Facebook fed me this slop (all 1989 Buick models), and I am absolutely here for it

Liquid Capital (Salzmann 2017)

🎵 Don’t Go Freighting My Heart 🎵

Tapping that “institutional reform” sign. More money is often not necessary and definitely not sufficient.

✨ introducing… ✨ 🌇 Transportation for the Abundant Society 🚅 "Abundance" says our problem is artificial scarcity—especially housing. But you can’t build your way out if transportation policy still treats traffic flow as sacred. Transportation is the binding constraint. ssrn.com/abstract=538...

Read this in draft—it’s great!

I’m 6-7 maxxing.

Ghost of transportation policy discourse past, present…and future? (Let’s hope not.)

“A year after the $1.1 billion overhaul,” which added a new lane each direction, “the 405’s rush hour drive times were a minute slower than they were before the workers broke ground. Five years later, traffic was worse at all times of day.” www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

It’s avoiding a slight trapezoid, Michael. What could it cost?

Good paper re current state procurement rules that prioritize procedural transparency enforced by adversarial legalism in an effort to obtain "low bids" over administrative discretion to choose best value. Potts shows how this has not always been the case and is the result of historic legal drift.

The projects I've been most interested in have gradually shifted from zoning and land-use reforms to transportation that enable land-use changes. Excited to see more work emerging in this field, from the Transit Costs Project to this excellent article from Greg

Fragmented governance, path dependence, risk-aversion: combined with rigid and at times farcical legal standards, these produce an auto-centrism that's highly robust to change. The paper provides the first account of this that blends legal doctrine, urban planning, and firsthand experience.

Beautifully put

Looking forward to diving into this!

Oh yeah, also this paper is under submission with journals now...

Ambitious framework about an issue that addresses a nagging anxiety of mine: the idea that though YIMBYs are winning the war on land use and permitting now, they may face an inevitable backlash if densification isn’t pared with a serious build out of transportation alternatives to cars.

Thank you for the feedback! So helpful. I wish we had had space to thank the dozens (!) of people who offered feedback on the preliminary draft. As an aside, never before have I changed so much between drafts. I ran a redline and the result was ~80% red ink; nearly 3500 changes in all!

I read and gave some feedback on a draft of this paper, and I will say it's a good piece and well worthy of a read if you work on transportation reform. The focus on increasing access and on fixing institutional barriers is spot on.

✨ introducing… ✨ 🌇 Transportation for the Abundant Society 🚅 "Abundance" says our problem is artificial scarcity—especially housing. But you can’t build your way out if transportation policy still treats traffic flow as sacred. Transportation is the binding constraint. ssrn.com/abstract=538...

St. Louis Fire of 1849. Don't hear much about that these days.

Many people are saying.

The exclusion of opportunity costs is one of the most unprincipled aspects of transportation decisionmaking.

Very excited to say that the stars have aligned and NYU Marron/Transit Costs Project have landed a grant that will fund a second edition of Momentum, which will apply the high-throughput framework to major regional rail networks beyond the NY area. Our three big new cases: - NJT - SEPTA - METRA

A good way to find out if street parking is truly indispensable in a dense area is to charge for it.

The bottom of a very good thread =>

Finally met the other guy who buys the @financialtimes.com Weekend at the corner store. Unsurprisingly, he’s me, but ten years older.

Legit concerns about AVs risk metamorphosing into a general panic when these incredible inventions should instead be the tip of a legislative spear for prodding automakers about gaps in their own safety systems. One senator even alluded to the US losing jobs for safety drivers, please be serious.

Celebrating the protection of union jobs first and continuation of a vital, generational infrastructure project second is an unintentional reveal about how US transportation projects work.

the end result of knowing basic things about urban planning is reacting to every news story by just constantly wanting to grab people by the collar while shaking them and shouting "do you have any idea how many Americans die in car crashes every year???"

Now that's what I call grade separation. (substructure of Marshall Field and Company's building (1902), courtesy bldg. 51 archive)

Reports of the 'death of distance' in frontier research were premature - say Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Leiboyu Xiang, and Neil Lee https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2026/01/26/the-brutal-geography-of-global-elite-scientific-research/

👀 (this loss exceeds the market value of the entire company, though probably not the enterprise value)

A store of value dot jpg

If the crash continues, the circuit breakers will trigger, and then, when the dust settles, value investors will come in. Right?

This is a far more potent example of gatekeeper influence than the much-criticized cases (eg, Vanguard outsourcing proxy advice). If S&P and Nasdaq allow favored firms to bypass the usual process to enter the most important indexes in the world, markets won't be the same. www.wsj.com/finance/stoc...

Read theory, i.e., Ricardo: "the substitution of machinery for human labour is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers" and may "render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition of the labourer" (1821!) (notably, Autor & Sarin are skeptical of the headline Q)

Even though the The Onion moved its HQ back to the Midwest over a decade ago (from Brooklyn to Chicago, originally in Madison), it’s still got some of that NYC spirit (here, the mental model of an incumbent renter seeing rent hikes rather than an incumbent homeowner enjoying price appreciation).

Now to take a big sip of water and look up total roadway fatalities since the Time for Decision (apparently 1957)...

The short version of what I hope will be a longer tirade later is while Hidalgo's (transit-and-) active transportation transformation of Paris is held up as a global ideal for urbanists, politics intervenes as always; her approval ratings in 2024 ranged from 19%-30% depending on who asked, and how.

I spoke with @andyjayhawk.bsky.social for this story (come for the reporting, stay for the quotes from the inestimable @annmlipton.bsky.social).

This article explores poor allocation decisions by one pension fund, but it's probably generalizable to cases where those managing giant pools of money are only slightly accountable for investment decisions. Unfortunately that characterizes a lot of public pensions. www.wsj.com/finance/inve...

I'm teaching a new course at Stern on AI in Finance and opening it up! Syllabus/slides on Github: github.com/arpitrage/ai... Weekly summaries on Substack arpitrage.substack.com/p/1-three-ru... First post is on Amdahl's Law, Jevons' Paradox, and why finance was slow to learn the bitter lesson

“There’s something uniquely American about stablecoins” Make of that what you will as.ft.com/r/a6803534-2...

GOOB LUCK TO ALL TEH HOOMAN PAW PAWFESSORS SUBMITTING TO PAW REVIEW

"In 2021, the total number of trucks operated on U.S. roadways was 169.8 million, versus 85.1 million in 2002 [almost a 100% increase]." "The annual number of miles driven by these trucks was 1.9 trillion miles, a 70 percent increase from 1.1 trillion miles in 2002." www.bts.gov/newsroom/viu...

A Hummer and an accordion bus both take up a lot of space, so it is difficult to know which one to prioritize moving in peak traffic.

Seas get angry. Lakes* do not. *except Lake Superior

The technology known as “charging for parking” would single-handedly eliminate several of the most tedious plots.