Notices by Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱 (notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com)

My dad sent me this article the other day and I literally laughed out loud when I read the title.

Only an American would write a title like that.

https://www.travelandleisure.com/munich-germany-most-walkable-city-in-world-11721214

You should know that these "city rankings" are always a load of nonsense and should never be taken seriously.

They're usually put together in an afternoon by a marketing department, in this case, it's a marketing piece for a home loans website.

The goal is to get clicks, not to be accurate. In fact, the less accurate you are, the more likely you are to get clicks, so getting the intern to put it together in Excel based off of an arbitrary "scoring system" is a benefit.

@LovesTha it was meant for "expats" and targeted entirely at HR departments so that they can evaluate compensation and hardship pay.

Every one of these ranking systems is nonsense. I should probably make a video about it some day, if I can bring myself to care enough about it. 😂

@soviut they are very common in the Netherlands, usually outside of shops when they don't want people to parks their bikes out front.

I'm still kinda mad they refused to allow the addition of a "no cars" emoji though.

They said they don't want to have anymore individual "no" emojis, but they also won't remove the ones they already have.

So we have 🚳 but have to do 🚫🚗 and hope the platforms display it properly some day.

https://www.smarterthancar.com/project/no-cars-emoji

Oh, good. Unicode 16.0 has added a "face with bags under eyes" emoji. I'm going to be using that one a lot.

🫩

I typically don't read comments beyond those left by my Patreon supporters, but after releasing a new video it's impossible not to catch a few stray comments when opening the YouTube Studio app.

I will never get tired of seeing one of the "If you love Europe so much, why don't you move there!" comments. 😂

Also I thoroughly enjoy one comment calling me a MAGA Trump supporter with the one immediately after it calling me a communist.

I knew "big box" stores were bad, but I was still surprised by what we found when researching this video. 😬

#bigbox #urbanism #cities #notjustbikes

https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-these-ugly-big-box-stores-are-literally-bankrupting-cities

I've been saying this for years: ebikes should have USB-C PD ports for charging!

Finally a manufacturer has actually done it. In this case using 140W power delivery, which is way higher power than any ebike charger I've ever used. And USB-C PD now supports up to 240W, which is more than enough for ebikes.

I hope this becomes the norm:

https://www.theverge.com/news/639681/usb-c-charging-e-bike-ampler-nova-specs-price

First of all, why would I be in favour of a car company, never mind an American car company?

Telsa makes expensive luxury cars, primarily for the US market. They're big and overpowered. They're dangerous (to others) and encourage people to speed.

And they're WIDE! Tesla cars are about 15 to 25 cm wider than a typical EU car, which means I can never pass them on a bike on the narrow Amsterdam streets.

So I put up a YouTube post about the Tesla protests happening in Amsterdam this Saturday:

https://actionnetwork.org/events/takedown-tesla-amsterdam

It made a few people mad, and a handful of people unsubscribed (almost entirely Americans: I can see from the stats).

That was to be expected.

But what really surprised me was the number of people who said something like, "Why are you against Tesla when they are in favour of everything this channel stands for?"

Uh ... wut? What channel are these people watching?

I am loving that things are finally moving to make European countries less dependent on US software (especially cloud providers), but I am disappointed that there isn't more of a focus on open source software.

There are several government programs within EU counties to fund the development of open source software. We need WAY more of that, coordinated at the EU level.

The best way to avoid being beholden to big tech is to fund viable open source alternatives.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dutch-parliament-calls-end-reliance-us-software-2025-03-18/

Bergen built the world's greatest bicycle tunnel and I visited! Check it out in my latest video on YouTube!

Unfortunately we can't have infrastructure like this in Canada because of the winter, so you'll only find stuff like this in a warm, flat, basically tropical city. You know, like Bergen, in Norway.

https://youtu.be/JCedclz03uI

@derrickb It would almost certainly work, and Teslas aren't the only cars that recognize speed limit signs either.

I feel like somebody out there must've tried that by now. 🤔

It is pretty dystopian if cyclists feel the need to dress up as traffic cones to avoid being killed by murderbots though. 😬

A couple of the photos showed the (very, very few) bicycle lanes that were actually plowed in Toronto, which was great, but it was really treacherous to even GET to these places in the first place.

There were a few other people cycling with me who were either very brave or, more likely, lucky enough to live and work along part of the minuscule "winter bike lane" network that were plowed.

But another photo shows the extremely dangerous situation of a semi truck in gridlocked traffic, in the dark winter rush-hour, blocking one of the very very few bicycle lanes that were actually plowed. 😩

I can't believe I ever cycled on these dangerous streets and in the dark! I don't think I would do that today. 😱

And la pièce de résistance, at the end of the photo album, was this photo of the bike rack at my work.

After braving the snow-covered car-infested streets of Toronto, I get to work and the snow plow has put all of the snow from the car parking right into the bike rack. 🤦

Google Photos just popped up with a "memories" album it auto-created with photos from 2016.

Almost all of the photos are from my bicycle commute to work, and it unintentionally showed just how ridiculous the whole "nobody cycles in the winter" excuse really is.

Most of the photos were bicycle lanes completely covered in snow, and mostly turned to hardened ice in the form of tire-treads, due to cars driving over them.

GEE, I WONDER WHY NOBODY IS CYCLING HERE?

#vikingbiking #biketo #bikewinter

And so it begins.

One of the "predictions" from my self-driving cars video that I was 100% confident would happen was that robotaxis will be programmed not to stop for pedestrians.

The idea that a single individual, outside of a motor vehicle, could stop a robotaxi is antithetical to both the tech bro mentality and American traffic engineering.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/on-roads-teeming-with-robotaxis-crossing-the-street-can-be-harrowing/ar-AA1wHy1N

It's exhausting how many Americans respond to my content with "this guy obviously has no idea how big the US is" when I have literally driven across the US seven times. I guarantee I have a better understanding of how big the US is (and how irrelevant that fact is to my content) than any of these people.

No matter how many videos I make it's still the same tired old excuses, over and over and over again.

There needs to be a word like "mansplaining" but for Americans. Yanksplaining, maybe?