Bureacratic timidity was Not the problem with the Red Line. Problem was Republican hostility to transit and to Baltimore, manifested in the Ehrlich and Hogan administrations.

The inability of US cities to expand their rail networks is becoming increasingly shocking www.urban.org/urban-wire/r...

MAGA a working-class party? Here's why the Trump-backed candidate decided to run in NV-02: "I was paying seven bucks, now I'm paying 15 to 17 bucks an hour for labor, because guess what they did? They could not get minimum wage to $15 an hour in Congress, so they do it through COVID & unemployment"

Bass (center-NIMBY) is puffing up Pratt (right-NIMBY) as a way to lock Raman (left-YIMBY) out of the race, meanwhile Huang (left-NIMBY) is acting as a spoiler to divide the left vote. 3/4 candidates functionally collaborating to shut out the only one who would do something about LA's housing crisis.

You can see catenary installation close-up today at the Bethesda Purple Line station.

Very good review of Molly Crabapple's book on the Bund. I would only add that her few mentions of Bundists in the US are badly distorted by ideological bias. forward.com/yiddish-worl...

The San Francisco progressives who bear a lot of the responsibility for this will insist that they are fighting against neoliberalism and against the commodification of housing.

The fruits of a system that makes affordable parking mandatory and affordable housing illegal. Means-tested free parking -- the vehicle owner can't use it unless they also own a house. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/u...

Joan Robinson: A real Marxist would be an analyst of their own era's economy, not a text-worshipping bearer of a sacred book. Karl Kautsky said the same: What Marx meant by "scientific" socialism is: Change the theory when its predictions don't match events. braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-jo...

This is a very good law. The same rule should apply when someone is walking or standing on a narrow sidewalk that is right next to the curb.

Well, I got the timing wrong. Looking right now like the time frame was 2 months.

Apropos of nothing in particular that might be getting online attention right now: How the Wobbly leader Big Bill Haywood in the 1920s defended his fondness for 25 cent cigars: "Nothing is *too good* for the proletariat."

The way this post has broken out of urbanist bluesky & gone viral backs up the poll finding. (Which I found credible even though the polling methods aren't well described, because the poll sponsor, Lending Tree, earns its keep from car loans & wants people to buy cars.)

A symbolic milestone! Purple Line test trains will run next month through Columbia Country Club and past the Town of Chevy Chase. The Club and the Town spent millions of dollars and pulled political strings, delaying the light rail 30 years but ultimately failing to stop it.

The AOC-MTG spat wasn't about coalitions or tactics. It was about two fundamentally different visions for the future of the American left. I wrote about it. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

❗❗❗❗ 49% of Americans say that if they could reliably get where they needed without owning a car, they probably wouldn’t want one. ❗❗❗❗ (While our federal government & most states are making it harder to get where you need without a car.) www.lendingtree.com/auto/afforda...

In 2023, I reported on a network of people exploiting weak rules in New Jersey and Georgia to illegally sell temporary license plates through sham car dealerships. Yesterday, DOJ announced federal charges against eleven people involved in some of those dealerships: www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr...

NYT poll of Democrats shows voters' idea of left & right not about economics. 47% want party to move to center, 19% not move, 28% move left BUT 49% favor socialism, 29% don't. More want party to move left on healthcare, to center on crime, immigration, transgender. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Our local election scorecard is here! TRANSIT SCORECARD - WHERE THE CANDIDATES STAND ON TRANSIT ISSUES www.actfortransit.org/scorecards2026

Israeli ambassador to US says J Street & Bernie Sanders aren't Jewish. He is mirroring "neo-Bundism." Both impose a political test on Jewish peoplehood. In so doing, they reject a fundamental premise of the movement (Zionism, Bundism) they purport to continue. www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...

neutrality in union negotiations is a normal thing in social democracies

Will the $1.8B slush fund wind up in the hands of Trump's Jan 6 foot soldiers or his rich buddies? Or his own? I think we have to wait & see, but on past performance the likelihood of the foot soldiers getting stiffed is high.

Wondering about a driver with a "I love my Eagle Scout" bumper sticker + half of the license plate covered to enable speeding and red light running without automated enforcement.

The monopolistic greed of the Washington Nationals has really gotten out of hand. To watch them on TV, not only do I have to pay an annual fee, I have to buy a new TV. To buy tickets online, I have to sign up for a Mastercard service that enables them to spam my mobile phone with texts.

A full write-up on the transit oriented development law just passed by the Maryland legislature. Includes the amendment proposed by @actfortransit.bsky.social which exempts mixed-use development on WMATA-owned parking lots from most local land use restrictions. ggwash.org/view/103392/...

The same trip right now by car would take 36 minutes - not including the time involved in parking. Just saying.

My Red Line train just went from Bethesda to Farragut North in 13 min 0 sec (door close to door close). This was a 15 min trip under ATO pre-2009 when it was my daily commute. Maybe 14 min early am. 19-20 min to Union Station, was 22-23 early am. Kudos to @wmatagm.bsky.social & entire Red Line team.

This is entirely correct. But also: The reason gasoline is an "inelastically supplied good" is that we've built a country where few people have a good way to get around other than driving.

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

On the Baltimore Red Line, everyone knows what "Bus Rapid Transit" means. It's a bus that's an excuse for not giving you a train. www.thebanner.com/opinion/colu...

Related to that is that the "When is anti-Zionism antisemitism?" discourse often misses the point. If "anti-imperialism" makes you favor wiping out not just Israelis, but also Uighurs, Rohingya & Ukrainians, you're not an antisemite. But you're just as bad as one!

Looks like Iran is asking for full US surrender. Kind of a mirror image of what Trump is asking for, at least in public, from Iran. This won't be over soon. www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...

TBF there were lots of Protestant pastors who would have told you that Henry VIII had a better understanding of what the Bible teaches than the Pope.

Light rail is not rapid transit. Rapid transit is a train that doesn't stop at road intersections. The idea of light rail was a hybrid between rapid transit and streetcar. BRT in the US means "the bus you get when you wanted a train." An anti-rail marketing term. dissentmagazine.org/article/brt-...

People have been asking for [what became] the Purple Line for 4 decades (since 1986)!🙋 www.actfortransit.org/act_and_purp... And we're almost there!

A truly appalling statistic buried in this article shows the magnitude of the driver impunity that kills thousands of pedestrians & cyclists every year. 14,600 different cars have been ticketed for speeding in a New York City school zone more than 16 times each! www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/n...

Just got the following email from the NYC bar association: "Update: All attorneys from the United States Attorney's Offices have withdrawn from participating in this year's White Collar Crime Conference."

Overhead wire installation for the Purple Line in downtown Silver Spring begins in two weeks. 88u74cfbb.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001...

The only true Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicts the stock & commodity markets that still believe what Trump says.

How on earth does NYT run a front-page story based on a study of which they've only seen the abstract and not the whole paper? How is a 2% increase in a variable that fluctuates year-to-year front page news? 1/2 www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/n...

NEWS: The D.C. Council has given final approval to @brianneknadeau.bsky.social's bill that would allow for smaller buildings to be built in D.C. with a single stairwell, instead of two as currently required. Proponents say it would allow building on small lots, and bigger units.

Joe Biden did exactly what generations of scholars & activists have blamed the German Social Democrats for not doing when the failed to stop Hitler. He fought & won against economic austerity. Both were victims of coalition circumstances for which they were not to blame.

Contrarian opinion: US Democrats should spend more time studying Australian Labor's recent successes than British Labour's recent collapse of support. Labour's poll numbers are no worse than other Social Democratic parties with varied policies. Australian Labor's success is almost unique.

The stated purpose of the MUTCD is uniformity. Which is needed - it would be very bad if green meant go in one state & red meant go in another. Warrants have nothing to do with that. Let engineers use approved devices based on guidelines + latest research, just as doctors prescribe approved drugs.

Slightly diminish a book: Goethe's Fast

Your "reason HAWKs exist" is not completely wrong, but really the reason HAWKs exist is that traffic engineering agencies feel pressured to make walking safer and are trying to preserve the status quo while giving the appearance of doing something rather than trying to solve the problem.

Planners like to compromise by giving the nimbys what the nimbys say they want. Which is rarely what the nimbys actually want (which is, no building at all).

Dept. of useless medical insurance paperwork. This is the only non-zero item in the thick envelope I got today from my Medicare drug plan.

When I testified, the Delegates from Baltimore City were extremely aware of this problem & very much wanted something done. Legislation was in fact passed this year and awaits the governor's signature. mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/L...

Turns out that if I want to watch Nationals games on my TV (rather than watch them on my desktop or my phone), not only do I need to pay for a subscription, I need to buy a new TV. Which I learned only by calling up, going through a voice menu that told me to watch on MASN, and talking to a human.