At the Terner Center Housing Governor’s Forum, Ezra Klein asked the candidates for a book recommendation. Unfortunately none said “The Low-Rise Speculative Apartment” by Wallace Francis Smith (1964).

Public commenters from North and East San Diego County complain of being neglected by MTS and SANDAG while their local governments are doing things like passing resolutions refusing to remove any miles of full-time car-accessible lanes and using their votes on SANDAG's Board to prioritize highways.

Similar to how many people imagine the formal US immigration system to be rational and orderly, I think many people have an extremely optimistic view of the rationality and orderliness of development and permitting of transit infrastructure on the West Coast.

Reminds me of Aaron Peskin showing up to the groundbreaking ceremony for the BRIDGE low-income housing project at 88 Broadway he tried to kill as Supe.

Anyone have numbers or a map for homes added to midtown / downtown Sacramento since 2015?

"The Government recognises that previous stop-start approaches to electrification may have contributed to higher unit costs and loss of capability, reinforcing the case for a more continuous and efficient approach in future." committees.parliament.uk/publications...

> 3A Drive awareness of available discretionary funds to local and regional organizations such as through educational programs. instructions unclear, optimizing public policy for the Awareness KPI

Villaraigosa is the guy from that post, asked to list his accomplishments and citing instead the number of meetings he has held

Question from the Chron to Antonio Villaraigoso: what did you do as Newsom’s infrastructure czar? www.sfchronicle.com/video/articl...

It’s suboptimal that a self-identified “huge YIMBY” S.F. software engineer bought a house in El Cerrito then immediately became the face of the anti-library parcel tax movement, including spreading FUD about BART and Transit Oriented Development, on behalf of local landowners.

Join us on 5/15 at 9am when @chittimarco.bsky.social debuts the new Transit Priority Atlas. Marco collected surface transit operating data for 32 global cities & documented interventions--bus lanes, tsp, etc--so we can combine to achieve better outcomes & more ridership: luma.com/rf2ehtyu

Trying this out for a similar issue — “Steyer has a good pitch on decarbonization from 50,000 feet up but the fact that everyone in the actual investor owned utility business is spending against him is an indicator that his ideas are unworkable and bad.” 🤔

The fact that things like impact of building codes, issues of constructability, construction costs, utilities, etc. are generally brushed away when they central to planning is quite telling. We really need to re-center planning education.

The political problem with reining in these design standards is that it’s a “technical” area where policymakers don’t feel comfortable overturning staff and there’s no objective or transparent cost analysis. www.oaklandca.gov/files/assets...

What if prop 13 reform opens up land in cities for redevelopment - who would want to live in the Sierra foothills then?

A major tax hike *on older commercial only" would be a huge boon for builders, right? Their opposition stinks.

BIA cannot articulate an actual housing-related reason they are spending heavily to oppose Steyer. - they oppose his commercial Prop 13 reform - which doesn’t apply to residential - they “pan” his modular housing plan (which is similar to Buffy Wicks’ plan) - gnostic policy they cannot describe

Trying out some punditry: “The gap between the presidential approval rate and the generic ballot is due to the Democrats failure to repudiate their prior opposition to rail electrification.”

Come through

As always, capital is flush and ops is starved.

OCTA and Metro cutting Metrolink funding for regional rail service (all-day, bi-directional service) to return to a commuter-focused schedule is a bad idea generally. It seems especially bad just before the World Cup and Olympics.

Creating a revolving loan fund for mixed-income housing then adding unnecessary complexity by mandating banks act as middle men for the transactions to code it as “free market solution” agenda is conservative everything bagel-ism. www.remappingdebate.org/article/revo...

huge "state capacity" job with my colleagues at GovOps: Assistant Secretary of Procurement and Acquisition Reform calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/...

Tom Steyer, in response to question about transit capital costs: “I am a big fan of public transportation but not at any price. I need advocates to come to me with a plan that works… like housing, it’s not going to be one thing. No silver bullets.” podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v...

Peter Magyar, my people yearn for integrated transit networks...

As SF modernizes signals for the T-Third and considers extending the Central Subway northwest, a key issue is affordably increasing capacity at underground stations - and implicitly for the rest of the line - from 2 to 3 car trains. Instructive piece re Skytrain buzzer.translink.ca/2026/04/how-...

Came across the US History text book “History of a Free People” by Brandon McCutchen from 1967 on reform movements. Compare against The American Pageant from 2012.

How little do you have to know about housing politics in California to believe the California Association of Realtors et al are interested in housing abundance?

Waiting for BART to open up at 8am - 2 hours later than Saturday - wondering how many other suburban/regional rail networks globally distinguish between Saturday and Sunday schedules.

Had to pay respect to one of the greats before hitting up the 6.

@mayorofoakland.bsky.social you going to the cal rugby game today?

Sub-regional network plans aggregating into a regional transit network plan... great idea. mtc.legistar.com/LegislationD...

Chile’s reforming its national zoning ordinances to: 1) assume 2 inhabitants/unit instead of 4, increasing allowable dwelling density 2) halve parking requirements near transit 3) lower FAR bonus threshold from 5000sqm to 2500sqm, also eliminating municipal veto. NIMBYs are seething

We're not tracking them per se, but what we're seeing is entirely consistent with that take. Every BR project in Beverly Hills that I saw immediately switched to AB 130. In places with less litigation risk, people are still doing projects with categorical exemptions.

Is anyone tracking projects that use infill housing CEQA exemptions under AB 130? Anecdotally it feels like many of them are in high-resource areas like Rockridge, Marin and the Marina where ambitious housing proposals weren't even proposed previously.

I find these articles bemoaning the lack of moderately priced single family strange. Single family homes near the core in high growth metros have a location/amenity premium. New SFH in outer or exurban locations will trade floor space for time. www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/disappe...

Not looking good for single stair reform in California. YIMBY groups are checked out and firefighters are highly engaged.

What’s up with some of the trades opposing? Do they just capitalize to flow to the larger projects where trades are used and single stairs aren’t applicable?

It's funny that the USDOT "Freedom to Drive" website links to the Biden-era Urban Congestion Trends report which highlights steadily lower congestion than pre-pandemic and VA's variable-speed limit project explicitly managing congestion without widening ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications...

ISO: a streetview bot that shows rail grade crossings and grade separations around the world.

Allison Arieff writes in the Chron about the National Single Stair Design Competition from LCI and @eastbayforeveryone.bsky.social ahead of Wednesday’s Assembly Housing committee hearing on AB 2252 (Alex Lee). www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/arti...

Don Perata campaigning against extended parking meter enforcement hours in his 2010 failed Oakland mayoral campaign…

BART is planning changes for platform assignments at Daly City that will balance headways and enable more cross platform transfers at Bay Fair and MacArthur. bart.legistar.com/LegislationD...

Similar dynamic to the 2025 Oakland mayors race where Mod partisans were trying to brand a candidate as a YIMBY based on vague commitments to permit streamlining while also advocating for a roll back of missing middle upzoning and parking reform.

Slowly going through this oral history of MTC/ABAG. Kind of glad the California Assembly no longer calls its budget committee "Ways and Means." www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyYz...

Island Press and others regularly put out books on planning, cycling, housing, urban design and existing transit but there’s not much in terms of any publication on transit service, programs and infrastructure delivery.

Appreciate this discussion of NFPA 130 here. The deferral to the fire service in each jurisdiction creates really bad incentives for cost control and risk.

This is a roadmap to delivering all of ST3 without decades of delay. If not this, then Sound Transit and the board must come up with another approach that delivers the full system with out scope cuts or decade long deferrals. #noexcuses www.theurbanist.org/op-ed-reconn...

Rep. Katie Jones is asking: Without objective service goals, the infrastructure owners (cities/counties) and transit operators are duplicating civil works and raising the costs/time of transit improvements. www.house.mn.gov/comm/docs/n8...

How California transit operators and institutions understand transit