When people say they want retail rent control, they have all sorts of ideas in their head about what tenants it’ll encourage and discourage, but this is the actual effect: privileging the preferences of 70-year-olds over those of newer, younger residents. www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/arti...

I think it’s structurally temporary because it comes from asymmetrical demand elasticity. Trading up to better housing happens nearly 1:1 with income growth. Trading down is very inelastic. It’s a slow-correcting disequilibrium from resistance to trading down. 1/

It's a really weird issue. If the price of gasoline goes up 40%, it goes up for everyone by 40%. Under shortage conditions, rents increase systematically in a regressive pattern. It's how you can tell there is a shortage. Rents go up more in neighborhoods where incomes are lower.

For those who are interested, here is excess rent inflation since 2015 in Atlanta. Matt is right that their methods are sophisticated, which just goes to show what a highly historically peculiar issue this is. The BLS methods don't measure this 80% difference across the region.

"Progressives don't want landlords and Conservatives don't want renters" is a very trenchant and troubling observation.

Love some light rail scrutiny. Seattle, welcome Austin to the club: www.texastribune.org/2026/05/21/a...

@rohanaras.bsky.social, quoted in the article, being from the Seattle area is a nice touch!

We don’t fund construction of highways and bridges at 5% design and we don’t go to the voters to ask for preliminary design resources. DOTs set aside a portion of FHWA formula funding for project development and precon. Generally those roles are carrier long term as DOT staff, not consultants.

The problem with attaching a budget ask to 5% or a conceptual design is that you have no idea how you’re actually going to build the thing: - what types of structures - the size and complexity of stations - construction phasing - utility conflicts - ROW and temporary construction easements

A familiar story for Californians and Washingtonians, and elsewhere in the US: An agency takes a crayon at 5% design - when scope, schedule, budget and risks are largely undefined - to the voters for money to advance preliminary designs AND construction for FTA local match.

People have a lot of trouble grasping just how many parking spaces you need to fill a subway station

vancouver's new articulated trolleybuses from solaris, 100% low floor with 4 doors for lower dwell times and better handling of crowds. will be the only of their kind in north america when they enter service.

Four doors on a North American bus? And it's a trolleybus!? 😍🦊

LIRR strike over. Details TK.

I don't doubt the faregates helped with vandalism but I also think BART's crime decline is just the inevitable result of people riding the system en-masse again. When no one was on transit, like the empty BART days of 2020-2022, then thieves can get away with snatching phones or people smoke onboard

So when the lad permits I’ve been playing around with a tool that you feed into it a shape file representing a rail right of way, a list of stops and their coordinates, and where applicable a digital elevation model. You specify train performance, superelevation, cant deficiency, line speed, padding

Land on the suburban fringe for greenfield logistics sprawl is "cheap" because huge costs are displaced onto the public (and the public pocketbook). It's terrible to see the road-related damage in an area w/the massive legacy rail infrastructure that Chicagoland has. We can make different choices.

NYU-Marron and @chittimarco.bsky.social rolling out a giant new visual guide and website — a “cookbook” — on interventions to make your Slow Bus Go FAST

Not yet a *deal* on federal housing bill, but a bipartisan House response to the Senate version! It includes fixes to the Build To Rent ban and avoids eliminating key bipartisan provisions like the Build Now Act We will see what the Senate response is but it's a provisional sign ROAD is back!

Excellent report out from Pew today on preapproved residential building plans. Preapproved plan catalogs allow entrepreneurial localities to cut development costs by a few percentage points and provide developers with significant time savings in delivering new housing. 1/

4th and 5th tallest towers in LA, with 2,500 units, just proposed next to the new D Line subway extension. The project would also include 2,100 parking spaces.

Even on our straightest, highest speed track in America that's also recently been refurbished for 160mph running, US-adapted European trains are no match for our country's iconically horrific road quality

This outlines Toronto Model of transit that I’ve been talking about for many years (and am working on a book about!). Basically, principle is that universal network of frequent, all-day, every day bus service is essential ingredient for genuinely useful transit. open.substack.com/pub/infrasto...

To be clear: I support this b/c it has proven benefits for readability compared to all caps & allows for the use of less abbreviated forms of names, which is also better for system legibility I moved Rhode Island's transit headsigns to mixed case for this reason storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/405b...

The greater LA area is approximately the size of Belgium and has about 1/10 of the total number of trains per day. The Brussels metro would cover an area just around Downtown LA

My Red Line train just went from Bethesda to Farragut North in 13 min 0 sec (door close to door close). This was a 15 min trip under ATO pre-2009 when it was my daily commute. Maybe 14 min early am. 19-20 min to Union Station, was 22-23 early am. Kudos to @wmatagm.bsky.social & entire Red Line team.

Tiffani Jenkins, who led this initiative at WMATA, actually has more numerical details on her own LinkedIn about what she achieved for NYCT as a consultant (at Network Rail Consulting, owned by by the UK) than the MTA has ever shared publicly! And now she’s in the private sector :-(

Catch @chittimarco.bsky.social launch our new Transit Priority Atlas (TPA) on friday at 9am in Brooklyn. You know about Offset Bus Lanes and Queue Jumps but what do you know about Transit Modal Filters and Auckland's bus-speed curve? luma.com/rf2ehtyu

This is reminding me that Jayapal has always snubbed The Urbanist, even during her first campaign for congress.

It basically went unreported, yes. As far as I know (and this is only from information filtering out through staff and operators) was a combination of some unexplained technical issue with the system and an overly cautious decision regarding people jumping in front of trains.

Fun fact. The Italian planning law (1150/42) never mentions the word "use" even in the single very vague reference to zoning: "the division of the territory into zones, specifying those designated for urban expansion, and the zoning characteristics and constraints to be observed in construction."

I feel a bit like a mad scientist here, but you realize this means you can pretty much add TSP anywhere? Replace loops with new non-intrusive detection that has vehicle classification abilities and its just a matter of political will. Let's make every route a BRT route!

Even if the Canada Line was as low capacity as people act like it is, and it isn't, at least it was built which for Ballard Link is look much more unlikely. Vancouver could have waited another couple decades for a higher capacity Canada Line for 10x the price but we wouldn't be better off for it.

Infrastructure projects routinely spend billions of dollars to avoid difficult conversations. I wrote a new piece on Infrastory on how we need to be better at recognizing the problems that can be solved with a phone call rather than big infrastructure. open.substack.com/pub/infrasto...

ST's blithe dismissal of ALR based solely on the Canada Line shows a lack of seriousness to tackling high costs. There are many forms of automated rail out there to examine. ST should do that examination rather than this mad rush to scale back the ST3 projects that we voted for and are paying for.

It really sucks that if you want to live in a nice new apartment in America you need to live next to a loud, polluted, and dangerous arterial road and have no options somewhere more quiet and residential.

Today I learned that STM only has 9 all-day high frequency bus routes (soon to be 10), with a good few more that are "rush-hour" high frequency routes (frequent only in the peak direction, during peak). How are they getting lapped by SEPTA on this?

The last @purplelinemd.bsky.social track was laid Thursday. It is set to open next year 🚊

Big upgrades for bus! 🚍 Metro’s bus technology now reports locations every 5 secs instead of 30 secs, giving you: ✅ More accurate arrival times ✅ Better real-time tracking ✅ Faster responses during congestion, detours, or delays Shorter waits. Better information. More reliable service! 🚌👏

Now that Trump has soured on the anti-build-to-rent portion of the housing package, Congress has a chance to make it as ambitious as possible — not to accept the lowest common denominator. @rohanaras.bsky.social, @awjustus.bsky.social, @willpoffwebster.bsky.social and I argue that more is more:

Only the big blue dots on this map have significant "peering capacity" (connections between networks), measured in Tbps. FCC lists fiber providers in Ashburn with 500 Gbps service; median US address has 300 Mbps service. When your business is data, you need fast fiber!

The original housing packages in the Senate and House were substantive answers to the housing crisis. As Congress writes a final version, it must take the best bills from both chambers—not just settle for the overlap. See our joint Niskanen Center and Institute for Progress explainer for more:

It's happening. On Friday, 5/15, we are soft-launching our Transit Priority Atlas 1.0 website. Come join us in person at 370 Jay Street to explore this knowledge-sharing tool and get lost in circulation planning layouts and intersection management strategies for better on-street transit.

During Porchfest I discovered that DDOT installed a HAWK at a normal intersection? Cross traffic was pretty confused by the situation (Not to mention the general chaos of Porchfest)

This seems like bad precedent for bike lane activism. Has Seattle ever been on the hook for a $9.25 million payout for a cyclist getting killed on a street without a bike lane? Because that’s the status quo.

Found it. The use of the term urbanism here it's not really the one current in English-speaking though, but it refers to the fact that it's more linked to the spatial dimension of planning (i.e. an "architecture of the city")

Staff signatures certifying engineering blueprints, a thing that we can no longer do 😔

And the difference-in-differences estimates show up only two years later. 2/

Derek Thompson is worried that "California still hasn’t actually increased housing starts in the six months" since SB79. Let's take a look at how quickly the biggest upzonings increased construction. 1/

this piece makes an important point that very few people seem to understand: the shared mobility service ("robotaxi") model can be compatible with healthy cities, whereas privately owned "self-driving cars" will turbocharge the existing incompatibility between cars and cities