ race to the bottom on quality. They’re responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.
And now be honest: Would you NIMBY a couple of multiplexes three-story apartment complex flanked by some commercial space and a tram stop in your suburb? A plaza, cafes, restaurants, bars, doctors, no car parking, it’s serving your suburb, you can bike there, there’s ample of bike parking. Would you support repealing laws that make such developments illegal.
I should really give up on collecting downvotes by arguing with people who are incapable of considering my arguments, but it’s worth making this point: “NIMBY” as a term has been overused and misused to the point of meaninglessness. Let me give an example:
There are people in cities and suburbs across the US right now trying to shut down small airports. Ostensibly they want the airport converted into “low cost housing” or a park, but the real underlying reason always seems to be that they hate airplane noise and the value of their house would increase if the airport were to disappear. The wrinkle is these airports existence predates ownership of their house, predates the construction of their house, predates their housing development, and in the majority of cases the airports are older than 99% of people in the area. Nevertheless, they are succeeding in shutting down these airports, which arguably have more right to be there than they do. They knew there was an airport there when they moved in. The developer knew there was an airport there when they built the house. In many cases, the airport was actually busier in the past than it is in the present.
These people could accurately be called NIMBYs, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the term NIMBY is most often wielded as a pejorative for anyone who opposes anything you don’t like. It has lost its descriptive power because people who want to conserve the status quo are NIMBYs, and people who want to change the status quo are equally NIMBYs.
Do you oppose development? NIMBY!
Do you support development? NIMBY!
Do you have any opinion about anything in your community? Believe it or not, also a NIMBY.
I think it’s bullshit. I think opposing change to preserve the status quo happens to be more valid in most cases. I’m sick of democracy being used as a weapon where an influx of outsiders can move into an area, become a majority, and vote to change its character. There are rural areas across the US that are being invaded by people from wealthier, populous states - namely CA and TX - as a result of remote work. The effect this has is that people who have lived there for generations are priced out, and then the local character is forced to change by these newcomers who now outnumber the original locals. If being opposed to that change is being a “NIMBY”, I think the NIMBYs are morally in the right - and I think the term being used as an insult is nonsense.
I read the link I posted, which is the same one you linked. I think some of the way you presented your argument suggests to me that you’re making a distinction between well-executed and poorly-executed transit, and saying that because I find transit/buses to be inefficient and an unbearable mode of travel, I must be using a poorly-executed system. That sounds a lot to me like no-true-scotsman, because you seem to be judging whether I’m experiencing the “real thing” based on whether I thought it was efficient or not. Clearly I must be experiencing a bad version of it if it was inefficient or otherwise not to my liking - or at least that’s what you seem to have implied.
I agree that we probably don’t have a common definition of good or bad transit.
I also think you should read up on what a phallus is.
phallacy
Nice.
Your argument parallels the no true Scotsman fallacy much closer than you realize.
You: no Scotsman would commit such a crime
Me: but it says here that a Scotsman committed the crime
You: No true Scotsman would commit such a crime…
Compare:
You: buses are great!
Me: I take buses and they suck!
You: good buses are great, you just aren’t taking the good ones…
It’s exactly the same. You get to decide who is a true Scotsman for the purpose of argument, and what constitutes a good bus service. You can simply declare that the bus service isn’t a good one and therefore doesn’t reflect badly on bus services, just as you can decide the criminal wasn’t a true Scotsman, and therefore you’re always right.
you now admit that you yourself have used buses that run frequently, which undermines your original argument, even if they had other flaws in your view
I have used buses which run frequently for buses, but which are still too infrequent and thus add lots of unnecessary time.
I think NYC is an excellent representative of transit done well. It may not be world-best, but there aren’t many places that are as dense or more dense and that creates a best case scenario for running at all hours and with maximum frequency. Also, most people don’t own cars and don’t drive there. There are few places with so many built-in advantages for transit as NYC.
It sounds like you just don’t like cities or being around too many other people.
No argument there.
I swear this is a no-true-Scotsman argument: “you don’t hate buses/apartments/transit, you just have never lived anywhere that has the good stuff”.
I’ve lived many places and traveled plenty, and I’m convinced there’s no good stuff. To have transit that works, you need density that’s oppressive. I did it in NYC, which is a best-case scenario for transit facilitated by high density. NYC has transit that runs frequently, and 24/7/365. Buses, subway, trains, and even ferries. It’s so dense most people don’t own a car (I certainly didn’t). Everyone lives in apartments. Walking and biking is the norm. Even pizza delivery is done by bike instead of car. Catching an Uber was still much faster for many point-to-point trips, because transit necessarily can’t go direct from everywhere, to everywhere.
Now that I’m back in suburbia, a trip to the grocery store takes 1/4 as long by car (same distance). I don’t have to spend a ton of time waiting to catch a connecting train or bus that I missed by 30 seconds. I don’t have to ride though stop after stop, packed in with other people. I can just go direct from origin to destination in quiet comfort, without the headaches
Not allowing the overcrowded parts of the world to invade the less crowded parts of the world is a policy choice.
I’m not opposed to it, but there’s something nice about having your own workshop. Depends on what you’re doing. I also have fewer and worse makerspaces where I am now than places I’ve lived in the past - it’s a crapshoot.
They pretty much do have to suck. They arrive infrequently, stop frequently, accelerate like an overloaded lorry, and are only remotely feasible if your start and end points are on the same route. Switching buses is a huge time penalty. They only approach usability in urban hellscapes that are so densely populated, it makes my skin crawl.
Yet they keep putting them in small cities and towns where they take 3x as long to get anywhere as driving because of indirect routing, while causing traffic congestion because of frequent stops and low performance. Seriously, fuck buses.
This is EXACTLY the kind of point I’m trying to make. Humans keep packing more and more into the same forever-growing cities and it makes the formerly-pleasant harsh, foreign, and unwelcoming.
There exist nice places that have balance - green spaces, slow pace of life, nice local restaurants, uncrowded trails, minimal traffic and short commutes.
Then they become discovered, become popular, and become overcrowded in a way that ruins what made them special to begin with. But they still look small to people from the big cities, who keep moving there. Now increasingly expensive, congested, and losing their original character, the urban zealots who invaded start screeching about cars, walkability, bikeability, and transit. It was perfectly bikeable, and there was no traffic before everyone tried to pile in.
The enemy is GROWTH, and OVERCROWDING, not single family homes and cars.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is “I don’t like people”.
I’m sorry, but that’s a really great fucking argument. I don’t like people. I don’t want to share walls with people. I want a quiet, private, green space to live in without the density porn half of this thread is fellating (and a significant number are also condemning).
Dense cities are uninhabitable to me, and I can say it from experience - having lived in cities having from 1-10m people including NYC, and including not owning a car and being fully dependent on public transit. The city life was always worse in every way than living in the suburbs. In the suburbs, it’s easier to get groceries, it’s easier to enjoy nature, it’s easier to go to the gym, or get to work. Everything about living in the city was harder, shittier, and more expensive.
I don’t WANT to own an apartment. I don’t WANT to share walls with my neighbors. I want space to work on my hobby projects like with wood and metal. To make noise without upsetting anyone. To have privacy, and the ability to get away from people. I need a shed, a garage, and some yard space. The only way I can swing it is fewer people and more space. Europe is too crowded for that in many places. It sounds unpleasant.
I guess if I really wanted to scream at a wall, I’d make a c/fuck-fuckcars. These people are beyond help, but I hope they grow out of it so I don’t have to live in high density hell because infinite growth is just accepted as normal.
Where are you getting this absurd, fictitious distance? I’ve lived in MANY different suburbs and cities. The driven distance is only ever slightly more than the straight line distance. The only consistently true fact is that public transit takes 3-4x as long to go the same places as driving (and I mean in dense urban areas with real transit). It really seems like there’s a strawman that fuckcars participants have in their head for just how bad it is to drive places in less dense areas - I promise it’s not. Or you just need to find one that isn’t shitty AZ/TX/FL new build HOA hell that exists only to enrich a scummy RE developer.
This is nothing like places I’ve been, most of which are not new suburbs
Edit: you probably hate new build suburbs that are imitating old suburbs because the population grew too much in the last 50 years and everyone wanted a slice of the pie
We do what we can
So would I, but when you try to talk to ultra-urbanist zealots about that, they act like you’re deranged for wanting your own land in a quiet place, using the devil’s transportation to go places public transit could not reasonably service.
That’s ludicrous - I don’t know which hedgerow maze you’re navigating to get to the grocery store. 2500ft is half a mile. You cannot make 0.5 miles into 4-5 miles in any reasonable amount of neighborhood streets, and I have never lived somewhere like that in 6 completely different suburbs in different regions/cities.
In my suburban neighborhood, the straight line, as-the-crow-flies distance is 0.52 miles. The driven distance is 0.7 miles. Everywhere I’ve ever lived it’s proportionally similar, though not always as close. Anyplace with public transit - even good public transit - would require more distance than walking and WAY more time than driving.
Are there just a bunch of people out there living in insaneland (where?!?)? Everywhere I’ve lived is dense city or completely sane suburbia. Are suburbs just an evil caricature of reality in your mind? Is fuckcars just full of people living in some crazy fictional strawman of a suburban hell?
How about this: housing in places with a shrinking population is relatively cheap and plentiful (math, right?). Developed countries could dial back immigration so that immigration + birth rate is below replacement. That solves overpopulation at the regional level.
What’s far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I’m from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.
In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you’re walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can’t possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.