PSA: Deboonking the Traffic Soyboys Part 7 – It’s not About Walkability, it’s About Fuck Cars

I especially enjoyed part 4 of our series here, where we took on the total refusal for these antifas to acknowledge that crime is more important than a lack of bike lanes. This is something universally denied by the Armchair Urbanists, although everyone in real life knows this to be true.

Walkability is punchability. – Noah Smith.

Noah Smith is a name you may be familiar with. He’s an intolerable Schlomo, but he managed to be right on this by siding with the 99% of the world who live in reality. He even goes and deboonks the “you just need more people walking in Detroit and then it’s totes safe like Tokyo,” nonsense.

I think that if you cite theories, you should ideally bring data.

I always love it when these extreme, tranny filled echo-chambers repeat really dumb things to each other so often that they begin to believe themselves. Then they make dumb copes for how normal people are too dumb to understand oBvIOUs tRUtHs like crime being no big deal and totally not affecting walkability. Then, when the people who should be their natural allies are like “uh guys I’m kind of serious about (walkability) policy here, like can you stop being retarded for two seconds pls,” they respond by acknowledging their overzealousness and correcting course.

Just kidding, they double and triple down on being retards who refuse to acknowledge the issue.

These people really are the caricatures I described in that piece, where they look at the below image, with the literal sidewalk shitting mentally ill drug addicts on the right, and the cars on the street, and loudly whine about how the cars are destroying walkability.

By the way, Noah Smith is still a retard. San Francisco is a shithole that lost almost 7% of its population during Covid-19. Vacant office space has increased by 290%. The use of the subway system is down by 75% in the commercial corridors. There’s suddenly housing available, but apparently the issues caused by soft on drug policies are secretly because of lack of housing.

Although he’s at least non-cultish enough to whine about buses destroying walkability just like cars, which they do.

I ended the last piece by pointing out that the traffic antifas really hate some types of infrastructure that are objectively good, and I feel the need to qualify that statement. All infrastructure projects, whether they be roads, power lines and power stations, sewage or rainwater treatment, airports, bike lanes, sidewalks, railroads or what have you, must justify themselves somehow. Not everything needs to be perfectly economical, and there are reasons to subsidize some things of course, but ultimately we have limited funds. We’ll get back to costs later when it comes time to dunk on high speed rail for Canada, but for now we’ll just look at the positives of certain infrastructure improvements, such as multilevel parking garages.

All the way back in the premier piece I encountered the claim from BritMonkey that parking lots take up 14% of the space in cities.

Switching to electric cars doesn’t solve any of the other problems that cars can cause in cities. For example, space.

…

14% of all space in cities is taken up by car parks alone.

Take everything that idiot says with a grain of salt, but there’s no question that parking can take up an enormous amount of space in a city or town.

There’s no question that many areas in cities have enormous flat lots dedicated to parking, and it’s extremely annoying to have to walk across these things.

If you take two parking lots and you build one two level parking lot, you can get away with half as much space taken up by parking lots. If you take ten parking lots and you build one ten story parking lot, you can get away with one tenth the amount of space taken up by parking. Sometimes there are some efficiency losses, but it’s roughly correct.

Of course, you may have to park further away from your destination, which puts a soft limitation on the total number of levels/stories that you should build. Try to build too many parking spots in one area, and people will have to walk further and further to get to where they want to go. But then again, having the top levels of a parking garage go unoccupied 95+% of the time is not a travesty, not having enough parking is a travesty.

Anyone who has ever done real city driving will tell you that you often can’t find parking close to where you want it anyway. This leads to some extremely stressful and dangerous driving where agitated and often late people are not watching the road and not looking at where they are going.

An often thrown out number attributed to Don Shoup is that 30% of traffic in downtown areas comes from people looking for places to park. This is misleading to the point of being untrue, as Don Shoup himself says, but there’s no question that a lack of parking is a very serious problem.

Blog Parknews:

On most streets at most times, no one is cruising. But many people want a number, and I can’t stop anyone from saying that 30 percent of traffic is cruising. Nevertheless, on busy streets where all the curb spaces are occupied and traffic is congested, a substantial share of traffic may be cruising.

For example, when researchers interviewed drivers who were stopped at traffic signals in New York City, they found that 28 percent of the drivers on one street in Manhattan and 45 percent on a street in Brooklyn were cruising for curb parking. This doesn’t mean, however, that 28 percent of all traffic in Manhattan is cruising for parking or that 45 percent of all traffic in Brooklyn is cruising for parking.

This is very location dependent. If I had to pick a number that matches my driving experience, using downtown Vancouver (over the Cambie bridge) as my most often driven to downtown, I’d say that at least 10% of my time spent driving into the city is spent looking for parking. Much of the time that’s me getting to my destination, then continuing on and driving in a somewhat random zigzag as I look for parking. I’ve also, on multiple occasions, stopped multiple kilometers from my destination because I see parking available and don’t want to risk there being none closer to my endpoint. I then have to walk the rest of the distance. Even with this I still spend about 10% of my time just searching for parking.

If you were to explain to drivers that you’re building a bunch of extremely tall parking garages that will ensure that 99% of the time when they go downtown they will have parking available to them, and it will be within 1km or less of their destination they would love that. Especially if the parking was biased towards places people want to be closer to for practical purposes, such as hockey rinks, or grocery stores, where you have to carry things. Drivers often have to park extremely far from where they want to go anyway, so they get the upside of guaranteed parking that they can plan in advance, with little practical downside, most of the time.

For each trip they will drive less distance in the city, since they’re never circling around looking for parking, and they don’t have to deal with other drivers who are on the road looking for parking. There are also no doubt fewer accidents and congestion due to parallel parking and people pulling into and out of street parking spots.

Pedestrians and bikers no longer have to deal with nearly as many agitated and dangerous drivers who are distracted looking for a place to park. There will be less space taken up by the occasional horizontal lot, which improves walkability, and in some areas we might be able to turn the area marked for parking into bike lanes, without being totally obnoxious to drivers, since they no longer need the street parking.

This is a win-win for everyone. Drivers may occasionally have to park further away, but get more parking, less driving (to find parking), a vastly less stressful experience overall, and lower chance of accidents. Pedestrians, who drivers turn into anyway, have fewer concrete lots to walk across, and fewer agitated drivers to worry about. Bikers get more bike lanes because the drivers no longer need the street parking.

This is on a case by case basis of course, as in some areas we might need loading vehicles to be able to pull over, bus stops, emergency vehicles to have access, or certain business owners or residents to have parking in areas where it’s not feasible to build parking garages. I’m not saying this must be true in all cases, serious urban planning requires custom solutions. But the gist of it, that not having enough parking is bad, and that solving this problem with vertical parking benefits everyone, is quite self-evident.

Who could possibly be against infrastructure that benefits everyone?

There are any number of dumb ways a city can allocate valuable downtown real estate, but near the top of the list has to be parking garages. A brief exploration of structured parking and some thoughts on how to prevent these kinds of calamities in your own city coming up next.

Oh right, these people.

And I do get a lot of comments along the lines of “man CityNerd, you’re good at identifying and describing problems, but you never tell us what to do about them,” so stick with me today because I promise I will get there later in the video.

Spoiler: his solution is to whine a lot about global warming as part of a club. Anyway, he spends the next two plus minutes soying out about book stores and organic dildos before saying something almost insightful.

Some of the casinos still have surface parking which stands pretty empty most times of day. And is maybe most useful for road testing driverless cars?

That does seem like an eyesore that makes walking around a pain. It’s almost like it’d be much better if there was a five story parking garage built offsite so this land could be used productively.

But for the most part the land use that really jumps out at you when you walk around downtown Las Vegas is just parking garages. Lots and lots of parking garages.

Oh that’s nice, I’m sure he’s happy that less square area is being taken up by –

And Vegas isn’t that far outside the norm for US cities when it comes to having structured parking. After all, downtown land is valuable, and isn’t this a more efficient use of land than a surface parking lot? 

Well that’s a tricky question and… I’ll come back to it at the end of the video.

Spoiler: he will, but only in order to make some midwit non-arguments covered in snark. In the meantime he’s got to do a sort of reverse soying over Las Vegas’ Garage Mahal.

It’s got some pretty standard modern parking garages, maybe with some nicer finish. Naming it after a universally acknowledged masterwork of Indo-Islamic architecture is maybe… I dunno… a bit over the top… uncomfortably close to blasphemy. I understand this is Vegas, the national capital of Anything Goes… but stilllllll.

This isn’t parody, he’s really upset that someone called their parking garage the Garage Mahal. This is what we’re dealing with here folx. A bunch of nasty, uptalking, soy-fueled gremlins. I have to use this guy as part of my incredibly satisfying dunking on high speed rail entry, and I swear to god his voice is just nails on chalkboard. He is such a faggot that he is physically painful to listen to. I’ve started the video below from the part where he “uhm, like, problematic guyz,” a fucking parking garage with a pun inspired name so you can see and hear him for yourself.

You see this shit? JFC those fucking facial mannerisms too. Everything about this guy makes me want to step on his neck.

He continues soy-whining about the Garage Mahal for another minute before promoting some global warming catastrophism… charity? Collective? Activist group? It’s not entirely clear. Maybe all of the above.

I went and checked out their site. At no point do they ever recommend building multi level parking garages. Their front page has this graphic, which clearly states “Inspired by cars.destroyed.our.cities” at the bottom.

In other words they’re just a bunch of spiteful mutants who want to get rid of cars, because fuck everyone who isn’t a downtown urbanist faggot with no children who spends all day living in the box before going on down to the local gay fuckparty and spreading AIDS everywhere. They also include this terrible, but slickly edited video by Vox, which includes an interview with Donald Shoup, the man mentioned earlier.

Donald Shoup: We have terrific opportunity to convert underused parking lots into housing for people to live. The upside is that we have a lot of benefits to reap from changing our policies.

What do you mean underused?

Starting at 0:54*

It is estimated in America there are 8 parking spots for every car.

Considering that these retards think that “8 parking spots exist for every car in America,” is some sort of argument I think it’s fair to say that their definition of “underused parking,” is ambitious at best, totally divorced from reality at worst. Should we have one parking spot for every car? Because then you would literally never be able to park your car anywhere, unless someone else somewhere in the country got out of their parking spot at the same time, in which case you could park there and they would now have to park in your spot. 

There are things like events which happen irregularly. Should they only build enough parking spots for the average hourly usage across the entire year or something? Does this include nighttime? If you’re going to accept that there should be more than one parking spot per car, can you show me your work where you’ve determined the ideal number and taken into consideration all of the many factors that would go into making an accurate estimation? No? You’re just a snarky midwit dipshit? 

Look, I can say retarded non-sequiturs too you know. Watch this. Look at all those seats above. Did you know that there are 1,000 seats for every butt in America? Get a load of that! PeDEsTriAn InfRAsTrUCtUre iS ExPEnSivE. Some bUTtBrAinS might say that butts need all those extra seats, but this is just nonsense. There should just be one seat for every butt in America. That way, when you want to sit down you can hope that someone has left a chair in the new area that you want to sit in. Did you know that 98% of our urban areas is devoted to seats? Butt infrastructure is inefficient, and it’s only due to the butt lobby that we have seats at all. We need to ban seats.

And of course, some of the worst offenders? You guessed it, the things that are killing the planet one baby furseal after another.

You might be pointing out that having lots of extra seats is nice, or something something full capacity. By that “logic” having more than one parking space per car is nice, and we know that can’t be true because snarky midwits on the internet arbitrarily decided that it wasn’t for literally no reason. As a result, we need to go back to having only one seat per American, which will free up lots of space in our precious urban centres for pidgeon delivered funko pops and Vibrant-Americans to do heroin while the police stand there and watch.

[This parking covers] up to 30% of our cities. And collectively taking up about as much space as the state of West Virginia.

BritMonkey said 14% above, and I didn’t believe him them. I don’t believe you now Vox, but if that were true that would be even more reason to start building vertical parking garages. The video never mentions these, and it’s time to get back to xir CityNerd who is busy not actually explaining why they are bad while whining in their general direction.

You’ve got a few [apartment buildings with car parks as the first few levels] and I can think of no greater visual demonstration of the insanity of minimum parking requirements or parking mandates than a high rise residential building where the first five or ten stories are just housing for cars.

I love the insane self-own of admitting that you have no better argument against parking mandates than Wow, Just WOWing at parking garages being attached to buildings, as if that didn’t already exist. In many cases the parking garages are built underneath the building, but here they’re built on surface level. Oh my god that’s… fine? In fact it even seems pretty convenient.

I’m not a huge fan of minimum parking requirements. I think they’re a very sloppy way of doing urban planning that seem to often lead to excess space dedicated to parking. Parking is also like insurance, where you want to pool lots of different areas together for maximum efficiency.

But this is fine, and xir CityNerd is admitting that this is his best argument against them. Having too much parking is a waste of resources, having not enough parking is aggravating and crippling.

The irony is downtown is the one place in Vegas that really has the potential to support car free living.

The way they soy over not having a car is just so goddamn annoying.

There’s a transit centre where you can get a bus to just about anywhere, and the transit centre houses a bike centre that has free, secure bike parking, showers, lockers, bike repairs. It’s really a great amenity.

So… it’s subsidized, the thing that these people always pretend that car infrastructure is.

Downtown has bikeshare too, and, by the way, way more bike parking than you’ll find anywhere else in greater Las Vegas.

Uh, did he just heckin’ say that? Doesn’t he know that there are already 37 bike parking spots for every one bike in America? Doesn’t he know that there should actually only be one, because reasons? And instead he’s literally praising these hideous bike parking spaces that take up 84% of our precious urban fuckparty locations and which LITERALLY GENOCIDE the walkability of these areas due to bike fags like Alex “pick up trucks must be destroyed” McNabb.

 

Biking is literally for natzees oh my god I’m too triggered to dilate properly right now in the middle of my cattlecar. 

Also there’s rail which hasn’t seen a passenger train in years.

Why must rail have passengers and not just cargo? Rail is very good at transporting cargo. It’s not so good at transporting passengers, which is why over the years we have naturally gravitated towards more cargo rail than passenger rail, especially here in Canada. But apparently this is bad because reasons. You’re just a stupid person for not getting that we should cut into the freight in order to let AIDS enjoying bugcreatures get on da choo choo to go get fisted at the international fuckparty in a different city.

Did he even bother showing that the railways go anywhere from Las Vegas other than the nearest major shipping port? No, he didn’t. Does he think that people should be getting rides down to the docks for some stupid reason? Maybe, who knows? He certainly doesn’t tell us. The concept of freight-friendly railways being different from passenger-friendly railways is a point that appears lost on these people.

You have to say, downtown Vegas has all the elements you’d want in an area you’re trying to densify.

Why is it just assumed that density is good when people clearly want to live in their own spaces? JFC I can’t take these faggots and all their snuck in premises. I can barely tolerate this garbage even though I’m getting important content out of it.

You can actually cross a pedestrian bridge over the tracks that, I kid you not, connects to parking garages.

Here he praises the pedestrian bridge, provided that it is over rail, and not a highway. This might shock you all, but the traffic antifas will not extend this courtesy to passenger bridges that cross over highways.

Anyway, it’s time for him to circle back to the beginning of the video, and dunk all over parking garages. Get out your funko pops and get ready to soyface, this is going to be epic ownage of the chuds.

Look, I can’t tell you what the future of parking garages is, but I’d be really nervous about building them at this point.

Uhm. Okay. I was sort of expecting you to explain how building multilevel housing for people makes sense and is necessary because muh densification, while building multilevel parking is bad because reasons. It seemed a difficult square to circle. However, you telling us that you personally are afraid of parking garages is a very valid substitute.

It’s all kind of horrifying. There’s this basic idea that structured parking is better than surface parking because it’s a more efficient use of land. But structured parking costs up to 10x as much per stall as surface parking and at least surface parking is, like, banked land that’s easier to redevelop.

Oh my gawd, it costs “up to” 10x more per stall to build a parking garage instead of just drawing some lines in the ground. Wow that’s… actually less than I thought.

Also, the single family homes that these bugcreatures hate so much are a lot easier to demolish and redevelop than apartment buildings. But I guess that’s bad somehow because reasons. He doesn’t bother actually quantifying what the redevelopment cost differences are, and one can assume that parking garages, being infrastructure, will need to be redeveloped much more rarely than the random buildings built on lots.

In fairness, he does give us the genius insight that building parking garages is more expensive and complicates redevelopment more than simply drawing some lines on the ground. I don’t think a single one of us knew that. Thanks, CityNerd.

So a parking garage ends up being expensive shelter for cars at a time when we seem to have more and more actual humans who are unsheltered.

It’s almost like mass migration that pushes rents through the roof combined with an opiate crisis is bad. Shame that, you know, the traffic antifas support both of these things. Also, we can build housing and parking garages. This is not mutually exclusive.

Structured parking is expensive just in terms of construction cost. But it gets a lot worse when you think about the opportunity cost of what we could be building on our valuable downtown real estate instead.

That is true for everything, and is literally the entire argument for building parking garages instead of surface parking. Because the land is valuable we want to take up less of it. The opportunity cost of having tons of surface parking is greater than having a few vertical parking garages. That is literally the entire point, how are you too dumb to understand this?

Okay that’s all I got.

Wait that’s it. You’re done?!

Well CityNerd is a LOLcow, but hating on parking garages is nothing new for these people. Let’s try Jason Slaughter, aka “Not Just Bikes”, and see his take on urban parking. I’m sure this won’t be ridiculous and hypocritical in ten different ways.

To sum up the first few minutes of his video, the local (((Green Party))) in Amsterdam won an election by squeaking out a plurality over 12 other major parties. They campaigned on removing 10,000 parking spaces in 2018, and have set about doing exactly this. But luckily, Jason Slaughter acknowledges the extreme strain this puts on drivers.

Removing parking is contentious.

Thank you Jason. It’s nice to see someone in the urbanist e-shithole treating these issues with –

After the motorific[sic] 20th century car owners are very entitled and feel that they’re owed cheap or even free parking everywhere they go.

Jason this is sort of the opposite track you should be taking if you don’t want people to think you’re a LOLcow. But I’m sure this was just a joke and he’s warming us up for –

But parking generates a lot of problems too, so many cities are trying to reduce it. That’s easier said than done though, and as the saying goes ‘when you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression,’ and boy are drivers ever privileged, even in Amsterdam.

Boy do I ever like the people who demand that our taxes pay for their public transportation fetishes, bike lanes and even parking garages – we’ll get there -, and even, laughably, high speed rail for Canada, calling us peasants who have the audacity to drive privileged and entitled. 

He continues whining about cars for the next ten minutes before revealing how the Green Party actually got rid of all the parking spots, which is that they didn’t. Okay they did remove some street parking, and in some cases I think that’s very reasonable. They also changed a lot of parking spots into designated loading areas. But mostly they did something that caused both CityNerd and NotJustBikes to seethe to no end.

So where did the cars go? Well they’re right here.

No, not in the water. A multilevel parking garage was built under the canal that has space for all the removed cars and then some. 

So this is great, right. The streets are SO obviously better and this is now one of my favourite neighbourhoods in the city. 300 parking spaces were removed to make these streets as great as they are, but this parking garage has space for 600 cars.

And it cost 35 million Euros, which is almost 60 thousand Euros per spot. But the residents who live nearby can get a parking space in this garage for the same cost as regular street parking. That’s a pretty big subsidy to drivers.

Except that it’s not a subsidy to drivers, you fucking tool. The only reason that you have such a nice street with no parked cars, something that I can often get behind, is that they built expensive underground parking for all the cars. It’s literally infrastructure that benefits everyone, but these urbanite faggots refuse to acknowledge that.

It annoys me so ****ing much the snuck in premise that parking spaces for cars isn’t essential infrastructure. People want cars. There is demand for cars. Cars are useful, and car infrastructure is no less legitimate than bike infrastructure. In many cases is more legitimate because it serves a valid demand as opposed to some gay “let’s make everyone bike in Calgary winters because I’m a homo,” bullshit. 

As a point of reference, Amsterdam only spends about 70 million per year on bicycle infrastructure, so this one parking garage is equivalent to half the entire cycling budget for a whole year.

As usual, car infrastructure is horrendously expensive.

Well how much of the bike infrastructure is underneath a fucking canal you moron? Do you think it might start costing more if we built a whole bunch of bike tunnels underneath Amsterdam instead of using up precious surface space? What the fuck is “as usual,” about an underground parking garage that’s also underwater? Like, this guy uses the most expensive parking infrastructure possible and compares it to nailing down a couple of bike racks at the end of a street. Do you not understand that painting two lines and making a car parking spot is probably cheaper?

If 300 parking spaces were removed on the street, but 600 were added in the garage, does this count as removing 300 spaces, or adding 300 spaces?

Well it turns out the goal of removing 10,000 parking spaces is only referring to on street parking spaces, so this still counts as 300 removed spaces.

Suck it Jason. Mein car ist komfy.

It’s still a really great goal. There are many reasons for removing on street parking, and the less of it we have in our cities, the better. But off street parking has problems too. 

Aw, did they build a bunch of off street parking in order to remove the street parking? 

Looks like they did.

Anyway, the biggest issue here is that the more parking you have, the more driving you have.

Good. More people being able to take cars everywhere is a good thing, and it’s insane to presume otherwise.

And I’ve heard anecdotally that people in this neighbourhood are now more likely to drive because of this parking garage. Before the parking garage was built, the limited parking on street would discourage people from taking their car, as they might not be guaranteed a spot when they return. But now that the parking garage was built people are more likely to take their car, even for short trips.

Good. Good. and good. Feeling like you can’t take your car because you won’t be able to find a parking spot when you get back is extremely stressful and unpleasant. I’m happy for those residents that they can now comfortably take their cars to the places they need to be because the city has built the infrastructure to facilitate this. My only complaint is that Jason Slaughter was not directly and personally taxed in order to fund this.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from visiting hundreds of cities around the world it’s that the vast majority of people will take whatever form of transportation is the fastest, and the most convenient. If you make trains the most convenient, then most people will take the train. If you make cars the most convenient, most people will drive. 

There are exceptions. There are some people who will always take the bicycle no matter how inconvenient, and similarly there are some people who, no matter how painful and inconvenient it is, will insist on driving, even though the city centre is not designed for it.

Some people are insane and will do dumb things because their entire identity revolves around hating cars for no good reason. But most people won’t, which is where all the seething about “muh car infrastructure,” comes from. In reality, people choose cars because they are great, not because they are CaRBrAInS who fell for GM’s propaganda that dirty subways aren’t nice. The more honest of them admit that they have to artificially make cars worse, because otherwise people won’t stop driving them.

Unfortunately the people who insist on driving create a lot of problems for everyone else, because they take up a huge amount of space and make the streets more dangerous for everybody who isn’t inside of a metal box.

For the record, I do support banning cars from some places, but he’s just whining right now, like always. Also, you know what else causes problems for everyone? Criminals, Jason. Criminals do.

Now this is about the time that the driving apologists will chime in and say that they are driving because they have no other choice and need a car for some reason. Thankfully the NRC [a newspaper] stopped and asked people why they were driving into the city centre. Were they all bringing their poor, disabled mothers out to the canal for a sunny Sunday? No, they were just driving because that’s what they felt like doing.

One group said they were at a place with one of the best park and ride garages in the entire city, and a direct metro line that literally brings you right to this location within five minutes. Instead, they sat in traffic for an hour and a half to get here.

So what you’re telling me is that cars are so great that people would rather sit in them through traffic for an hour and a half rather than get out and ride the subway for five minutes. You think this makes the subway seem good because?

There was only one guy they interviewed who really needed to drive because he was helping his son move in to a new apartment. Of course, he had to sit in traffic that shouldn’t have even been there if these people had just taken the metro like everyone else. 

The majority of this traffic every weekend comes from people shopping, especially at De B’Jenkorf, a high end department store.

Gee, Jason, do ya think that maybe, just maybe, part of the reason why these people were putting up with hour long traffic was because they were buying enough stuff at the stores to fill up their cars, and literally could not make the same trip with public transit? 

But I guess they didn’t “really need to drive,” when they loaded up their car with hundreds of pounds worth of goods. They should have just rode the packed subway and been extremely obnoxious for everyone else by taking up enough space for six people.

By the way, above is what you get, as of time of writing, when you search for “not just bikes amsterdam parking,” as I did. Remember folx, underground parking is absolutely terrible and expensive and – DID YOU SAY UNDERGROUND BIKE PARKING OH M JEESUS I HAVEN’T BEEN THIS EXCITED SINCE MY WIFE’S BOYFRIEND BOUGHT ME A NINTENDO SWITCH!

And what allows these people to do this is this [off-street] parking garage, which holds over 400 cars.

This is a textbook example of parking generating traffic. As long as this QPark garage is here, there will be people wanting to use it.

I don’t want to have to keep harping on this, but the urbanites reframe this as bad, when it is good. Fulfilling market demand is good, and again, they only do this for cars. I bet he’d say that the underground bike park, no doubt expensive, makes people want to bike. He’d just claim that as a good thing, because cars == bad, bikes == good. 

So far Amsterdam has removed over 4,000 parking spaces, and time will tell if they hit the full 10,000. These changes will make a hugely positive impact on streetscapes all across the city, and while removing street parking is not a full solution, it’s still a big step in the right direction. Now the next step, let’s turn this ugly thing [same QPark garage] into housing.

Well Jason, they literally built that so they could remove the street parking, so good luck with that.

 

I couldn’t help myself and I clicked on his “Underground Bicycle Parking is Amazing,” video. At no point in time does he whine about the cost, or bloviate about bike infrastructure being too expensive. In fact, he even says this.

The garages are typically free for use, at least for the first 24 hours.

Sorry Jason, what was it you said about drivers?

After the motorific[sic] 20th century car owners are very entitled and feel that they’re owed cheap or even free parking everywhere they go.

Faggot soyboy (P)redditor expats in Amsterdam like myself who own bikes (in Amsterdam) are very absurdly entitled and feel that they’re owed cheap or even straight up free parking everywhere they go.

It’s amazing how blatantly hypocritical he is. He talks about how he couldn’t find parking with his bike sometimes, because there were so many other bikes on the street. In response to bike owners feeling entitled to free parking, the city built enormous underground bike parks. He still manages to whine about them anyway, and at no point does he point out that all this parking “induces demand,” for short bike trips that could have been served by walking, and clogs up the existing pedestrian and bike infrastructure with “unnecessary” trips.

Finally, remember when CityNerd praised the pedestrian bridge over the rail station? Well these are great when over rail, but terrible when over highways because reasons.

It’s at that point that some Americans will flippantly say that what we really need is pedestrian bridges. That way people walking can cross the street without ever having to interact with cars, at all. But this solution is almost always proposed by the people who drive, not the people who walk.

Good thing people who drive literally never walk or that statement would not make the slightest bit of sense.

These crossings are miserable, and they make what should be a short trip across the street into a long ordeal. There are always these ramps, so the distance you have to walk is significantly longer. And if you think it sucks to walk up one of these things, it’s even worse to take a wheelchair up one.

These problems can be totally solved with pedestrian underpasses. They can have much more gradual slopes, at the expense of being somewhat more expensive to build. But like many infrastructure projects, you get what you pay for.

Or at least you should. Pedestrian underpasses often are totally unusable for this One Weird Reason that is the actual reason why the overpasses are unusable. I’ll let Jason (accidentally) explain.

In my video collaboration with shifter last year he needed to cross a very wide “stroad” in Calgary last year and needed to cross this pedestrian bridge, which was more like a concrete ditch in the sky. 

We’ll get to “muh stroads,” in another piece. It’s as retarded as you think.

Though the people on the ramp on the other side were nice enough to offer him some of their crack cocaine. Canadians are so friendly!

I know that I’ve covered the Urbanists Bugcreatures utter refusal to pretend that crime isn’t the dominant factor in “walkability,” before, but it’s so hilarious their complete and utter refusal to acknowledge the barest whiff of reality. Oh yeah it’s a real shocker why mothers don’t let their kids walk over the bridge with the crack whore and her pimp on it. Damn you cars! You’re responsible for all of our societal problems!

By the way note how he was whining about the bridge being a “concrete ditch”. It’s actually perfectly fine, nice even. If there weren’t crackheads on it, it would be a wonderful addition to the transportation infrastructure.

Which gets us back to the underpasses. You see they have the advantage of not requiring you to walk up stairs or up a steep ramp. What possible problems could they have?

Toledo Blade:

City officials plan to block off a crime-ridden pedestrian tunnel under I-75 later this week, a step several neighborhood residents endorsed during a brief community meeting Monday evening.

The tunnel at Eastern Avenue, which links a small neighborhood east of the freeway with the rest of Toledo’s old south end, was intended to give children from the enclave a shorter walk to school and otherwise keep it united with the rest of its neighborhood when I-75 was built decades ago.

But David Pratt, Toledo’s commissioner of streets, bridges, and harbor, told the meeting at the South End branch library that gang activity and vandalism have turned the walkway into a nuisance. By week’s end, he said, gates will be welded shut, with more permanent measures to follow.

“The criminal element has taken over,” Mr. Pratt said. “Trying to do upkeep and maintenance is just not feasible.”

Diana Vasquez, who lives one house away from the tunnel’s west portal and brought pictures of graffiti and garbage inside it, supported the plan.

“I want it closed,” she said emphatically. “They’re shooting, doing drugs, and my husband’s truck got shot. … My 14-year-old son knows he’s not allowed to go down there.”

Jaime can we pull up a picture of the underpass that they’re talking about?

Wow, imagine being such a CaRBraIn that you don’t want your kids going into there, and being surrounded by the local wildlife. Don’t ya know that there’s SaFEtY in NuMBerS. Can’t believe these NoRMiEs fell for the automobile propaganda so completely that they genocided the walkability and bikeability of their own town?

Some people might point out that the residents of Toledo already had their underpass stolen from them by criminal scum. However, Jason just steps over the crack cocaine enjoyers to continue whining.

Let’s be very clear here, approximately zero percent of people prefer to walk out of their way along a long, filthy concrete trench with an elevation of several meters other than just, you know, walk across the ground to get to where they’re going. 

I think most people would prefer not to get hit by an oncoming semi-truck from the freeway. So, is he saying that the highway traffic should all stop for him when he feels like crossing the street?

Jaime, can you bring up what he said about drivers again?

After the motorific[sic] 20th century car owners are very entitled and feel that they’re owed cheap or even free parking everywhere they go.

Let’s update this one for urbanist bugcreatures.

100 Years after the cars rightfully replaced horses because they are awesome, a tiny minority of urbanist faggots got radicalized online into hating them for retarded reasons. They are so entitled that they feel that they’re owed the ability to literally walk in a straight line to anywhere they want to go, which wouldn’t have been true even back in the age of horse and buggy. How do these people have this little self awareness?

Jason continues.

These bridges are built for exactly one reason, so that people walking do not interfere with the flow of cars.

These are not built for the benefit of people walking.

They literally exist so that people can walk across a highway. If they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t stop the FUCKING highway to let people walk across, they just wouldn’t be able to walk across. Only a tiny minority of constantly online morons think that highways should have pedestrian crosswalks.

This is car infrastructure masquerading as pedestrian infrastructure.

No, it isn’t. But remember the underground car parks? Remember how they enabled the streets in Amsterdam to be clear for pedestrians and cyclists? That was bike and pedestrian infrastructure masquerading as car infrastructure, buddy.

Or rather, that was infrastructure that benefited everyone, which lots of infrastructure projects do. Xir traffictards simply refuse to pretend that anything that is good for drivers can also be good for everyone else, when this is objectively false. And they have such little to offer anyone that they titter at crackheads shitting up (sometimes literally) pedestrian infrastructure, and then whine that people don’t want to walk.

Hey! We’re rearing to go in the next installment. Pony up some of your time, and yell yourself hoarse in anticipation as we rein in the colt of traffic once and for all with an understanding of these weird, never before seen things that were used for transportation before cars were invented. I’ve been stalling to write this piece, it is the mane event after all, but I’ve finished the other responsibilities that I’ve been saddled with and I’m ready. What am I talking about? That is the equestrian.