Notices by Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱 (notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com), page 2

@petrescatraian I don't have any plans to visit the Balkans at this time, but if I do, I need to have a reason to visit.

Nobody wants to watch a video where I complain about all the things wrong with a place they've never been to. I would prefer to focus on something that is done well, and then mention some of the things they could do better.

Japan has some truly crazy trains, so while I was there I tried to ride a bunch of them.

Here are six of my favourites! The Pokémon one was insane!

https://youtu.be/hTPIs370dPM

@CIMB4 sorry, that's between me and Natalie. 😆

omg I was rewatching an old @contrapoints video tonight and when I got to this segment I had to pause it to yell, "YES GIRL!!" 😆

omg Chuck from Strong Towns wrote the best smackdown of a "why don't you just let people live the way they want to live" replyguy that I've ever seen.

It's so good that I'm willing to link to the Bad Site so that people can read it:

https://x.com/clmarohn/status/1803131603033690537

Chuck has SO much more patience for this bullshit than I do.

I guess that's why he's the advocate and I'm just the angry YouTuber.

CityBeautiful recently released a great video about how to fix stroads.

It's accurate, and lines up exactly with the advocacy that my wife and I were doing 10 years ago, right down to using StreetMix to redesign streets.

It's also extremely depressing and makes me glad I don't live in North America anymore.

https://youtu.be/1V679pkDl6k

None of the following is critical of City Beautiful: he is a great guy and his video is completely accurate, as usual.

In fact, there are several things in his video that are just *too* accurate.

When redesigning a stroad, you can't take space from cars (except in rare situations), you can't change intersections, and you can't move any utilities.

You need to plan around the scraps left over on a stroad designed for drivers.

So the ultimately, the solution will be a big compromise.

Dave mentions some typical improvements that can be made to a stroad like this, given the political constraints.

The end result of this kind of redesign looks something like this photo.

This is Wonderland Road in Fake London.

Is this better than the stroad in the post above? Yes.

Is it good? Absolutely not.

And the problem is, streets and roads are only redesigned about every 30 years.

So this is it. This is all you're getting for at least a generation.

Lipstick on a pig.

This is why Strong Towns does NOT advocate for redesigning stroads like this. There's no point.

It will cost a bunch of money and political capital and those "bike lanes" will be used by only a handful of people (just like on Wonderland Road), which will only serve as something to point to and say, "see? nobody bikes here!"

Chuck's article, "How do you actually fix a stroad?" is useful here.

The answer: you shouldn't.

So what should you do?

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/12/2/how-do-you-actually-fix-a-stroad

Strong Towns advocates for incremental improvements.

Fundamentally, it makes more sense to focus on "downtown", or whatever traditional development still exists in your town.

Making a small change to rejuvenate a traditional walkable neighbourhood will always result in better payoffs than any stroad repair.

See Dundas Street in Fake London.

This cost less than any stroad repair, but will do way more to improve your city than adding bike lanes to 5 lane stroad.

Do this to every traditional neighbourhood that hasn't been bulldozed.

Relaxing zoning laws in these places to allow mixed-use development.

Add protected bicycle lanes connecting these places.

Increase transit service (even buses) to every 10 minutes between these neighbourhoods and to popular office parks.

Turn old malls into mixed-use developments with high-quality transit connections to those traditional neighbourhoods.

Build great places where people actually want to be.

I was catching up on some older Scientific American articles and came across this one from March.

It's an article about the problems caused by car dependency, and it hits all of the important parts of a solution (zoning, regulation exceptions for SUVs, free parking, etc).

There are no surprises to anyone who has been orange-pilled, but it's still nice to see this kind of article in the more mainstream press.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/changing-car-culture-can-benefit-our-health-and-our-planet/

@owiecc I don't take transportation advice from Americans. 😉

@owiecc yes of course he does. He's American. That's what I'm saying.

Americans are exposed to so much propaganda about cars that I don't care at all about their options on transportation. They're incapable of thinking outside of a a car-centric view of the world. Even American urbanists carry with them a deep-seated car-supremacist view of the world.

These guys actually tracked down a copy of Archie (including the source code) and now have a public Archie server back online!

Archie was the Internet's first search engine (before the web existed). I remember using it in the early 90s.

It's pretty funny how usable 90s tech is: imagine, a search engine that just gives you direct links to file downloads without any other nonsense involved!

https://youtu.be/CUwR9xdEuZI

I'm getting some quality footage for my upcoming video about Japanese trains.

I love that I can get a Shinkansen back to Tokyo at 10PM from a city with less than 100K population.

The drive would be 183 km and take 2h23m but this train will get me there in 1h10m.

It's included in my JR East train pass, too.

♥🚄

I can't believe I'm in Japan when the Aurora Borealis is in the Netherlands.

Good thing I've already seen them before in Yellowknife.

https://fosstodon.org/@AkaSci/112422344899892103

Tokyo has BBBase, a train designed for road cyclists to take their bikes out of the city for a ride.

It has big, comfortable seats and special racks for road bikes.

I am an old white guy with no bicycle. I'm sure everyone is wondering what the heck I'm doing on this train on an early Saturday morning. 😂

So, I'm on this Shinkansen train in Japan ...