I got inspired to do a fuller debunking of Not Just Bikes' video, I GOT A NEW TRUCK!! (AND A MILLION SUBSCRIBERS!) - YouTube, which I had briefly critiqued last year.
Besides the usual general urbanist myths, he also was talking rubbish about the areas he was filming in:
There's a lot to unpack here, especially because he was lying about what he was filming.
Ignoring the stupid jibes at pickup trucks and conservatives (given that he throws the "fascist" label around willy-nilly and blocks lots of people, you can see what we have here) and just dealing with this claims about the built environment:
1) He claims that if you get your stuff from a quick service restaurant via the drivethru it takes a long time. But usually I find choosing pickup takes longer than using drivethru. And when you order stuff for pickup, they often don't call your number/name, and sometimes they forget your order.
On the other hand, when you are at the drivethru there's active pressure on the service staff to clear you because there're cars behind you, and people get their stuff one by one at the pickup counter, so they need to give you something.
2) He insinuates that you need to use the waiting lot to get your stuff when you go via the drivethru. This rarely happens to me. It happened a bit more during covid but I can't remember the last time it's happened to me.
3) He mocks low property taxes and links them to lousy roads. But a 2013 study found that drivers paid for 70-90% of road costs "through fuel taxes, vehicle registration fees and tolls".
That aside, whenever you hear urbanists/left wingers bitch about how other people are paying too little property tax, note that to make this claim they always look at property tax *rates*. Yet, a low property tax rate doesn't mean you have low property tax, since property tax is paid based on the value of your house. If the property tax rate is low but the value of the house is high, you still end up paying relatively high property tax.
In 2023, Zoocasa released a data compilation of property tax rates, house values and property taxes on average house values for 32 regions in the Greater Toronto Area. Unfortunately, this was a graphic rather than more tractable data, so I had to convert this into a spreadsheet.
When you look at the dollar value of property taxes paid, you can see that the rank of the non-Toronto municipalities for property taxes paid falls and they no longer are the municipalities with the lowest property taxes.
Ironically, the roads in the York region (where he filmed much of this video) are actually better than in Toronto, so he's not even accurate in his claim that suburbs have bad roads. Consistently, the roads consistently voted the worst in Ontario are mostly in Toronto and Hamilton, which are 2 of the 3 densest population centres in the province.
He also deceptively edits the video.
At 5:03 where he complains about roads, he seems to be entering Highway 404 at Highway 7, which is between Richmond Hill and Markham.
But at 5:06, where he complains about being stuck in traffic, he's on the 404 near Finch & Sheppard, he's actually in Toronto itself, not the suburbs.
Then he claims he is "25 minutes to the grocery store, 35 minutes to work". I can't comment on the commute to work, because that would require assumptions about workplaces (but I will note that not everyone works in the downtown of a big city, and one reason people move to small towns is for a shorter commute), but from around where he "lives" (see below), he is only 5 mins from the grocery store (Food Basics).
As an aside, you often hear people bitch that property taxes in Toronto are "too low". But these are the same people who advocate city living because it's more efficient to service cities as more taxpayers share infrastructure. In other words, if property taxes in big, dense cities are "low", that's a feature, not a bug.
4) He makes a stupid remark about sitting on "supple red leather seats" despite traffic being "pretty bad". But given that he praises the Netherlands at the end of the video (and in his other videos) and that he spends most of his time bashing the USA, it is super ironic that the average commute in the Netherlands is 34.5 minutes but 26.7 minutes in the US.
5) Naturally, he alludes to one of urbanists' favourite myths - that induced demand means that expanding roads is pointless since traffic will just increase to fill the road.
In reality, studies which produced this result had poor methodology, since there were no/poor controls (if the roads had not been expanded, traffic would've gotten worse anyway). In reality, studies find the coefficient of induced demand to range from 0 to 0.25, i.e. increasing road capacity by 10% will cause traffic to increase by 0-2.5%.
In other words, expanding roads does indeed improve traffic.
6) He pretends to diss bike lanes, but in reality, bike lanes can worsen congestion. If no one uses a bike lane (on many of the roads he films on, I never see anyone riding a bike), all this congestion is absolutely for nothing, but even if a few cyclists do use them, net welfare is not necessarily higher.
For example, one study found that there was 1 cyclist for every 400 vehicles. So even on a naive calculation, bike lanes taking up more than 0.25% of road space would be a waste. But when you consider that bicycles can be ridden on the open road and don't need a bike lane, bike lanes become even more inefficient (bike lanes can only be used for cycling, whereas a normal road can accommodate both a motorised vehicle and a bicycle).
Ironically, multiple studies find that bike lanes actually reduce cyclist safety, so the cycling lobby's ego is actually harming cyclists.
7) He then goes "home", which he calls "semi-rural".
Yet, the area which serves as his "home" is somewhere around Woodspring Avenue in Newmarket. Newmarket is a town and in 2021, it had a population of 87,942. It is also in the Greater Toronto Area, and the mayor thinks it may be the only 15 minute town in Ontario, or even Canada. As such, calling it "semi-rural" is just fake news.
8) He then makes snide remarks about homeowners' associations (HOAs) and being fined for his front door being the wrong colour. Urbanists like to promote dense living, which is often in high- or medium-rise apartments. However, ironically, the restrictions through bylaws when you live in a condo are usually much stricter than those in a HOA.
9) He then claims he needs to turn rooms of his house into a gym, a bar, a library, a church and mini-golf, because there're none of these nearby. In reality, all of these are near where he's filming. From the intersection of Woodspring Avenue and Ford Wilson Boulevard (where he's at at 7:56), you're 5 mins drive from a gym (GoodLife Fitness Newmarket in York Town Square) or a bar (St. Louis Bar & Grill), 8 mins drive from the Newmarket Public Library, 4 mins drive from a church (Crosslands Church) and 8 mins drive from mini-golf (Cardinal's Northern Adventure Mini Putt).
You are also 19 minutes *walk* away from Upper Canada Mall, which is the 27th largest shopping centre in Canada and the 12th largest in Ontario.
10) Lastly, he makes some comment about his neighbor's leaf blower being loud, which is ironic, because cities are louder than suburban areas, and much louder than rural ones.
Sadly, feel-good myths bashing the suburbs play well to a large crowd, so such videos continue to be popular.
