Keep it that way.

Everybody, everywhere is talking about single-stair

Sucks that cell data service on the NYC Subway barely works for me anymore. Nice feature when it lasted, but now I can no longer reliably load a basic website. I wonder what happened? Does anybody else experience this?

Brightline is about half done with a $45 million project to improve protection at 327 grade crossings between Miami and Cocoa, and it says trespassing incidents were down 30% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025 www.wftv.com/news/local/t...

Accusing Hunter urban planning students of not “talking to the community” is funny given that 88% of them graduated from the NYC public school system. They *are* the community! www.hunter.cuny.edu/news/enterin...

The lesson of Brightline's May ridership: if you build it, they will come. May '26: 304,277, up 19% y/y April: 292,626 March: 337,874 Feb: 274,100 Jan: 288,450 Dec: 292,092 Nov: 280,136 Oct: 260,370 Sept: 227,851 Aug: 252,425 July: 255,472 June: 254,627 May: 256,633

Illinois is rolling back mandatory road tests for drivers from ages 79-86. This is older than the average life expectancy! All of us know people in this age bracket who drive, but shouldn’t. Just a disastrous policy.

Example of added protection for a higher-risk bldg (up to 8 apts per floor, 11 stories) w/o 2nd stair: vestibule protecting single stair + elevator lobby. 2023, €1,973/m^2 ($212 psf) in Mannheim, DE. Mass timber outer walls, likely concrete floors (for sound) and core. www.heinze.de/architekturo...

I think the factory version is called a "crane runway" in English. I'm not sure it was ever used in an English-speaking countries for ground-pounded tower cranes building buildings though.

Team Schlossberg convincing the people that he has the experience to lead by putting his preschool on his fliers

Uhh is this real? If even vaguely so, can we kill it? www.city-journal.org/article/cali...

A lot to like in this Transit Abundance Playbook. ifp.org/transit-abun...

200,000 apartments is a bit under 1% of total US multifam stock. The US multifamily development sector is much less concentrated than single-family, and I think this is one reason why single-fam homebuilders have so much more influence in building code development than multifam developers do.

If you are outside the US and Canada within the next few weeks, please take a photo of the brand (found on the nameplate, the button on the outside, or just a sticker inside – sometimes the maintenance firm is different from the manufacturer), and tell me the country and rough building age!

These are from Bergen (or at least the first one is), and fun fact: they installed a vacuum tube system for waste collection (Envac) downtown to reduce the number of trash fires and lower fire insurance costs www.envacgroup.com/us/projects/...

Learned a new phrase: chemin de grue. Crane railway, where you put a crane on rails and build one prefab building after another in a line. I can’t find any reference to it in any language other than French though.

You guys remember Pajama Sam?

Are the trades in Philly pushing some specific legislation here, or what? buildfairphilly.com

Question for the YIMBYs and urbanists from a friend: who do you vote for in NYS's 27th State Senate district Democratic primary, Yuh-Line Niou vs. Grace Lee?

Listening to the meeting of the New York State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council discuss a draft of the state’s single-stair study by Jensen Hughes. It hasn’t been released to the public, but the members’ negativity towards it suggests that it’s more favorable to the concept than they want.

Lowercase-a affordable 2BR/2BA's shrunk significantly because the Chicago Fire Department can't accept even three-story single-stair buildings like the rest of the country has for decades. Rear stairs can't replace single-stair for all lot shapes and zoning. chicago.urbanize.city/post/residen...

Seems hypocritical for people living on these environmentally catastrophic two-acre lots cosplaying as farms that have disfigured the countryside in suburban subdivisions 20+ miles from downtown Atlanta to now be complaining about infrastructure development www.nytimes.com/video/techno...

Can anybody in Toronto tell me about Bill 98 and bird-safe glass? Is it totally removing Toronto’s requirements, or what? @conradspeckert.bsky.social @damienmoule.bsky.social

As part of Bill 98, a new regulation has been proposed capping minimum lot sizes in zoning to 175sq.m. In Toronto lot subdivision would be feasible in most of the city. I think that's the effective end of Neighbourhoods policy and with it the OP. toronto.cityhallwatcher.com/p/are-counci...

Damn, those bulb-outs suck. I don’t understand why DOTs build them on streets with unprotected bike lanes. Isn’t it obvious that they’re going to be protected one day and the bulb-outs will just get in the way?

@stephenjacobsmith.com wow look it’s the same

This past Tuesday versus this past Thursday. WHY

💄 on a 🐷

Sometimes Corbusianism is worth it for great apartments. An American form-based zoning code and scared-of-heights building code would lead to a four-story building without light in bathrooms or kitchens, with half the units looking onto a small, dark rear yard www.archdaily.com/1042352/vicc...

Added a dozen new people to this since last shared. I try to keep it pretty tight, only people who actually post about (not just reply/are interested in/work in) codes/standards/construction. And if you get new followers from it, take it as a hint to post even more, because people are interested :-)

This is why. The Netherlands does not allow single-stair buildings taller than 5 stories.

Damn, these Dutch floor plans are awful. There is really no way out of it, no matter how good your architects are and how good the buildings look from the outside – double-loaded corridor buildings suck. www.archdaily.com/1042421/nieu...

Got buried on Friday, but these are pretty extraordinary lengths to go to avoid just putting in catenary. For context, Caltrain Mod was $2.5b and that was for 50 route miles of wire and a new fleet that’s ~5x larger (that will likely outperform the battery trains because batteries are heavy).

Is your child up at 9pm arguing about tram networks with the entire staff of the FT and some tedious Americans who are not familiar with the concept of a joke? This report make shock you.

This is the first stone church in ancient Rus, and in my timeline everyone is angry. The building is recent, it was rebuilt in 1941 and later in the 1990s, but it's quite a parallel that the last time it was destroyed it was thanks to Hitler.

The reason the NYC DOT doesn’t have the money to make these trashy painted sidewalk extensions (1st pic) permanent is it’s spending all of its budget redoing perfectly accessible curb ramps to meet the terms of a $1.5 billion nonsense ADA settlement. Last photo is the “before” – it was very flat!

Switzerland is not as NIMBY as portrayed. It should build much more housing and be more welcoming to immigrants, but it is to Europe what the Bay Area is to America, yet it voluntarily has open borders with far poorer places, it builds 3x the housing, and new 2BRs in Zurich are well under $4,000/mo.

The way they play with loggias to maintain short distances to every room’s darkest corner is great. That’s something you can’t do with American form-based codes where the building envelope parameters (height, setbacks, lot coverage) become the controlling floor space limits rather than FAR

The level of utility undergrounding here is remarkable. There are no trees for a kilometer in this nature reserve and this line seems to connect to windmills, so I imagine they’re high voltage.

A little reminder not that, but rather how much slower Germany transitions to BEV. Land of poets and thinkers was decades ago.

Remembering a multi-day conservative freakout because Lizzo briefly played a founding father’s flute

This 0.748 miles of bus lane was installed in 1982. After 44 years it will soon be in effect for 3 additional hours (7a-10a).

Les jeux sont faits: Thanks to urban municipalities and french speaking regions, Switzerland says NO to the far-right proposal demanding to cap the population at 10 million inhabitants.

local conservative think tank IPI is blaming our Inclusionary Zoning ordinances www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/mandating-unaffordability-how-chicagos-housing-affordability-requirements-decrease-supply-and-increase-costs/

I’m more curious what the biggest loss was. Why had post-GFC production been in test decline for the last decade?

Funny LinkedIn post where a large engineering firm is promoting its “amazing” new (and more expensive) sidewalk sheds design for NYC – all of the New Yorkers in the comments are like “yay! awesome!” and the Austrian is like “why do you need so many of these things?” www.linkedin.com/posts/design...

"Baltimore began building its underground matrix of tubes, dubbed a 'subway for wires,' in the 1890s. To this day, some 80% of Baltimore’s conduit is either terracotta or Orangeburg, an outdated material made of wood pulp; the rest is the more modern PVC pipe."

One reason the Glonzoing of data centers is so maddening is that it’s an abandonment of the idea that we can use government regulation to prevent or limit the worst harms of industry while still obtaining the benefits of industry.

Yesterday I posted a Politico article on complaints by Puerto Rican political elites that Mamdani snubbed them. So many “Politico is trash and hates Mamdani” replies. It was newsworthy! Not because the complainers were right, because they showed their asses. But his fanboys couldn’t even take that.