"Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud":
What had been a comfortable speech listening volume is dwarfed by ordinary cars, not even modded boy racer cars speeding, just basic sedans doing the speed limit.
That’s rather anti-human.
The car was probably driven by someone who needed to do a human thing. Drivers are not evil Captain Planet villains.
The anti-human thing is NIBMYs driving everyone out of cities and preventing density.
In other situations where someone annoys hundreds of people, harms the health of hundreds of people, primarily for their own benefit, we'd call that bad, undesirable, and socially shame the person doing it, wouldn't we? The situation is anti-human; it's not a nice situation to exist in as an unaugmented human outside a car, not nice to walk in, to talk in, tarmac road isn't beautiful, vehicle fumes don't smell nice, they're harmful to health, and it's not cheap to build cars and roads everywhere and maintain them. Cars take a huge amount of space to move one person compared to the space of one walking human or one biking human, and they push 'places' further apart to make room for vehicles and car parks.
It should be that for such tradeoffs, cars need to have an enormous payback - things which absolutely can't be done without them. For example, emergency services - noisy, but needs to move mutiple people and equipment in a hurry. Delivery vehicles needing to move large quantities of goods around, labour needing to move equipment around. However if it's done for travelling 2 miles because urban design gave no thought to walking or biking so that the only safe and convenient way to cover 2 miles is by car, even though owning a car is a huge cost, that's anti-human design.
The NotJustBikes YouTube channel linked above has the message that most people are not 'car people' but will use whatever transport is (the cheapest, the quickest, the most convenient). It's a failing of urban design and big picture thinking when individual car driving is the winner for many short journeys when it could be otherwise. It's a bit of a failure when walking and driving are a sidewalk beside a main road and other routes have no (sidewalks, streetlights, bike lanes, safe crossings, etc).
Compare for example the NJB videos:
- "Why grocery shopping is better in Amsterdam" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk where he compares shopping for food in Amsterdam with driving to an out of town box store in Canada, and having to drive in Canada.
- "Safe cycling showdown - Good vs. Bad city design" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8F5hXqS-Ac which is a 20 minute video, first 10 minutes is NJB cycling from Amsterdam center to a hardware store ~10Km away on the edge of town, voice overlay is him describing what makes good/bad cycling infrastructure along the way. The next 10 minutes is an equivalent ride in Calgary, Alberta, from city center to out of town hardware store a similar distance, and similar overlay commentary. The contrast is stark.
Annoying for living vs annoying for entertainment.
The reality is, cities are incredibly noisy due to cars, but also construction work, people shouting, loud music and much more.
No? He drives cars, uses multiple car rental/car shares schemes, often says that it’s not cars he dislikes it’s urban design which leads to car dependency - unsafe for anyone outside a car, no provision for anything other than driving, single family housing zoning leading to everything being too spread out to go anywhere without a car - and that he’s not a ‘cyclist’ and would prefer taking a tram when possible.
The channel is even called “not just bikes” to push back against your kind of mischaracterisation.
While not everything can be done on a bike, a lot of people use a car when there is no need to. I can't understand why because cycling is way more enjoyable and in most cases a much faster way to get around town than a car. Especially if you own an e-bike.
I own a car but hardly feel the need to use it. I usually need to buy a full tank of gas once or twice a year.
It's kind of hard to over emphasize the the damage they've done, specifically as forms of personal transportation (versus more commercial transport).
He does have a video called "The Best Country in the World for Drivers", in which he shows that by reducing the need for cars for most people, actually helps the optimize things for operating a car:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k
And until the ~1920s, societies managed to function pretty well without the streets being taken over by cars:
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
I don't see why they need to have total priority with-in cities to the extant they currently do.
It's incredibly people-dense so there's definitely some baseline human noise, but I cannot emphasize enough how absolutely dwarfed by cars and delivery trucks it is. Construction work, shouting, music, etc. are almost a non-factor in comparison.
"people shouting" and "loud music" don't even factor.
Cars are by far the biggest noise contributor in a city and tbh i'd like drivers to pay a tax based on max sound a car may make on max engine speed(and if they want to pay less tax, speed should be physically limited to max 100km/h or something similar based on gps. But that's just a fantasy