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Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com

<p>A cranky old guy who has been places and seen things.</p><p>No, I am not going to bridge to Bluesky. However I do have a W-Social account (@notjustbikes.com)</p><p>Please do not re-post my posts (or screenshots of my posts) on other platforms. These posts are meant only for Mastodon.</p>

Posts

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    I am really excited about this second season of Day Pass. Season one was a &quot;pilot&quot;, and we didn&#39;t really know what the show would become. But this time around we knew exactly what we wanted to make and it turned out great! Season two will begin releasing in October and there will be six episodes across six different cities in Asia! https://youtu.be/hVd5pIBz4ro

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    Here&#39;s the latest AI slop creator ripping off my content. This time they ran my script through an AI &quot;podcast&quot; generator (likely the free one by Adobe) and put it under the footage from my latest video. When I make my videos, I spend hours travelling and filming on-location to get real footage that can&#39;t be found anywhere else. Then these AI slop creators steal it and release it as their own. About 90% of my exposure to &quot;AI&quot; these days is just slop farms ripping...

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    Here is the link to the petition, and there&#39;s more information in the article I linked to, above. https://c.org/fDgKpTjRRp I really think this happened because the big shippers (like Amazon) wanted it this way for regulatory capture (to purposefully keep the little guys out). But it&#39;s still ridiculous that the EU let this happen in this form. Carveouts for small businesses are the norm in EU legislation for exactly this reason.

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    RE: https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes/117031622101246791 It&#39;s amazing how cyclists will make almost exactly the same arguments in favour of riding their private bikes everywhere that car drivers make in favour of driving their private cars everywhere. At a certain point, private transportation does not scale, and that applies to bicycles too. Sure, it happens at WAY higher volumes for bikes than for cars, but it does happen. I don&#39;t want trains and stations getting fille...

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    Toronto is one of those cities that looks better the farther away you are from it

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    Patreon link if you&amp;#39;d rather watch it there: https://www.patreon.com/notjustbikes/posts/agenda-amsterdam-163895404 The full video will come out on YouTube on Sunday.

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    In October 2019, te same month I started Not Just Bikes on YouTube, Amsterdam published the document &quot;Agenda Amsterdam Autoluw&quot;, a plan to make the city (nearly) car-free. So, seven years later, what did they actually accomplish? Did they do what they said they would do? https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-the-amazing-plan-for-a-nearly-carfree-amsterdam

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    @GhostOnTheHalfShell Yeah. 😔

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    RE: https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/116653327892138785 &amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s why whenever I go to war, I always use this video&amp;#39;s sponsor, Incogni...&amp;quot;

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    Ferdinand Bolstraat is one of my favourite streets in Amsterdam, but the history of how it got that way was way more complicated – and interesting! – than I thought. My latest video (out early on Nebula &amp;amp; Patreon) is about the history of this nearly car-free street. https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-the-crazy-story-of-my-favourite-street-in-amsterdam

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    The Dutch Government is considering new rules around e-bikes and electric scooters that would include requirements for insurance, license plates, and helmets. You can read the proposed changes here, and you can respond to it up until June 9th (two days from now!) here: https://www.internetconsultatie.nl/amvb_lev_kader/b1

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    It&#39;s good that the government blocked this merger, but it&#39;s kinda horrifying to hear that the backend for an absolutely critical bit of government infrastructure like DigID is being provided by a private corporation. 😬 https://www.techspot.com/news/112552-netherlands-blocked-us-company-buying-app-dutch-citizens.html

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    OK, so I knew that the bicycle tunnel in Bergen, Norway, was going to be good, but this was WAY better than I expected it to be! My video about it is now available on Patreon and Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-how-is-a-bike-tunnel-this-freakn-great

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    Bergen built the world&amp;#39;s greatest bicycle tunnel and I visited! Check it out in my latest video on YouTube! Unfortunately we can&amp;#39;t have infrastructure like this in Canada because of the winter, so you&amp;#39;ll only find stuff like this in a warm, flat, basically tropical city. You know, like Bergen, in Norway. https://youtu.be/JCedclz03uI

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    This graphic illustrates a major problem I have making videos: The last street is still absolute garbage. There isn&amp;#39;t even public transit. The US (⅓ of my audience) is so far behind in city design that this is all they can reasonably hope for. Meanwhile the rest of my audience is starting from the last street and trying to build something better. It&amp;#39;s like if I had a maths channel and wanted to talk about calculus, but ⅓ of my audience was still debating if multiplication act...

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    Since releasing my oil video I&#39;ve had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead. What&#39;s odd is that almost all of the messages mention that nuclear power is the only solution for the &quot;base load&quot;. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and I took several nuclear science electives. I like nuclear energy. But I received so much &quot;base load&quot; gaslighting that I started to doubt my own understanding of the situation.

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    The coming oil crisis is going to suck, but the one small silver lining is that when oil gets expensive, cities get better. My latest video is now available on Nebula and Patreon (YouTube on Sunday): https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-when-oil-gets-expensive-cities-get-better

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    I had a great chat with Meredith Glaser, from the Urban Cycling Institute &amp;amp; Ghent University, to talk about &amp;quot;study tours&amp;quot; and how she gets international policymakers on-board to build better cycling infrastructure in their cities. This was one of my better podcast conversations, so definitely check it out! (Also available on all podcast platforms) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jtcuc4RUjA

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    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&amp;#39;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...

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    &amp;quot;While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it. Slowing automobility’s violence and pollution will be impracticable without the replacement of policies that encourage Car Harm with policies that reduce it.” This is a quote from a 2024 paper entitled, &amp;quot;Car harm: A global review of automobility’s harm to people and the environment&amp;quot;, and I finally made a video about it (now on Nebula &amp;amp; Patreon): https://ne...

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    I was doing some research for a video and randomly came across this image from GM, which was on a page to promote the benefits of electric vehicles. This image is obviously photoshopped, but look at this place. It&amp;#39;s prime waterfront land, directly across the river from a city, and it&amp;#39;s being shown as a featureless asphalt surface. Even in their &amp;quot;optimistic&amp;quot; visions of the future, car companies&amp;#39; vision for cities is shit.

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    @BrentToderian@mastodon.online and some of his associates have started the &quot;Urban Truth Collective&quot;, an organisation dedicated to combatting lies about good urbanism: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2026/03/05/urban-truth-collective-straight-talk-about-the-joy-of-cities-in-an-age-of-disinformation Most of these lies are collateral damage from the fossil fuel industry&#39;s anti-climate change efforts. This is one way that urbanists are fighting back. More to come !

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    RE: https://mastodon.nl/@nrc_nl/116085857772166483 It was ridiculous that Polymarket claimed to be anything other than a gambling company. I&amp;#39;m glad Dutch regulators aren&amp;#39;t stupid enough to fall for that. I especially hate it when people call them a &amp;quot;prediction market&amp;quot;. They don&amp;#39;t &amp;quot;predict&amp;quot; anything, any more than a traditional bookie &amp;quot;predicts&amp;quot; the outcome of a horse race. Of course Polymarket is even worse than tra...

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    You may have noticed that I almost never use music in Not Just Bikes videos, and that is very much intentional. I recently put together a bonus video explaining why I don&amp;#39;t use music, and what that has to do with the Minecraft YouTuber &amp;quot;Mumbo Jumbo.&amp;quot; This video is only on Nebula (not YouTube), for reasons that become very obvious when you watch the video: https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-why-i-dont-use-music-in-my-videos