PSA: Deboonking the Traffic Soyboys Part 21 – Miscellaneous Dunking on the “Streetcar Conspiracy”, Trolleybus Fetishizing, Irrational Skyscraper Hatred, Before the Soy Imperium Demands that we Crush the Ruralite

I’ve promised for the past two entries to move on to the Urbanite Crowd’s LOLbertarian tier takedowns of the economics of suburbia. The end of this piece will bridge to that one. Unfortunately, or fortunately if you’ve been enjoying this series, we’ve got some miscellaneous dunking to get through. I’ve complained before that the Traffic Troons are annoyingly wrong on pretty much everything they talk about, but I can’t always justify a long digression in the middle of any particular piece. Today, we look at just one small part of the complete and utter bullshit these people spew on a regular basis. 

Above is Alan Fisher’s video titled “Why TrolleyBuses are Vastly Superior to Battery Electric Buses.” Initially I figured the title was simply clickbait. After all, electric buses have the obvious advantage of not needing the wire infrastructure built, maintained, or operated on. Any rational person would recognize that battery powered electric buses have a mobility and convenience advantage that, in some situations, should prove superior than trolleybuses.

(3:48) So what makes trolleybuses inherently better then? The first reason that trolleybuses are better comes down to how –

When I first watched this video I anticipated that he would eventually get around to a one-sided and snarky mention of the obvious advantage of battery buses. Something that downplays this, or pretends that it doesn’t matter, but ultimately acknowledges it.

Nope. Alan Fisher legitimately thinks that trolleybuses are inherently superior to battery buses. They’re just better, period. He spends the first part of the video explaining the basics of trolleybuses to us as if we are five. Then he moves on to whining about the environmental impact of lithium mining. I was ready to start agreeing with Fisher for the first time, but he starts this part off with the following whining.

(5:40)

We live in a very throwaway society. People rarely think about what it takes to manufacture, or the materials required to build something nowadays. This obsession has lead to the use and extreme rise of automobiles in the United States over the last century.

You’re right Alan, I’m sure that’s it. People just have no idea that cars secretly cost millions of dollars per vehicle to manufacture. Not even the automobile manufacturers know this for some reason. If only they occasionally took a look at the cost of their own product’s manufacturing, they would realize that they are trillions of dollars in debt because a Honda Civic ACKSHUALLY costs at least six million dollars to manufacture. Or maybe this just proves that car manufacturers are secretly subsidized somehow.

That automobiles are better than horses, which were infesting our cities long before cars, is either irrelevant, or maybe horses never existed or something. The real advantage of automobiles is just that no one cares how much they cost to manufacture. 

Any transportation method is going to be better than an automobile. For resource-wise, materials-wise, and a communal use-wise.

I just want you to know that I’ve been transcribing him accurately, in this blurb and the one above. Don’t think I’m the idiot who’s writing this down wrong, he just talks like a retard. And no, he doesn’t bother providing any evidence for this claim. Evidence is for caRbRAiNs.

Anyway, he gets into the ethics of Cobalt mining. I was about to begrudgingly give him a point, but he immediately transitions to praising the USSR, outright playing the anthem while cutting to footage of various USSR events and iconography. The anthem keeps playing in the background until his outro blurb. Because when I think ethical treatment of workers, I think USSR.

It makes sense in a country like the USSR, where resources are very limited and especially rare earth materials are limited, trolleybuses became very popular.

Or it was a whim of the communist politburo that was based on nothing in particular, Alan. It’s important to note that, while servatives are basically intolerable, they’re right when they say that these people admire communism precisely because it lets them force things down peoples throats that they don’t want. Of course, we here at the Daily Rake do like a strong and powerful Government, it just needs to be doing the right things and with the blessing of the people.

I digress.

They say that you should always be prepared for the worst that can happen in life. Well, maybe we should build society the same way. The luxury resources that we have today might not be available tomorrow, or for future generations. Trolleybuses are just one piece of the puzzle to building a sustainable future.

I’m sure that a system that requires tons of wires be in place and run on power from a generator is going to be very resilient in times of war or natural disasters. Much more so than a battery powered bus that can run anywhere. 

Above we see an electric bus navigating the streets of Rome. I’m sure those historic streets would be immensely improved upon if they had a whole rats nest of wires installed above them. You may not agree, but remember, trolley buses are inherently superior. There are no strengths and weaknesses here, they’re just better and you’re a dumb dumb for thinking otherwise.

Let’s check in with the real world on the whole trolleybus thing.

VTransit Center (2022):

Boston, MA – The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority or MBTA has revealed plans to replace their current trolleybuses on routes 71 and 73 with battery-electric buses.

Weird. They have firsthand experience with trolleybuses. They should know by now that they are inherently superior to electric buses. Alan Fisher is a serious intellectual. He would never just make a 9 minute video sperging out over the advantages of trolleybuses while never bringing up the obvious disadvantages. 

Alan is furious with the auto industry. This is not urban planning.
He’s a professional who takes Sim City quite seriously online.
This was like a virgin going to Bill’s Standard Fuckparty.
He wore an “I heart trains” shirt. He spouts random gibberish. These guys are carbrains.

I can’t believe that the evil auto industry holocausted those trolleybuses in Boston. After all, they are inherently superior to the battery buses that are replacing them.

Above is another video from this genius. In it he answers the question that no one asked. Said question is “why are the the awesome version of horses (autos) the things that cities are based around?” In the entire six minute video the term horses is not mentioned one time. There’s some weird just-so story about how WW2 prosperity made America build car centric infrastructure. Then he whines about the rail corporations being mismanaged, because admitting that passenger rail was just outcompeted by automobiles is bad optics.

He also references the “streetcar conspiracy.” You can find Wikipedia’s entry here, and it’s what he screencaps above.

Wikipedia:

Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.^[a] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland. NCL often converted streetcars to bus operations in that period, although electric traction was preserved or expanded in some locations.

Other systems, such as San Diego‘s, were converted by outgrowths of the City Lines. Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry.

In short, a bunch of corporations tried to form a cartel around both busing and streetcars/trams in some small parts of America. In some areas they even expanded the streetcar lines. In most areas they reduced or got rid of them. This is because streetcars are, frankly, pretty bad, and had been on their way out for decades before this cartel even begun. That was true all throughout America.

By 1918, half of US streetcar mileage was in bankruptcy.

…

Quinby and Snell held that the destruction of streetcar systems was integral to a larger strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency. Most transit scholars disagree, suggesting that transit system changes were brought about by other factors; economic, social, and political factors such as unrealistic capitalization, fixed fares during inflation, changes in paving and automotive technology, the Great Depression, antitrust action, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, labor unrest, market forces including declining industries’ difficulty in attracting capital, rapidly increasing traffic congestion, the Good Roads Movement, urban sprawl, tax policies favoring private vehicle ownership, taxation of fixed infrastructure, franchise repair costs for co-located property, wide diffusion of driving skills, automatic transmission buses, and general enthusiasm for the automobile.^[b]

The accuracy of significant elements of [streetcar fag] Snell’s 1974 testimony was challenged in an article published in Transportation Quarterly in 1997 by Cliff Slater.^[47]

In other words, a bunch of soyfaggots insist that streetcars largely died out because muh auto industry something something General Motors something something streetcar conspiracy. This makes no sense, since streetcars were already on their way out, and this was over a small part of the US for a short period of time.

Then actual scholars come in and fact-check them with an enormous list of all the reasons why buses and other forms of transportation are just flat out better. Oh and one of the two guys behind the conspiracy is probably just a lying anti-trust lawyer who was doing some shameless self-promotion.

Here is the 1997 article by Cliff Slater where he explains just how full of shit these people are. I will only quote the beginning.

Transportation Quarterly Archived:

The issue is whether or not the buses that replaced the electric streetcars were economically superior. Without GM’s interference would the United States today have a viable streetcar system? This article makes the case that, GM or not, under a less onerous regulatory environment, buses would have replaced streetcars even earlier than they actually did.

I highly recommend reading the entirety of his piece. It is quite excellent, and the “streetcars are secretly awesome” myth is one of these bizarre things that the traffic trannies repeat over and over and over again. Streetcars largely disappeared from everywhere around the world, except the cities that keep them as novelties like Toronto.

Cliff Slater even includes this graph below of American cities with public transportation served through buses exclusively, all in the years before the “streetcar conspiracy.” It’s plain as day that streetcars/trams were on their way out, because buses were just better. It’s such an obviously stupid and easily debunked talking point of the traffic antifa that we would all be riding streetcars if it weren’t for muh General Motors.

The streetcar holocaust of 1944 is about as plausible as the real holocaust of 1944. But apparently a localized conspiracy to jack up the cost of buses reverberated around the world, and that’s why everyone started holocausting their trams post WW2.

Wikipedia Entry on Trams/Streetcars:

After World War 2, trams were seen as advantageous in many countries because, unlike buses, they did not use scarce petrol resources. However many tramways closed in the mid 20th century, as they were seen as less effective in terms of costs and use of the roadway than other forms of street transport. However, in recent decades tram networks in many countries in Europe have grown considerably. The Netherlands, which already makes extensive use of trams, has plans to expand tram services to two additional cities.

Trams/streetcars are naturally outcompeted by buses, which are much more flexible, and don’t obnoxiously take up a huge part of the road. They naturally are on their way out, except for niche uses like tourism, but then WW2 happens and we get extreme fuel rationing giving them a resurgence, just like we saw for passenger rail.

Then the butthole-leftists come in and demand that we start building more of them, because obnoxious twats want to make everyone’s driving experience worse.

Now back to Fisher.

Newer generations are living in cities and not owning cars. This is a massive change from past generations.

They’re also not owning houses, or much of anything at all. Never seen someone reframe “young people are extremely impoverished relative to previous generations,” as such a good thing, but you do you. 

Switching soyboys here we see RMTransit again. I’ve found him less objectionable in the past, but he says something that needs to be called out.

I constantly praise Paris for its incredibly well conceived transportation network. And I think its tram network in particular is a perfect explanation of the type of services that make a lot of sense with trams.

This plays as we see the following tram.

You may have noticed that it is entirely empty. Look at the video time at the bottom left. This is the entire tram.

I’m not exaggerating. There’s no one here.

There. Is. No. One. On. The. Tram.

What is it with the traffic troons and bloviating about how awesome public transportation is while showing everyone empty buses, or in this case trams.

It’s possible that the tram was out of service or something like that, but there is no indication that this would be the case. The words spell out locations in Paris, instead of the French equivalent of “Out Of Service,” and we see the exact same message on another tram that looks about half full later in the video. 

Later in that video he says the following.

Like almost every other place in the world, many French cities ripped out a large portion of their trams in the mid twentieth century.

Once again, extreme WW2 fuel rationing ended the era of trams/streetcars, this time in Paris. Let’s check in with other parts of the World.

This guy explains how trams were holocausted in London.

(2:50)

So if it wasn’t cables, why were they so tramsphobic?

Thanks, guy. It’s nice to see a man who enjoys trams as much as he enjoys dresses.

According to him London had the most extensive tram network in the world at the turn of the 20th century. But trams are expensive to maintain, so they replaced them with trolleybuses. But trolleybuses also suck, so they replaced them with…

Buses.

Presumably this is because there was some corporate shenanigans done from 1938-1950 in Los Angeles. If only that wouldn’t have happened, the Paris trams would still exist. Or maybe the trolleybuses. Damn you General Motors!

While we’re on the topic of trams, we’ve got to include this bit of nonsense from Adam Something. He featured heavily in the piece on horses, where he claimed that streets were all about having gay fuckparties with children instead of transporation. He also had the dumbest explanation of “induced demand” ever. Now he’s back to deboonk “Smart Gondolas,” by explaining that you should actually just shove streetcars on the road because fuck cars.

(1:20)

[Here is] the Swyftcities Gondola System and why it’s incredibly stupid.

Adam Something provides the above screencap of a tweet of Swyftcities. I went and looked it up their webpage for myself, and found this on their About Page. For some reason my confidence in their engineering is dropping.

That’s a bit unfair. This is what their actual team looks like.

I’m still not exactly chomping at the bit to invest in this crack squad of confidence inspiring transport revolutionaries. 

A German company, UpBus, appears to be trying to do something similar, and for the same reasons. I have little to no confidence in either of these corporations, but that’s not really the point. The point is that Adam Something is a moron who doesn’t get the advantage that their product would bring if it actually worked.

Okay so it’s an urban gondola system. And the whole idea seems to be that it’ll whisk passengers above streets, avoiding congestion. The pods would also be fully individualized. I know this, because I asked. So what we’re looking at here is an Uber on wires, basically. 

The Swyftcities gondola thing is a form of personalized rapid transit. Below you can see an video of ground based PRT from Heathrow Airport.

Remember the Partial Trip Problem that mass transit suffers from? This is designed to be far less bad in situations where you have dispersed starting points and dispersed end points. As a result, they can make many more service stations, and many more destination systems, allowing you to much more gracefully match the actual transportation demand of the public. 

If Swyft Cities could pull off their Gondola implementation of this it would legitimately be a transit revolution. You could just hop in one of their pods from wherever, and then go to an end destination that is very close to your house. I have no faith that this will work, for a whole host of practical and technical reasons, but once again, the point is that Adam Something fundamentally doesn’t get it.

Now what is wrong with this idea? If you look at this animation these things go fairly slow, maybe 20km/hr, meaning they are only suitable for shorter distance, maybe the lower end of middle distance. Can we think of a mode of individualized urban transportation perfect for short and middle distances. Yeeeaaaah it’s called a bicycle. 

 

Does this retard think that ET was actually real and bicycles can fly?

The whole point is that you’re suspended above congestion, instead of sharing the road with cars in the first place. You can also ride these in the middle of a Canadian winter without freezing your balls off, never have to worry about going up (icy) hills, and can sit down with a bunch of heavy groceries. 

Case in point in their promo video they show a dramatic re-enactment of a person using Swyft through an app. I’ve nailed down the approximate locations, punched them into Google Maps, and would you look at it, it’s an 8 minute bike ride.

It’s an eight minute bike ride from the Safeway (a grocery store) to their home. Good luck pulling that off while holding a huge amount of groceries. And again, winter, ice, etcetera.

I’m not defending the company, and I think their product won’t work. I just can’t stand this faggot not getting the point while snarking constantly. 

So instead of building towers, wire tracks, stations, and pods, and also maintaining them, you can just paint a bike lane. Transportation revolutionized!

He then proceeds to show something that is far more than just a painted bike lane.

I remind you that there is a fixed amount of space for road. If you are getting rid of two lanes each way for cars and replacing them with bike lanes, that means that you’ll have even more congestion. The entire point of the gondolas was so you can keep the road for the cars while having this pedestrian transportation gondola because it’s grade separated. 

Now on their website they promise things like efficiency. “Nonstop rides and flexible routes move passengers in high volumes.” This statement is not true, and betrays a phenomenal misunderstanding of transit from Swyft.

I’m getting this weird premonition that Adam Something is about to betray to us his total lack of understanding of transportation right now.

Do you know what other transportation method has big metal boxes offering non-stop rides and flexible routes? Cars. And they are the most inefficient space and energy wasting transportation there is. Individual motorized vehicles are an inherently wasteful way of moving lots of people.

It literally is the “walking on floor is less efficient than walking on a conveyor belt, and therefore worse,” psuedo-logic all over again.

But how do you create an efficient system that moves passengers in high volumes? Let’s see if some good old common sense will give us a solution. If we look at any congested city we can quickly identify busy routes along which a lot of people drive, and points of interest that a lot of people want to go to. Now, get this, if you build a transit line along that busy route, and transit stops at or near points of interest, a lot of people will take that transit instead of sitting in traffic jams for two hours. 

Build subways and bus lines where they are needed of course. But you can’t possibly service 100% of the people currently taking cars along a certain route unless they are also starting their destination from a location near a transit station. If they then drive another 40 km to their house, you didn’t do jack shit for them.

I went over this nonsense logic before, but these Urbanite midwits just don’t get it. The most basic concepts in transportation elude their feeble little minds and their self-proclaimed “common sense” asininity.

Trams, trains, and buses move far more people than Ubers as it turns out, even if the Uber is suspended in the air.

Only if you actually have enough demand to saturate them. 

But we can’t have trams, trains, and buses, because that would violate the holy status quo of car dependence. 

With the exception of trains running in a subway, or on an elevated platform, all of these interfere with cars because they take up space on the road. Buses and gondolas are also not mutually exclusive. You can have bus lines and saturate them for when that makes sense, while also having the detachable gondolas to serve the same function as cars, just suspended in the air. The same goes for subways and skytrains.

And for the record, all the cities in the world have cars everywhere, and before that they had horses. Personalized transportation serves a very valid need, just like personalized televisions. But I guess movie theaters are more “efficient,” by the arbitrary metric of people watching/space area or electricity consumed or whatever, so we’ve got to take everyone’s TV’s out of their houses now.

If we look at Swyft’s renders, their system – whose biggest selling point is freeing up urban space – goes above a five lane road for cars. If we’re so concerned about inefficient urban space use, why not take away a lane or two from cars, and convert them to bus lanes, dedicated tram lines, or separated bike paths, which would then move far more people.

How can someone be such a moron that they don’t understand that the tram below takes up space on the road, while the suspended gondolas do not? 

I don’t know why I have to share a world with people who don’t appear to understand the basics of grade separation, despite making pretend urban planning core to their adopted bugman identity. The whole point of subways is that you build them under the city, so we can have the automobile transportation undisturbed over the top. A tram is essentially a subway, except that it obnoxiously gets in everyone’s way.

Adam Something proceeds to “fix” this system by proposing his own, “better” system. 

Therefore I propose to transfer this system to ground level, eliminating all the aforementioned [safety] issues. Now efficient space use is very important to us. Thankfully there are five car lanes, two of which we can easily convert to dedicated pod lanes, which will move a lot of people, increasing efficiency. Now we can skip the wires and the poles by putting the rail on the ground. And we can immediately have two even for added stability. 

Adam, I don’t know if you realized this, but we now have less lanes for cars.

I’m not sure your tiny brain properly understood this, but with the gondolas we can have as many car lanes as we can fit on the street. This wasn’t a complicated point, not sure how you missed this one. Like, the gondolas are above the street, not on it. 

Now the individualized transit idea is cute. As in our pods operating like automatic Ubers. But that’s not efficient enough. Let’s build our line along a busy corridor with pre-planned intermediate stops so that a lot of people can get on and off when they want.

Partial. Trip. Problem. You. Fucking. Moron. Also, spacing problem.

For this highly efficient operation however, the pods are too small. So let’s join our pods together into one big long articulated pod with lots of doors and much higher capacity. Join us at TR4M Systems for this incredible new mode of – [midwit snark continues].

Finally, a solution that works for everyone. Now an already congested street can suffer from extreme congestion constantly due to the removal of half of the lanes. Thanks, Adam Something, I can’t believe that you don’t get paid by big cities to do their urban planning for them.

Truly, the car lobby’s tentacles reach out across the world. First they holocausted Los Angeles’ unprofitable streetcars. Now they prevent Adam Something from getting paid billions to not understand grade separation. Maybe one day he can understand that planes fly over cities and subways run under them.

For the record, if Swyft Cities could actually deliver on their vaporware, it really would be revolutionary. Every city could add something nearly as good as cars, and above the road. They wouldn’t have to stop at traffic lights, and would suffer far less from the Partial Trip Problem. You could also use them in winter, and enjoy a somewhat scenic ride through your city while going about your day. 

My criticism of this company is that I think there are technical and practical issues that they won’t be able to solve. Adam Something’s criticism is that he’s a snarky midwit who doesn’t  understand grade separation, the Partial Trip Problem, the advantage of personalized transit for dispersed and irregular trips, and thinks you can just yeet some lanes on a road because “muh induced demand.” We are not the same.

We’re not done with Adam Something. Here he manages to totally misunderstand another transportation startup company. This time it’s Parallel Systems.

In case you didn’t bother clicking on Adam Something’s tedious video, Parallel Systems product is autonomous rail pods. Basically you take one individual car of a train, put the load on their pods, and then it goes to the exact destination where it is needed.

This is an incredibly stupid idea. However, it is stupid for exactly the reasons that Adam Something is contractually obligated, as an Urbanite Bugcreature, to not understand.

You see, actual people who work in logistics, as opposed to faggots who LARP like the real world is Sim City, understand the value of point to point shipping. The main weakness of rail is that you often have to aggregate so much stuff that you can’t ship anything that is time sensitive, and you have to use an army of trucks to aggregate the product in the first place, and then disperse this afterwards, maybe with a holding warehouse or two in between. If you didn’t have to do that, rail would be much more practical for a large number of jobs.

Snarky midwit Adam Something “improves” this product just like he “improved” the personalized gondola project previously. By fundamentally not getting it.

At intersecting systems we re-imagined the system by going larger and simpler.

Not this again.

This is made possible by our centralized power source called locomotives.

They can pull trains that are miles long

which can be served by large scale terminals

that provide an excellent economy of scale. 

In a rare stroke of sanity from the comment section someone states the obvious, even if they don’t quite get what a complete and utter moron Adam Something is. After all, the entire point was to increase complexity so as to better match the real world demands for freight transport, which is often quite dispersed.

Adam Something is a moron, but so are the people behind Parallel Systems. Their product is made totally irrelevant by this thing that is amazing at shipping dispersed goods to dispersed locations. It’s called: a tractor-trailer.

Trucks have access to the general purpose road system, and can therefore pick things up right at the warehouse, and deliver it directly to a different warehouse. Trains can’t do this, no matter how small you make them, since there are drastically less rail lines everywhere. That won’t ever change because steel wheeled vehicles gargle balls at accelerating, going uphill, stopping, and turning, and are thus unsuitable for doing what automobiles do.

This Parallel Systems bullshit has nowhere near the flexibility of trucking, but now also doesn’t get the economy of scale of rail. They do this just to get very mildly better locality of shipping. Even that assumes they can work with the existing rail monopolies, who may shut them out completely.

Even if we had nationalized rail it might be totally rational to not let them operate. One of the main benefits of rail is that you don’t have thousands of tiny little vehicles zipping around. Congestion is a thing, even on rail. 

Adam Something can’t point this out, because then he’d have to acknowledge the advantage of the general purpose road system, and automobiles in general. Or maybe he’s such an uninformed idiot that he legitimately does not understand the easily understood problem with rail freight that Parallel Systems were failing at solving.

As an aside, it’s arguable that their corporation is just bullshit like the Tesla Semi. That truck serves no niche except for faggots who want to bloviate about muh global warming catastrophism and have billions of dollars to signal with. I suspect that Parallel Systems has some Government subsidy lined up, which is the only way that their corporation makes the slightest bit of sense. But rather than point any of this out Adam Something just goes “hurr durr muh long train better than short train.”

An equivalently retarded argument would be to notice that skyscrapers are more “efficient,” whereby efficient I mean have a higher population density per square area. Then you just go around and say that literally no other form of housing is acceptable, because it’s less “space efficient.” Maybe throw in better heating efficiency or something.

Just build skyscrapers constantly, everywhere. When people tell you that there isn’t any demand for skyscrapers in rural areas, just explain that you can “induce demand” building random bullshit that nobody wants. Build some skyscrapers in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and they’ll all fill up. And skyscrapers are good, because they’re really “efficient.”

Also, don’t pay attention to all the space that the people in skyscrapers need, by including the stores they shop in, the roads that service those stores, warehouses, etcetera. Make sure to have the most obnoxiously surface level argument possible if you really want to fit in with the urbanite clique.

All of this makes it highly ironic that another of Adam Something’s absurdly retarded takes is that skyscrapers literally serve no purpose. No really, you shouldn’t build them in “99.9% of cases,” according to his deep analysis. And yes, that’s a quote from the video below.

Skyscrapers are the symbol of wealth and modernity. They dominate the skyline to the point where they become intrinsic to a city’s image. Investors, politicians, and the general public seem to be loving them. And why wouldn’t they? Skyscrapers are big and shiny, usually at least, and a true status symbol.

And I am here to ruin the fun and tell you why skyscrapers are actually pretty stupid and why we shouldn’t build them. My view is that in 99.9% of the cases you don’t even need to go above 10 floors.

You may be thinking that he will prove that 99.9% of cases argument.

SPOILER: He won’t even attempt to do this. Instead he’ll throw out a grab bag of incredibly stupid and baseless claims such as the following.

(1:55)

But going down to the park from the fiftieth floor is not the same as going down to the park from the fifth floor. One takes five minutes, the other takes fifteen.

You may be thinking that he’s about to post proof of his astonishing claim that going down to the ground floor takes fifteen minutes from floor 50, and five minutes from floor 5.

Anyway he sums up the “problems” with skyscrapers below. 

Anyone who thinks it’s insightful to tell the people who actually build skyscrapers that they are expensive is a waste of carbon. They know, and so does everyone else. That’s why they build them on areas of land that are extremely expensive, like downtown Manhattan, and not random rural areas. When you factor in the cost of the land, it makes sense to maximize the productivity of the thing you build on it, not minimize costs.

I sometimes wonder why I waste my time even addressing the bullshit that comes out of their cunt mouths. The only thing that makes this worth it for me is that I’m turning this series into video content and trying to get more eyes on the site that way. 

Now, in the beginning I’ve mentioned that I don’t think there’s any need to build anything taller than 10 stories in 99.9% of cases. And so let me show you why.

Let me guess, he’s he’s going to trot out a vanity project by an oil rich Arab billionaire and then pretend that the economical impracticality extends to all skyscrapers.

This is the Burj Khalifa. It is 828 meters tall, and has 163 floors. 

I predicted thith. I also watched the video before writing this piece, so it was pretty easy to anticipate him making the exact same argument at the exact same time.

This right here is the plot on which the Burj Khalifa stands. On it we could easily fit five entire [commie blocks]. And if we could –

I’m going to stop right there.

This right here is the Chrystler building. It is the 19th tallest building in America, and only the 11th tallest in NYC. I picked it only because the name popped into my head. Notice how, unlike the Burj Khalifa, it largely extends out of the plot of land that it’s build on top of? And it’s one of the worst examples of this in America, due to its relative pyramid shape.

Here’s another shot of NYC. Notice how rectangular all the skyscrapers are? Do you see how, unlike the Burj Khalifa, they don’t have massively wasteful plots of land around them? That’s because they weren’t built to break the tallest building record, but for a combination of prestige as well as practical purpose.

Here’s another shot of NYC from the air. Notice how none of the buildings, literally not one, have a massive area of dead space around them? It’s not just NYC either. Below we have Hong Kong, which is littered with skyscrapers standing right next to each other.

What you’ll notice, if you look closely, is that Adam Something is a fucking idiot.

His entire argument is rests on the premise that, since the Burj Khalifa is wasteful with its surface area, therefore all skyscrapers are. This was trivially debunked in five minutes of searching. Not even five minutes. That’s just how long it took me to write this and gather the images.

In other words, five ten story tall commie blocks was all it took to beat the world’s tallest skyscraper. And that should really tell us something.

It tells us that vanity projects often have little economic practicality, Adam.

I’m sure he’s just about to drop the bombshell on us that the moon landing wasn’t as efficient at moving passengers as a subway station. Maybe after that he can explain that the Taj Mahal wasn’t as efficient at housing people as a military barracks.

I really do think that skyscrapers are just this big, dumb, afterthought kind of solution to the very real problem of lack of housing stock and office space in major urban settlements. But then why not start elsewhere?

Because building big rectangles and filling them full of places for people to live in is the most space efficient usage of land for the purpose of housing. The reason we start with increasing the amount of housing to decrease a housing shortage is because it increases the amount of the thing we want to increase. We don’t start with something retarded instead, we start with the obviously correct thing. 

I really don’t know how I can convey this information any simpler. I am not using big words here. More housing == more housing. Everyone else on the planet figured this one out, maybe someday he can too.

Why not do intelligent, complex urban planning, and eliminate instances of wasteful use of public space.

Something tells me he’s going to bloviate about cars again.

Cars, for example

are a huge waste of space and they spend 90% of their lifetime parked. So what if instead of building a skyscraper, we begin by reducing the number of cars in the city, and built some medium size apartment blocks on the now vacant gigantic parking lots.

Because even the most pessimistic estimations of space taken up by cars shows that roads and parking lots combined only take up 40% of the surface area in places like Los Angeles that are commonly known as spread out pavement hells. In contrast, New York City is already 75% residential by surface area.

Milrose:

• Residence: Accounting for 75% of NYC’s land area, residence districts accommodate various home types, from single-family houses to mixed-use apartment buildings. Manufacturing uses are not permitted in these districts, and commercial uses are only permitted if the Residential district has a Commercial overlay.

Even if literally the entire rest of New York was just automobile infrastructure and was all deleted to make room for residences, that would increase the land dedicated to residences by just 1.33x. In contrast, if we went from Adam Something’s utterly fucking idiotic and artificial cap of 10 stories per building to 100, we would increase our housing by 10x. This isn’t hard for people who can actually do math.

Also no, we can’t get rid of cars, we need them for transportation. I could rehash the myriad of reasons why, but there’s a certain point where you just have to call these people faggots and move on. Just because they repeat the same garbage over and over again does not mean that it deserves a rebuttal every time.

As you can see, when it comes to handling housing shortages and lack of space in major cities, there’s a myriad of other points where we can start that are easier and more effective. Oh and also they don’t cost as much as a skyscraper.

Just delete all the car infrastructure that we need to live. That’s much easier than building higher than 10 floors.

I’m not even scratching the surface with these LOLcows. I could write for days on Adam Something in particular. But now it’s time to get back to dunking on Alan Fisher. Here he is snarking about Americans not understanding trains.

(2:20)

A large portion of US citizens will never experience anything like this. Oftentimes you’ll hear stories of US citizens traveling to Europe or somewhere else in the world and returning with stories of grandeur about how they mostly rode trains everywhere and didn’t need a car.

They also will talk about how they fragrance their obvious American idiosyncrasies on cute little walkable villages and towns that are only accessible via trains. 

Fragrance their idiosyncrasies?

I rewound that part about ten times and that’s just what he says. I don’t know if this is an expression in some parts of the world or if Alan Fisher just forgot how to talk again.

Either way I can let that go. What I can’t let go is his totally unsubstantiated claim that there are “cute little villages” in Europe that are only accessible via rail. That’s a pretty outstanding claim, considering that any historic village or town would have been designed back when these things were all the rage.

Wheeled vehicles pulled by horses have been around for thousands of years. I don’t want to bore you by rehashing part 8 of this series, but you’d think that he would at least provide a single shred of evidence for towns and villages accessible only via rail.

I decided to search for “european villages only accesible via train,” hoping to find any evidence of this myself. I didn’t find any, but one of the first results I got was this.

Am I getting through to you all just how utterly divorced from reality these people are and how easy it is to debunk the garbage that comes pouring out of their mouths? 

Then again they return to their hometown somewhere in the US that is in a land of suburban developments with no central downtown. They wonder to themselves, why did they enjoy going to all those places overseas? Surely it was the different cultures, or maybe the foods.

I’m sure that there is much less of a culture of twerking in the quaint little tourist areas the Americans are frequenting, what with there being fewer Crime-Americans over there. I’m glad that Alan Fisher acknowledges this, and doesn’t try to –

But rarely do Americans make the effort to recognize that it really was the access to trains and transit that allowed those places to have nice, walkable downtowns and easy to access shops and bars.

Sorry, my bad. I forgot that the reason why Newark is so much less pleasant than the tourist areas of Europe are because there are more trains. 

Like one guy once said, ‘so subtle you might not even have noticed, but your brain did.’

I’m sure their brains noticed the lack of something else, even if they didn’t write about it on Facebook.

Let’s check in on bussing in America.

Boy, I sure do think that it would improve the quality of my life to share spaces with the local wildlife in Newark, New Jersey. Damn General Motors for holocausting these “third spaces” where multiracial gay dildo conventions can spontaneously occur. 

Oh and by the way, this is what Alan Fisher shows as he bloviates about European towns only accessible via rail. A European street with, you guessed it, parked cars. Guess they got there by hopping on a train.

Okay, we’re done. There’s so much more to deboonk, but we have to stop there. I’ll leave you with Adam Kotsko, a typical butthole-leftist, who argues that no one should live in rural areas. 

Our government institutions are INSANELY biased in favor of rural areas.

Jaime, can you pull up an image of this guy.

Say no more.

High speed rail. Collective forced labour. Fuck the suburbs. It’s like Warhammer 40k, but now with dildos and AIDS.

My apologies for screencapping that last tweet twice. Twatter threads can be funny that way. Anyway some guys in the replies point out the very obvious problems with this.

Not one single urbanite has ever done manual labour in their entire lives and they should all be thrown into deradicalization camps where they can do backbreaking hard manual labour until the spiritual gay has left their bodies. 

Next time, and I’m not joking this time, we get to what might be the dumbest argument these dipshits have ever put forward. You see, Whitey in the suburbs is ackshually subsidized by DaQuan in da inna city. That might sound implausible, but that’s just because you’re a dumb cARbRaiN.