Shapiro should be going out of his way to ensure that the entire state gets reformed zoning and match Pritzker's energy. But that isn't how PA politics is done and the boat won't be rocked

The mayor might actually be cooked here, and her poor comms strategy is mostly to blame

A subtle reminder of how this worked out last time: “Mr. Trump said he’d wanted to own the shuttle for years because he likes the idea of owning it. It was not a financial decision as far as I can tell” www.aerotime.aero/articles/260...

ever wonder why your bus is waiting for a green light? excited to share a big work project milestone (and kudos to the team who delivered this) - the first ever California Open Transit Signal Priority Metrics, a key rulebook on how to evaluate the operational performance dot.ca.gov/cal-itp/tsp-...

The Berkeley traffic diverter: As peasants in the Dark Ages looked upon the Roman aqueducts arching above, today's engineers can only gaze in wonderment at the awesome works of their forebears. This mysterious technology, once thrown up with ease and abandon, is wholly lost to modernity.

this article convinced me that the tax should be $10

WABA WON

New faregates are great, but the decade-long saga it took for several agencies to stumble towards the right design while e.g. PATCO had paddle gates since 2007 is downright shameful and a waste of millions to venders

“No infraction seems to escape him. Nakamura can hear a meter expire in the night the way an owl hears a mouse across a snowy clearing in the woods…”

Here in Philadelphia, Uber, your friendly neighborhood monopolist, is blanketing the city with ads to stop a rideshare tax that would prevent cuts to 340 School District of Philadelphia teachers, reading and math specialists, counselors, and more.

It's funny that the USDOT "Freedom to Drive" website links to the Biden-era Urban Congestion Trends report which highlights steadily lower congestion than pre-pandemic and VA's variable-speed limit project explicitly managing congestion without widening ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications...

the idea of nebulous community input also undermines the explicit democracy we all participate in. i went in to pull the lever for mamdani with an idea of how DOT will run and will do the same for hochul because i have a good idea of how the mta will continue to run under her and lieber.

Wild card: what are the chances urbanists could convince Rich Lazer that expanding I-95 is unnecessary for the Port of Philadelphia??

Widening is probably what will result if DOTs have their way, but for suburban/rural areas, probably the best bang-for-buck congestion fix is railroad grade crossing separation!

It's worth caveating that classrooms a century ago were little more than masonry shells; the budget has since shifted from fancy facades to interiors with AC, control systems, integrated gyms, and multipurpose functionality. This is the compromise people expect!

"The entire increase in business taxation — and far more — is paid by businesses headquartered outside Philadelphia that sell into this market"

I think the real scandal that should have been covered is why Philly is only getting 6 games and Dallas with zero regular transit getting 9???

If Councilmember Lozada really wanted to ensure both housing is built and gardens are preserved, she could upzone the numerous industrial lots that no gardener has ever touched. But she won't, and this will only lead to her capitalizing on more political tension

Maddening that they couldn't fit in a bus lane on the bridge and continue to 19th St. Every striped median represents wasted space

If we still had the Trenton Viaduct today, there probably wouldn't be so much 90-degree parking and it would be a great linear park

IPUMS DHS data extracts can now be created using a microdata API in R, through a package called ipumsr! See our introduction to the microdata API at https://tech.popdata.org/ipumsr/dev/articles/ipums-api.html

3D map of the Chongqing Metro that shows the elevation and decline of each line, with some essentially looking like roller coasters (Chongqing is the Chinese city that went viral for showing how you could be on the ground floor but then walk a bit and be on the 22nd floor, due to the hilly terrain)

In terms of actual frequency and runtime performance, given the poor build and alignment quality interurbans are roughly equivalent to today's intercity bus routes. And it turns out this region has still been doing pretty well, minus the peri-urban milk runs primarily for rural freight!

Skateboarding: now officially allowed in Paine Plaza!

Philly can have nice things (but I will always miss the old light fixtures)

Appreciate this discussion of NFPA 130 here. The deferral to the fire service in each jurisdiction creates really bad incentives for cost control and risk.

🎧LISTEN🎧 Authorities are still looking for a driver who fled a violent crash in Wilmington Thursday afternoon. An SUV brought down multiple power lines, and struck three houses, causing a natural gas leak. spr.ly/63328B6fiJY

Chicago has introduced building code reform to allow scissor stairs in multifamily by right up to 15 floors/150 feet: chicityclerkelms.chicago.gov/Matter/?matt...

Philly is going to get a generation of goodwill from all the tourists for how we’re actually trying to accommodate guests during the World Cup instead of extracting every cent.

How California transit operators and institutions understand transit

For those who don't know, the green card application asks whether you have "EVER been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society, or similar group in the United States or in any other location in the world"

Unironically move the Final to Philly at this point

Amusing game of musical chairs, with the future Eagles move hopefully we will get back to this!

The city finally admits designing a flat-roof bus shelter was a complete mistake, and bolts on a non-matching sloped roof

The Big Sky North Coast Corridor is moving forward and so is the national conversation about the future of passenger rail. bigskyrailmt.gov/spring-2026-update

Boston -1000 Philly +1000 (As if there was any question which city goes harder) via @jtannenwald.bsky.social www.inquirer.com/soccer/world...

New York City Council’s main policy goal with regards to supermarkets is to keep Walmart out of the city so that Gristedes can stay in business and John Catsimatidis can keep stealing New Yorkers’ money to donate to Donald Trump. These people will help anybody but their constituents.

Very important distinction: in Philly, no significant difference in housing project *permits* but *units*. And most of this can be attributed to beating the 2021 tax abatement reduction. Tracking which massive projects have let permits expire after 5 years is more important!

“Beyond the basic fiscal math, it is counter-productive to liberal goals to indulge the anti-tax politics of the right. (. . .)If we believe that the government can and should improve the lives of its citizens and the world, it can only do so with the collective buy-in of taxation.”

End of an era

Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.

Japanese pavilion at InnoTrans 2026 brings together 18 participants https://www.railwaygazette.com/innotrans/japanese-pavilion-at-innotrans-2026-brings-together-18-participants/70736.article

One out-of-state business challenged the first $100K of revenue BIRT exemption in court, the administration threw up their hands and threw small businesses under the bus, and now we're going to lose a bunch of therapists and FDR park vendors because their city tax burden is insane.

What is likely happening here: 1) The bulk of this ticket cost is probably going towards policing costs 2) The scope of security is not driven by FIFA but by local govts and DHS, taking a SEAR 1/NSSE event and adding more security theater like shutting down Penn likely over NJT's objections

Hugely overlooked problem in transit: the increasing amount of funding dedicated solely to paying out claims from car crashes. Good on Janno

SCMP: Péter has thoughts on the the Budapest-Belgrade line "an example of something not in 🇭🇺 interests, saying it was built with 🇨🇳 money, technology and workers, primarily for 🇨🇳 benefit, and funded by “an enormous sum of money that is sorely missing from 🇭🇺 own railway development” @jonworth.eu

Two incremental but important PA zoning preemption bills (ADUs and unrelated housemates) have made it out of committee and onto the House floor! www.pahousingchoices.com/news-center/...

“The seven-level structure, meant to relieve parking pressure for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia workers, was widely seen as an imposition on the Grays Ferry neighborhood,” writes The Inquirer Editorial Board.

Can urbanists be done with confidently wrong cranks? Approximately 3% of U.S. multifamily debt is securitized (CMBS)—over 85% of MF debt is agency or held on bank/insurer balance sheets—and the 25 largest developers account for just a quarter of new units delivered.