Well Jason wasn't lying about the snark in his newest video.
I genuinely don't understand how anyone with ears can stand listening to this man's voice, it's one of the most annoying I've heard.
In any case, like most recent NJB videos, most of it is just him repeating points from previous videos he's made and recommending you go watch those. He does this on at least three occasions in this one video alone and and at one point just outright recommends watching every video on his channel.
When he's not regurgitating old points he's already made, he's using a frankly disgusting amount of stock footage.
This shot of a "high school physics teacher" gets used three times. Apparently some of his viewers are starting to notice, he might even lose some Nebula paypigs with this one.
In any case, the actual video is about how Amsterdam recently set a citywide speed limit of 30 kph (18.6 mph for the "ignorant Americans"), and how this is an overwhelmingly good thing with no downsides (and that they should be even lower in certain places). His arguments start out reasonable enough, talking about traffic fatalities decreasing when speed limits are lower which makes intuitive sense, but then he lets his visceral hatred of trucks and SUVs take over.
In the 1980s, it wouldn't be unusual to find a family driving, say, a Ford Fiesta, but today you'll literally see idiots commuting to their desk jobs with some ridiculous thing like a Dodge RAM 1500, which can be up to 4 times heavier. The kinetic energy of that 80s Fiesta going 60 kph is the same as a vehicle four times its weight going 30 kph. So it's perfectly reasonable for yesterday's 50 or 60 kph roads to become today's 30 kph roads, to compensate for this trend towards larger, heavier vehicles.
He seems to have forgotten that he wants those heavier vehicles banned from city centers. He also tries to argue that with lower speed limits you don't need traffic lights, and that smaller cars need fewer safety features including... airbags, which is interesting.
You might be asking, "wait a second, doesn't this guy jack off to streetcars? How does he square those with lowering speed limits?" Well he's thought of that and straight up thinks the speed limits shouldn't apply.
Amsterdam has also allowed many public transit lanes to keep their 50 kph speed limits. The logic here is that public transit vehicles, driven by professional drivers in a dedicated center-running lane, can travel safely at higher speeds. I mean, there isn't really a good reason to make trams drive slower, just because cars are more dangerous.
I really struggle to understand how these urbanists think that buses and streetcars (and even fucking TRAINS), which are significantly bigger and heavier than any SUV or truck could ever dream of being, somehow never cause accidents because they're driven by "professionals." It's not even that they don't show the same anger towards those accidents that they do towards car accidents, they're just in complete denial that they even happen
but they do, particularly in states with the dense walkable cities these people love so much.
He also tries to argue that your eyes aren't able to perceive as much at higher speeds, showing a ludicrously exaggerated view of what drivers
actually see when driving at high speeds.
Maybe when drunk. Also, again, why is it ok for bus and streetcar drivers to be going this fast?
He claims he'll make a follow-up video with data gathered from Amsterdam setting new speed limits (
heard that one before) and also announces he'll be doing livestreams where he takes a radar gun and monitors drivers like a wannabe traffic cop.
He concludes with this:
The thing that bothers me is that the data is really, really, really clear here. At some point we have to realize that anybody fighting against lower speed limits within cities is either willfully ignorant, or they're a selfish asshole who values their convenience more than other people's safety. I am so tired of our cities being loud, uncomfortable, and dangerous because of assholes who drive too fast, and think the rules don't apply to them. We need to take back our streets, and lowering speed limits is a big step in that direction.
Yeah keep up that rhetoric for the brick people on /r/fuckcars, I'm sure they'll do completely rational and sane things with that mindset.
Actually that's not fair, his actual conclusion is the sponsor of the month, Ground News, which is an app that lets you compare news articles from various websites and details how far left or right on the political spectrum they are (i.e., how correct they are).