Join us @icgee.bsky.social @publicenterprise.bsky.social and @seamlessbayareaca.bsky.social for a webinar about how transit funding holds back ambitious investments like electric rail that we need for climate action & affordable transportation. January 8th, 1-2 PST. actionnetwork.org/events/trans...

I'm in the Sun Sentinel, making the case that DeSantis's tax cuts are insufficiently conservative. www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/12/09/a...

Preapproved building plans represent a novel way to lower building costs and speed delivery of infill housing. After recent local leadership, nonprofits, states, and federal policy makers are taking notice. 1/

“Over the last 10 years, 17 of the nation’s 20 largest transit agencies have undertaken network redesign projects” good overview of bus network redesigns. enotrans.org/article/bus-...

This would be cool if they could pull it off

President Trump, apparently enamored by the pint-sized Kei cars he saw during his recent trip to Japan, has paved the way for them to be made and sold in the US despite concerns

Starting Dec 10, most Bay Area transit transfers will be free for two hours. If you take AC Transit to BART then transfer to Muni, your fare today is $9.10. With Clipper 2, the free AC and Muni transfers mean your fare will be just $3.90 1/

In 1978, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors downzoned the city, banning multifamily homes in many areas and sparking a decades-long affordability crisis. 47 years later, on a 7–4 vote, they passed the Family Zoning Plan to finally begin to undo that mistake. The times, they are a-changin’!

Big housing news in San Francisco today: the Board of Supervisors (their equivalent of City Council) votes to upzone the entire western half of the city. Currently much of the westside is houses. Commercial streets get a height boost. Diagrams & maps below from sfplanning.org/sites/defaul...

Tomorrow, Oregon is poised to approve the nation's first statewide model zoning code + become the first state to make it mandatory in cities that underperform their peers on housing production www.sightline.org/2025/12/03/n...

One regret: I wish I'd searched law literature for cites on how STV solves Voting Rights Acts electoral minority inclusion *and* avoids the toxic district-based remedy that California has (disastrously) pursued I treated it as common knowledge but it needs proof & there are great cites!

Don't understand the rationale for having AVs do California stops if true. I can't imagine this significantly increases trip speed?

What I would like to see this tech used for is autonomous buses. But sadly I doubt that was ever likely with it being invented and pioneered in California

good piece on Waymo's self driving cars we can reasonably begin to look at self driving as a potential public health breakthrough, Waymo cars are much better and safer drivers than people the problem is the economics of the technology not the technology itself www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

Such an elemental yet overlooked reality of planning. If you don't: - Design a new route to add value to the network overall - Make changes to the existing network to incorporate the new asset ...you're kneecapping yourself. A key part of transit hist: homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2024/07/12/t...

Slow zones are a big problem for CTA in large part because Chicago is just such a geographically huge city. The trains really need to be fast to be effective.

How your city council is elected can suppress housing production by up to 21%. Cambridge, MA, shows how an at-large city council combined with ranked choice voting can elevate citywide YIMBY coalitions proportionate to their growing support. commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/how-...

That's not the issue. The concern is that they won't have enough time to maintain all the signals if the make each individual signal more complicated. Like Jerry said, the issue is that you need to trick US/Canadian controllers into running ped waves. In NL it's natively supported

I strongly recommend this article. I can speak from deep personal experience in Cambridge & in a district/at-large county. The Cambridge system promotes participation by minorities of all kinds. District voting unfairly empowers geographic minorities. commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/how-...

The forced bus transfers are an underrated part of REM's success rather than inconvenience, and it's instructive to compare to PATCO: although they share similarities in land use and orientation, NJ Transit was never forced to divert its buses going direct to Philly; PATCO ridership never broke 40k

If U.S. transit costs more to build because our institutions don’t build stuff often enough to figure out how do it cheaply, that’s extra poignant in Portland. TriMet hitched the future of rail to freeway builders & saw a 20-year ecosystem of local railbuilding expertise wither & crisp since 2015

I am very curious as to how Portland's multi-member districts will operate in the long term. My instinct is that districts might lock out pro-housing voices in heavily nimby districts and vice versa in heavily pro districts, with the citywide result depending on the ratio between the district types

My colleagues @awjustus.bsky.social and @aarmlovi.bsky.social have a new article out connecting electoral design to local housing politics. They show how proportional representation in Cambridge has sidestepped the pitfalls of both district based and traditional first-past-the-post councils

@aarmlovi.bsky.social coming in and writing about Cambridge like he got a degree at the K school or something. commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/how-...

You may've heard that at-large city councils represent citywide interests but violate the Voting Rights Act, dooming us to single member wards with "member deference" But! Cambridge's "Single Transferable Vote" system, a type of citywide RCV, eliminates member deference without violating VRA!!

For better or for worse, REM pulled off a very successful bit of cultural/regulatory arbitrage. They've essentially created a regional rail network at reasonable capital/operating costs by...making it "transit-y" rather than "RER-y." Contrast with GO's efforts is striking.

A way to conceptualize this: Lyft is a publicly traded firm. Its investors expect market average if not market beating returns on capital spending. That probably means citibike expansion is conservative, and prices are high to ensure that rate of return.

Somehow I'd never seen this visual representation of all of the different alignments for Federal Way Link along SR 99 that were under consideration, with the transitions between trenches and elevated segments shown so strikingly. (We didn't pick any of these, and built it next to I-5 instead)

Zoning is such a strange institution—in every other sphere of economic life, this sort of command-and-control micromanagement has been thoroughly debunked. And yet when it comes to land use, we're still doing it.

The design is hurting my eyes a bit but you can always do that better Hardware looks like a 46" LCD display which runs about $6-10k depending on the vendor and support/warranty The bigger cost is getting utility power to the shelter (~$20k/stop). Curious if this was a specific capital program

I really wish lay people understood that there is nothing intrinsically faster in at-grade, on-street rail compared to buses. If anything, it has a number of constraints that can make it potentially slower. It's the quality of priority that determines its performance, not the rail.

Parking spot density various Greater Tokyo locations from Shibuya to Chiba New Town, plus Thai, German, UK and US data. Which basically says my hometown/borough has the least parking in the world. Best part of England indeed.

Relative to peer jurisdictions, I think Arlington County, VA is quite well-governed. However, the county has an advisory panel going to consider big changes to our governance, including a ❗ move from at-large to district-based representation❗

I think this is mostly San Francisco finally shrugging off the pandemic, but it is *really* funny that rent prices in San Francisco shot up *immediately* after the city banned RealPage and other algorithmic price setting software. My pre trends are incredible!

DC is enforcing a “crackdown” on streeteries—outdoor seating for cafes—charging the cafes huge amounts of money to keep the facilities in place, and forcing them to use seating that doesn’t work in the winter. It’s a huge self-own, likely to end up hurting businesses, reducing street vibrancy.

Portland: Highly damaging transit service cuts may be coming in the next year. Still no sign of a plan on how to prevent them. No, there is not a lot of waste in the system; almost all service is justified by ridership or equity (we did that work). trimet.org/servicecuts/...

My line on this kind of thing is that we need policy, programs, and infrastructure that allow cities to function *better* as they grow. Public transit does that. When more people drive, cities get worse for everyone, including drivers.

Insane but true fact: making US roads as safe as Canadian, Australian, or European roads would save more lives than eliminating murder from the US.

What a weird week it has been. Anyway, Build Housing, yes.

One thing that's interesting to me about this purchase is that BEBs were apparently only 15-20% more expensive that the diesel quote they got. But BEBs seem to regularly be quoted at double the cost for transit agencies? For example, MTCs pricelist has a 40ft BEB at 1,407,600 vs 716,400 for a diesel

I've had zero to do with it other than watching as an Orange Line rider, but rapid implementation of dropbacks on the OL is one of the coolest things I've seen in my time at the MBTA. From a process improvement exploration project to full-bore implementation in just a few months.

So how to move forward, what are better metrics to capture our housing pressures? I don't know the definitive answer to that, but I have been playing around with various approaches. One is the work with Keith on First Time Buyer Lorenz Curves that focuses on ability to buy a home.

What's the other important margin? Location! Both between metro areas and within metro areas. Housing provides shelter, location, and privacy. We often forget location, and even more frequently forget the privacy aspect. So I want to talk a bit more about privacy.

@lausterna.bsky.social and I looked specifically into this question and found that while "culture" has a measurable effect, the main driver of household formation (or the lack thereof) is economic. More to the point, in Canada it's rents that drive cross-metro differences in household formation.

New study finds that "vehicles with large driver-side blind zones are much more likely to strike crossing pedestrians while turning left." Which vehicles have big driver-side blind zones? Those with thick A-pillars, bulky side mirrors, and tall hoods—i.e., big SUVs and trucks.

which i think speaks to the most important point, which is that a house is not just a house: it is a location, and far and away the most important thing about that location is how well it lets you access good jobs www.amazon.com/Order-withou...

Big news: House GOP head of transport committee says he wants to retain the mass transit fund, defying the Trump Admin’s proposal, which I detail below ⬇️ subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025...

Good post. This is my personal primary complaint about the MTA ending the monthly pass. Monthly passes encourage ridership: you no longer think about whether to use transit, you already have it covered.

Interesting podcast episode about Switzerland's new risk-based fire safety code, which was prompted by concerns that fire safety costs were getting too high and that they were overregulating (the phrase "too safe" is uttered) in some cases www.firescienceshow.com/226-new-swis...

My crazy idea for incorporating public feedback into city planning: You let residents vote for representatives in city government, and those people are empowered to implement the policies they promised while campaigning.