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Numtots Have Entirely Missed The Point Jane Jacobs Was Making

The Guardian introduces us to a grouping who have entirely missed the point being made. The Numtots are a group, Facebook community, a mistake of millennials perhaps, who argue for a heavily planned urban environment, one that bans cars and moves entirely by public transport and or bicycles and Shanks’ Pony. The argument itself, well, why not?

The year is 2025. There are no cars, only public transport and bicycles. Four-lane highways have been replaced by bike paths. Pedestrians share the pavements with cyclists. The air is clean (because the buses are electric), and the living is easy.

This is the future the Numtots want.

Predominantly millennials with a passion for public transport, urban planning and internet humour, Numtots’ interests intersect in New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, the Facebook group from which they derive their nickname. There, nearly 100,000 of them discuss and debate their perfect city, or transit lines in their area, or perpendicular traffic flow and improvisational vehicle pathing.

Well, because it’s a bloody stupid argument is one reason why not. They’re described as teenagers and just beyond – that is, those who haven’t yet learnt the lesson that detailed planning of the world just doesn’t work. Hayek dealt with this in his Nobel Lecture, The Pretence Of Knowledge. No, you don’t get to dismiss this as the frothings of some Austrian (and Austrian) crank, he’s right here. The world just is too complex and chaotic to be planned, the centre never can have the information to do it.

We’ve even practical experience to guide us, the Soviet Union in the past, North Korea today perhaps, are planned societies without those pesky privately owned cars in any volume and they were – or are – s**t places to live. Yes, I do have extensive and intensive experience of Moscow’s public transport, thank you.

It doesn’t work.

It also fails Chesterton’s Fence. We cannot decide that something is no longer needed until we answer the question of why it arose in the first place. So, why has every society either free enough or rich enough to have a form of privately owned, personal, transport had a form of privately owned, personal, transport? What bit of being human is it that leads to this outcome? Until that is answered – perhaps to deny it which would fly in the face of all observable evidence, perhaps to say that something really has changed – then we’d be damn idiots to ban it.

But here’s what amuses:

Numtots’ guiding principles are broadly summed up by the page’s URL: “What would Jane Jacobs do?”

Yes, they’re using Jane Jacobs to argue in favour of extensive and intensive urban planning. Numbnuts or what?

Jacob’s defining fight being against that extensive and intensive urban planning of Robert Moses. Sure, he was in favour of cars and expressways, she wasn’t. But it wasn’t because she was against cars and expressways, it was because she was against extensive and intensive urban planning. Liveable cities are organic constructions, they’re emergent from the repeated interactions of people over time. That is, they’re not planned.

Numtots – using the wrong justification for an impossible policy disagreeing with what we know about human nature. Well, yes, suppose that’s why the teenagers are there, not the adults.

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Spike
5 years ago

So the kids want a city where someone takes them everywhere — and don’t feel the need to think it through, that that “someone” is a unionized, featherbedded bureaucracy, with tons of “jobs” for people of perfectly balanced races who are unfamiliar with the concept of “work”; a system which, if it is as bad as the one in Boston, will let a predicted and routine snowstorm shut down a commuter line for a full month. Never mind. If they ever get their wish, and are stranded in the suburbs, they can blog about that too. Regarding “clean air,” the… Read more »

Southerner
5 years ago
Reply to  Spike

… or a whiff of hydrogen sulphide-scented methane filtered through lycra.

jgh
jgh
5 years ago

“Pedestrians share the pavements with cyclists”

Not if I have anything to do with it. GERROFF THE FUCKING PAVEMENT!!! WALLOP!

Jklein
Jklein
5 years ago

“What bit of being human led to this outcome?” Until the automobile came about, streets in major cities were shared by pedestrians, carriages, and trollies. When automobiles first appeared on urban streets, some cities sought to curtail or even ban their use, because they made it impossible for foot traffic to share the street. Auto companies lobbied fiercely for the institution of modern traffic laws, which hand the streets to the cars and relegate foot traffic to sidewalks. There is no “bit of being human” that led to the rise of the automobile in the city. It was business interests,… Read more »

jgh
jgh
5 years ago

“Pedestrians share the pavements with cyclists”

Not if I have anything to do with it. GERROFF THE FUCKING PAVEMENT!!! WALLOP!

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