The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities

The size of Canada really isn’t a valid excuse for Canada’s poor public transit, nor is Canada’s population. Notjustbikes posted a good video rebutting this argument a few days ago: [VIDEO]

HAH that is one of the most ridiculous excuses... and is also directly refuted: [VIDEO] ^^ "Not Just Bikes"

This argument is just.... wrong. For a video describing how wrong it is, refer to Not Just Bikes: [VIDEO] For text and numbers: Shenzhen urban area is 1,748 km2. Atlanta is 353.04km2. Los Angeles City is 1,299 km2 (yes the metro area is quite larger, but so is Shenzhen's). The average length of a trip in the US is 19.63 km. This is simple basic stuff. There is absolutely nothing that makes Americans uniquely need tank-sized vehicles with 1000km range, even with the uniquely terrible urban design that most American cities have.

This is irrelevant, though, since the size of the country isn’t what determines where people go. It’s not like trains got less practical when Alaska got admitted to the union. Sprawling, low density, single use zoning, combined with parking minimums, have much more to do with it. Here’s a video that explores the topic if you’re curious [VIDEO]

> NL is an easy case to make though: super densely populated so there is a large tax base for such projects. See "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities": * [VIDEO] We don't care about the densities of entire countries, we care about the densities of where people live: cities. For the US, 40% of the population lives in counties on a coast: * [LINK] 200M people live with-in 100 mi (160 km) of a border: * [LINK] The US population is already highly concentrated: * [LINK] * [LINK] There are large swaths of the US where there's a whole lotta nothing (population-wise).

There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station , and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. "The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail" - [LINK] - "Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)" [it's not walkable] - [LINK] - How American urban transit is built misunderstanding the way transit needs to work to be successful, notably trying to build transit as a bandaid over car problems, but not making it regular, frequent, reliable, fast, convenient, instead plonking an isolated transit connection from nowhere to nowhere which runs once every couple of hours and then pointing to it as an example of how transit doesn't work in America - "America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)" - [LINK] - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - [VIDEO]

> A bicycle is trash (fun to ride, not that useful). Entirely dependent on the infrastructure: [LINK] > What are you going to carry on your bike? Five bags? Seems like a lot of groceries to buy at a time, but if you really want to: [LINK] > I don’t want to go 5 miles away, I want to go 200. You cover 200 miles every day? [VIDEO] Regardless, you can own a car for those longer journeys just fine and still make most trips by bicycle. > With bikes and walking, your world is small. Yeah, that's why public transport is important too. Cars as well, although deprioritized. > Electric cars powered by renewable energy get rid of most of the negative externalities. They get rid of some of the noise and almost all of the harmful exhaust. That's about it. They're still 2 ton+ massive steel cages that are incredibly dangerous to everyone else, take up a ridiculous amount of space, and require extremely expensive infrastructure. As for the rest, sure, I'm not really criticising your particular choices, it sounds like you live in a rural area where a car is necessary anyway. However, there's no way for everybody to be able to live like you do. There are just too many people. We need to live with long-term sustainability in mind.

> Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving. That's absolutely not true. It only became true in the post-war when there was a push for suburban sprawl, lobbied by GM and all the auto industry [0] > it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car. "Where there is a will, there is a way", right? The discussion is not even if she can go by without a car, but whether she would want it. > We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets. Ok, but then don't go around trying to rationalize your bad choices and poor capacity for civic organization. [1] Don't go around saying "I lived in NYC and I thought I could live without a car, but after I had kids I realized they are not so bad", and please don't go around saying "it can't be done". Amsterdam and Rotterdam were once also car-centric cities which managed to turn themselves around in less than a generation. There is no inherit limitation in the US that forbids this change to happen. There is no amount of American Exceptionalism that can prevent people from clamoring change. Maybe it won't be done in the US, because people are lazy and not willing to sacrifice their own convenience for some communal benefit, but it's super annoying to always get in these discussions when people try to hide their preferences on external circumstances. North American cities are they way they are by choice . [0]: How The Auto Indus