Chapter meetup update! We will be moving our location of our 1/21 chapter meetup to La Doña Cervecería Brewery in an attempt to help boost local, immigrant run businesses impacted during the ICE surge. Still meeting at 6:30 on 1/21. Address is 241 Fremont Ave N.

Thank goodness for Birthright citizenship 4-1

For too many families, homeownership feels less like an opportunity and more like an uphill climb. Today I laid out my plan to lower housing costs for Minnesotans. Read more: amyklobuchar.com/priorities/…

BREAKING: Kendall Qualls just won GOP endorsement for MN governor with 60.4% over MN House Speaker Lisa Demuth. @KSTP

For reference, Minneapolis has the same average summer highs as Barcelona and lower winter lows than Moscow. European weather is unbelievably mild, all things considered. Most of the rest of the world has far more natural disasters AND far more temperature variation.

Zohran just cited Minneapolis, Austin, and Auckland as cities that lowered housing costs via upzoning certified ball knowledge, Auckland is a deep YIMBY cut

Great to meet with the Twin Cities New Liberals and learn their ideas on housing, energy, immigration and more. We need a Democratic agenda that works, and these folks are up to the task.

BART spent $90 million on new fare gates. They're recovering about $10 million a year in fares. That's a 9-year payback on paper. The actual return hit in six months. Embarcadero station went from 112 hours of corrective maintenance in the six months before installation to 2 hours after. Daly City saved 109. Balboa Park saved 75. Across the system, 961 hours of cleanup work disappeared. Corrective maintenance is the term BART uses for graffiti, heavy soiling, vandalism, the damage that needs a crew not a janitor. At several stations it dropped to zero. Crime fell 41% year over year. Riders who reported seeing fare evasion on their trip dropped from 22% to 10%. Citations issued by BART police went from 2,200 in January to under 1,000 in July, because there was nothing to cite. The gates were a filtering project disguised as a revenue project. Old BART gates were waist-high orange fins designed in the 1970s. You could hop them in under a second. That made the station effectively a public space, and the rider mix reflected that. The new gates are 72 inches of polycarbonate with 3D sensors that detect tailgating. You either pay or you don't enter. Once you don't enter, you also don't smoke on the platform, sleep in the elevator, or harass other riders. BART tried hiring more police for years. Blitz operations at high-traffic stations. Increased patrols. Dedicated transit cops. None of it moved the numbers the way six feet of polycarbonate did. The $10 million in recovered fares is the smallest line in the return. Fare revenue used to cover 70% of BART operations. After the pandemic it collapsed to 22%. The gates won't fix that gap directly. They fix the precondition for fixing it: a system that office workers, families, and tourists are willing to use again. Ridership growth at stations with new gates outpaced ungated ones before the rollout finished. A $400 million annual deficit is heading to voters in November as a sales tax measure. Voters don't approve sales taxes for transit agencies they don't feel safe in. The $90 million on gates is buying BART the right to ask the public for more money. That's the real return on six feet of polycarbonate.

For the first time in Norwegian history, a bus will carry passengers in regular traffic without any human behind the wheel. The first pilot without a safety driver was tested Friday, and if all goes as planned, anyone can ride driverless buses starting in May.

Thanks to @TCNewLibs for hosting an excellent conversation last night! Had a great time discussing transit safety, effective prevention and intervention efforts, and how we can make our communities safe for everyone.

Chapter meetup update! We will be moving our location of our 1/21 chapter meetup to La Doña Cervecería Brewery in an attempt to help boost local, immigrant run businesses impacted during the ICE surge. Still meeting at 6:30 on 1/21. Address is 241 Fremont Ave N.