I’m excited to spend 2026-27 at the University of Chicago as a Visiting Scholar at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation & Harris School of Public Policy. I’m grateful to be a part of this supportive community and for my projects to benefit from its tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship.

A really nice feature of Seattle's population growth is for most of the last decade the number of cars hasn't increased with the number of people.

Traffic-jamming a cul se sac is actually an ancient ritual for summoning the NIMBYs (complimentary)

I’m sorry, I enjoy mocking California as much as the next person, but I think we can agree that spending 50 cents per resident giving free diapers to new parents is fine.

Dems will be like “institutional reforms? That pales in effectiveness to my strategy, affordability” and then enact policies that make affordability worse

Many people have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, but the US research university is globally dominant to an almost unbelievable degree. The typical state university is a football team stapled to a R&D lab with a budget bigger than the entire nation of Belgium.

Sawmill towns, rise up!

Diffuse future benefits vs. concentrated present costs rules everything around me

Infrastructure policy in Ann Arbor makes the WSJ! (gift link) This really is a story of deferred maintenance. Monitoring and pruning millions of trees confers possible benefits in the future, while the actual work requires spending money today and generates conflict. www.wsj.com/lifestyle/an...

Though not as graphic as some reports, this will be traumatizing to many. The sexual torture inflicted on the victims of Oct. 7—including those held captive in tunnels for years afterward—was deliberate and systematic. If you're "yes, but"-ing this, you're not hearing. www.cnn.com/2026/05/12/m...

a lot of people clearly think that the united states should have a "hukou" style system of controlled migration

I can think of someone up to the challenge.

get in piggies it's time for another load of slop

Excited to be publishing 🚶🚷 Schrödinger’s Crosswalk 🚷🚶in the Transportation Law Journal! Current draft here, feedback welcome: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Current* conditions near Frankfort, MI:

Now, to see which issue generates this level of derangement…

We've reached extreme levels of stretching the term "pedestrian."

People vote for a ballot measure to fund lines on a map and don't realize that that is functionally Step 0 in the process (and is properly missequenced).

Thirty years on, the actual Law of the Horse essay is unremarkable and did not age well.

Going forward, all assignments will receive a half-grade bump for every generation back they go in the technology of delivery. This does confer an advantage on the children of telegraph magnates, but so it goes.

Chicago & Philly are most concerning to me in terms of what diminished transit ridership means for city proper. Their systems don't have the weakest recoveries overall, but the metros have increasing job sprawl and that's set to intensify. Relatedly, they have a lot of underutilized rail capacity.

Curb ramps are a hugely important issue in themselves, and also emblematic of larger problems with building infrastructure. Digging into it properly will require considerable time and money (I have a grant proposal pending, but even if it's granted there will be more work).

Self-driving automobiles save you hassle. They're a great consumer technology. Self-driving trains are a boon to the operational and fiscal capacity of public transit and, in turn, the productivity of cities. I like both forms of tech, but despite some similarities their output is very different.

Have yet to read anything convincing that AI-led improvements in efficiency won't just juice aggregate demand, with both consumption and production following the shape of Jevons paradox. If I were in a pitch meeting, I'd ask the founders to show me one (1) job that AI has replaced end to end.

I love win-wins, but tradeoffs are to be expected when it comes to the ultimate rivalrous good (physical space).

✨ New draft up! ✨ Transportation for the Abundant Society, with Jonathan Levine (urban and transportation planning, U. Michigan) Thanks to those who've offered feedback to date (so much, some we're still incorporating!) no charge or login needed: ssrn.com/abstract=538...

Failed legal challenges have delayed major infrastructure projects like new roads and power stations by a collective 32 years. Labour recently changed the law to cut the time it takes to throw out anti-infrastructure lawsuits. And it's working. www.samdumitriu.com/p/the-planni...

Me, boarding a mixed-traffic streetcar:

Super cool, in a nerdy way, to see drain tile in action. This and the stainless steel plow (to which muck does not stick) are what made the Midwest into a giant farm.

[email protected]'s latest on reincorporation. Descriptively, it seems Delaware's economic model is now at risk. The franchise biz is high value to DE (and higher than it ever will be to TX or NV), so you might've expected more DE loss-aversion. www.businesslawprofessors.com/2026/05/earl...

LinkedIn posts and AI, a match made in heaven apparently.

My work has long benefited from peer review, and I’ve tried to return the favor when I can. Today I’m delighted to be joining the editorial board of Law & Social Inquiry (@lsijournal.bsky.social). It feels good to make a small institutional commitment to peer review at a difficult moment.

Possibly relatedly, anyone else finding the FT less readable this ~year? It’s soaked in gloom and doom about the economy—which may be warranted in Britain’s case (don’t know enough to know) but is kind of a tedious bias in a financial publication. I have the NYT for my FUD needs.

We’re currently experiencing the strongest positive exogenous shock to transit use in years. Will be interested to see if it affects ridership.

It was supposed to be the Summer of Ahab.

It’s hard to put the slopulism back in the tube, but we gotta do it.

A simple pleasure I miss is being able to listen to the radio while walking around. And thank you, no, I won’t be fiddling with an app for that.

I would simply cite the Biden DOJ itself, which two years ago celebrated blocking Spirit’s rescue as “a victory for US travelers who deserve lower prices and better choices.” www.justice.gov/archives/opa...

So great a movie that, despite several forms of technology being central to the plot, it has aged beautifully. Not coincidentally, it also has one of the best casts of all time.

Not just moar money, but changes in the governance and objective function of local government? That’s my bat signal. (in NYC specifically: repository.law.umich.edu/jlm/vol2025/..., in transportation generally: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....)

77th and Columbus, 37th and 3rd, 17th and 10th

When I moved to downtown Iowa City as a car-free junior professor, the neighborhood gas station was so ugly I could hardly stand to have it around. But when I bought a car the following fall, I was astonished at how much more appealing it had become in just one year. (with apologies to Mark Twain)

In the US, my money’s on privately owned self-driving cars over robotaxis. I can’t think of a single aspect of in-person life that has tilted toward a communal rather than private form over the past 50 years.

Search in vain for a replacement flux capacitor for the DeLorean, end up getting trampled by a horse.

The effort failed by a margin of nearly 3 to 1, lol

“a 1% increase in the tax rate reduces suburb-to-city commuting by 6.39%” and, the authors estimate, “[r]eplacing the wage tax with a non-distortionary land value tax would bring 26,000 jobs from the suburbs into Philadelphia. Such gains triple when we allow for productivity agglomeration forces.”

My unpopular urbanist opinion is that America is too rich to bring back old school SROs, and the future of low-cost independent living is microstudios with private bathrooms and little kitchenettes (two-burning induction cooktop, minifridge, microwave), sink maybe shared with bathroom

Pretty bearish for Detroit (as metonym, city, and region alike).