Why your next car should be an electric cargo bike

"Make cities better" may be the best direction for climate action in these grim times. 80% of Americans live in urban areas. Creating neighborhoods with reliable, frequent public transit, protected active transit, and dense, affordable housing could make US cities *so much better to live in* while..

Watching a panel on "urbanism as climate action." This is a huge, burgeoning field/idea/movement, but the desiccated boomer counsels who decide where climate funding goes are *clueless* about it and so it has to seek funding elsewhere.

Despite all of these junkets, I don’t think either the Austrians or the Americans really have a clue about what the circumstances are like in the other place. Neither understands the vast gulf in demand, shortage, or construction cost between the two places.

“Why your next car should be an electric cargo bike” www.theverge.com/transportati...

73 units of social housing, a ton of family-sized homes... 3 and even 4-bedroom dwellings w/ daylight on 2 and even 3 sides. private outdoor space... and the building is less than 45' deep. and this is 100% illegal in all of the US www.archdaily.com/1033969/73-s...

Electrek: Tesla influencers tried Elon Musk’s coast-to-coast self-driving, crashed before 60 miles Hit debris in the road. Car kept going-after bouncing off the debris. Model Y had a broken sway bar bracket and damaged suspension components. electrek.co/2025/09/21/t...

under-rated form of radical activism. BDSM, among many things, if you wear normal clothes - the fancier, the better - and ride a bike at a relaxed pace with a basket full of groceries, you're sticking it to the oil/car/terrorism/fascism industry while showing everyone how fun it is to do that.

I’ve been saying forever that the federal government should condition HUD money on pro-housing reforms. Now the Trump administration is doing it but with anti-housing reforms.

In which parents(!) compare kids(!) getting measles(!) to an unavoidable(!) car crash — www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/u...

As flooding, sea level rise, fires, and other climate impacts increase, we'll need to move about 20 million Americans by 2100. Here's how we can rethink managed retreat to get ahead of the rising tides. bit.ly/4dlhuQN

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

If there's one thing that gives me hope it's growing number of folks who realize the decline of local journalism has disproportionate explanatory power for our current predicament. Craig did not intend to destroy local news. He just started a free classified list. But it destroyed local news.

Los Angeles' A line is now the longest light rail line in the world, if the Bay Area had something this long, it would run all the way from San Jose to San Francisco.

They banned cars in front of the New York Stock Exchange. In case you were wondering how real, actual capitalists feel about driver violence and communist car industry subsidies.

Given [waves hands at everything] I have some recommendations: 1: Subscribe to your local newspaper and see if there's a print edition. Read it at the kitchen table with coffee. 2: Find a bookstore and browse in it often, buy one book every time you go. 3: Stop consuming news online.

It really is like Nixon live blogging Watergate and the journalism establishment saying eh, what can you do

Wrote about how California needs to get serious about the urban disorder our failure to build housing has created.

I'd bet Los Angeles is going to fail as a city in the next ~ 10 years. Bankrupt and broken. At the core is the doctrinaire NIMBYism that governs the place -- a sure-fire way to go bankrupt -- but a culture that promotes NIMBY governance is the deeper issue: Nobody knows/cares what things cost.

“When you fail to provide outlets and agency to people, like these kids, they will take space for themselves” This isn’t even the best quote from this young rider about the passion the youth have for bikes. Fantastic content

Someone could write a very powerful story about the tenuous relationship Christian right has with the 1st Amendment. On the one hand, they exist because of it. On other hand, they absolutely do not want it to apply to their enemies -- especially, but not only, women, LGBTQ, and other "heretics."

I had this same experience last year when I visited Manhattan for the first time since 2014. And that’s why I live in New York, now.

New York needs more homes, because more people deserve to experience New York. (and it would lower rents!)

We know that transit is a lot safer than driving no matter how you slice it, and cities built to encourage transit trips see far less people dying on their streets. Making transit faster and more reliable has to be a part of the work to get Portland to zero traffic deaths.

we tried nothing to reduce traffic deaths and it somehow didn’t work missionlocal.org/2025/09/s-f-...

This is all very sad but misses the main point: Do not, under any circumstances, buy a house in Florida unless you can self-insure. Why people are still retiring there is beyond me. Buying homes? Insane. The place isn't going to make it.

What we call things reveals a lot about our priorities and biases. Graphic via @reenamahajan.bsky.social

Autonomous driving systems should be required to prove that they can safely pilot an 8‘6“-wide vehicle on streets with 9 foot travel lanes. If they can, cities will save a great deal of money on asphalt. If they can’t, they aren’t fit for purpose.

The failure of progressive philanthropy to give billions of dollars to shore up journalism is the mirror image of Sinclair and Fox and Disney utterly gutting freedom of speech, censoring voices on behalf of the fascist regime, and convincing one in six Americans that vaccines are poison.

One thing my time in the bikelash trenches has taught me about politics and media is that when you read a headline that says "Residents Outraged By New Bike Lane" and then click through to read the story you almost find out that the "residents" are like 17 people in a neighborhood of 30,000.

I would love to be part of the conversation on MSNBC related to the Kimmel story and it's chilling effects on first amendment, but unfortunately I was terminated by MSNBC for stating that "hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which lead to hateful actions".

Guys, where ya been. Those of us who track the media been warning y'all for decades. "Once Sinclair takes over a station, millions of Americans are exposed to a more politicized, right-leaning news broadcast with less local coverage every night." www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-...

Basically everybody needs to watch "Lives of Others" and "Handmaids Tale" to get a sense of where we are, and where we're headed. It's chaotic, but only nonsensical if you have no sense of history, and how "it happens here."

What did you think the Lost Cause of the Confederacy was really about? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

The revolution will not be televised will not be televised will not be televised

The number of "climate Mayors" who actively block the list important climate interventions should make us all think about what it means to be a "climate Mayor" in 2025. Hint: Not what you think it means.

*President of the Confederate States We really need to move out of the denial stage of grief, here. 2016 was 9 years ago. The Confederate Supreme Court has already ruled that Trump is immune to the laws of the former United States. Maybe we should accept that, and move on?

Showing more hustle in heels than the jackbooted and masked agents 👠💅

Buses Definitely Fuck, Man

Driver violence is out of control in @adenaishii.bsky.social 's Berkeley. If she & city council won't act, we need to start taking action in streets ourselves. Enough concern for feelings of violent drivers. Make streets safe and enforce the law, or resign. www.berkeleyscanner.com/2025/09/16/t...

I can imagine no possible scenario that we get on the 1.5C track. The global vehicle fleet of 2045 is already ~ 60% gasoline SUVs, and -- unless we shut down the EU and U.S. car industries, and spend $ trillions on "cash for clunkers" -- will be closer to ~ 75% by 2030.

To extent they call themselves climate activists, I think electric car advocates have to be the most dishonest people I've ever known in activism. Just a steadfast refusal to believe math and science of climate change and car pollution. Suburban car brain has ruined our chances to solve climate.

The problem with takes like these is that they fail to consider how vehicle fleet turnover actually works, at all, a massive and fatal blind spot that dooms climate activism. It's true that China is leading the world with EVs. But the U.S. is leading the world with gas-guzzling trucks & SUVs.

If you spend just a few days outside of a car in the United States -- which, admittedly, most adult Americans have never done in their lives -- you can't avoid concluding that we are an exceptionally violent country. Want to understand our current political predicament? It starts behind the wheel.

"…and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel.”

This is infuriating. Letting people drive into your city with their uninsured and illegally modified pickup trucks is no way to run a city. sfstandard.com/opinion/2025...

Democracy dies in darkness.

This will end up doing more long-term damage to the U.S. economy than anything else that has happened, IMO. To treat delegates from a modern, technologically advanced society this way -- especially when we're a backwater governed by batshit religious fanatics -- dooms our development efforts.