New on the blog: how @caltrain.com could accomplish level boarding soon, fast and cheap. This is their most important capital project.

Complaints from the Palace Hotel shut down SF and SJ RR service on Market Street to 9th Street. Feels like terminal service on Market Street would have likely lead to SP electrifying the Peninsula service and building a subway around 1910.

In the condo defect system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the builder lawyers who sue contractors and the plaintiff lawyers who also get paid.

I realize writers aren’t responsible for headlines, but describing California’s condo laws as “bureaucracy” is particularly wrong. Instead of civil servants protecting home buyer deposits and ensuring quality construction, we’ve outsourced the work to plaintiffs attorneys.

I’m going to name a name: Hydee Feldstein Soto, the LA City Attorney, was, from what I saw, the most gung-ho in opposition, and played a huge role in killing it in LA. She just lost reelection – first time in a century. It turns out that there is political risk to being a NIMBY in a housing crisis.

Unit type for HDB production from 1960-1984. Interesting to see how 1 bedroom provision dominated in the early years of the program when there was lots of pressure to quickly resettle central slums.

Construction claims on the Hetch Hetchy Railroad.

East 21st St in Oakland is getting a repaving project, and here we see TVRR's work to amend Measure U paying off. TVRR got language to make sure the paving program also included safety upgrades, and here you can see OakDOT using this opportunity. 1/x @tvrr.bsky.social @walkoakbikeoak.bsky.social

I really enjoyed this Mark Berry interview with @freewheeling.info re what it took to push forward South Wales Metro. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

I wrote about why new apartments in Walnut Creek offer a pretty low living standard and why it's impossible to build a 3 bedroom apartment with a playground here. kevin.burke.dev/kevin/walnut...

My colleague @jmooreotto.bsky.social is in @ifp.bsky.social’s Transit Cost Playbook. He argues for replacing discretionary grant financing for transit projects with federal loans! The current regime shreds state planning capacity due to intermittent and capricious funding. ifp.org/loans-can-st...

A lot to like in this Transit Abundance Playbook. ifp.org/transit-abun...

Just on urban history signifiers, I prefer George over McDuffie.

Cool how Sacramento gave California BIA (sprawl builders) a veto over changes in the building code, but doesn't actually control it. Cooked in a lab to get terrible policies.

Everyone treats these issues very individualistically, whether it's pushing for an exemption specifically for their project or blaming "rogue agencies" for having somehow uniquely high costs. When typically the rogue agencies problem is too many consultants, which requires systemic reform.

There’s a wide open lane for the legislature and governor to do something about urban transit costs. Current reforms are typically limited to project specific relief for CEQA or procurement flexibility. Not the broad permitting reform or state capacity necessary to actually move the needle.

Spot on op-ed from Payton Rockwood asking California state leaders to give urban rail transit the #SB79 treatment - i.e. preempting local veto over rail lines: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor....

Indeed Henry George said the opposite

“[Lincoln-Roosevelt League stalwart & future California Railroad Commissioner] Max Thelen led, and apparently thrived on, an intense dual life. By day he was a diligent Western Pacific lawyer… Max returned to Berkeley [from WP offices]… only to be caught up in the demands of local politics.”

Mort d’auteur but I don’t think Henry George would agree with Patrick Condon that we should tax housing development instead of land rents to address housing affordability.

I regret to inform you that Phil Bokovoy is back in Berkeley and is spending his time spreading FUD about BART and Connect Bay Area.

Moving onto Kerr’s American Railroad Politics 1914-1920: Rates, Wages, and Efficiency. Shippers, who predominated in ICC, lost influence with nationalization via Railroad Administration (RA) in late 1917.

“The [ICC] lacked economic wisdom. Its members had seemed, at the beginning of the troubles, to be as well qualified for their task as anyone could expect. Nearly all of them were lawyers, & since when had anyone needed any other qualification to serve in government.” Martin’s Enterprise Denied

Electric railways and vehicles are national resilience and energy sovereignty.

Electric rail crayoning bill ✅ beyer.house.gov/uploadedfile...

The way Saint-Étienne modernized it's tram in the 1970s-2000s is a great lesson for cities like Toronto, Boston, Philly, San Francisco etc. It's all there: circulation planning, new dedicated RoW, priority route with systematic descoping of lateral streets (RI-RO) etc.

The dynamics between ULA and the current Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association are a lot like Prop 13 in 1978. Local govt is unable to fix the issue, Legislators from outside of LA don't feel responsible and expect someone else to fix it. California is sleep walking into a new fiscal crisis.

Coming up on Wednesday. Listen to Robert Raburn and then talk to me about the Geary Subway as an automated light metro.

Steve Glazer (Orinda) is the face of opposition to Connect Bay Area in the media. His opinions about transit are incoherent. He wants flat fares for BART so trips to/from Antioch are cheaper, but he also wants BART to cut spending and opposes the regional measure. www.politico.com/newsletters/...

In April Caltrans released their 2025 State Rail Plan Annual Report. It discusses shifting from planning and investment based on horizons to network states where service expansion, including capital projects, are tied to actual project delivery. dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-...

The Thomas L. Berkely Way bike lanes / road diet between 19th Street BART and Lake Merritt is great.

Listening to @dereksagehorn.bsky.social talk about the history of Prop 13 (fittingly with the Tribune Tower in the background).

I'll be there! Join us!

Who has cross sections or plans for stations for the following light metros? - Broadway Line - Ontario Line - Sepulveda

Concerning

I PRA’d the bid tab summary for a different curb ramp contract let under streamlined procurement rules. Top line: the post-reform procurement quadrupled the number of bidders and drove pricing down to the top range of peer jurisdictions.

Whether you elect someone to make regional decisions or not seems central. When you elect the mayor of your nothing suburb do you think you're making a decision about the subway 20mi away? If you are and you don't know that, it seems like a problem!

A mandate from voters for SMART to shave two minutes off their 32 minute schedule by building two new sidings.

No service vision No quantified service goals No basis to include additional cubic yards of concrete to support improved accessibility and more reliable dwell times in routine paving

The US has a massive talent pipeline of institutions like public universities dedicated to solving engineering problems, eg digging and pouring concrete. We don’t have a similar pipeline for phone call problems, where the solution is getting the necessary decision makers in the room.

I am perplexed by the S.F. partisans outraged that S.F. Bike Coalition endorsed Scott Wiener over Connie Chan - given that the latter’s signature policy priorities over the past six years have been re-opening JFK Drive and Sunset Dunes to cars.

Real prisoners dilemma with locally-generated traffic modeling and cost estimates under a consultant-dominated system. Either strategically misrepresent traffic & costs that will create problems later Or Be upfront and never get traction relative to projects that do strategically misrepresent.

Has anyone compared the service qualities of Wilshire subway plans pre Henry Waxman's congressional ban and what actually got built or is being built? Did the speed, capacity or station access get better or decline?

A wild document and it seems to massively overcomplicate what seems to be a fairly straightforward problem of, "we have one of the busiest bus lines in the nation, let's replace it with a train".

This State Auditor's report on East Bay bus agencies seems to actively misunderstand what transit service coordination and integration in terms of schedules and routes actually looks like. www.auditor.ca.gov/reports/2025...

Awful result. This is downstream of making commitments to projects at 0% design in ST3. It doesn’t matter how much construction money or program management you have if you’re making decisions out of sequence.

New York State just authorized a land value tax that could generate billions of dollars for new transit. For the @niskanencenter.bsky.social, @aarmlovi.bsky.social and I wrote about how the renewal of § 119-r in the FY27 budget could unlock a virtuous cycle of infrastructure delivery in NYC.

The way SFCTA Geary/19th planners are using “integrated part of the region’s rail network” here indicates they seem to believe that a one seat ride is the only way to integrate transit trips. www.sfcta.org/sites/defaul...