New York City is 8 days out from having a habitual subway rider as their Mayor

Americans will spend the next 20 years paying the price - a market of last resort for Trump's petrostate oligarch allies whose oil reserves would otherwise go stranded.

I love that he's explaining the housing crisis from the landlord perspective

One of my oldest friends runs a streetwear brand and they just put out this hat that is surely designed for my BlueSky followers, specifically.

"But can't we talk about the people this policy harms?" is a good way to never enact policy that helps a whole lotta people. It's not that you ignore the possible harms of well meaning policy, but you have to be careful about how much weight you give them.

The point I wish got emphasized more is that the big winners from congestion pricing are *people who urgently need to drive*. Because they are ones that travel times really matter for. I always thought that instead of congestion pricing it should be called "free streets" - free from other cars.

My 4 year-old, solemnly looking out a car window at the exurban Cincinnati landscape: “We’re not in Brooklyn anymore.”

You may not believe that building new housing lowers rents, but your landlord does:

Are you a student in NYC with an interest in housing policy? Apply for a Fellowship with Open New York!

Congestion pricing is keeping stores from going out of business:

This is completely ridiculous. The state legislature is *full* of landlords and yet they’re apparently allowed to vote on tenant protection bills all the time.

Funny how there's apparently no conflict for councilmembers who're landlords voting on tenant protections, or homeowners voting on new housing projects and rezoning actions. Just for renters who want more homes.

One of my close friends moved into her childhood home and her mom moved into a recently-built ADU in the backyard. Now her mom can easily help with her baby and not have to maintain a big home.

As I’ve said before, politics in New York City don’t fall along traditional partisan lines, they fall along the divide of inner boroughs and outer boroughs and the outer boroughs think they’re the only real New Yorkers. They all also have clearly melted their brains on the Internet.

They're low trust libertarians who erroneously convinced themselves they are communists because the formative moment in their political life coincided with a moment where the main anti-establishment candidate was a socialist

Someone like Dan Osborn has shown you can win over some MAGA voters with populism — I’m not saying we should never try — but if you are a leftist who dismisses Wine Moms and your theory of change in 2025 revolves around winning white, rural racists, you’re just very dumb lol

The public sector workers don’t count as working class because they’re mostly people of color, and the service industry workers don’t count as working class because they’re mostly women. But that doesn’t count as racist or misogynist because those people are “urban” and therefore the oppressors.

See they don’t count because they’re women, and it’s not misogynist to dismiss them from your class politics if you call them “white women.” But the petty capitalists do count because they’re white men, and it’s not racist to center them in your class politics if you call them “working-class men.”

Encouraging results from San Francisco's speed camera pilot. Speeding reduced 72% at the 15 camera locations. Tickets issued dropping week over week (tldr enforcement works) www.sfmta.com/blog/our-spe...

David Brooks, who wrote in the NYT last month, "The Epstein Story? Count Me Out" is... in the latest Epstein photo dump published by @oversightdemocrats.house.gov. He should absolutely be fired by NYT for this. Major conflict of interest that he didn't disclose.

if you think ai and water use is a giant problem, i have a bunch of stats about the ag sector to show you

Los Angeles: where the palm trees are lit better than the bus shelters 🫠

Please fucking relegalize new hotels, what are we doing here??

Every few years or so we hear about a new female speech pattern (vocal fry, uptalk) to which we are invited to object. It doesn't take very long to determine that what these people are actually objecting to is that women are speaking at all.

NEW: Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani will appeal a Queens judge's ruling ordering the city to rip out the new protected bike lane on 31st Street in Astoria. nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/12/17/m...

One thing I think popularists have failed to grapple with is that for Republicans and aligned independents, policies being associated with Dems makes them unpopular basically regardless of what they are on the merits.

I made a joke last year that as a country we were going to see universal home insurance and car insurance before universal healthcare.

Honestly, have people who say this sort of thing never been to Europe or East Asia? (The countries eating our lunch on reducing traffic violence.) Yes, they've made a bunch of design changes to reduce speeds, and have much better transit. But they also have speed and red light cameras everywhere.

All the evidence suggests that safety cameras work incredibly well, but keep shilling for reckless drivers pissed about a $50 ticket over the corpses of dead children.

the main reason is sprawl. can't run buses efficiently if no one lives close together. in cities it's because of white flight and the hollowing out of urban schools but is hard for the same reason. and parental hesitation to buses (danger, time, etc) are all downstream of sprawl too.

Open New York’s 2026 NYC Policy Agenda is out now! Here’s how we plan to turn New Yorkers’ mandate for housing into action:

If anything it’s single-family sprawl that’s ideological.

Landmarking could cost the property owners 1.4 million dollars, instigated by their neighbors who want to buy it below market value.

I’m sure this will be fine.

This drove me insane. A parent tried to responsibly trust his kids to ride the public bus to school unsupervised, and some busybody phoned the government to complain about him. He eventually won in court, but I can’t imagine the happening when I was a kid (gen x). vancouversun.com/news/local-n...

Americans online talk like being American is a disability. Americans can't use the car less often. Americans can't live in walkup apartments. American families can only prosper in suburbia. It's really "damn bro can you do anything whatsoever"

Looks like they plan to follow LAX's example--undercutting a transit investment by simultaneously expanding vehicle capacity.

this kind of money on airport expansion is, i think, among the most egregious forms of climate arson, at least relative to how much anyone is willing to talk about it

NYC designated two new historic districts in Brooklyn last month, adding to what is already an absurd situation (historic districts outlined in red).

Total left-YIMBY cultural victory that this is all they got. Also I know that nobody cares about facts anymore but Bloomberg downzoned a lot more than he upzoned

In the old days, developers would buy old, worn-out mansions, split the lots, and replace them with rowhouses. On the right you have the old mansion, on the left are the rowhouses built to replace the other mansions.

I promise I will eventually stop posting about speeding but it’s so rare that an opportunity exists to argue a position that is as controversial as it is irrefutable. It’s like walking in to a dog torturer convention and saying you think it’s wrong to torture dogs

Trying to arrest the people who literally keep a roof over our heads. Also one of the most dangerous jobs in America www.bls.gov/charts/censu...

Fuel Cell is a joke technology and AC Transit going all in on it (at the behest of a board member) was a huge and costly mistake.

As with disparate impact arguments against safety cameras and traffic enforcement generally, making a disparate impact argument against DUI enforcement is absurd—what about the Native, Black and Hispanic pedestrians and bicyclists disproportionally killed by drunk drivers?

The last public event I attended before Covid shutdowns was a Bernie rally in LA, during which Dick Van Dyke was asked to stall until Bernie arrived and so he started pontificating about whether or not the bombing of Hiroshima was necessary. 10/10 political rally. Happy 100th, Dick.

Never ask a woman her age A man his salary And an American band why they never tour in Canada

Didn't Chomsky justify his relationship with Epstein at some point by saying it let him meet the world's top minds? And all this time he meant Steve fucking Bannon???