Ask any Irish person about the impact of the Donnelly Visa program & how it offered unparalleled opportunities to skilled young people from a small country struggling to grow. These programs work & create generational change for everyone they touch.

Me riding into 2026

Would be great to have AUS Airport add this type of service in downtown during the upcoming rebuild. And once established could expand into a regional bus hub which would support onward travel options to other parts of Texas.

In 2018, Austin started tracking housing production by city council district, and even without the (excellent!) enforcement measures suggested in the DC version, the naming & shaming did a great deal to spur building and helped highlight the inequities of where housing gets build citywide:

My pickleball building code strategy is to adopt European window standards so that we can buy and manufacture triple-glazed tilt-and-turn windows at affordable prices that actually keep sound out

This situation definitively means the federal government is now funding 0 high-speed rail projects, as it cancelled funding for a Texas project earlier in 2025, and no other projects in the US qualify as high-speed rail.

And for the skeptics, $1 million in revenue in one year from a single (popular!) street in Austin where paid parking was fully implemented. The revenue from 2025 is *even* higher. www.axios.com/local/austin...

On that note, results of left-turn calming pilot at 16 locations across the Austin—46% decline in pedestrians hit & 32% decline in vulnerable rd usrs (ped + bike + scooter) hit Each intersection cost about $5.4k, each saved up to $182k in annual crash costs www.austintexas.gov/sites/defaul...

And just confirmed- if this number holds, 2025 will likely be the first time Austin will have ~2x the number of traffic fatalities vs. homicides in a single year:

Austin at 54 homicides for 2025, which is similarly down from our recent average of around 70 for the last few years: www.kxan.com/news/local/a...

Despite what the headlines might say, Texas has been & continues to be a renewable energy leader. #txlege

A new report from researchers at the Yale School of Public Health warns that the U.S. government’s abrupt cancellation of funding for mRNA vaccine research could have devastating health and economic consequences for the nation.

Before the 1990s, plane crashes caused by microbursts used to kill planeloads of people fairly regularly. Dr. Ted Fujita and NCAR scientists figured out how to detect microbursts and warn pilots about them. Since then? Zero airliner crashes from microbursts.

Going to need a big party to celebrate this one @aura-atx.org @safestreetsaustin.bsky.social 🙌🎉🚲🚴🚴‍♀️

Wow! If you are a resident in Austin and want to park in front of your house, the cost is $60/ year. If you are a developer and want to use that space for some sort of improvement project, the cost exponentially more. And if we have to close a budget gap, guess which rate is going up first?

City of Austin is facing an ongoing budget shortfall, and yet as far as I can tell, no one had suggested increasing the yearly RPP fees, which are absurdly low. And yes, lower income Austin residents can purchase discounted permits as part of their participation in AE's CAP.

Different city, same story - Parking requirements + zoning restrictions are hidden barriers to fixing the childcare crisis. Want to make day & adult care more affordable? Eliminate parking mandates, and allow more of these business in every part of your community .

Just a reminder that ICE didn't exist until 2002. It's not some longstanding institution that must be maintained. It was created as a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11, and it could be gotten rid of as easily as it was created.

There's a medium-sized message here on the safety of buildings based on the size of their floorplates and number of stairwells. There's an enormous message here on how important it is for our safety rules to be evidence-based.

25 years ago today, SCOTUS elected George W Bush president of the United States by blocking completion of a voting canvass in Florida. A subsequent canvass by the Associated Press showed that Bush's rival, Al Gore, had won the race in Florida—and thus the contest for the presidency—by 700 votes.

Great news from FL on the impact of the Live Local Act: 48,000 new homes in development since enactment. Maybe state housing reforms aren’t failing after all!

Ask anyone one in Austin about the "stealth dorm" panic and how it took years to undo the damage created by residents who thought *they* should get to control who lived in their neighborhood near UT.

And very auspicious that this happened the same day as the National Single Stair winners were announced! www.singlestair.com

FTA Gives Austin Light-Rail Medium-High Ranking, the Strongest Rating in the FY2026 Program Year | Austin Transit Partnership - www.atptx.org/federal-tran... … #trains #ATX #Texas #TX

Texas SB 840 has entered the chat.

ROAD to Housing act died this week in the House. Would have been a great counter example of this dynamic. Unfortunately just proves @joshchafetz.bsky.social is absolutely correct, substantive Federal housing reform is going to require Democratic control.

Plano, Farmers Branch, Highland Park, and Irving are all weighing leaving the transit agency. Before the matter lands on May ballots, here’s how that has gone historically.

Austin giving real Gotham vibes during a foggy night last week.

Essentially saying "you can only get more family-sized units through sprawl, allowing apartments will only yield studios" is pretty wild when the whole premise of his report with @bobbyfijan.bsky.social a few months ago was "we can make apartments more family-friendly."

From the @wsj.com chief foreign correspondent

I really would like to hear a non-nefarious reason why reporters at places like the NYT, WaPo, or NPR can't take 10 second to tell us that the $100 billion we spend on SNAP is 1.3% of the budget or the $6 billion that went to the AIDS program in Africa was 0.9% of the budget. Love to hear a reason.

Once again, the selected image is doing all the work here to undermine the vaccine. Stop showing painful reactions to needle injections - show the impact of NOT getting the shot instead!

democratic leaders need to make a huge deal about the antivaxx insanity coming from RFK Jr. like, in addition to being fucking insane, immoral, and dangerous, antivaxx is significantly less popular than even the most unpopular dem policies. we need to ceaselessly hammer them for it

Waymo robot “was not recognizing that it needed to obey the state law of stopping whenever the (busses') red lights were on,” AISD Police Assistant Chief Travis Pickford 20 times, diverse conditions www.statesman.com/business/tec...

The Trump administration has removed MLK Day and Juneteenth as holidays that include free entrance to national parks, adding the president’s birthday instead

Austin now has three @aura-atx.org members on our Planning Commission. And the majority the #atxcouncil won their seats with our endorsement. Showing up works.

2/2 I am really old. (Though still younger than all US prez except Obama.) But not *within my lifetime* has a Democratic president appointed a Chief Justice of Supreme Court. The most recent one was almost *eighty* years ago — Fred Vinson, appointed by Harry Truman, in 1946. Before my time.

This regressive move will literally kill people. It's making kids' liver cancer great again. And it's a sign of more harm to come. CDC panel recommends delaying birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine www.statnews.com/2025/12/05/c... via @statnews.com

You can help Bolts continue to provide crucial coverage of local elections. Here's how: - Repost this = I donate $1. - Follow @boltsmag.org = I donate $1. - Donate (link below) + tell me how much = I match your donation. (Donate monthly = I match a year's worth)

Austin @parkingreform.org homer forever 🙌🅿️

Sticker spotting outside of Mellow Johnny's bike shop in Austin. 🫡 to the person who put this there! See you tonight at Brushy Street Commons. Tickets: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-war-on...

A picture is worth a 1000 words. The birth dose of hepatitis B vaccines in the USA eliminated perinatally acquired hepatitis B infection from over 20,000 cases a year before the vaccine was introduced to <20 cases a year. The gaslighting by the current members ACIP is obscene, unethical and cruel.

The CEOs of both Ford and Stellantis, who are there to celebrate the rollback of vehicle emissions standards (which will drive climate change), are standing right behind Trump as he makes these racist comments.

Austin's Parking Benefit Districts have generated over $6million dollars for local street upgrades and that is at 51% funding. PTMDs are a revenue generating machine, you just have to turn them on.

Northern Ireland has entered the chat.

It's one thing to read about what's going on. The power of video is how immediate and visceral it makes everything. Watching people desperate for food talk about how their local food pantry can't feed them anymore because of federal cuts is something else: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Krx3...

Filing deadline in Texas is next Monday, December 8th.

Dallas is number 1 in the country for most gross property tax revenue lost due to highway ROW on developable land w/in 3-mile radius of the center of downtown at $217.9 Million annually.

Just imagining how much better it would be if ALL news stories about vaccine-preventable illnesses were illustrated with pictures of people with the disease, not pictures of needle injections. If you must show something that people will find scary & unpleasant, make it the disease, not the cure.

How a homegrown company that’s been at it for so long. didn’t even get considered is beyond me. Oonee is doing great work just across the river in Jersey City and it’s a shame the Adams admin excluded the company. Eric Adams was even an early booster!