Stone pavings of Helsinki I really would like to know the per sqm cost, the construction and maintenance budget, and who funds what and how because the quality of soil treatment in new developments is incredible. In Montréal, we can't even afford to use stone in our most iconic main street.

Chicago’s Divvy bikeshare shattered records in August: 🥇Highest month in program history: 995K rides 🥇Highest month for e-bikes: 500K+ rides 🥇Highest month for scooters: 200K+ rides The City's efforts to make Divvy more affordable & accessible are paying off!

Just got the hottest ticket in Chicago events.bloomberglive.com/event/9d5b2d...

How could you not support someone with such excellent taste in television???

Argyle, Wilson, and Cermak (Chinatown) are consistently three of the best-recovered CTA stops, while the rest of the Red Line sits at varying levels of average.

The hits keep coming: Another proactive rezoning to B-3 (5-6 stories) on Cottage Grove in Bronzeville between 43rd and 47th

They should have done this for Lincoln Yards and the 78.

What’s happening to the CTA here!? Would be super curious to see this broken down by line. Also wonder what the 2019 stats would look like.

On the one hand this station looks cool and accessibility retrofits (not just elevators but wider platforms etc.) are much needed. On the other hand its hard to see us getting construction costs under control *at all* if a single station renovation costs $440M. blockclubchicago.org/2025/08/20/s...

California is so backward we first need to eliminate ***helicopter*** parking mandates???

More than three years after I went to my first community meeting about this, Clark Street Bike Lanes (Montrose to Winnemac) are finally happening!

This is in no way a dunk, but reading the blurbs of From Boom to Bubble makes it clear how much the discourse has changed - “overbuilding” discourse is the post-recession era replaced by emphasis on its opposite. The question is which part of today’s discourse will be the same in ~10 years!

This bungalow for sale in the 13th Ward has a pre-ADU: - separate kitchen & bathroom in the basement - compliant basement ceiling height - a separate entrance from the outside to the basement without having to go through the main floor Why block the homeowner from renting the basement out?

846 marks the highest CTA Rail staffing levels since 2019. Solid flagger class too. On pace to hit those pre-pandemic numbers just in time for the fiscal cliff to hit.

I wrote about how to get deeply affordable housing, and the duality of housing programs daniel-kay-hertz.ghost.io/how-to-get-d...

For all the HHN fans out there you can thank local advocacy groups like @betterstreetschicago.org and activists like @foxyjewishmama.bsky.social for winning faster buses and safer bike lanes so hopefully the only horrors you have are on purpose and fun.

The rolling dismount #RealBiker

One thing that is interesting here: It doesn't seem like the modern conception of aldermanic prerogative had taken hold yet. No one would ever say this today--it assumes that the decision is the administration's, which they would have to fight to overturn, as opposed to the other way around

"If passed, Baltimore would join dozens of places around the country that already have eliminated minimum parking requirements." www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/tr...

Awesome to see ONE Northside endorse the largest upzoning in modern Chicago history. If you believe in the efficacy of inclusionary zoning, it only makes sense to support large scale increases in zoned housing capacity

Chicago's got a live single stair bill now, from Alder Matt Martin chicityclerkelms.chicago.gov/Matter/?matt...

saw a couple of dudes sitting on folding chairs on their bare 3-flat rooftop overlooking the L tracks and drinking a case of beers, this is what chicago is all about

Lord, I see what you have done for others (Berkeley's public rental registry to track unit-level rents)...

I HATE this narrative around Cuomo. The retort to “he got a lot done” isn’t “but he harassed women and was a bully,” it’s “actually he didn’t do much at all – it was just an act – and he let a lot of problems fester with his inaction and awful management style.”

This coach house was built in 2023 by the couple who own the property to have a place for their mother in law to live in and help take care of their newborn child. The “granny flat” is real.

This looks like a great project, but pretty high parking ratio for rentals in that part of town, and a five story podium..! 🫠 chicagoyimby.com/2025/04/rend...

Pretty funny that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms ends with the triumph of Jin, who [offstage, after the book] fall apart after just 36 years, and end up re-establishing themselves just controlling what used to be Wu.

"Down with the BRT, long live the bus." I've just published an unusually polemical, argumentative post on my Substack explaining why I think Bus Rapid Transit is a failed planning concept. open.substack.com/pub/marcochi...

Chicago’s stagnation here is pretty notable and very worrying, and suggests that their post pandemic bounce back is nearly over. They need more funding, but *also* management that is laser focused on nuts & bolts of operations - hiring, frequency, reliability, safety, cleanliness!

CDOT opened another one of 100 planned electrified bikeshare stations in Chicago yesterday. Electrifying just a fraction of Divvy stations will eliminate dramatic amounts of battery swapping, VMT & CO₂ emissions each year! chi.streetsblog.org/2025/04/03/a...

Hanging this left vs. center-left abundance debate on elevator standards is funny because the actual people in the US elevator industry writing and defending the US standard have no clue what a YIMBY is (nevermind an “Ezra Klein”), and mostly voted for Trump resnikoff.beehiiv.com/p/the-abunda...

New from me! The hidden costs of CTA's $5.75B Red Line Extension. A story of forgotten finances, risk, and opportunity costs. citythatworks.substack.com/p/the-red-li...

⚛️ GREAT NEWS: this week, a bill to allow Large Modular Reactors in Illinois will be in committee! There are just two states in the country with an arbitrary limit on the size of a nuclear reactor. Sign all four witness slips: HB3603 is.gd/cvfIZn is.gd/vHoeqe HB3604 is.gd/6LIQ9C is.gd/QrpgPz

I’d have a lot more sympathy for the CTA - and be willing to believe that it really is a money issue more than a management/leadership issue - if the CTA themselves had been ringing the alarm about this. On the current course the system will be more than half slow zone by 2030!

What may surprise folks is civil servants are directly *subject to* common irritations with government: delays, red tape, arbitrariness. They’re regularly at the mercy of funding shortages and threats of political retaliation. Many work under policy-enforced risk aversion. DOGE dialed all of it up.

When the tribune tower was built there were two and three flats directly behind it

Parking requirements in Chicago exist on paper but functionally are non-binding in ~99% of developments post-2022 reform; they do create an administrative burden, however

Chicago Single Stair Question! If 3-8 flats weren’t required to have two stairs, I suspect they still might have them in order to have easy front and rear access - the alternative in a typical layout would be ground floor hallway running from front to back.

“To fix the problems of American governance… A good place to start would be where government is currently under assault: public administration. It’s not enough just to defend the administrative state — it must be strengthened.”

The National Weather Service took more than 150 years to build. Forget flight or the internet or whatever - public-service systems like this are the marvels of the modern world. Conceptual cathedrals, constructed across generations and dedicated to the public good.

Chicago Area Transit Costs Question: Why is the SSL West Lake Corridor so much less expensive (1/5th the cost - ~$1B vs. ~$5B, iirc?) for a new (albeit single-tracked) construction rail segment that’s twice as long as RLE and also includes ~4 new stations? @egoldwyn.bsky.social ?

I very much hope that the focus is on *consistent* 10-minute all-day headways and not just throwing more bunched buses out there

Exciting news for transit users in Chicago: The CTA is committing to frequent, all-day bus service on 20 routes throughout the city, starting with core routes on the South Side later this month. [Now getting the operations right to maintain even headways is key.]

On December 16th, DPD and Wards 46, 47, and 48 are hosting the final open house regarding the proposed proactive rezoning of Broadway! 🏘️

Urban housing crises wrecked our capacity to absorb immigrants. Earlier waves from failed states in and around the Caribbean found apartments in Miami and Brooklyn. But in 2023, those doors were closed, so we got Midtown Hotels and random Rust Belt towns – not places so used to that kind of thing.