I saved about $12 in free/reduced transfers getting to/around/back from San Francisco today thanks to Clipper 2.0. clipper2.hikingbytransit.com

It seems suboptimal that the developers of the Schlage Lock site are phasing that project — which requires a new street connecting Vis Valley to Bayshore Caltrain — so that the connection is last instead of first. sfplanning.org/sites/defaul...

Nextdoor doesnt surprise me anymore but was astonished by the claim that the TEMPO bus lanes on International Blvd are rarely used (15,000 riders a day, 10 minute intervals).

A 2025 update of a 1951 map. Typical transit travel times from downtown San Francisco to Bay Area transit centers and transfer stations. Blue lines are all routes between all transit centers.

The most important thing AC Transit can do is to set actual speed, frequency and reliability service goals (vision timetable) for the network. That way ACT, host cities, the public and funders know what discrete improvements are supposed to add up to.

Service led planning

The 1935 Moscow General Plan would be a pretty good rubric for most high growth US cities / regions today — apart from the width of road widening. From Peter Hall’s chapter in Metropolis 1890-1940.

A website has popped up to coordinate opposition to this senior housing project in Rockridge. The project “is an alien presence that will permanently damage the architectural integrity and charm of our community.” 6230claremontseniorhousing.com/about/

The Central and East European building typologies featured in the 1982 US Infantryman’s Guide to Urban Combat. www.bits.de/NRANEU/other...

I very much enjoyed attending the showcase for the National Single Stair Design Competition, put on by East Bay for Everyone and Housing Action Coalition last week.

The Sacramento Streetcar Mitigated Neg Dec is out now and the shortened route has a slightly higher operating speed without the loop to 15th street and double backs along the riverfront and to West Sacramento city hall. www.sacrt.com/wp-content/u...

This is what passes for progressivism and climate policy in California. Jane Kim’s answer for elevated fire risk and actuarial risk? Put it on the public dime. Urban renters should bail out well to do exurban property owners and landlords in fire zones. FAIR plan is already a ticking time bomb!

FAIR plan’s current liability is greater than the entirety of CA’s annual budget and it’s only a fraction of CA’s property owners. The insurance industry would have to backstop this weee the FAIR plan to go bankrupt, which is both likely and impossible. Jane Kim wants to increase public exposure.

It's really, really dumb that a major source of affordable housing funding in California requires spending part of the funds on purchasing electric buses

Caltrans evaluation of the San Pablo Avenue bus/bike project's non-standard designs flags the absence of 4/6' bicycle lanes at intersections where right turn auto lanes are present. Consequently it is assessed as "medium" probability for nonstandard design feature approval.

Books I enjoyed in 2025 in no particular order: Unfinished Metropolis by Ben Schneider Outstanding description of metropolitan growth breakdown and attempts to re-build city-making in the US over the past 15 years.

This is completely unacceptable! AC Transit’s hydrogen fleet has 43%-64% availability depending on model, leading to canceled bus runs and stops in the middle of service. They must address this to retain/grow riders. Transit reliability is even more important to riders than speed or frequency.

Would love to see the ridership modeling for LOSSAN Optimization Study - 1 TPH and 2.5 hour travel time (from 1/2 TPH and 3 hour travel time). I suspect Surfliner would be NEC levels of profitable. www.amtrak.com/content/dam/...

That’s right transweb.sjsu.edu/sites/defaul...

Building good transit requires building good systems to deliver it - planned networks; ridership models; engineered standards and cost/benefit analyses. The problem is precisely that we require each locality to reinvent what should be a well-understood wheel, discarding learning after each project.

This ridiculous new post by Strong Towns correctly identifies a problem - we build too many failing transit capital projects - and completely misses the mark with its proposed solutions - stopping federal funding for them and instead making projects small and phased.

“Joe Kelly” (2025) posits that people would take a Breda ETR 300 from Paris to Florence in 2025.

Single stair design competition with @eastbayforeveryone.bsky.social and HAC. Congrats to David Baker Architects for their San Francisco lot winning design Steplight. www.singlestair.com

Transport project delivery was broken by stapling together 100 good intentions. But it's fixable: - Embrace + expand FTA audits - Love your procurement team and have their backs - Be transparent and thoughtful around risk - Fund capital *programs* to develop + sustain in-house delivery expertise

California passed a 5 year ban on ADU owner occupancy requirements in 2019. AB 976 (2023) made that ban permanent.

During the 2021 RHND process, ABAG/MTC planners said housing goals weren’t allocated to Westside SF because “2500 sqf lot sizes are too small for apartments.” They were wrong.

East Bay for Everyone, as co-host with Livable Communities Initiative, is proud to announce the winners of the National Single Stair Design Competition: www.singlestair.com

Tomorrow, Wednesay December 10, at 6pm @eastbayforeveryone.bsky.social will be showing off single stair design competition entrants from the Bay Area along with HAC in Downtown Oakland. See all the details here: actionnetwork.org/events/12102... See you there!

Importantly, we can recognize that there are a range of modifications, and we can design changes to service, organization, equipment, electronics, and infrastructure – in that order – to deliver improved service to riders. Why not squeeze out those needed seconds and minutes with low-cost ideas? 4/x

Item 2C deals with collaboration and communication, which was sorely tested by the International Blvd TEMPO project itself. @seamlessbayareaca.bsky.social has proposed the right solution: Service Led Planning. The concept is basic: first, ask what we're trying to deliver in terms of service. 2/x

The secret sauce of Zurich's transit priority at intersections: two-stage crossings, variable length cycles made of stages that can change their length and order adaptively, and narrow lanes and intersections resulting in very short clearing times

not the presentation to livable california 💀

I see Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies may or may not have helped blow up the bipartisan Road To Housing Act by telling GOP members it was an Anti-Family bill. ifstudies.org/blog/congres...

In contrast, in the Bay Area the current official transit priority policy discussions are all about making sure buses don't get interfered with by bike and pedestrian features - engineers want wide turn radii and oppose projects that would reduce the number of lanes on wide roads.

This seems interesting (a shorter paper is here) thebhc.org/sites/defaul... (Companies like the SP spent the first 50 years pissing off the people who lived in the states they had monopolized, when they lost the monopoly people didn't cry for them.)

"La Grande Direttissima del Lago Salato"

“A paradox of laissez-faire America in which privately owned & operated RR were incompatible w/ a society that highly valued the unconstrained exploitation of land. Private RR operation required profits. Unconstrained land exploitation demanded more transportation than RR could provide at a profit.”

EH Harriman seemed to instinctively understand service led planning: “additional net income could be derived by reducing the cost of trans-portation, and that costs could be reduced by acquiring higher capacity cars and larger and more efficient locomotives.”

Reforming housing and transportation systems and institutions: Which strategy?

What’s going on here AC Transit?

If you see this, repost with your model of positive masculinity.

Southern Pacific’s electrification & modernization of Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda suburban rail. - 29 miles of upgrades - 21 miles of extensions - 7 year schedule - standardized pole spacing and specs - self built power generation - budget from conceptual design to final acceptance $4m —> $10.5m

my favourite part of getting a new Marco post is always the inspiringly well-made diagrams

We have hundreds of California four-lane roads to upgrade to meet our mode shift goals. 1) Why does a local agency like ACTC have to lead design for these projects, when that'll mean it's always their first time? 2) Why are we making them design concrete mixes and traffic circles from scratch?

I may be taking this claim more seriously than the author but here’s an interesting observations about construction insurance cost differences between common and civil law countries - namely the Netherlands and Ireland. www.housingagency.ie/sites/defaul...

The article cited in the OP claims that if a 3-story Habitat for Humanity middle-income project had "gone to four residential stories" it "would have required an elevator, creating excessive costs" and "had they gone even higher, they would have needed to build in concrete..." Is this true???

Features you will not find in most apartment buildings in most of these countries: - Sprinklers - Second stairs - Vent stacks - Standpipes - Wheelchair turning radii in elevator cabs - Construction cost controls

Anyone who thinks height limits, setbacks, lot coverage, design standards, or stairway/elevator regulations, etc., aren't "zoning" is lost in the sauce.

Really struggling with the claim that “countries that really care about housing (from the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, and Ireland to Singapore) have construction cost controls.” medium.com/@el.compay.n...

Oakland is one step closer to re-opening a cafe/beer garden at Lakeside Park next to Lake Merritt. cc @aceckhouse.bsky.social @eean.dev oakland.legistar.com/LegislationD...