San Jose, CA and Hamburg, Germany at the same scale. Which of the two urban environments do you think most people would prefer to live in?

Now that everyone can see firsthand the success of congestion pricing in NYC, looking back on the environmental review process feels even more absurd. 4,000 pages and 3 years of review to study the environmental impact of… using cameras and prices to reduce traffic.

When many of the ordinary things people want to see & do are relatively close together, the bicycle is the most efficient way to get around.

Having practical options for getting around is a lifestyle upgrade.

People who don't ride bikes should be delighted when other people ride bikes. Get as many drivers out of your way as possible. 🥳

What will these buildings look like in 50 years with no maintenance

People will go on vacation to a place like this and then, back home, they’ll vote to make sure this never happens in their town.

People who sometimes use a bicycle for transportation are much better drivers because they have more than just a windshield perspective of the world around them.

Terrible lo que hace fomentar la bici en las ciudades.

Such a scene is often framed as proof the Dutch are superhuman—they’re not. The real miracle isn't the Dutch cyclist. It's the environment that allows ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Build the infrastructure, and you'll find your city is full of capable cyclists too.

I don’t get what the anti-bicycle people want. Drive instead? And add to traffic / parking woes?

Bike lanes caused this traffic jam, I'm sure of it.

I really like the look and scale of this neighbourhood.

Bicycles are hugely space efficient, which is why they make a lot of sense in congested cities. This video demonstrates why there aren’t traffic jams in bike lanes.

This is amazing! When a little league ran out of money and couldn't maintain its field, a local developer came in, bought the field, and redeveloped it into a parking lot for the nearby data center He even kept the baseball diamond visible in the parking lot to give it some character We need more of this in our communities!

What every voter and apparently, the NY Times Editorial Board, should know about housing policy: 1. Rents reflect the balance of supply of apartments and demand for those apartments in a given area. That’s it; there’s no magic. If you want lower rents, you can hope for a recession that destroys jobs and, therefore, demand. Or you can add supply. 2. There is no amount of money that any big city government could feasibly spend that would add materially to supply. This is because, depending on the location, new apartments cost $250,000-1,000,000 to develop… building even a few hundred of those starts to stress any city budget, and many big cities need tens or hundreds of thousands. 3. On the other hand, investors (including pension funds and endowments, insurance companies, rich families, etc.) can collectively **easily** provide enough capital to build as much housing as we need **so long as they are confident they can get a reasonable return**. To get those investors to fund the creation of the housing our society needs, we must do two things: 1. Dramatically reduce the time & complexity associated with securing governmental permission to develop housing. This means reviewing and simplifying the overlapping regulations that constrain housing production: zoning codes, building codes, parking, ADA, etc. But it also means changing the cultures within the relevant governmental agencies from “default no” to “how can we help you?”. 2. Provide certainty around on-going regulation of apartment operations. The way investors get a return from building rentals is as follows: They hire managers to lease the apartments, collect the rents, pay operating expenses and any mortgage payments, and then send the investors the cashflow that remains. But governments all over the country have been restricting the manner in which apartment buildings can be operated in all kinds of ways. For example: Cities have been making it harder to screen tenants, while also making it much harder to evict tenants who don’t pay. You can see why both of those measures are politically popular. After all, who doesn’t want people to get second chances? And who wants anyone to get evicted? But, as a manager, the combination of those two regulations makes it much harder to predict, with any certainty, that the rent will get paid… and that makes it very difficult to get investors to provide capital to create more housing. Another example: Rent control. Again, I understand why renters love rent control and why politicians want to give it to them. But, if, as has been the case in NY, LA and San Francisco, city governments hold annual rent increases below the rate of growth in the operating expenses of the buildings, the cashflow payable to the investors shrinks… making them much less likely to invest capital in building more apartments. In conclusion: For ~every other good or service in the economy, we allow the market to function, and the result is that we have a surplus of choice at all price points (think of food or clothes or cars), which is spectacular for the consumer. If we want a surplus of choice at all price points in housing, we need to get comfortable with the idea of allowing the market to provide it. And that means allowing investors to build rental apartments *and* allowing them to operate those apartments in a manner consistent with making a reasonable profit. Remember: Every developer of rentals is either a landlord-in-waiting or hoping to sell to one.

It's almost vacation season for NIMBYs.

Every successful urban trail built in the US over the past couple decades has the same problem: too narrow

"There's no demand for transit in America!" Transit in America: