More evidence for Iraq as a defining, formative event for Millennials' political awareness.

Who needs a village when you can have parking lots?

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...

this is incredible stuff. most state DOTs would spend tens of billions on highway expansions to try and see numbers like this (that wouldn’t even pan out anyway thanks to induced demand lol)

[man standing up meme] I do not think any one individual’s ”lived experience“ is ever relevant to whether a claim based on aggregate statistics is true

Rail $395 million Public transit $753 million Debt $1.7 billion Highway upgrades $5.3 billion someone who is good at transportation planning please help me budget this. my state is dying

Woman comes to US at age 6. Graduates nursing school. Work permit. No criminal record. Snatched and imprisoned by ICE for 6 months now. About to be forced back to Honduras. A life destroyed and one less nurse. Merry Christmas. www.nola.com/news/educati...

🗣️ Boston: Your voice is needed! On Dec 9 at 2 PM, the City Council is holding a hearing on removing parking minimums for new housing. This is your chance to weigh in on Boston’s future. 🏙️ More info 👉 www.abundanthousingma.org/action-alert... #bospoli #mapoli #housing #Boston

My 5 year old came home from kindergarten a couple days ago asking if anyone was going to come to her school and take her, or take other kids. She wasn't able to articulate where she got this worry or what she'd heard. But many of her fellow students are Somali. I hate this so much.

This is wrong in an impressive number of distinct ways.

One of my AV hot takes is that to avert the worst consequences of their mainstream adoption (such as hellish congestion and more induced sprawl) cities need to get serious fast about charging directly for road usage. And almost nowhere is. Also because electrification will kill the gas tax.

There are many good reasons to be wary of both this tech and this business model. But almost all replies and QTs on this are focused on the risk of it hitting people, and I actually think the evidence is pretty clear at this point that Waymo's safety record is better than that of human drivers.

For the second time this year, Connecticut has sent the nations most expansive statewide parking minimum reform to Governor Lamont. This time he's planning to sign it. westportjournal.com/government/h...

And how much Transportation is hidden in the other categories? What portion of Housing costs is the garage under your apartment building? What portion of Food is the sea of parking surrounding the supermarket? What portion of Healthcare is car-related injury and respiratory disease?

St. Paul is lit right now!

People have for real gone from "My neighborhood is a community of which I am a member, and sometimes my neighbors may mildly annoy me" to "My neighborhood is a curated consumer experience I bought into by owning property here, and I can complain to the management if my experience is unsatisfactory."

A family friend was telling us about what her husband shared about his experience in Broadview before he was deported back to Mexico. She's been sharing to friends and family because she's just in disbelief & horror what her husband told her. She wasn't able to talk to him until he was in Mexico.

Regular reminder that we install signal poles and light posts with breakaway bolts *with the explicit purpose* of allowing cars to cleanly drive through them. This results in the regular wiping of pedestrian off sidewalks, who might imagine that they are protected by nearby infrastructure.

The leaves on Rainier Ave are making a pretty convincing argument that the center turn lanes don't get much use -- lots of excess road space that could be protected bike infrastructure.

If there is a Minnesotan in your life, please show some respect for their culture today by patiently allowing them to regale you with what they were doing October 31st, 1991. Refrain from rolling your eyes or trying to change the subject, as this ritual is deeply meaningful to our people.

10/23/25 IG: mike_kelly_photography 10am ICE arrested US citizen after alleging she‘d made a threat. Both woman & onlookers refuted claim, but ICE proceeded to force her to ground & zip-tie her hands. Incident followed a failed attempt by ICE to gain access at nearby laundromat 🛑THIS MUST STOP🛑

Getting one of these for my front yard.

Good thread:

A thing I struggle to communicate concisely is that the "time tax" is mitigated by arranging your life differently, and those choices can be really rewarding. Most habitual drivers envision car-lite living as making all the same trips at the same times, just without the car. That sounds terrible!

More people should understand that this is standard practice in American urban planning. The zoning on paper is not a real plan for growth, it's the opening bid in a highly politicized negotiation between home builders, elected officials, and activists with the power to kill projects.

I watched a CNU session in 2023 where Peter Calthorpe pitched this kind of "grand boulevard" vision—and explicitly said it wasn't worth the political fight to upzone single-family neighborhoods when you could redevlop 40 miles of El Camino Real with 5-over-1's. Just a totally misguided approach.

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

"Who wants to buy or build in a place that might be condemned? Hanging the possibility of demolition over a community is itself a slow form of demolition. This is the cruelest feature of zombie projects: They do damage even when they never get built."

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

I wish I could deny this…but it’s true. It’s who we are.

149 homes 😍 Next to CTA 🚇 Only 21 parking spots 🚗 Replaces a surface parking lot 🥳 chicago.suntimes.com/real-estate/...

A study in an utter lack of political courage and governing on instinct, vibes, and paranoia all around.

My earliest Dad's Car memories are of bouncing happily to Dire Straits' "Walk of Life" on the way to the farmers' market, and I'll be honest, that song still brings a huge grin to my face for that reason.

The play here, if you're trying for political reasons to mollify homeowners afraid of losing their street parking, is to grandfather existing residents in with subsidized permits, while new arrivals (tenants + owners) are eligible but pay market rate. Eventually you'll just have market rate parking.

Happy Park(ing) Day to those who celebrate! bsky.app/profile/stro...

St Paul is so back

A lot of good stuff in the Massachusetts YIMBY Bill that would help re-legalize badly needed missing middle housing. Including, of course, statewide parking reform! 🤞

I wonder sometimes about historical events where we study what we think they were thinking: was the reality sometimes much weirder and we'd find it incomprehensible? Like, what's the 1800s version of "When an assassin's bullet has 'owo notices ur bulge' on it I can tell you that guy was a groyper"

A cool natural experiment using cellphone data finds that, when people relocate to more walkable areas, they walk more and are more active. Why does this matter? Because many related studies were affected by self-selection bias, where people who like to walk might choose to live in walkable places

TIMELINE CLEANSE Residential dwellings <$100k are not just possible, they are being installed *right now* in Portland, Oregon, thanks to the 2021 legalization of homes-on-wheels. www.sightline.org/2025/09/11/h...

Parking mandates are an open assault on urban trees. If you don't sign on to getting rid of those, you can't say you are "for housing AND trees" with a straight face. I appreciate my pro parking reform/tree protection friends very much.

This is an underappreciated point. Cars take up such disproportionate road *space* compared to the share of road *users* who are in them, so we underestimate non-car travel. Bikes and buses are carrying a much larger share of the people using the road than you think. They're just not in your way.

Tom Broderick @trumbullbrod.bsky.social from Connecticut Parking Reform shares how Bridgeport, CT, defeated a push to bring back parking mandates by a razor-thin 5-4 vote! parkingreform.org/2025/08/15/d...

one of the things i've been struggling with is our zoning mismatch - affordable housing is pretty much illegal for 90% of the city - except on freight routes and arterials... pretty much the most toxic and dangerous place to add housing. often in incredibly unwalkable places.

Remembering why I rarely post about charged topics on here (especially outside of my professional world of urbanism + land use). Some thoughtful pushback, a whole lot of anger at me for things I *didn't* say (pancakes / waffles!), and some extremely rude strangers who are now blocked. Yay!

It's also true that around 1 in 20 Americans have long COVID, many of whom experience significant activity limitations. People with long COVID (and CFS more broadly) have been gaslit about their symptoms for years and far more resources need to be dedicated to them. www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19...

My wife has had debilitating long COVID for ~1 year. I nonetheless agree with this. To the "pandemic isn't over" crowd I want to ask, "What would it take for you to consider it over?" The virus is a permanent part of life now. A serious public health response won't and shouldn't look like 2021.

Yes, and: It might lower productivity as a first-order effect, but this sort of re-localization of some of our economic life would also make communities more resilient, add to social capital, and decrease inequality. "Quality of life", after all, contains some measurable things, not just vibes.

Call it Anti-Industrial Policy: we need is a suite of policies to nudge Americans to own and operate more little public-facing businesses. Speciality shops. Six-seater bars. Esoteric services. Restaurants serving two or three dishes. It would lower overall productivity and increase quality of life.

When you scratch at it, the nebulous "character" often just reduces to "I want places to be exactly the way I remember them having been for years, because I have a nostalgic attachment to them." New things have no soul and old things inherently have it, kind of regardless of what the things are.