Even in planning circles I feel like the importance of international migration for city growth is underappreciated. Immigrants account for nearly all of population growth in the biggest cities. The story also notes that the multifamily market will be more affected than sales.

He said this a year ago, not last week. We really need to start taking what folks say seriously when they say it. Not when it’s suddenly problematic. These people have been arguing for surveilled and private city-states for a long time.

As a middle aged white guy who follows plenty of middle aged white guys here I’m surprised at the lack of chatter that Jeff Tweedy released a triple album on Friday. Seems there should be more overlap in my follows interests. It’s a good record!

Another point that has been made before, but this is a perfect example of how his reality is exclusively made up of things he sees on television. Exclusively.

The core of the rivalry according to this piece is Meta will collect training data through its glasses and Tesla will collect those data through its cars. And those data will go through AI magic and give the world humanoid robots. Then we all get our own C-3PO, which will not drive or wear glasses.

Waymo is back up running in Phoenix, but with limited cars. They were out from midday Friday through Saturday due to rain storms Friday. No idea what happened or why, but that’s a pretty severe disruption in service because of a storm.

This is an incredible shot.

Lyndon LaRouche was appropriately treated as a crank and I think today he’d be mainstream GOP.

Waymo is still shutdown in the Phoenix area, per users there. >24 hour outage bc of rain in Arizona. FWIW, I imagine Waymo's Phoenix ops team has been overwhelmed by the dozens if not hundreds of immobilized and/or partially submerged robots they've had to retrieve and inspect, repair, clean, etc.

Chandler, AZ is incorporating Waymo into its microtransit service. The fare is usually $2 but Waymo’s will be $1 for a while. “According to the city, some of the most popular destinations include schools. The city estimated that nearly half of the 36,000 annual rides are to and from school.”

The best Bob Dylan covers are when he does them himself and makes a totally different song.

The current tariffs are causing automakers to back off of work to make cars lighter. So, tariffs will have some effect on overall road safety.

ICYMI: Proximity is the Enemy of Mobility (and Mobility is the Enemy of Proximity)

TIL about Project Graham, where researchers and artists collaborated to design a human that can survive modern roads. www.meetgraham.com.au

I hope this show is all about the invention of the t-test. Gift link.

In this story they talked to a guy who lives four blocks away (!) from the proposed ADU and is very opposed to anything that changes the neighborhood he's lived in for 40 years. It should not be a surprise that concerns about parking are driving the opposition.

Independent of the merits of this project, letting voters decide the fate if individual projects is bad for planning.

Sure, why not add screwworms to the mix. I guess we haven’t heard about killer bees for a while, either.

I've never understood diplomatic immunity for traffic rules.

Rare opportunity to get paid to write about why urban highways are bad! streets.mn/2025/09/23/c...

Mamadou is the Shatoshi Nakamoto of New York food delivery. Gift link.

This reminds me of The Blaster, a South African invention that was a flamethrower attached to a car to deter car thieves.

For some reason they are outside of First Avenue in Minneapolis.

ASU attendee does the university proud.

This is a good piece. Another good quote: “I can teach you how to drive a bus. I can’t teach you to be nice.”

The "I Voted" stickers were popularized after a 1985 Phoenix vote for a new tax to build freeways. A Realtor group designed them to give out to morning voters, so people who hadn't voted yet would get inspired. Afternoon voting was known to drop off. People wanted the freeways and the tax passed 2-1

With Cass Sunstein in the news with bad takes again today, we can revisit how Nudge isn't an effective theory of policy, either.

This is a huge issue in many US cities. The tax implications of RTO/WFH are not at all settled.

The Phoenix region has lots of microtransit services, from neighborhood circulators to on-demand. Chandler just added Waymo for on-demand service, so part of that service is now AVs. The service already existed.

The Perfect Cycling Family? An exploratory analysis of depictions of family cycling https://findingspress.org/article/144444-the-perfect-cycling-family-an-exploratory-analysis-of-depictions-of-family-cycling?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Taxis are credence goods, as most riders trust they aren't getting ripped off and the service is safe. Regulations help here. Tesla is undermining the idea that AVs are safe with their service, and that will hurt the industry overall, as most people will associated AVs with crashes if this keeps up

I'm curious how much of this is an effect of urbanization being strongly associated with party ID, which is older than this divergence. If it is, then something wild has happened in the suburbs since 2020. Urban has been mostly blue, rural mostly red, and suburbs pretty even. See charts here.

It's not like energy has been that important for global power or anything. I'm sure the US doubling down on the economy of a century ago will be just fine. Gift link.

The Superfine Dandelion - The Other Sidewalk [Phoenix, AZ, USA ; Psychedelic Rock] (1967) https://redd.it/1bpvuyn https://youtu.be/Uth10vJXdz4

The homes in Phoenix’s Willo neighborhood are historic, but also small by modern standards, and located near downtown where denser development should occur. If we want to preserve these homes we should move them. The homes can be preserved while the neighborhood changes.

It does not seem that there is a clear overall RTO story, and that it's a bit of a muddle right now. As noted recently, it seems stable around 25% of work days done remotely, firms use it to cull workforce, and employees like it. We aren't fully remote, nor are we fully in-office.

Pissing from the springboard, volume 644,473 www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/u...

It’s more like national potato lunch hour, tbh.

The pandemic and RTO hybrid schedules may have strengthened the pull of suburbia, according to research cited here. Gift link.

The effect of car dependency: in 1940, Basil Rathbone was photographed wearing an overcoat outside his home. As more men relied on cars, overcoats became shorter to accommodate drivers. Today, the right is marketed as an "overcoat," even if it would've been considered more sport coat length in 1940.

I have a major piece in Bloomberg Citylab today. Should the US let transit fail, as Pennsylvania is already doing? And if not, what are the arguments we need to let it succeed? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Overpromising to investors is one thing, and overpromising to the government is another.

It seems that simultaneously to raising the H1-B visa to $100k he lowered the cost of the Trump Gold Card path to residency and citizenship to a starting price of $1million. If businesses pay $2million they get an unspecified number of visas.

This is an interesting argument in favor of moving more freight to rail from truck, which we should do. There are trade-offs between costs and speed, of course. gift link.

I strongly agree with every single word of this. Public disorder is toxic to the pro urbanist political project and we must take it seriously.

I agree with this, and I think it is past time to make cars a focus of planning cities and infrastructure. By that I mean we should decide what cars are allowed (by size, weight, and speed maximums) and allow firms to make whatever fits within those parameters.

Data centers bring noise and pollution and impressively few jobs relative to their size. They are the opposite of what is needed, especially in (sub)urban areas.

These are two bad ideas for this land. The data center is truly a bad idea: "Developers are salivating for the 13 acres of land — nestled among trendy boutiques and high-end housing on leafy parkways along the Mississippi River — with visions ranging from a data center to a new NBA arena."

New Uber Feature Allows Women To Request Nonthreatening Eunuch Driver https://theonion.com/new-uber-feature-allows-women-to-request-nonthreatening-eunuch-driver/