So that was an unexpected diversion to Queens!

Well then.

There are two places on transit where my Apple Watch will reliably generate a “Loud Environment” notification: on @bart.gov, and on the @mta.info Holiday Train. It’s worth it, though.

most people, left and right, treat traffic violence like the weather and not a specific policy choice

These contraptions have no place on any road, anywhere, least of all on city streets. But it is the HEIGHT OF HYPOCRISY for a company whose goal is to "limit our impact on the communities we touch" to commission these monstrosities to roam around for a daft, insipid ad campaign.

Excuse me, some of us call it "the emulation layer". www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/w...

Remind me why we can't just pedestrianize Lower Manhattan?

Hey, Columbia Sportswear, if you really care about the outdoors, if you really care about people, maybe you can explain how clogging New York City’s streets with two diesel exhaust-belching rolling billboards for a MARKETING CAMPAIGN aligns with your ESG goals?

A robot is only an OTA away from a behavior change, good, bad, or weird. Waymo robots have always violated some traffic laws. For >year they have been getting noticeably more aggressive as I've shown in a variety of videos. Apparently, on purpose per Ludwick who's been on this project for 15 years.

I want you to understand: ariadne.space/2025/12/02/i...

In case, like me, you were wondering what on Earth UMTA was up to…

I really want to see proper FDIR capabilities in consumer devices. You can’t push packets through a cellular link despite adequate signal strength? Power-cycle the modem _automatically_, and if that doesn’t fix it before reaching some pre-determined lockout, then _annunciate a fault_!

I'm working on a new Web site. There's a dev server running on my laptop, which is connected to public Wi-Fi, and I want to see it on my phone, which is on 5G. This should feel like magic, like some kind of networking sorcery, but thanks to @tailscale.com it all just works.

"Hey, should I buy this 16 TB drive that's on sale today?" No. It's almost certainly a liability. Let me explain. If you're just looking for somewhere to stash a third, or fourth, or fifth copy of some cold data, sure, maybe.

As a former Federal civil servant, this whole thread is just heartbreaking. I urge you to read it in full.

Sometimes it’s tough to work in transit, but stories like this make it all worth it.

no one has ever spoken like this about a GoA4 (grade-of-automation four, or no staff on-board and completely automatic) driverless metro

I think I’ve mentioned this before but a fun little data science project for someone would be to build a map of places where you can see the stars at night and which are transit-accessible.

On this Trans Day of Remembrance, we remember the bright and courageous trans people whose lives were stolen by hatred. Their absence is felt across our city. We will honor them by building a New York where every trans person can live safely, fully and freely.

(as regards the last repost, there is an increasing view among consultants and operators that GoA 3/4 systems simply _must_ have PSDs, and that doesn’t have to be the case! SkyTrain and the DLR have functioned just fine for decades!)

I understand the benefits perfectly, and they make sense, but platform boarding doors for metro systems are my worst nightmare. Removing the rush of air and unobstructed view of a train arriving in a station is an unimaginable loss of romantic feeling and metaphor from society. Don’t @ me about it.

[Ed Harris in Apollo 13 voice] alright. What do we have on this spacecraft that isnt gender.

I understand that folks may not view transit agencies as paragons of functional behavior. But, in two particular ways, I contend that thinking and acting like a transit agency may improve your life: kurtraschke.com/2025/11/neur...

finally wrote that blog post, in which i argue that "people will lie about using AI for coding" is not a good reason to allow people to use AI for coding: blog.xkeeper.net/thoughts/ran...

like, i’m sorry man, but gun to my head, i’ll take the statistical probability of another fukushima nuclear disaster over the certainty of what we’re losing to climate change turning off existing nuclear plants before we’re out of fossil fuel consumption to displace is objectively insane!

I seldom post on LinkedIn, so you should know that when I do it must be for a darn good reason. In this case, the Subways Performance Analysis Unit, a great group of people I work with closely, is hiring for an analyst: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

The interminable wait for DNS to propagate.

What can you learn from 80 million GTFS-realtime feed fetches? I dig into the good, bad, and ugly of real-time transit data in my latest post: kurtraschke.com/2025/10/gtfs...

Happy Subway Day!

Proud papa moment: my son J published a letter in the @nytimes.com today (in print tomorrow) on the need to think our definitions of autism.

I was recently in the Bay Area again, and each time I find it a little bit harder to leave behind.

I use they/them pronouns now. Yes, I know what today is.

I had an insight this morning: the way I am coming to feel about autonomous vehicles is a lot like the way I feel about nuclear power. kurtraschke.com/2025/10/nucl...

I have a major piece in Bloomberg Citylab today. Should the US let transit fail, as Pennsylvania is already doing? And if not, what are the arguments we need to let it succeed? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

nothing more freeing than pushing absolutely terrible nondescript commit messages to a private repo only you are in

AI weirdos can pry em dashes and sparkle emojis from my cold, dead hands

You can say that machines don't have a soul, but the motor in this elevator made it to the very last trip before flashing over, just as the decommissioning process was about to begin. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFxR...

Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too malwaretech.com/2025/08/ever...

A lot has happened to PATH in the past 25 years -- 9/11, major construction work, COVID, etc. But consistent across all of these events have been ensuing reductions in off-pk service levels: since 2005, the number of PATH trips crossing the Hudson on Saturdays has fallen by *50%*

Does it still count as a “burrito taxi” if it’s a robot?

They’re moving in herds!

I try generally to be civil online. But this...this just pisses me off. To be clear, this sentiment is not directed at the commenter, but rather the circumstances which have led people to think this way. You see, I use em dashes and en dashes, and words like "delve".

This is thoroughly incredible in many ways. But perhaps the most jaw-dropping thing for me was the apparent IPC mechanism between the guest OS and the page's JavaScript. I kept scrolling down, playing with the emulators, looking for some hint as to how it worked. bsky.app/profile/ares...

I wrote something new! It’s a UI design history essay about Mac’s Control Panel, and it uses emulation in some… maybe new and maybe interesting ways? aresluna.org/frame-of-pre...

How to live with cats and model trains

20 years ago (back when I was in high school), I wrote a primitive screen-scraper to generate an Atom feed from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Event Notification Reports.

The Therac-25, widely regarded as one of the worst catastrophes in safety-critical software design, only killed three people (and severely harmed several others). Horizon, by contrast, killed at least 13, and has harmed thousands, if not tens of thousands. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/w...

Greater Vancouver: home to first-rate fully-autonomous trains since 1985, and now...this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdmx...

I wrote about Linus Media Group's car reviews back when they were just reviewing EVs. I wasn't keen on it then, and I'm not keen on it now. bsky.app/profile/kurt... But now, they've gone and reviewed a gas-powered SUV: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyCl...