Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
Every time some holier-than-thou bike advocate is chastising me for "giving up" on North America and moving to Amsterdam, I check their profile and it'll show that they grew up in some shitty suburb or small town, and moved to one of the half-decent cities in North America.
Every. Fucking. Time.
They moved to a better city and it's fine, but somehow me leaving the continent is the worst crime imaginable.
It's so tiring.
Every urbanist moves if they're able to. At least I'm honest about it.
Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
The only exception is if they were already born in one of the best cities in the country.
They won the urbanist birth lottery.
The rest of us shouldn't be shamed for wanting to live somewhere better.
And if you can't move, for whatever reason, that's fine too. Then you should join https://StrongTowns.org. That's why I've been promoting them since before Not Just Bikes was even a thing.
Chuck actually stayed in Brainerd, MI.
I think that's insane, but at least I can respect that decision.
Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
If you'd like to become a Strong Towns member, go to:
https://notjustbikes.com/strongtowns
I've been told that over half of all Strong Towns members heard about the movement through Not Just Bikes.
Even though the online drama is infuriating at times, I'm still proud of that accomplishment.
Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
@brewski yes, but Vancouver is already one of the most progressive urbanist cities in North America.
Look at what London, Ontario has done for transit since 2002. Almost nothing.
Which is the point, of course: advocates want to move to the place where things can seriously improve in 20 years, not the places that are stagnant (or even moving backwards).
Brewski
It can also be easy to overlook the improvements the half-decent cities have made in just the last 10-20 years.
As an example, the entire length of the SkyTrain system in Vancouver has roughly tripled since 2002.
Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
@InkySchwartz Strong Towns has thousands of members, and dozens of employees, from all across the political spectrum.
I've been on record saying that I think Chuck's politics are trash, but I also don't think that you should dismiss the movement because of the politics of its founder.
Plus, I don't think any urbanist movement is going to be successful in the United States without appealing to Republicans.
Inky says "What the hell?!"
@notjustbikes Sadly while I like Strongtowns for what they are, Chuck's politics that he is running on are not great and present as stock conservative horse hocky with no recognition of LGBTQ+ people and non heterosexual relationships.
Plus his podcast is great except then he did the episode for conservatives and lied about the left over and over, as if that is the only way to talk to US Conservatives.
I really expected better of him.
Adding his political party: https://www.solidarity-party.org/platform
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.