Currently at a crossroads thinking about long-term plans and I’d love to shadow a transit service planner sometime. I’ve been fascinated by service planning since I was a kid and learning more about their day-to-day work would be really helpful! 🚌🗺️

There's two fundamental downsides to mass AV use: 1. They fail in "novel" situations that humans can adapt to. Ranging from annoying to "isolated" collisions to blocking streets after a quake. 2. Like Uber/taxis, AVs spend more "useless" time on the road than personal cars, creating worse traffic.

For a preview of what's to come from AVs, look to San Francisco. As ex-SFMTA CEO @jeffreytumlin.bsky.social explained here, affluent people love Waymos. But they muck up transport networks by blocking streets and obstructing transit. What’s good for individual riders may not be good for the city.

happy boxing day to all who celebrate

"Le is one of a handful of Asian women who operate San Francisco buses. Among the roughly 2,500 Muni operators employed by the SFMTA, about 80% are men and 20% are women. While Asian operators make up roughly 43% of the workforce, Asian women account for just 1.7%."

yellow line skokie, illinois

Downtown Boarkeley

📢🌾 I’ll 2x match up to $5,000 donated to the World Food Program between now and December 28th end of day. That‘s a 1x personal match and 1x employer match. We can raise $15,000 together, up to 60,000 meals. 🙏🏻 Just share your redacted receipt, I’ll match daily. donate.wfpusa.org/page/Funding...

📢🌾 I’ll 2x match up to $5,000 donated to the World Food Program between now and December 28th end of day. That‘s a 1x personal match and 1x employer match. We can raise $15,000 together, up to 60,000 meals. 🙏🏻 Just share your redacted receipt, I’ll match daily. donate.wfpusa.org/page/Funding...

Idea for anyone with machine image recognition skills: Take a bunch of fridge/freezer grocery photos, and a bunch of receipt images, and generate the itemized PGE food spoilage claim. www.pge.com/en/account/c... They rely on this being too tedious for people to do.

48 hours no power or running water, with 6AM restoration as the next estimate we’ll blow past. I’m hopping mad at the lack of planning and care on every single level.

While I’m at it, why is the mayor instagramming power outage updates without getting city departments to blast updates through more conventional channels? On the surface he looks good, if you think about it for a moment it’s bizarre.

The PR push around “we’re taking the power outage in the Richmond very seriously” lowkey icks me out for how much it de-centred the rest of the city. Thousands of people in Civic Center have no power OR water w/ yet another quiet delay, and narry a peep from Mr Vertical Video.

Why yes, my guinea pig takes BART.

California has fire code rules to veto plastic posts for protecting bike lanes California also has rules that allow Waymo to gridlock an entire city during an emergency with no consequences Why does state only care about fire response times when regulating bike lanes, but not when regulating tech?

Point that hits: trusting sources of truth doesn’t happen b/c people are smart, it happens b/c they are raised and culturally aligned to trust those sources. Appealing to intellect isn’t great at winning people over b/c intellect isn’t the common factor in why you trust the institutions you do!

What a waste of energy. This will be the third vote. The park is more popular than ever. Voters aren't going to convert the third most popular park in the city to a road. www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s...

This always drives me a little nuts about people posting that quote. He is talking to children, and it's good advice for children. But you are an adult. You are not supposed to look for the helpers. You are supposed to BE a helper

I think about that "once you accept that all positive changes will negatively affect some poor people, and negatively affecting any poor people isn't progressive, then you'll understand the cornerstone of progressivism is doing nothing" tweet a lot.

There’s a problem in large swaths of political advocacy where introducing any negative externality (“but what if a chronic dangerous driver needs to drive to work?”) is an unacceptable evil. Any status quo harms are just the natural order of things. Unfortunately, almost any change has a downside.

most people, left and right, treat traffic violence like the weather and not a specific policy choice

i think a (perhaps underappreciated) aspect of this whole situation is the extent to which every elite profession is filled with people who excel at drawing attention and want to be famous more than they want to do the actual job

At the #muniForever rally @jackiefielder.bsky.social calls on Mayor Lurie to raise the parcel tax cap for skyscrapers from $400k to 800k and eliminate tenant passthroughs. “As Muni goes, so goes the city.” Says if we don’t see movement in negotiations, we’ll be back with more to announce.

this is a good excuse to post my all time favorite Star Trek meme

“Slop” type content on demand is kind of the ultimate peak of senseless craving - stuff that just exists to optimally hold your attention for the sake of holding it - and it feels like something that Dharma teachers should hone in on.

Wheee, new handle.

King tides bring a glimpse of the future, as sea levels rise. This photo is the highway north out of SF, in Sausalito. Imagine the billions of dollars to be spent on adaptation just in the Bay Area.

Day 3 #ArtAdventCalendar. Thinking of Claude, the albino alligator who died this week at age 30 at the Steinhart Aquarium. Claude was a quiet, compelling and constant presence at the Aquarium and we will miss him. Tissue paper and acrylic on canvas.

Tonight's sunset

I think part of What's Going On with billionaires is that the daily friction of interacting with normal people is part of what anchors people to the real world, and once you have enough money to buy your way out of the friction you can knock down a load-bearing column propping up your sanity.

IMO what you really want to look for in weather systems and daily conditions is cirrus clouds and other high altitude clouds, without too much low cloud cover in front of the sun.

We can restore at least 2019 service if we pass Muni Now, Muni Forever's community parcel tax proposal. But Daniel Lurie is pushing his own version that would lock in cuts (in order to save millions for downtown companies like Marc Benioff's Salesforce who just got Trump tax cuts). Write a letter!

I know I sound like a broken record on this and that’s OK. Montreal gets a lot right. But one of my biggest disappointments of this city’s political establishment is saying “no” to an amazing automated train for the underserved east end of the city for largely aesthetic reasons.

In the glass-and-steel canyons

Bad day for anyone who breathes air in Oakland & the East Bay. Remember to mask up if you go outside & also help dismantle the fossil fuel dependency which leads to dangerous air and an unstable climate

San Francisco: please sign and support a Muni funding plan that will improve transit service and keep San Francisco moving! actionnetwork.org/letters/we-s...

i wrote a short film

A commendation goes a long way for Transit Operators, and this one got me out of a doldrums all on its own. If you find yourself recognizing and appreciating a Muni Operator for excellent service, consider submitting a commendation: www.sfmta.com/getting-arou...

'Iran’s capital must be moved because the country “no longer has a choice,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday in remarks carried by state media, warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain' #Iran 🇮🇷

toronto looking magical this afternoon

I wonder at what point do I make a fresh bluesky account to work around being delisted? Being un-Googlable ongoing sucks.

Being on the east coast is crazy. I wake up and there aren't any posts, and then I try to go to sleep but sports aren't done and a San Francisco politician is having another scandal and wait they've resigned?????

Violent rhetoric is not only strongly embedded in our cultural expression, it is an extremely well-known phenomenon that people consistently rate violent rhetoric used against them and people they like as significantly more severe than violent rhetoric used against people they dislike.

Goodnight, sweet prince. Muni's last Breda makes its second-last run. #byebyebreda

These stories dropped on the same day It's good-government reform to let the mayor unilaterally appoint department heads. By the way, he just appointed a supervisor who couldn't run a pet store

Animal cruelty and creating a public health hazard should utterly disqualify someone from getting tapped as an inexperienced supervisor. Mayor Lurie failed due diligence and should seek to reverse the appointment. sfstandard.com/2025/11/10/s...

All right, I've got it everybody: if it's AI, it's bad; if there's AI doing something good; it's not AI.

“No negative externalities allowed” results in blanket anti-actionable-change politics, because the status quo is so good. Never mind how real or unreal the negative externalities even are.