A new baby elephant was born at the Fort Worth Zoo this summer and she is a beautiful little alien

I just paid $44 in import fees on an $18 purchase, I have to canvass tomorrow to fill the funding hole that Trump blew in our city budget, & I’m about to meet my friend who’s leaving the state tomorrow because her husband is fleeing the purge of academia in Texas But sure, give this guy more power

Join us next Thursday at Bouldin Acres on South Lamar for our October Social, starting at 5:30. The venue has a playground, pickleball courts and a dog-friendly patio, so please feel free to bring family, friends and fido! RSVP here: actionnetwork.org/events/aura-...

When our transportation system is built only around cars, it leaves too many people behind. #WeekWithoutDriving invites all of us to experience what it’s like to navigate Austin without a car and to consider how we can make our city safer and more accessible for everyone.

I have a piece in the latest issue of @vitalcitynyc.bsky.social about New York City's very special building codes (evacuation maps! mass timber! drop ceilings! pipes!), and some issues for code reform more broadly www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the...

Check out this proposal for redeveloping an old NBA arena in San Diego (now home to a minor league hockey team and an enormous empty parking lot)

Auto-centrism has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself

Well, the city of Stockholm thinks that you just need 3 Three. Like one, two, three. 🚦🚦🚦

🚦❓ How many traffic lights do you need to manage in-neighborhood traffic in this 1.3 sq km densely built and apparently gridded area of Södermalm, Stockholm?

The Boston Globe Editorial Board is running a whole series on the state’s excessive building code regulation over the next three weeks – single-stair, Massachusetts’s unusually low high-rise definition, and the mess of different septic system rules www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/21/o...

How Drew says the options would perform:

The Utah redistricting committee has put five congressional maps on its meeting agenda for tomorrow, 9/22. le.utah.gov/interim/2025...

Were the escalator announcements for Grand Central Madison designed by hostile state actors or something? There so many within earshot of each other and they *never* stop

It’s not the best use of resources right now, but I hope one day—when times are good and men are kind—we can do the same for Ladybird Lake www.kvue.com/article/news...

The Chicago River's reclamation is a big civic success story. It took decades of hard work by advocacy organizations and government agencies to reach this point and it will take decades more work to protect and build on the gains. Next up is reclaiming lakefront park space from the #DLSD expressway.

Welp: Texas A&M President Mark Welch just stepped down after pressure from Republicans over a video of a professor who taught about transgender people in a children's literature class

The DOJ is initiating an effort to segregate the City of Austin in order to punish its citizens for the grave sin of voting Democrat This investigation is a politically and racially motivated attack on our city and its people

DART really wants you to know this line is squiggly

Gotta be the weirdest part of NYC to me

A lot of NIMBY discourse is like Tantalus reaching in vain for the apple, only his other hand is holding up the branch

This panel (& the whole conference) was so much fun to do. It was an honor to be up there with great architects and researchers & an honor to speak to so many people excited about single-stair! Santa Monica even voted to legalize six-story single-stair *while* the conference was happening 🥳

Imagine being this beholden to a bunch of rich jackasses who can’t dream bigger than a three-car garage

Six little single-stairs all in a row

One thing I’ve become absolutely convinced of is the next transportation authorization bill must include MPO reform—require them, nationwide, to give proportional representation to their members Earliest we’re supposed to get one is September 2026, but there’s a chance it’ll be after midterms

“An extra 1% of government engineers retiring, in California, increases costs on projects by 4-5%. So these people are paying for themselves many times over”, according to Zach Liscow at this #YIMBYtown panel

Today, CER launches our paper “ElectroLink: Modern Passenger Rail Service for Southern California.” ElectroLink shows how electrification, level boarding and through running can speed up trips, improve access for all riders, and bind together the region. ⚡♿🚴 calelectricrail.org/electrolink-...

Boston's fed grant to improve safety at key intersections has been cancelled by USDOT because, according to the agency: "DOT's priorities presently include... preserving or increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles... [the] project includes several elements that impede vehicle capacity & speed"

RE-TIME SIGNALS. Currently, Seattle's downtown traffic signals are timed for 25 mph, which is fine for cars but leaves bikes waiting every few blocks. Reducing that to 12.5 mph—as they did in Portland—can improve safety and move all modes more effectively.

Absolutely wild that these are still getting built in some of America’s great cities

You can feel heat coming out of the sewer and it smells foul.

For context, here’s an interceptor chamber. Building traps are essentially the piping components shown here.

One of the areas of critique was the requirement for building traps. By 1895, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, Warsaw and many other cities had stopped requiring them. The UK continued using them until the mid 20th century. NYC and a few other East Coast cities still require them today.

It’s a Friday night and I’m reading latest amends on SB 3438, which would create a Northern Illinois Transportation Authority to coordinate fares, schedules, service for Chicago-area transit. It has some of the most ambitious transit project delivery reforms in the country afaict.

Nice policy writeup on the piece from the Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale: tobin.yale.edu/research/exp...

🚨NEW RESULTS (w/ Slattery & Nober) - When gov't engineers retire, highway projects cost more: the engineers pay for themselves 6 times over - Improving gov’t engineer quality from the 25th to 75th percentile reduces costs by 14%, equal to 3x avg. engineer pay Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

HUGE HOUSING NEWS: The Assembly just passed our bill allowing more homes near public transportation, SB 79! We need more housing & we need it near transit. It’ll reduce traffic congestion & carbon emissions & increase transit ridership & affordability. Go housing! Go transit!

SB 79 has now passed both chambers in California!

If you care about housing policy, you should know John Zeanah's name. He worked to get 3-6 units covered by IRC in Shelby County (Memphis) way back in 2022! Delighted to see this report & hear about his new board position.

Repairs took about three years. Workers created a design for a paint job that would highlight the special coach, and make it stand out in the depot and on the road. She was christened “Pamela” to honor a 9/11 victim and features an American flag on her sides and a "9/11/2001: Never Forget" graphic.

During the September 11th terrorist attacks, @MTA.info bus 2185 was badly damaged. It sat near Ground Zero covered in dust, ash and fallen debris. Though the bus could have been sent off to scrap, the MTA chose to rebuild it as a symbol of the city's resiliency.

Ask yourself why you do not have an e-cargo tricycle with two golden retrievers in it and what you are doing to rectify that situation

Graph of intense pain and suffering (this is after the 50% tariffs on Brazilian coffee)

The coolest part of this challenge is the entries all had to comply with Denver’s zoning code, on specific existing sites. You should really flip through them when you get the chance, this is what’s possible with just one change!

That is really a tell—in a letter ostensibly about safety in the building code, they can’t resist complaining about street safety Los Angeles should just politely ignore this letter. It clearly isn’t about single-stair, it’s about other issues, and single-stair is just a convenient podium.

Just last month the FBI forced out its top agent in Salt Lake City, a Pakistani American woman whom a former FBI agent describes as a “legendary case agent who was involved in some of the most significant national security cases of the last two decades.” www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rc...

It's crunchtime, folks! SB 79, our bill to legalize apartments in transit rich areas of California, is about to go up for a vote! Call, text, and email! @cayimby.bsky.social cayimby.org/call-sb-79/

For reference: Oxford has a population of about 160,000, not much bigger than College Station

Man, Talarico vs Paxton, in this national environment, we’re never gonna get a better shot than this Absolutely vital we get this man nominated in March

12 hours ago, we announced a kickoff rally for our Senate campaign. 1,800 people showed up. This is how we win Texas.

Organizing and/or going to a local community meeting and saying "things should be better, somewhat" has the policy impact power of sending a 100,000 posts.